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Maurice Samuels, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair" (Yale UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everybody, and welcome to a new episode on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Geraldine Goutfa. Today I'm thrilled to host Maurice Samuels, who is the Betty Jane Elian professor of French and Director of the Yale Program for the Study of Anti Semitism at Yale University. Today we will discuss his latest book, Alfred the Man at the center of the Affair, which was published by Yale University Press in the Jewish Life series in 2024. Marie, congratulations on this publication and welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you, Geraldine. I'm very happy to be here.
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B
So first, could you tell us a little bit more about how you got to this particular book? You've written extensively about Jews in 19th century France, so I wonder if you can kind of situate this particular project within your other publications on the topic. And also I want to say at the outset that I absolutely love the Yale Jewish Life series. I haven't read all the books published in the series, but I've read a few and it's just marvel. So I was curious to hear if Yale reached out to you and asked you to write the book or if this is something you had in mind. How did it come about?
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C
Yeah, so they did reach out to me to write the book and partly because, as you said, I've worked a lot on 19th century French Jews. I wrote a book called Inventing the Israelite about the first Jewish fiction writers in 19th century France. And then I wrote a book called the Right to French Universalism and the Jews that looked at how Jews have been at the center of debates over universalism in France from the French Revolution through World War II and after. And then I wrote a book that was for a more popular audience called the Betrayal of the Duchess. And it was about a little known case of antisemitism in 1832 that I argue was really a precursor to the Dreyfus affair. So I was really primed to write about Dreyfus. I also teach courses on Jews in France and where the Dreyfus affair figures very prominently. And probably most importantly, I've been running a program for the study of antisemitism at Yale since 2011. So I think those were the reasons why Yale approached me. It came at a good moment. I was looking for a new project and I thought, yes, I can do that. Although I was wondering what I could add to all the literature on Dreyfus. So I'm happy to go into that.
- [03:45]
B
Yeah, that actually wonderful segue into my second question, which had to do with the literature on Dreyfus, because there is indeed an extensive scholarly literature on the case, and historians have used the case to talk about the political crisis in France, the birth of the intellectual, the kind of the journey towards the law of Laicite, the law of 1905, the separation of church and state. But in this literature, there's surprisingly little about Dreyfus as the central protagonist in this literature. To put it differently, Dreyfus is not the central protagonist in the case. And so from the beginning of the book, you really set out to center your study on Dreyfus's Jewishness, which you argue, rightly. I think that it's been largely neglected by the literature. And here, one thing that really interested me in your book is that you actually trace this back to how his family responded to his arrest, his incarceration. And you say that his own family really wanted, and maybe the broader Jewish community wanted to downplay the Jewish aspect of the story, to frame it in more universal terms. So, yeah, I wonder if you can kind of talk a little bit more about this and about what does it do to our understanding of Franco Judaism and more broadly to our understanding of 19th century France to center, finally, to finally center the Dreyfus affair on Dreyfus himself.
