New Perspectives on an Old, Yet Relevant, Scandal

At War With Itself

By LEO DAMROSCH

DREYFUS

Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century

By Ruth Harris

Illustrated. 542 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $35

French Jewish Officer, Dreyfus, Served 4 years on Devil's Island on false charges

The scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair still resonates after more than a century, though it has been blurred for most Americans by time and distance. It is the goal of the Oxford historian Ruth Harris to extricate the story from the myths it has generated, on both the left and the right, and to trace its tortuous evolution from 1894 to 1906 in all of its human complexity. Combining an even-tempered tone with generosity of imagination, she has achieved that goal, charting a steady course through the voluminous literature that the affair inspired and exploring the reactions of scores of soldiers, politicians, journalists, salonnières and ordinary citizens. A helpful “Dramatis Personae” at the end of the book lists nearly 150 people, all of whom are given substantial treatment during the course of the narrative.

Alfred Dreyfus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Alsace, a disputed eastern territory that many French people regarded as covertly German. He was 10 years old at the time of the Prussian invasion in 1870, when the French Army suffered a humiliating defeat, and he remained fiercely patriotic ever after, which motivated his choice of a military career. Intent on improving its leadership, the army began to promote officers on the basis of success in examinations rather than through the old-boy network, and Dreyfus was one of those selected for special training. The old-boy network was predictably resentful, especially when beneficiaries of the new policy were Jews, who numbered fewer than 100,000 in a nation of 38 million and were regarded by many as an insidious “enemy within.”

On Oct. 14, 1894, a few days after his 35th birthday, Captain Dreyfus spent the evening in his Paris apartment with his wife, Lucie, and their two young children. The next morning he was summoned unexpectedly to headquarters, subjected to a bewildering interrogation and placed under arrest. During the star-chamber trial that followed, he was never permitted to know the actual charges against him, which were based entirely on a torn-up bordereau, or memorandum, that a cleaning woman had retrieved from the wastebasket of the German military attaché. It was clear that someone was offering to sell low-level secrets to the Germans, and a chain of flimsy circumstantial evidence was said to point to Dreyfus. He wasn’t short of money and wasn’t entangled with women, two of the most frequent motives for espionage at the time, but his superiors decided that the handwriting on the bordereau was his, and an Alsatian-Jewish scapegoat was convenient.

For the rest of the book review:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/books/review/Damrosch-t.html?_r=1&ref=world