NORMAN SIMMS: TAKING DREYFUSS’ NAME IN VAIN- AGAIN ****
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/taking-dreyfuss-name-in-vain-again?f=puball
Norman Simms is the author of Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash (Academic Studies Press, 2011). The second volume in the series, Alfred Dreyfus: In the Context of His Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew (also by Academic Studies Press) was published in July 2013; and the third Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria (Cambridge Scholars Publisher, UK) in September 2013.
In Flight to Arras (1942), Antoine de Saint-Euxpéry meditates on the way the French nation confronted the harsh reality of their defeat by Nazi Germany. He says, near the end of the narrative of his experiences as a reconnaissance pilot during those last days before the surrender was signed, that there is a difference between those who believe that a civilization be valued by the way it honours one man who gave his life that thousands might live and those who argue rather than a nation is to be exalted because all of its citizens were ready to die to preserve the life of one man. Without saying so directly, Saint-Exupéry describes what happened when, after a more than decade-long struggle to overturn the false charges, the verdict of two court martials, and the strident bigotry of the press, mobs in the street and entrenched time-servers in the Army, the State and the Church, Alfred Dreyfus received his vindication. Dreyfus endured the physical and psychological torments of dales imprisonment for nearly five years on Devil’s Island twelve years of public ignominy, and a lifetime of nightmares and frustration in his hope for full and final restitution, but he never wavered in his loyalty to France and its Republican Ideals, his belief in the goodness of the Army and the civilization of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
Now once again, Alfred’s name is taken in vain. It is contended by the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic groups who call for divestment, boycott and sanctions against Israel, that they are being made victims of a barrage of lies and slanders by the Israeli military, the pro-Israel Lobby and the multifarious (and nefarious) Jewish controllers of the press, the culture and just about everything else in the world. Certainly the lies, distortions and slanders purveyed by these people are one thing, whereas the attempt to draw in Dreyfus as a model of their own experiences is quite another. On the one hand, to attempt to answer each of those bizarre mistruths that are set up as historical reasons for opposing Israel and denigrating Jews and Judaism does not merit a detailed response; that would only be to grant to such statements the status of rational arguments, whereas they are anything but. On the other hand, defending Dreyfus yet again means attempting to set forth a long, complex analysis of who he was, what he underwent, how he and his wife grew stronger in their love and their loyalty to one another-and since the analogy makes no sense at all.
When Alfred Dreyfus was arrested in 1894, he was a young artillery officer temporarily posted to the Intelligence Office in Paris; he was also happily married to Lucie, and they had two young children. Relatively well-to-do, thanks to both his and her family, they believed that they were happy, well-assimilated French Jews. Both families moreover had come from Alsace, one of the provinces forcibly annexed to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and they like other refugees, Jewish and Christian, felt not just the sting of military defeat, but the humiliation of losing their homelands, and so were devoted to what was called la rivanche, the revenge, the wish to take back Alsace an d Lorraine. This was why Alfred, like many other young Jewish boys, was told to join the army.
This is why it was so utterly preposterous for the Army to charge Alfred with treason and espionage in 1894, and why it was so outrageous for anti-Semitic and Catholic newspapers to scream in their headlines that all Jews were traitors and spies because they were innately, culturally and religiously incapable of loyalty and forever prone to acts of disloyalty. The mobs in the streets shouted “Down with Dreyfus!”, then “Down with Dreyfus the Jew!” and then “Down with the Jews!”
From the moment of his arrest, Alfred Dreyfus proclaimed his innocence, and he never wavered. More than that, from the moment of his incarceration, as he screamed and raged, beat his head against the prison walls and shouted “I am innocent,” his family, the Dreyfuses, and her family, the Hadamards, never doubted his innocence; they never wavered in this belief. In similar circumstances, even today, when a family member is accused of treason and espionage, found guilty by two court martials, sent away to perpetual exile, and daily vilified in the press, in the parliament, and in the streets, spouses find it too much and seek a divorce, other relatives hide in shame and refuse to speak or act on behalf of their loved one, and frightened good people cower in the shadows, keeping their heads down, and hoping they too will not be made into victims. But because Alfred and Lucie never wavered, eventually-slowly, agonizingly-the tide began to turn. Eventually, but not inevitably, not inexorably, the balance of public opinion began to shift, and in due course Alfred was exonerated.
