From Aesthetics to Politics in the Dreyfus Affair Roderick Cooke
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From Aesthetics to Politics in the Dreyfus Affair Roderick Cooke Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Gaduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2013 Roderick Cooke All rights reserved ABSTRACT From Aesthetics to Politics in the Dreyfus Affair Roderick Cooke This dissertation proposes a new interpretation for the political engagement of French writers in the Dreyfus Affair between 1897 and 1900. I argue that aesthetics has been undervalued by past scholarship on this question, and analyze the engagement of four very different writers - Emile Zola, Ferdinand Brunetière, Henry Céard and Saint-Georges de Bouhélier - demonstrating that, in each case, their prior aesthetic thought was a vital part of their political discourse on the Affair. This claim involves a rethinking of the relationship between aesthetics and politics as it has usually been conceived, with the aesthetic no longer a reflection of the political, but rather a potential source for it. For each of the writers studied, his literary criticism and theory (dating as far back as the 1860s) are put in dialogue with his writing about the Dreyfus Affair itself through close readings of both corpuses. In each case, attention is paid to the continuities and inversions of central ideas such as individualism, truth, and the Republic, in order to illustrate their structural role in the intellectual world of the fin de siècle. As a result, I have termed the four chapters 'micro-histories of ideas' to convey the way in which individual concerns provide a window onto the major battles of ideas in the France of the early Third Republic. The Introduction both presents the four authors and discusses past theoretical work in the field of aesthetics and politics, highlighting differences from the approach used here. Chapter 1 is devoted to Emile Zola, the inventor of the term 'naturalism' in literature and its foremost exponent. I argue that Zola's apparently intuitive appeals to truth and justice in the miscarriage of justice that affected Alfred Dreyfus were in fact drawn from his fiction, and beyond that from a commitment to truth in the literary domain that stretched over the previous thirty years of his career. In Chapter 2, Zola's critical adversary, Ferdinand Brunetière, is examined. I show that Brunetière's famous attack on individualism and the intellectuals during the Affair has its origins in his opposition to Zola's naturalist project many years earlier. In both cases, the divisiveness of Zola's actions - whether in the novel or in his pro-Dreyfus articles - was a threat to the harmonious solidarity theorized by Brunetière in both the literary and political spheres. Henry Céard, a former Zola disciple turned nationalist journalist, occupies Chapter 3. Céard's commentary on the Dreyfus Affair is almost entirely targeted at Zola, and relies on a panoply of literary techniques, so much so that Céard seemed to see the Affair as a text to be elucidated. Through his attempts to do so, we can observe the realigning of the French political right through the eyes of a mid-ranking commentator who was particularly adept at addressing his audience. Chapter 4 discusses the case of Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, leader of a poetic movement called naturisme. De Bouhélier became a Dreyfusard despite ideological leanings - anti- Semitism, militarism, revanchism - that predisposed him to the opposite camp. I argue that it is only an examination of his poetic thought that can explain his Dreyfusard engagement. This entails a greater revision of the traditional 'human rights vs. raison d'état' divide invoked in studies of the Affair than has previously been advanced. The Conclusion ends by considering the applicability of these findings to other historical moments, paying particular attention to the Algerian independence crisis as a time in which there was a conscious attempt to repeat elements of the Dreyfus Affair, and in which aesthetics and politics were once more intertwined. Contents Introduction 1 The Dreyfus Affair: Background, Chronology, Causality 27 Truth, Justice and Science: Zola, Defender of Naturalism and Dreyfus 38 Ferdinand Brunetière: Anti-Naturalist to Anti-Dreyfusard 100 Henry Céard Reads the Dreyfus Affair 145 Naturism and the Dreyfus Affair 212 Conclusion 277 Tables for Chapter 1 282 Works Cited 285 i 1 Introduction "C’est un problème d’esthétique que ni l’accusation ni la défense n’ont cherché à résoudre." -Henry Céard, February 1898 The importance of writers in contributing to the development and resolution of the Dreyfus Affair has been acknowledged since its beginning. Without the often rancorous involvement of authors on both sides of the controversy, the case of a Jewish army captain falsely convicted of treason could never have split France in two and threatened its continued existence as a republic the way it did between 1897 and 1899. While Emile Zola’s epochal text ‘J’Accuse...!’ has received the most significant attention, other authors on both sides of the conflict have been studied both individually and collectively. This is true of novelists like Zola, poets like Paul Valéry, or critics like Zola’s implacable opponent Ferdinand Brunetière.1 Yet what past analyses of all these writers, no matter their allegiance or preferred genre, have shared is a strange disinterest in their writing itself. That is to say that the engagement of men and women of letters in the Affair that turned France into a maelstrom of ideological struggle has been studied largely without reference to the writing from which they lived and made their names. The major exception to this trend has been those studies examining the fictionalization of the Affair after its end (or, in a few cases, during its course): these studies tread very different territory, looking at the afterlife of the crisis where I will be examining its prehistory. 2 1 Valéry, in a shock to many of his readers, has been revealed in recent years as a committed anti-Dreyfusard. 2 Most recently, Evlyn Gould’s The Dreyfus Affair and the Literature of the Third Republic (McFarland, 2012) discusses fictional responses by authors including Zola and Maurice Barrès to the events and themes of the Affair. 2 It is this absence of literature that I’ve sought to remedy in the present work. Before describing how I’ve aimed to do so, one must ponder the question of why it was necessary to do so. Why the scant attention paid to writing and textuality in analyzing the Affair? One reason may be that the immense scope and continued resonance of Alfred Dreyfus’ case, and everything it set in motion, seems to set it apart from the realm of literature. Zola may have begun his very first article about the Affair by exclaiming “Quel drame poignant, et quels personnages superbes!”3, but the weight of the events he went on to describe sets it apart from the narratives of his earlier Rougon-Macquart novels. Another factor in the marginalization of writing is the nature of the approaches past scholars have used. Pierre Bourdieu’s influence is strongly imprinted on the historiography of the Dreyfus Affair. Both Christophe Charle’s now-classic text La Naissance des Intellectuels (from 1990, and which will be a frequent point of reference in the coming chapters), and, much more recently, Gisèle Sapiro’s La Responsabilité de l’Ecrivain (2011) draw deeply on Bourdieu’s theoretical developments for their framework. Chief among those developments is the notion of field: in this case, following Bourdieu’s own Les Règles de l’Art, the literary field. A disclaimer is in order: the fact that I am contending that Bourdieusian approaches minimize the importance of text and aesthetics in the Dreyfus Affair does not mean that I in turn minimize their importance to its analysis. Charle’s work, in particular, is surely the single most significant contribution to the study of the crisis and its impact on intellectual life in France. Nevertheless, no study can adequately cover every dimension of such a complex and multifarious moment in history. Treating authors as points on a graph, demonstrating the near- deterministic relationship between literary associations or academic specialty and the choice of a 3 Emile Zola, La Vérité en Marche (Paris: Charpentier, 1901), p. 3. 3 side in the Affair, runs the risk of implying that aesthetics and the nuances of individual ideology counted for nothing in the decisions made by those concerned. Among other recent studies of the polemic that pay interested but ultimately shallow attention to writing must be mentioned Ruth Harris’ Dreyfus (2010). Harris’ primary focus is not writers per se but individuals both scholarly and political, and the passions that drove them to choose both allies and enemies. A central claim in the work is that the two sides shared more than they differed, and that emotion is a necessary category to explain the deep divides that nonetheless arose from 1897 on. As a result, her discussion of figures like Brunetière or Maurice Barrès can move too quickly to establish a kinship between some of their ideas and those espoused by their opponents. I will, at various points, argue the opposite: that the roots of many choices made during the Affair were in place long before the eventual participants had ever heard of a Jewish officer and his treason case, and that those roots were frequently aesthetic and originally had no overt connection to politics at all. In other words, for all the passions that undeniably accompanied them, Dreyfus Affair engagements were idea-driven; what Harris explains through the Freudian “narcissism of marginal difference” was in fact a set of highly personal intellectual congeries.