- [05:18]
C
Yeah, right. So I say in the book that it's, I think, after the French Revolution, the most written about subject in French history. So there's an enormous scholarly literature. And so I did think at first, like, what can I add to this? But the fact that this book was going to be published in the Jewish Live series got me thinking, what would it mean to write a Jewish Life of Dreyfus? So putting Dreyfus at the center of the story, which, you know, I think you're totally right to say that that does not really happen. And in fact, one of the most famous classic books about the affair in French is La Faire Sandrafus. You know, so the affair without Dreyfus, the idea being that since Dreyfus was on Devil's Ey island that, you know, the affair itself played out without him. There's been a tendency, I should say in recent French scholarship, to put him more at the center. So, you know, I'm thinking of Vincent Duclair, who's a big Dreyfus scholar in France, who has already done this, and I learned a lot from his work. But he doesn't really talk about the Jewish dimension that much, which is not to say that, you know, of course everyone who writes about the case mentions that Dreyfus was Jewish. Like, you can't talk about the case without mentioning that. But it's very seldom the center of the story. So I really wanted to know what would it do to really center the question of Dreyfus Jewishness. So for me, that meant three things. It meant, first of all, talking about the role of Jewishness for Dreyfus himself and for his family. And, and there I think that I was trying to, you know, correct a sort of misimpression that a lot of people have, you know, including important scholars like Hannah Arendt, that Dreyfus was an assimilated Jew. And he, I argue that he was definitely acculturated. But if we think that assimilated means he had given up his Jewish identity, that's far from the truth. You know, he wasn't a personally religious person, but his wife was. They were nominally Orthodox. They were married in the, you know, the Grand Synagogue in Paris by the chief rabbi who was a friend of their family. Everyone in their family married other Jews. Both of their children married other Jews. They were in a very Jewish milieu. So the fact that he became a French army officer, by no means, means he, he was somehow not Jewish. So I was, I really. And I, I should also say I benefited from this really great collection of personal items that had been donated by the Dreyfus family to The Jewish Museum in Paris, including a lot of Jewish ritual objects like his wife's prayer book, Yahrzeit calendars that they used to say prayers to honor the death of family members. So I was really able to show that Jewishness was really a part of their lives. So that was one part. The second part was to really focus on the role that antisemitism played in the case. And there, again, a lot of. There's a whole trend in scholarship to say that that was a minor detail, but in fact, it was not. It was really central not only to why he was accused, but more importantly, why the case became an affair. So, you know, there are other cases of espionage. People don't really care. This excited people got people, you know, impassioned because Dreyfus was Jewish. And I argue that it was his Jewishness that, you know, it was because the Jewish question had come to the fore in, you know, throughout. In France, but really throughout the west, as many, you know, Jewish families were moving to Western European countries and were really challenging the notion of citizenship, we're calling into question who belonged in these countries. What did it take? Were these countries universalist and therefore open to anyone, or were they based on blood and soil? And so the Jewish presence was really calling into question the fundamental nature of citizenship. And that's why I think the case became so important. So those were two aspects, and then the final third one was I wanted to know what the case meant to Jews throughout the world, so how Dreyfus life affected the lives of other Jews. And that's where I feel like I did the most, like, original research for the book. So in one chapter of the book, I set out to read Jewish newspapers, many of which had recently been created before the affair, in English, French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish. I had some help from research assistants in the languages I couldn't read. And that was really interesting. So I'm happy to talk more about that.
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B
Yes, we'll get there. Yeah, that's something I want to return to. But before doing so, I want to kind of dwell a little bit on the biographical details and the question of. Is Jewishness? And there are two particular spheres I want to explore. The first one is really, is family history, because that I really didn't know. The Occupation of Loos is really from the borderlands between France and Germany. So I wonder if you can say a little bit more. And how about that fit within the broader story of the emergence of Franco Judaism. Yeah.
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C
And there I was, building on an American scholar from several decades ago. I Think in the early 90s, Michael Burns, who wrote a kind of family history of Dreyfus and did a lot of great original research. So yeah, the family was from Alsace, from, you know, he was born in Mulhouse in the 1850s. They were a prominent well to do family in textile manufacturing. Dreyfus was the youngest child and his parents decided to adopt French culture, basically. So Alfred and his next older brother Mathieu, were raised in French, sent to French schools. After the Franco Prussian War of 1870, Alsace became Germany and the Dreyfus family, like many Jews, opted for French citizenship. They felt very loyal to France for making Jews citizens. So they became, they became, you know, stayed French, although one brother opted for German citizenship so they could hang on to the textile factories in Meulouse. So Alfred was sent to French boarding school in Paris and quickly decided to train for a military career, partly because of the trauma of the Franco Prussian War and the occupation of his hometown, the sense that France had had a limb amputated by losing Alsace and Lorraine. So he was an ardent French patriot, which is one of the reason why getting accused of treason was so deeply painful for him. But I also show in the book that that route of, you know, intense French patriotism and joining the army was not rare for an Alsatian Jew of the period. There were actually something like 300 French Jewish officers at the time, which is one of the things that aroused the passion of anti Semites.