Two court martials had found him guilty. The case against him was, well, not quite solid, based as it was on lies, perjury, forgery, innuendo and bigotry. The first tribunal met in camera, withheld vital documents from the defence lawyers, and colluded behind the scenes to reach their unanimous verdict. Outside, at first, the French nation paid little attention, and those who did accepted the verdict: after all, how could a panel of highly respected military officers be wrong? And surely a dirty little Yid was not worth worrying about, was he? Over the next five years, as evidence began to mount that there had been lies told, that some officers produced phoney letters, that others spoke in whispers about documents that did not even exist, and that the signature supposedly by Dreyfus was actually by someone else, Capt. Ferdinand Esterhazy, an officer of questionable morals, a womanizer, a gambler, a man desperate for cash, and therefore who had the motives Alfred never did to sell his country down the drain to the Germans-how could it be Dreyfus, the wealthy, happily married father of two, the man who dedicated his life to la rivanche? Then in 1898 Emile Zola, France’s most well-known known writer-but also a novelist of questionable tastes, who dared to write sympathetically of prostitutes and murderers in Nana and The Beast in Man, and who dared to expose the details of why France was defeated in 1870 in The Debacle-penned his J’accuse: the front page challenge to the Army and the State to come clean on Dreyfus’s innocence. Several court trials later, when Zola fled to England to avoid huge fines and jail-time for his efforts, sufficient change in public opinion in France for the Court of Cassation, the Court of Appeal, quashed the verdict of the military tribunal because of its errors in procedure and because the evidence showed there was no case to answer. However, it was a civilian court, and all it could really do was to return Dreyfus to the status quo ante, what he was prior to the trial. An officer accused of espionage and treason.
Hence, when he was brought back from Devil’s Island in late 1898, believing he would soon be a free man and once more a loyal officer in the French Army, he was put on trial again, this time in the city of Rennes. Since the military judges had to deal with the case as though everything was as it had been in 1894, considering only the evidence presented back then, the court martial found Dreyfus guilty again. This time, however, the decision was not unanimous. He was found guilty with extenuating circumstances; of course, the primary circumstance being that he was innocent of all the charges. Therefore, instead of perpetual exile, he would return to Devil’s Island for only ten years. The anti-Semitic press cheered. The mobs shouted their old hateful slogans. His family despaired for his physical health and his mental state of being. Then, a new government in Paris, a few days after the trial in Rennes, Alfred was offered a pardon. He didn’t want it. He didn’t need it. His ideological supporters asked him to refuse this grace so they could go on fighting the good cause for another ten years. Lucie and her relatives, Alfred’s brother Matthieu and other brothers and sisters, Lucie’s parents, siblings, cousins and friends were appalled. Alfred would not survive five days, or five minutes, if were sent back to the tropical hell-hole and the little insalubrious cabin on Devil’s Island where he had suffered so long. They pleaded with him to accept the pardon. A broken man at 38, most of his bright red hair turned grey or gone, his once flashing eyes now blurred, his voice barely audible, he accepted-on condition that, when he was rested up and recovered from malnutrition and tropical disease, he would continue to fight the good fight to restore his honour and good name for himself, his two children, and his community. And that is what he did.
It was not a total victory in 1906, twelve years after the initial accusations, but it was something: he was received back into the Army and he was awarded the Legion of Honour-and in the same courtyard where he had been degraded, stripped of his rank and insignia, and paraded before the soldiers of France who turned their back on him. It was not a total victory because he was not given the rank he would have achieved had not the unbelievable happened and because he was given only the lowest rank for the Legion of Honour. But it was something. After all, when he went to his old supporters during the Affair that still bears his name, from men now well-entrenched in power-cabinet members and prime ministers, from those who had used “the cause” to further their own careers and their political agendas-to ask for help in winning a fuller clearing of his name, he was pushed aside as an annoying little Jew. He retired from the Army.
And yet, by then well into his fifties, when the Great War began, Alfred Dreyfus requested to return to active service, and for four years he helped defend France from the invading Bosch. His loyalty to France never wavered. His loyalty to the Army was central to his very being. Yet when he asked to be posted to the front, his superiors-his former colleagues, now leading officers-wrote in their reports that they were not sure, were he sent into the trenches as he wished, which side he would fight for. Victory, you see, was not complete. In 1918 he retired again, and then in 1935 he died. His grandchildren tell us that all the rest of his life Grandpa Alfred woke in the middle of the night because of nightmares.
Some people now say that, for all the errors, bigotry and callowness displayed by the French institutions and public during the Affair, finally French justice and fair-mindedness won out. Dreyfus was proved innocent and he was restored to his old rank, wasn’t he? It may have taken only another hundred years for the Army to grudgingly admit that they had been wrong and put up a statue of Alfred, albeit in an out of the way little corner of Paris, but they did it. So we should all be happy now, take a deep breath, and feel good because in the long run-Hooray for us!-justice always wins out, and civilized nations come out on top.
Some other people aren’t so sure. No one was ever held accountable for the espionage and treason that had occurred in 1894. Oh, to be sure, some of the forgers and perjurers died or committed suicide, but all the higher echelon felons were granted pardons and retired on huge undeserved pensions. The middle-ranking criminals lived on to botch up the Great War and see France mired down in five years of trench warfare. The leading anti-Semites sat back and bided their time, which, as we all know, came in the 1930s, and many of them formed the core of the collaborationist cliques in Paris and in the Vichy Regime. They had their own rivanche, revenge. Lucie went into hiding in the south of France. Other relatives died at the hands of the Gestapo or in concentration camps.
If only there had been a State of Israel then. Thank God there is one now. A whole nation acts and is ready to sacrifice itself to save one man or one woman.
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