The as National Theater

Venita Datta

Has no one noticed that this Dreyfus Affair, this gigantic drama that has roused the universe, seems to have been staged by some sublime playwright, determined to make it an incomparable masterpiece? Emile Zola, “The Fifth Act,” L’Aurore (September 12, 1899)1 The Dreyfus Affair is one of the most dramatic, indeed, melodramatic, events in French history. Writers as talented as , , , and Zola himself all tried their hand at addressing the Affair in works of fiction and while historians and literary scholars may not agree whether their fictional representations succeeded in capturing the real drama of the Affair, there is a concurrence that reality is often stranger than fiction.2

1 Émile Zola, “The Fifth Act,” L’Aurore, September 12, 1899. Reproduced in Alain Pagès, ed., Zola, “J’Accuse” and Other Writings, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1996), 140. Bernard Lazare wrote that the Affair “interested Zola only when the was complete, when the trio of Esterhazy the traitor, Picquart, the good genie and Dreyfus the martyr seized his imagination;” quoted in Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 57. Harris’s work examines the role of emotion (on both sides) in the Affair. 2 Proust began work on Jean Santeuil in 1896 but never completed it (it was published posthumously in 1952), and also incorporated the Affair into A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927); Anatole France, M. Bergeret à (1901) and L’Ile des pingouins (1908); Romain Roland, Les Loups (1898); Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Barois (1913); Zola: Vérité (1903). See also Armand Lunel, Nicolo-Peccavi ou L’Affaire Dreyfus à Carpentras (Paris: Gallimard, 1926). The only play in this list is Les Loups, although the 1931 French trans- lation of a German play on the Affair was forced to close down after protests from the right-wing Action française. Some of these works incorporate the actual events of the Dreyfus Affair into their works of fiction while others transpose the events of the Dreyfus Affair, creating their own fictional affair. For a more detailed examination of these fictional representations, see Susan Suleiman, “The Literary Significance of the Dreyfus Affair,” in Norman Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 117–139. Suleiman notes that there are few representations of the Affair in fiction because the history of the Affair is itself so novelistic and dramatic. More- over, some historians of the Affair have treated the events like fiction, thereby further blurring the line between history and fiction: Suleiman, 124. See also the short dictionary articles, Pierre Citti, “L’Affaire en literature,” 424–428, and Philippe Baron, “Le théâtre,” 514–520, in Michel Drouin, ed., L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z (Paris: Flammarion, 1994; re‑ issued, 2006). On the disagreements among scholars as to the literary quality of these works, see Evelyne Méron’s article “Vérité historique, symbolisme littéraire: les bizarreries de l’Affaire Dreyfus et leur utilsation par Martin du Gard dans Jean Barois,” Les Intellectuels 26 venita datta

The various episodes of the Affair are the stuff of overblown fiction: a cleaning woman who doubled as a spy for the French finds the compro- mising bordereau in the wastebasket of the German Embassy; a myste- rious dame voilée supposedly reveals to Commandant Walsin-Esterhazy the plot against him; a prominent writer, Emile Zola, is forced to flee the country to escape prosecution for defamation, losing his entire fortune in the process, and, moreover, dies in suspicious circumstances; another “villain,” Colonel Henry, commits suicide after being imprisoned for fabri- cating evidence against the accused (one should note that ­anti-Dreyfusards had their own images of heroism and villainy, casting Henry as the hero and Picquart as the villain). Notwithstanding, the most melodramatic aspect of the Affair is the central theme of the falsely accused soldier, the victim of a massive cover-up, who returned from detention on Devil’s Island like Lazarus risen from the dead after the real author of the compromising document, Esterhazy, was revealed in a theatrical coup.3 A novelist or dramatist writing such an account would have been accused of exaggera- tion, something that Anatole France recognized in L’Ile des ­Pingouins.4 Even the major players of the Affair seem like fictional characters: Ester- hazy resembles a moustache-twirling villain straight out of the boulevard theater while Colonel Picquart plays the part of the “heroic” officer who risked his career to reveal the cover up; not to mention the devoted Lucie and Mathieu Dreyfus, wife and brother of the victim, respectively, who continued to believe in their loved one’s innocence and persisted in their quest to vindicate him.

face à l’Affaire Dreyfus alors et aujourd’hui, Roselyne Koren and Dan Michman, eds., (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 259–274, in which she takes historian Géraldi Leroy [“L’Affaire est un roman,” L’Histoire, no. 174 (January 1994): 80] to task for his comments on the lack of literary merit of various novels of the Affair. Contemporary novelists are also fascinated by the Affair: Susan Daitch, an American novelist, has recently published Paper Conspiracies (San Francisco: City Lights, 2011), which begins in the 1990s with a film restorer working on the Méliès film and moves back in time, even recounting the story of Madame Bastian, the cleaning lady who found the bordereau. In addition, two recent mystery novels take place against the backdrop of the Affair: Barbara Corrado Pope’s The Blood of Lorraine (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010) and Claude Izner’s Les Souliers bruns du quai Voltaire (Paris: 10/18, 2011). 3 A businessman recognized the handwriting in the bordereau, which had been repro- duced in the press, as Esterhazy’s. For an excellent historical overview of the Dreyfus Affair (which reads like a novel), see Jean-Denis Bredin, L’Affaire (Paris: Juillard/Presses Pocket, 1983). 4 Anatole France, Chapter 6, “Les Quatre-Vingt Mille Bottes de foin” (“The 80,000 Bales of Hay”) in L’Ile des Pingouins, (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1908).