Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (78 page)

44. Alfred Dreyfus and
La Croix

C
ONSTANTINE, SAINT HELENA,
the Seamless Robe, a nail of the True Cross, relics of the man who replaced Judas; a first battlefield of the Crusades and of Eisenhower's campaign; the birthplace of Karl Marx and of Klaus Barbie. What more could be subsumed under the name of Trier?

If Rome was vulnerable to the tide of invaders at the time of Saint Augustine, so was its northern capital on the Moselle. Germanic tribes had no trouble taking control of Treves, as Trier was known in the fifth century. (Recall that the name derived from the original tribe that Caesar's army had encountered in the region five hundred years before—the Treveri. The initial Roman settlement had been called Augusta Treverorum, which eventually shook down to Treves.)

There had been Jews in Treves from the beginning of the Roman settlement. With the coming of Germans, some Jews, presumably as a way of identifying themselves in language that the bearded new overlords would recognize, took a new name, a Germanic mimicking not of the meaning but of the sound of Treves. They put the word
drei,
which meant "three," together with the word
fuss,
which meant "foot." Thus the ancient name of the city of Trier provides, in the historian Michael Burns's phrase, the "linguistic skeleton for his family name"
¹
—the name, that is, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus family had migrated south from Trier, but not far. Settled near the Rhine, in Alsace, they would find themselves in the midst of conflict between France and Germany, as the forces of nationalism split Europe. Alsace had its eyes firmly fixed on France at the time of Alfred's birth in 1859. As his home city of Mulhausen had shed the Germanic by calling itself Mulhouse, so Alfred's father traded the Germanic "Dreyfuss" for the Frenchified "Dreyfus."
²
Yet the Franco-Prussian War, which had traumatized Paris and, indirectly, sealed the pope's fate in Rome, also put its stamp on the Dreyfus family's home region. As it would repeatedly, with such catastrophic effect, the border shifted, this time to the west, across the Rhine. In 1871, Mulhouse became part of the new Germany that Bismarck was shaping out of the alliances of principalities and city-states he had pulled together to fight France.

The German occupiers came when Alfred was twelve years old. It was, as Burns reports Dreyfus saying, his "first sorrow."
³
His family was Jewish, but his first identity was as French, and as was true for most Alsatians, the German occupation only reinforced him in that primordial loyalty. The Dreyfus family had made the most of emancipation. Alfred's grandfather Jacob, born before the French Revolution, had traveled the Rhineland as a peddler of used goods. But Alfred's father, Raphael, born in 1818—on May 12, one week to the day after Karl Marx was born—became a prosperous merchant, then an even more successful manufacturer of textiles. Unlike Marx—perhaps reflecting what it was to live in France just then, not Prussia—both Raphael and his son were raised to take their Jewishness both seriously and for granted. But also, since they considered themselves French, never German, to see it as no barrier to full citizenship.

The family was affluent by the time of Alfred's childhood, and his older brothers were moving into the thriving family business. Alfred was educated at boarding schools in Paris. Though more inclined to intellect than action, his intense feeling for France led him boldly to aim for a career in the French army. The shadow of the Commune was still on Paris during the time of Alfred's schooling: in 1871, he would have been twelve years old. A dread of revolution as social dissolution was in the air. After the Commune had been destroyed, Roman Catholicism had found ways to reassert itself. A massive church, the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, was being built on the hilltop of Montmartre as a monument to the victory over the anticlerical Communards. At the same time, radicals, Freemasons, and a class of economically powerful Protestants opposed the restoration of Catholic influence. The parliament of the Third Republic was riven with factions reflecting all of this. Such discord only reinforced in the military an ethos of nonpolitical and nondenominational devotion to an ever more mystical
la France.
That devotion naturally meant support for the established order, whatever it was. Alfred's one intensely felt political opinion was tied to the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine from Germany—a conviction that fueled his military ambition.

