THE DREYFUS AFFAIR- A REVIEW BY LOUIS BEGLEY OF ” AN OFFICER AND A SPY” BY ROBERT HARRIS
The Dreyfus Affair, which splintered French society of the fin de siècle and continued to divide it well into the 20th century, began on the morning of Oct. 15, 1894, with the arrest for high treason of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old artillery officer, a high-ranking graduate of the elite École Polytechnique and the École de Guerre (the French Army’s war college), and was chosen on the basis of his grades and overall performance to train with the army’s general staff. Robert Harris, in his fine novel “An Officer and a Spy,” lucidly retells the famous, bizarrely complicated and chilling story. His narrator is Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, who was promoted to that grade six months after Dreyfus’s arrest and put in charge of the general staff’s statistical section (the coy sobriquet of a counterintelligence unit), and went on to become one of Dreyfus’s improbable and indispensable saviors.
Dreyfus’s presence on the general staff was a double anomaly, annoying to his colleagues and superiors. Merit-based appointments had been introduced only a few years earlier, replacing the comfortable system by which general staff officers co-opted candidates who resembled them: sons of noble or solid bourgeois families educated at Catholic schools and St. Cyr, the military academy founded by Napoleon. Far more remarkable and significant, Dreyfus was a Jew — the first ever admitted into the precincts of the Holy Ark, as the very anti-Semitic general staff was called with unconscious irony.
So when evidence surfaced suggesting a traitor at the general staff was passing secrets to the Germans, suspicion quickly fell on Dreyfus. Relying on a dubious handwriting analysis and disregarding the absence of a motive or any other proof, the war minister General Mercier had Dreyfus arrested.
Dreyfus’s court-martial trial, held in closed session, began on Dec. 19. Mercier had been warned early on that the case was weak. Now his personal observer at the trial — that same Georges Picquart — told him acquittal seemed likely. Afraid of the scandal that would erupt over his frivolously charging an officer with treason and risking a confrontation with Germany, Mercier and his cohort swung into action. A major from the statistical section took the stand and perjured himself, incriminating Dreyfus. Mercier dispatched an officer to hand the tribunal a secret file, containing documents that had been altered or forged so as to point to Dreyfus’s guilt. These were accompanied by a memorandum (prepared by a staff officer) that gave them the appropriate nefarious slant.
The secret file, the perjured testimony and the forged documents all amounted to felonies under French law. But they had the desired effect. After only an hour of deliberation, during which the file was read aloud, the judges found Dreyfus guilty and sentenced him to military degradation and imprisonment for life. On Jan. 5, 1895, before a mob of thousands screaming “Death to the Judas, death to the Jew,” insignia of rank, epaulets, buttons and braid were ripped off Dreyfus’s uniform, his sword was broken and he was forced to perform the “Judas parade,” a march around an immense courtyard lined with soldiers. He was deported to Devil’s Island, a nearly barren rock formation measuring less than one square mile off the coast of French Guiana, and held in solitary confinement until June 1899 — when he was returned to France after the nation’s highest court ordered a new trial. News of the irregularities at the court-martial had gotten out and, eventually, Dreyfus had many defenders who had worked unremittingly for that result. (They included the celebrities Émile Zola, Anatole France and Georges Clemenceau, as well as the young Marcel Proust.)
But it is possible that the real traitor, Maj. Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, a dissolute and incorrigible liar and schemer who belonged to an illegitimate branch of the great Central European aristocratic family, would have never been discovered without the unflinching courage and rectitude of Georges Picquart.
Picquart was the soul of honor and an officer of exceptional cultivation, bravery and promise. He was clearly destined to rise to the top of the army hierarchy, and he did — partly because of his role in the Dreyfus Affair — becoming a general after Dreyfus’s rehabilitation and eventually serving as minister of war.
Drawing on the vast trove of books about the affair and some newly available materials, Harris tells a gripping tale. Once Picquart had discovered evidence linking Esterhazy to the German military attaché, he determined to his own satisfaction that the handwriting in evidence belonged to him, not Dreyfus, and that the documents handed to the military tribunal were clumsy forgeries and drivel. He resolved not to go to the grave carrying the secret: The man on Devil’s Island had to be freed, and the real traitor punished. But when he made his views known, the fury of the army’s top brass turned full blast on him. Cast as a renegade whistle-blower, an ingrate who would not let a Jew rot to save the honor of generals, he was imprisoned and cashiered from the army before he was finally redeemed.
For all his suffering and rectitude, it so happens that Picquart, like Dreyfus, was a prig as well as a hero, but Harris makes him sufficiently charming and vulnerable to engage the reader’s sympathy. Yet if the novel has a fault, it is precisely the decision to view the affair through Picquart’s eyes. The focus is necessarily too narrow, failing to take in the historical background, without which some of what happened may seem more puzzling than it was. For instance, the savage determination of the generals not to admit a mistake, and the public’s support of that position, has to be seen in the context of the army’s status at the time as the one respected (indeed venerated) French institution. The French had been crushed in the 1870 war with Prussia and lost most of two huge regions, Alsace and Lorraine. But the army had reconstituted itself, and was seen as the instrument of inevitable revenge. To impugn the honor of its chiefs was unforgivable.
Similarly, the callousness that allowed the generals and junior officers who knew the truth (or should have) to leave an innocent man in jail cannot be dissociated from the extraordinary wave of virulent anti-Semitism that had washed over France since the 1880s. Yes, there was a traitor peddling secrets (unimportant ones, as it turned out), yes it was the duty of the statistical section to ferret him out, and certainly the frenzy of the cover-up and the all-too-familiar impulse to punish the whistle-blower instead of the culprit played its role in the viciousness with which Picquart was persecuted and framed — but it is hard to believe that an officer as manifestly blameless as Dreyfus would have been charged with treason and railroaded to life imprisonment if the stereotype of the Jew as the man without a country, riddled with vices and by his nature a traitor, had not permeated the French psyche.
An Officer and a Spy: A novel by Robert Harris (Jan 28, 2014)
AN OFFICER AND A SPY
By Robert Harris
429 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Louis Begley is the author of “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” and a number of other books. His latest novel, “Memories of a Marriage,” was published in 2013.
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