“Death to the Traitor!”

Chapter 5 “Death to the Traitor!” On December 22, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish faith, was convicted of selling military secrets to Germany and was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in Guyana. Dreyfus steadfastly maintained his innocence and on January 5, 1895, in the courtyard of the École Militaire, when he had been publicly stripped of all his insignia and his sword had been broken, he stood stone-faced and proclaimed, “Long live France! You are de- grading an innocent man!” Turning to the journalists in the courtyard, he cried out, “You will tell all of France that I am an innocent man!”1 Pressing against the courtyard gate despite frigid weather, crowds sent up shouts of “Death to the Jews!” “Death to the traitor!” “Death to Judas!”2 According to her friends, on the day of Dreyfus’s conviction, Geneviève Straus dressed completely in black.3 The Dreyfus Affair would convulse France for the next twelve years, polar- izing the nation. Far beyond the question of the guilt or innocence of one man, the Affair would ultimately be about the nature of the French Republic and its institutions. Dreyfus had been convicted of espionage based on the evidence of a single document, referred to as the “bordereau”—later discovered to be a forgery— that had been found in a wastepaper basket. Exasperated by their lack of hard evidence against a man in whose guilt they fervently believed, the di- rector of French intelligence, Colonel Jean Sandherr, along with his assistant, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert Henry, fabricated some additional papers and in- serted them into a file which Dreyfus’s lawyer, Edgar Demange, never saw. All seven military judges found Dreyfus guilty without raising questions about this secret file—a clear violation of military code and French law.4 Top military leaders, having convicted an innocent man, then participated in a massive complicity to protect themselves and to conceal the evidence. Since the 1880’s, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and xenophobia had been sweeping through France, fueled in part by France’s humiliating defeat in the 1 Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 183. 2 Ibid. 3 Chantal Bischoff, Geneviève Straus (1849–1926) : Trilogie d’une égérie (Paris: Balland, 1992), p. 158. 4 Brown, p. 180. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004344�67_007 90 Chapter 5 Franco-Prussian War and by the growing popularity of right-wing newspapers such as Édouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole (Free Speech) and the Catholic newspaper, La Croix (The Cross). La Croix called for the expulsion of Jews from France, saying, “Was the Jew not the enemy within, unassimilable, irreducibly opposed to our traditions, our way of life, our mentality and our interests?”5 Drumont had founded in 1889 the Anti-Semitic League, whose slogan, “France for the French” became ubiquitous. Rallies, brawls and riots orchestrated by this league were spreading in French cities.6 According to Drumont, France had been taken over by “intellectuals, Jews, Protestants, foreigners and Freemasons” in a conspiracy to destroy the nation.7 The old myth of the stateless Jew was reborn and anti-Semitism assumed a new guise: it was not traditional religious hatred of past centuries, but rather political and economic racism. “In one sector of public opinion, a fortress- France nationalism asserted itself, whose mission was to defend the cohesive social organism against modernity.”8 Jews, who had recently become more visible in France because of their success in industry, liberal professions and academia,9 were associated with the democratic politics of the Third Republic. According to the historian Michel Winock, a segment of the French popula- tion was turned toward the past … particularly toward the institutions of the Church and the army.10 In 1895, while Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, his wife Lucie and brother Mathieu Dreyfus immediately began their mission to demand a retrial. “Your brother’s cause must be defended be- fore public opinion,” a warden at La Santé prison had told Mathieu. Politician after politician had refused to help them in their efforts.11 One journalist, how- ever—Bernard Lazare—converted to their cause after a few conversations, began to work quietly on a pamphlet, “A Judicial Error: the Truth about the Dreyfus Affair,” which was published in the fall of 1896.12 Aside from Bernard Lazare and Alfred Dreyfus’s immediate family, no one openly took his defense in the aftermath of the trial—not the government, 5 Ibid., p. 207. 6 Ibid. 7 Michel Winock, “Une Question de principe,” in Pierre Birnbaum, ed., La France de l’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 556. 8 Michel Winock is quoted by Brown, p. 208. 9 Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), p. 63. 10 Winock is quoted in Brown, p. 208. 11 Brown, pp. 183–184. 12 Ibid., pp. 185, 188..

Load more