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B
So what conditions did these Jewish soldiers fare? How much did they experience anti Semitism before the affair itself, before drifting?
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C
That's a good question. So in general, the army after the Franco Prussian war, so after 1870 became more meritocratic. So there was this sense that they needed to reform, there was going to be another war with Germany, they needed to modernize the army. And so they became much more, much less of an old boys network, much more open to, you know, talent, which meant much more open to Jews. But there was still this old guard in the army and it breaks down a little bit of where you did your training. So the officers who went to St. Cyr, which was the traditional, you know, kind of training, military academy, were most. There was a kind of aristocratic ethos. Very few Jews, the Jews mostly and the modernizers mostly trained at the Ecole Polytechnique, which was, you know, really, it still is a very top school in France. And Jews were overrepresented. I show in there by the 1880s. So Dreyfus himself experienced a little antisemitism. I talk about one case when he was in officer training school where he received from this one professor who was an open anti Semite. He received a top grade for accomplishment his work and a zero for character for the kind of subjective character assessment. And the only other Jewish student in the class received a similarly low grade. And it's very interesting what Dreyfus reaction was because he protested and he went to the head of the school, said this isn't fair. The head of the school basically said it's true, it's not fair, but it won't affect your overall standing. So we should let it drop. But I think it shows that Dreyfus was someone willing to fight against antisemitism and very aware of what antisemitism was. So he definitely did experience some, especially once he became an intern on the army's general staff where he was the only Jew among, among those interns. And that's. They discovered there was a traitor in their midst and there really was. The suspicion fell on him because he was the only Jew. Limu Imu and Doug, here we have.
- [15:55]
A
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- [16:09]
C
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [16:12]
A
They see us.
- [16:13]
C
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
- [16:21]
B
So I, I do want to talk about this because this is really core to the, to the book that you wrote which is really is. Is quest for justice and Dignity. So you said it actually played out before his arrest, but you really see it throughout the course of the affair. But before kind of delving into this, I wonder if you can give us a really, really brief summary of the arrest, the aftermath of the arrest and the affair. Because the affair did not coincide with his arrest. So I wonder if you could just give us in a few words a really short timeline. We'll talk more about how we responded to this event.
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C
Sure. So in 1894, the French intelligence service discovered that a French military officer was selling secrets, military secrets to Germany. They had. Someone had a spy in the German embassy who collected the trash and they found a letter from a French officer offering to sell secrets. So as I said, they, they reasoned kind of erroneously that the, the traitor must have been on the army's general staff and was probably an artillery officer. None of this wound up being true. But they looked at the list of officers on the general Staff saw one Jewish name and looked at his handwriting, and there was some similarity, but there were also big differences between his handwriting and this document, that of, you know, the letter offering to sell secrets. So. But they immediately decided it must be him. They, you know, had a short court martial where they didn't show the evidence against him to his own lawyers, which was in complete violation of French military and legal procedure. He was found guilty. He was subjected to a humiliating public degradation ceremony in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, where they broke his sword and ripped the insignia off his uniform as 10,000 onlookers screamed, Death to Judas, Death to the Jews. It was really quite a scary event. He was then shipped off to Devil's island, this remote penal colony off the coast of South America. They had outlawed the death penalty for political crimes, otherwise he probably would have been put to death. But it was pretty bad. Victor Hugo called Devil's island the dry guillotine. He called that whole penal system. So the idea was that he would probably die there. It was unbelievably brutal conditions. And he was kept there for five years, cut off from his friends and family. He, you know, given inedible food. They didn't speak to him for five years. They would shine a light on him all night, so horrible tropical insects would crawl all over him. He was chained to his bed at night. I mean, unbelievably brutal. And the only thing that kept him going was this desire to