Remember how I love book reviews? This one's a beauty. It connects modernism, European anti-Semitism, national transformation, societal turning points, ideals and realities, history, culture, and deferred but eventual justice.
Just as picking up A Distant Mirror or The Proud Tower means that I disappear into that milieu until I've finished rereading the entire book (which is why both tomes are presently somewhere slightly difficult to reach, that I may at least try to get on with life), so thoroughly evocative of those times is Tuchman, so does any piece on turn-of-the-[previous]-century France rivet my attention (why yes, somewhere in here is Janet Flanner's reportage from early 20th century Paris, which gave me new names to pique my interest when I saw them elsewhere). Most of the roots of "modern" (i.e. late 20th century cultural, political, social, and fashion) life were sunk back then. (World War I sank the rest.) And the Dreyfus "affair" intersected with culture and politics in far-reaching and unimaginable-at-the-time ways.
A taste. Maybe a full bite:
Begley wants to use the occasion not for French-bashing, or for reciting the enduring history of European anti-Semitism, bleak as it is, but as a pointed warning and reminder of how fragile the standards of civilized conduct prove in moments of national panic. The Dreyfus affair matters, he believes, because we have, in the past decade, made our own Devil’s Island and hundreds of new Dreyfuses—the Dreyfus affair matters because we’re still in the middle of it. Begley, as he recounts the story of the Parisian fin-de-siècle legal drama, also spends many pages showing that among the prisoners in places like Guantánamo are many Dreyfuses—innocent, as he was, and, on the whole, much worse treated. He wants to arraign Americans, and particularly those who fetishize the Dreyfus case without grasping its principles: that every accused person should be able to face his accusers in a fair trial, and that national panic makes bad policy and false prisoners.and
In any modernized country, the backward-looking party will always tend toward resentment and grievance. The key is to keep the conservatives feeling that they are an alternative party of modernity. (This was Disraeli’s great achievement, as it was, much later, de Gaulle’s.) When the conservative party comes to see itself as unfairly marginalized, it becomes a party of pure reaction, which is what happened to the French right after Dreyfus. Instead of purging the anti-Semites, people on the right decided to rally behind them. They came to hate the idea of the Republic itself..and
The lesson to be learned was the lesson that Clemenceau had tried to teach the jury at Zola’s trial. The urge to protect the nation from its enemies by going around the corner to get them is natural, but what you get is usually not the enemies, and, going around the corner, you bump into something worse. Breaking the law to defend the nation ends up breaking the nation. Sometimes long stories have short morals.I remember looking this up in our newish World Book Encyclopedia, probably after seeing The Life of Emile Zola on TV, probably around the time that Paul Muni died. There were many mentions of the case in places like Vogue and Time (the magazine) and Exodus (the movie) and a full section in The Proud Tower.
Just to be sure there is no misunderstanding: Je suis une Dreyfusarde.
Please read the whole thing, even though it is more than three paragraphs.
I might crosspost this.
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