As Burns recounts the progression, Dreyfus was admitted to the École Polytechnique, a military academy, and upon graduation in 1880, he was commissioned. A decade later, having earned the rank of captain, he solidified his position with an admirable marriage. In a ceremony at the leading synagogue of Paris, and of France, Captain Dreyfus married the twenty-year-old Lucie Eugénie Hadamard. She was an elegant, well-educated pianist, a clear-eyed young woman from a distinguished family. Her father's diamond trade in Paris had made the Hadamards wealthy. Presiding at the wedding was Grand Rabbi Zadoc Kahn, who, as the leading spokesman for French Jews, had notably affirmed a commitment to "Fatherland and religion."
⁴
As we saw earlier, this tendency to reduce Jewishness to religion alone could and would be used against Jews for whom the identity was more comprehensive. But it served the purposes of the secular society to treat Judaism and Christianity as equivalent, since both were to be dismissed. Rabbi Kahn's role, however, was not to raise such points of contention, but to sidestep them. He said, "Jews above all feel a love for France without limit ... They are proud ... to work for her prosperity and to defend her flag."
⁵
That was exactly how Captain Dreyfus felt. He would happily leave his Jewishness out of it. In our terms, that part of his identity was private, and in this public-private dichotomy, as in that between religion and identity, we see the Enlightenment dualism that first surfaced in Descartes.

Lucie and Alfred settled into a comfortable apartment in the Eighth Arrondissement, between the ChampsÉlysées and the Seine, an area where a good number of affluent Jews lived, a mile or two up the river from the district around the Hotel de Ville, where poorer Jews were concentrated. It was in the Place de l'Hótel de Ville that Saint Louis had burned the Talmud in 1242. The smoke from the flames could well have drifted across the needle spire of nearby Sainte-Chapelle, which the sainted king was then building to house relics of the Passion found by Helena, including the crown of thorns. A century and a half later, the Jews of Paris were expelled, not to return for nearly three hundred years.

But this was a new day in Paris. For a century, the promise of
liberté
had beckoned Jews. Nearly all Jews living in France had settled into French identity, speaking the language as their own.
⁶
By the late nineteenth century, forty thousand lived in the city, including many refugees from pogroms in Russia and Poland. Yes, the Jew-caricaturing tradition of Voltaire was alive here, but the code of liberalism by now required a certain circumspection in such expression. Yes, many Catholics, especially clerics, assumed a Jewish alliance with Freemasons and Protestants, but many other Catholics had grown into a benign indifference toward Jews. This tended to loosen society's grip on the tenets of faith and on its prejudices. All of which meant that the Third Republic, coming after Napoleon Ill's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, upheld the new ideal. Like its economy, its social structures had proved to be more expansive than anyone could have predicted. In France, Jews no longer had to hope to be citizens; they already were. Their attachment to the republican ethos reinforced the impulse among defenders of the ancien régime throughout Europe to regard Jews as the living image of the hated Revolution.
⁷
As we have seen, Jews were perennially liable to be blamed for the excesses of that Revolution, which in Paris had included the savage desecration in 1791 of Sainte-Chapelle itself.

Captain Dreyfus, at the start of a promising career, seemed proof that the Jews of France had arrived. Admitted to the elite École de Guerre, the war college that groomed senior officers, he graduated ninth in a class of eighty-one. By contrast, as Burns points out, Napoleon Bonaparte had graduated from the École Militaire near the bottom of his class.
⁸
Dreyfus was rewarded in 1892 with an appointment to the army's general staff. It is often said that he was the first Jew to hold such a position, but that is not clearly so. As the historian Robert Hoffman points out, some Jews had become generals by then. As to Jews on the general staff itself, it is hard to say, but that very "uncertainty should be significant, for most of the French seem not to have paid close attention to who and where the Jews were."
⁹

Nevertheless, one of Dreyfus's superiors protested his appointment because he was Jewish. But according to the minister of war, "The army makes no distinction among Jews, Protestants and Catholics, and any such division is a crime against the nation."
¹⁰
The appointment of Captain Dreyfus to the general staff stood. The event should have marked a fulfillment of the promise of emancipation. Instead, it was the beginning of its undoing.

