NORMAN SIMMS: DREYFUS STILL MATTERS BUT NOT THE WAY SOME PEOPLE THINK
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yes-dreyfus-still-matters-but-not-the-way-some-people-think?f=must_reads
On the one hand, the news that Roman Polanski is planning to make a film on the Dreyfus Affair fills me with joy. There has been so much new information made available since the series of anniversaries passed by from 1994 – when a hundred years passed since his arrest, trial, condemnation, exile, torture on Devil’s Island, second condemnation, and then pardon in 1899 – and then eventual exoneration in 1906. The last two major feature films now belong to history themselves and it is time to bring the story up to date using all the skills and artistry that have developed since the 1930s and 1950s.
But I am not so sure about a film about the Dreyfus Affair made by such a controversial figure as Roman Polanski. Yet perhaps his long exile based on crimes committed a generation or more ago give him insights most of us lack, although to be sure Polanski has not been in the living hell-isolation, silence, tropical discomfort, worry about his family and his honor-Alfred Dreyfus went through.
Also I am not sure that a spy thriller genre is appropriate to the case, a legal error based less on a series of judicial errors than bureaucratic arrogance; less a matter of espionage and treason than the manipulation by the authorities in the government, the army and the judiciary itself of Truth and Justice.
Moreover I am afraid of some of the usual inaccuracies and distortions in popular conceptions of the case against him, the persons who came to his aid, and the man himself.
In the popular films made about Dreyfus, the man shrinks into the background, and the leading players in the historical events are seen to be Emile Zola and his own trial caused by publication of J’accuse, but Bernard Lazare had entered the fray earlier and with more cogent arguments. Col. Picquart who finally came out in public to proclaim his innocence also grabs the limelight, while Major Ferdinand Franzinetti had seen that Dreyfus was innocent from the moment he was arrested and never gave up the fight, even when he was cashiered out of his post as head of prisons for the Army for his persistence.
Alfred’s brother Mathieu rightly is applauded for his service to the cause of truth and justice. But not only did Lucie Dreyfus bear the brunt of keeping her husband’s courage strong for more than five years, but Alfred’s older sister Henriette and her husband Joseph Valabrègue constantly provided a refuge for the family and laboriously trekked to government offices to plead on Dreyfus’s behalf. Lucie’s parents, too, the Hadamards, took in their daughter and her two children, at a time when the anti-Semites were harassing everyone close to the Dreyfus family.
While unfortunately virtually the whole of the French Jewish community–with the honorable exception of the Chief Rabbi Zadok Kahn–went into hiding to avoid provoking further riots and mayhem, the Dreyfuses, the Hadamards (Lucie’s family) and the Valabrègues (Alfred’s older sister’s in-laws) continued to petition for Alfred’s retrial and release. In the past, too often, Alfred is dismissed as an almost irrelevant cipher, the occasion for the Affair, and not a courageous man.
The heroes of the piece have been portrayed as those public figures-including even the enemies, such the real spy and traitor Count Esterhazy or the forger of misleading documents Col. Henry-who form part of the Affair, and not Alfred and his extended family who endured the whole fiasco for so long.
Other couples have split up when one of the partners is sent away to life-long incarceration, but Lucie and Alfred deepened their love and their mutual understanding. Other families have turned their backs on the scapegoat fearful of their own safety and comfort, whereas the relatives of Dreyfus stayed loyal from the very start to the bitter end. Other nations when faced by sustained and relentless lies, forgeries, intimidation, blustering and again sheer arrogance of power have given up altogether, whereas France regained its dignity for a while, although by the late 1930s it had lost it again.
Nor finally, has the general view taken seriously Dreyfus’s identity as a Jew-In fact, his Judaism is seen as superficial and he is charged with being an assimilated, French technocrat. My reading of his prison notebooks (the fifteen cahiers have only recently been made available to the general public) shows a man of wide and deep cultural reading, but very much a man of the late nineteenth century. His tastes in the arts, historiography and literature were not those of the avant-garde, as his psychology and philosophical views were with the thinkers now shunted aside by the post-modernists. Yet that does not make him dull, unimaginative or superficial. Not all our own so-called “progressive ideas” will stand the test of time, I am sure.
But what makes me hesitate in full support and enthusiasm for this proposed new film is the fact that again and again in the last few years leftwing commentators have argued that the Dreyfus Affair is a sterling example of the same kind of traducing of justice as one sees in the second Bush administration, in the enactment of the Homeland Security regulations in the USA, and in the pursuit of terrorists. Louis Begley’s Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) is a prime example, insofar as the author tracks down every detail of the Dreyfus Affair as though it were an allegory of our own times, with the consequence that the real events of 1894 to 1906 are lost, the character of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus misrepresented, and the implications of the struggle for honor, freedom, justice and truth is lost. As I have studied these details for the last ten years at least, it strikes me that Begley’s (and his cohorts’) interpretations are at best debatable and at worst grossly wanting in precision.
The Affair did not split France down the middle, as is often stated. The sides were more lopsided, and in the latter phases of Dreyfus’s fight for exoneration and compensation he was betrayed by many of his intellectual and political supporters who found him an annoying little Jew. Their causes-separation of Church and State, socialism, anarchy, the downplaying of the army-were not Alfred’s. Dreyfus underwent humiliation, exile and physical torture for the sake of Truth and Justice. He never begged for mercy, he never asked for forgiveness. When he was finally restored to his position in 1906 and the crowd shouted “Vive Dreyfus!” he stopped them and shouted back: “Vive la France!” He served his country during World War I and lost many young relatives in the combat. He lived until 1935, and so did not see Lucie his wife go into hiding from the Vichy collaborationists or his granddaughter and other relatives murdered by the Gestapo. But Dreyfus knew that what happened to him was done “because I am a Jew.” Alfred said several times that had the Affair had been about anyone else than himself, he would not have been a Dreyfusard. The complexity of his own situation and the great moral tragedy of his character would make the subject of a great film.
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: The Man with the Exploding Head should be out towards the end of this year; and a third volume tentatively entitled Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: Illusions, Delusions and Allusionsis being prepared for 2013.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yes-dreyfus-still-matters-but-not-the-way-some-people-think?f=must_reads#ixzz1vV1v4qrg
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