clear his name for the sake of his family. So meanwhile, back in France, his family, especially his wife, who was a real heroine, and his brother, fought to, you know, prove his innocence. But, you know, how do you prove someone's innocence? It's very hard. So they were trying to figure out who the real traitor was. They were also trying to interest intellectuals and kind of prominent people in the case, which they wound up doing eventually. There were a few breaks in the case where they did discover that the real traitor was this dissolute minor aristocrat named Ester Aziz, who they brought up on a court martial. And he was exonerated, even though there was clear evidence that he was. He was guilty. But that case got more people interested, including the famous novelist Emile Zola, who began was convinced of Dreyfus's innocence. He wrote a blockbuster article with the banner headline Jacques I Accuse, where he basically blew the lid off the case, showing how the army had not only conspired against Dreyfus, but had basically colluded with an actual traitor. And this case, at this point, France was Really divided and on the brink of a civil war. At this point, we're in 1898 and you know, half the country either remained convinced of Dreyfus guilt or recognized he was probably innocent, but thought he should be punished anyway. So either because of antisemitism or, or because they were just devoted to the army and couldn't, were unwilling, thought it would be bad for France for the army ever to acknowledge it had made a mistake. And I should say that the army at this point had dug in that it would be a huge scandal if the army had made a mistake.
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B
They very actively covered it up.
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C
Covered it up. So there was a real cover up. And. But you know, the good news is that half the country basically did support justice for the Jewish officer. And you know, after Dreyfus article, there were pogroms basically throughout France. There were anti Jewish riots in 69 cities. Eventually more evidence emerged that Dreyfus had been framed so. And that several of the documents shown to the judges in the case had been forged. At that point they realized they needed to bring him back for a second trial so that you. They threw out the first verdict, brought him back to France in 1899, had another trial. This one lasted for several weeks, was a huge media spectacle. They found him guilty again, even though there was. It was so clear he was innocent. At this point, the outrage around the world was such that France realized that it needed to do something. There was a threat that other countries were going to boycott the 1900 World's Fair. So the, the French president offered Dreyfus a pardon. He accepted it on the condition he could keep fighting to clear his name. And he eventually did. In 1906, he was completely exonerated. He was restored to the army, although not to the rank he should have had if this had not happened. But he was awarded the Legion of Honor and he wound up resigning from the army because he wasn't given his proper rank. But then he rejoined again during World War I. His son also fought in World War I. And then, you know, he eventually died in 1935.
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B
Truly incredible, incredible story. And I learned so much from the book. I want to return to the ritual degradation ceremony in 1895. And I wonder if you don't mind, I want to read a little bit from the book because there were so many moments in the book where I was really deeply moved by your account and the way you use the sources to really bring him back to life and give us a sense of how we experienced all this. But this part of the book page 56 and 67. I was deeply moved by it. So on page 57, you have the drawing from Le Petit Journal from the newspaper, dated January 13, 1895. And you see Dreyfus himself during the ceremony, standing really up erect while its military sword is being broken. And you write in relationship to this drawing. And I'm going to read here a little bit. The press corps, with reporters from all around the world, scrutinized his face for any sign of guilt or remorse. He resolved to show them nothing but dignity. I stiffened myself to concentrate all my strength, he later wrote, to keep upright. I recall the memory of my wife and children. He managed to hold his head erect, his back straight. As soon as General Poldera read the verdict and declared him unfit to bear arms for France, Dreyfus turned to the assembled soldiers and cried out, soldiers, an innocent man is being degraded. Soldiers, an innocent man is being dishonored. Long live France. Long live the army. But his cries were drowned out by shouts of done with the traitor and death to Judas. If Dreyfus also heard shouts of done with the Jews and dirty Jews that certain newspapers reported, he didn't say. I mean, just. Just incredible. And this is just one source among many in which you really show his attempt is not only the moral strength, but the. The physical effort that it required to retain his dignity in such, you know, Degradation.