The facts of the so-called
I'affaire Dreyfus
are quickly summarized.
¹¹
In October 1894, Captain Dreyfus was arrested and charged with spying for Germany. For two weeks, Lucie was told nothing of his whereabouts, or of the charges. Finally, she was asked to provide letters in her husband's hand to investigators, which she did. The evidence against Dreyfus was one handwritten page enumerating the military secrets that had been passed to the Germans. The army charged that the writing was the captain's. His wife believed in his innocence from the start, and resolved to defend him.

When the arrest of Dreyfus was made public, the fact of his being a Jew set off an explosion of anti-Jewish invective in the press. In December, Dreyfus was brought to trial, convicted, and sent to Devil's Island, the notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana in South America. He was its only prisoner at the time. "My only crime," he cried, "is to have been born a Jew!"
¹²
The army rejected every suggestion that an injustice had been done, but the captain's family refused to abandon the effort to prove otherwise. The minister of war who had presided over the case, General Auguste Mercier, turned all criticism into a point of personal honor, and much of French society rallied to him. Those who supported Dreyfus, on the other hand, were seen by an increasingly agitated press and public as participants in a conspiracy against the nation. The case became politicized, with factions facing off across the clearly defined, but heretofore dormant, fault line separating right from left, monarchist from republican, Catholics from the new secularists. And all of those differences coalesced around the word "Jew."

A year and a half after the first charges were filed, an army supporter of Dreyfus uncovered a document in handwriting that matched the single page of script that had convicted Dreyfus, but this document was known to have been written by one Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. Supporters of Dreyfus, called Dreyfusards, demanded a new trial. That was denied, but charges were brought against Esterhazy. On January u, 1898, he was acquitted by an army court. Two days later, the novelist Emile Zola published a broadside attack— "
J'Accuse...!
" —against those responsible for scapegoating Dreyfus. Zola condemned "the odious antisemitism of which the great, liberal, rights-of-man France will die if she is not cured."'
¹³
But he also named names—"I accuse General Mercier of having rendered himself the accomplice ... I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands certain proofs of Dreyfus's innocence ... I accuse General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse of having made themselves accomplices..."
¹⁴
—singling out the ministers and generals who presided over the frame-up. As a result, Zola was charged with, and then convicted of, defamation, prompting his flight to England.

But Zola's charge transformed
l'affaire,
galvanizing that part of the population prepared to believe in Dreyfus. Pressure on the army mounted. In August 1898, one Colonel Hubert Henry admitted that he had forged supporting evidence against Dreyfus in the original trial. Then Henry committed suicide. A court of appeals ordered a new trial for Dreyfus. In the late summer of 1899, after the prisoner's return from Devil's Island, the second trial took place. The army's entire high command now saw its honor at stake, as well as that of General Mercier. They were more determined than ever to stand by the original verdict. The board of officers presiding at the second trial, choosing, as it was put, between Mercier and the Jew, once again voted to convict.

There is every reason to believe that army officers knowingly covered up an initial mistake, especially once Merciers honor became yoked to Dreyfus's guilt. But to the conservative segment of the public that supported the army, the matter was simpler, and since they were ignorant of the hidden facts, so was the choice. General or Jew? It was unthinkable to those upholding the honor of France that Mercier and the others would lie. Mercier was an embodiment of the old order.
L'affaire
was revealing that the old order was in some way corrupt.

The injustice of the second conviction was apparent. Immediately, the president of the Third Republic, Emile Loubet, pardoned Dreyfus. On September 19, 1899, he was released from prison. That did not satisfy Dreyfus or his family. They continued to press for a complete exoneration, an impulse that even some supporters saw as Jewish impudence. Finally, in July 1906, the high court of appeals, a civilian court, reversed the second conviction, decisively overruling the military. "Dreyfus Innocent!" one broadside proclaimed, a victory "
du Droit, de la Justice et de la Vérité."
¹⁵