The Endgame

Newsletter #19 - Vive la France!

This newsletter looks at issues and events from the endgame point of view. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Player options are limited and diminishing.

Toronto, April 9, 2023

Vive la France!

My new book about antisemitism describes the Dreyfus Affair in a chapter that discusses antisemitism in France. The Dreyfus Affair is famous as a startling and sinister expression of official antisemitism. But one intriguing aspect is often overlooked—the peculiar personal conduct of Dreyfus himself.

It all began in December 1894 with the trial and conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer. At nine in the morning on January 5, 1895, in the courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, before a large and hostile crowd, the epaulettes were torn from Dreyfus’s uniform in an appalling way designed for his maximum humiliation. This was the so-called “degradation ceremony.”  During the brutal ceremony Dreyfus cried out, “I am innocent.” Then he added, “Vive la France!”

The Jewish Austrian-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl was present at the degradation ceremony. In the words of his friend and compatriot Stefan Zweig, Herzl “had known in his heart at that moment that Dreyfus was indeed innocent, and only the fact that he was Jewish had brought the terrible suspicion of treason down on him.” Herzl went on to found political Zionism, impelled, some say, by his disgust at the treatment of Dreyfus.

Dreyfus spent five years of solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, the French penal colony. After long and complex legal proceedings, he was finally declared innocent in 1906 by the Court of Cassation, the highest court of appeal in France. Then—extraordinarily—Dreyfus rejoined the French army, his devotion to France apparently undimmed by his persecution and imprisonment. He was promoted to the rank of major and made a knight of the Legion of Honour.

Dreyfus suffered hugely at the hands of the State and was dealt a monstrous injustice. (If you have any doubt about the extent of his suffering, read his own account of what happened, Five Years of My Life 1894–1899.) You would expect Dreyfus to be overwhelmed by anger and bitterness. And yet, at the degradation ceremony, at the height of his humiliation, he cried “Vive la France!” And when he was eventually found innocent, after five years of suffering on Devil’s Island, he rejoined the French army. How can this be explained?

Is it that Alfred Dreyfus was an ordinary man, deeply conservative, full of deference and loyalty, unquestioning of institutions, with little imagination? Is it that he just didn’t understand what had been done to him?

Or was it that he was thoroughly imbued with the overwhelming desire of French Jewry to assimilate, to be part of French society, to belong, no matter the cost? The novelist Louis Begley has written that French Jews “transformed their sense of gratitude for their citizenship into an unswerving patriotism and self-identification with France” which led to “the tendency of French Jews to minimize the importance of anti-Semitism, remain passive, and avoid speaking out against outrageous behaviour…”

Assimilation has seldom worked for Jews, in France or anywhere else. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called it a dreadful misunderstanding. “Genocide was not imposed on the Jews in spite of their effort to assimilate, but in response to this very attempt. The more they hid their Jewishness, the more terrifying they became to others.”

Dreyfus is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. I visited him there in 2018. His unremarkable grave is hard to find in the crowded graveyard. The inscription on his tomb records that his granddaughter, Madeline Lévy, was murdered in Auschwitz. The tragedy of the Dreyfus family did not end with Alfred.

P.S. My new book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics.  You can get it at the usual places.