- [25:34]
C
Yeah, yeah. That, you know, because I tried to just imagine inside his head what must have been going on at that point where you're accused of the worst crime. For you, an ardent patriot being accused of treason. Nothing worse than that. And everyone believed he was guilty. It must have been so horrifying. And to maintain your dignity, I use as the picture for the frontest piece of the book a photograph taken immediately after the degradation ceremony. And it's an extremely poignant photograph where you see his uniform, you know, the insignia have been ripped off, and he just looks so sad. But he's, you know, his. He wants to remain dignified and maintain this military, you know, bearing, and it's so poignant.
- [26:27]
B
So actually, that brings me to the question of his personality. And it matters not only in our quest to understand what it was, but also because, as you show in the book, his personality actually had a direct impact on how it was perceived, because this is really a moment in history where mass media comes into being, and the media played an important role in the case. And you say that one of the tragedies of Dreyfus's life was his inability to bridge the gap between his Public and private self. So can you talk a bit more about the role that the media played and how his personality actually kind of worked against him in this particular context?
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C
Yeah, he was a very, like, inward focused person. Very reserved, I would say, which didn't, you know, make him a lot of friends among his fellow army officers. And I think there was a lot of resentment also because he was very wealthy. So he had a personal income of something like 40,000 francs at a time when the salary for an army officer was 2,000 francs. But he was also just very personally reserved. And so, you know, what he didn't realize, especially at the second trial, was that in this age of mass media, as you said, people wanted a performance of innocence, whereas he really believed that he just was innocent and didn't need to put on a show. But, you know, even very sympathetic observers were let down, I think, by his performance. And keep in mind that at that second trial, he had just come back from five years of torture where he didn't speak for five years, and that no one would talk to him. So he had lost his voice. He was rail thin. They had to pad his uniform. He was so emaciated. He was also still suffering from tropical diseases. So, you know, it was quite difficult. But he didn't. He wasn't. He was never able to kind of win sympathy with his personality. And that although in private, you know, there's a saying in English that still waters run deep. And he really, what I tried to show was that he did have a very rich inner life. He was a really well read person. He was a true intellectual. One of the things that gets said about him that I really wanted to argue against. And this goes back to Leon Bloom, who was the first Jewish prime minister in the 1930s of France, but had been a big Dreyfus supporter in his youth. After Dreyfus died in 35, he wrote his Souvenir sur la Fair, where he says he has a famous line there. If Dreyfus had not been Dreyfus, would he even have been a dry Fusard? So, you know, did he understand the implication being that he didn't understand what was at stake in his case? He was this military guy, he was this stiff, you know, unthinking person who didn't understand what the fight on his behalf was really all about. That is totally not true. And I show in the book that he definitely did understand why, what was at stake in the affair. And that's clear in the letters he wrote both to his family and to the president. Of the French Republic demanding his exoneration.
- [30:06]
B
Sadly, our conversation is coming to an end, but I do want to finish with two important questions. The first one is really the question of the impact of the affair on Jewish communities abroad. We don't have that much time for you to tell us everything we ought to know, but I wonder maybe if you can center your answer here on how American Jews particularly responded to the affair and then some final words about why this affair matters today. It should be noted that the Musee d' Arrai du Sol du d', Esc, which you mentioned earlier, recently had an exhibit about Alfred Lefousse. I think your book is very timely. So if you could reflect a bit about, you know, if there are any lessons, if any, that we should take away from the book.
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C
Yeah. So as I said, I have a chapter in the book where I look at how Jews around the world viewed the affair. And what I discovered was that, you know, Jews at that time, at the end of the 19th century, were very divided and they're really politically fall into three main groups. So this was the period that Zionism was getting started. So the first Zionist Congress and the very years that the affair was playing out in the, you know, 1897, 1898, what I call the integrationists. So the people who believed that Jews should be loyal subjects of the countries in which they were born. And that was the dominant view, especially in Western Europe and the United States, of kind of middle class Jews who were opposed to Zionism. They were also opposed to the third option, which was socialism and this idea that, you know, Jews should be part of a kind of international community of workers. And what I discovered was that the affair was really essential for all three political ideologies and kind of crystallizing what was at stake for Jews. So in the United States, I looked very closely at this newspaper called the American Israelite, which was published in Cincinnati, and it was, which was where there was a big community of German Jews, of reform German Jews who were, you know, very well integrated, had been in America for, you know, several generations and were very opposed to both Zionism and to socialism. And, you know, at first they were horrified that a Jew would be accused of treason. They, you know, assumed he must be guilty, like a lot of, you know, like everyone did. No one could believe the French army would make a mistake like this. But then, you know, when it became clear that he was innocent, they had to walk a pretty fine line. So on the one hand, they wanted to fight against anti Semitism, on the other hand, they wanted to. They didn't want to give too much credence to this idea that there was antisemitism because that would feed into the Zionist narrative that Jews weren't safe in America or Western Europe and needed a homeland of their own. So the kind of ideological compromise they came to was, oh, this could happen in France, where they don't have the same legal protections, but America is different. So they really bought into this idea of American exceptionalism partly because of the Anglo American legal tradition, which they felt was different from France. And you know something, a case like this could never really happen. Not necessarily true. But also this idea that America was just a completely different kind of country where people were just naturally tolerant. There was also, I should say, a lot of anti Catholic sentiment that we see in also the mainstream non Jewish American press, which was also very pro Dreyfus, partly because it was very Protestant. This idea that America was a Protestant nation. This could only happen in. In a kind of Catholic country that was still, you know, kind of tied to kind of old, you know, old ideas and prejudices. So that was really where the Amer, a lot of mainstream American Jews came out. So this idea was, this is really scary. We need to fight against it, but we are safe in Americ because of it.
- [34:48]
B
That's fascinating.
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C
Yeah. And so then, yeah, the question of how the relevance now is really a good question. And I think that the case is perennially interesting, but especially now at a time of rising antisemitism. And, you know, I think that many of the reasons that Dreyfus was accused are still very relevant for understanding antisemitism today. This idea of a Jewish conspiracy, you know, conspiratorial thinking that Jews control the press and the media, which became very important. This was a big accusation being, you know, lodged against the people defending Dreyfus. It was one of the reasons that, that Jews felt hesitant to defend Dreyfus because they didn't want to be seen as defending him because he was Jewish or staying in the idea of a Jewish conspiracy. Jews were in a very difficult position. I think some of that is still relevant. The other thing that I think is very relevant today, even though, you know, antisemitism, it's not exactly the same now. I think, you know, the creation of the state of Israel and of Zionism has really reshuffled the, you know, so I don't want to make easy analogies between what's going on now and what's going on then. But one other thing that I think is very relevant is Dreyfus's commitment to the truth, to maintaining, to fighting against antisemitism, to maintain how to. How to survive when it seems like everyone is against you. I think those lessons from the affair are still very relevant today there.
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B
Thank you. I think those are excellent closing words. And I've so enjoyed reading the book. It was excellent. And I devoured it within hours, so. Yeah. And it's really impressive.
- [36:53]
C
That's so nice.
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B
Yeah, it's really impressive because, I mean, there's so much literature. I mean, so many sources you could have used. So your ability to just deliver something that's very readable and I think a read that's accessible for not just for academics, but for people outside of academia, too.
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C
What I think is, yeah, you are a. Should say the target audience for the book, in a sense, that. But also, I did try to write it for people who don't know anything about the Dreyfus affair. I think that was my goal, is that you could pick this up and learn about the affair itself and about this very extraordinary person.
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B
Well, I can say I've recommended it to friends outside of academia, so hopefully they will heed the message. Thank you so much, Mori. It was really a delight to host you today, so thank you so much.
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C
Well, thank you so much, Geraldine. It was really fun. So thank you so much.
- [37:47]
B
Thank you. And have a great day. And I also wish our listeners a great day as well.
- [37:51]
C
Okay, thank you.