The Ghosts of Alfred Dreyfus
IDEAS
By Ronald Schechter
July 7, 2006
On July 12, France will celebrate the centennial of the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer whose false indictment on a charge of treason set off a political scandal in the country.

In a certain light, it would seem that the Dreyfus Affair — and the environment in which it emerged — has long since been buried. Yet Dreyfus has remained an iconic part of the political landscape in France. Even the openly antisemitic leader of the extreme rightwing National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has taken to comparing himself with the wronged officer. Indeed, recent acts of anti-Jewish violence over the past few years have prompted direct invocations of the persecution of Dreyfus. The most horrific of these was this past January's Affaire Halimi, in which a street gang kidnapped a young Jew of modest means named Ilan Halimi and demanded half a million euros in ransom from his single mother. When, on advice of the police, she ceased to maintain contact with the kidnappers, they tortured her son for three weeks. He was found handcuffed and naked, with burns on 80% of his body, and he died on the way to the hospital. The police denied that this was a hate crime, and the minister of the interior claimed that the kidnappers' motives were primarily greed, not antisemitism.

But as grisly as the Affaire Halimi was, and as insensitive and incompetent as the law enforcement authorities proved themselves to be, its connection to the Dreyfus Affair is limited: Although antisemitism was a prominent feature of the Dreyfus Affair, its deepest influence was left not in the realm of ethnic tensions but in the battle for the rights of the accused — that sometimes unpopular, yet always essential pillar of any just society.

When seen from this perspective, there is little cause for celebration, as examples of affairs truly analogous to Dreyfus seem to emerge every day. Indeed, last year more than a dozen men and women from the French town of Outreau were detained on charges of pedophilia — at least one for nearly a year — before they were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Stories of physical abuse during interrogation, detention of up to a year, and the suicide of one suspect and attempted suicide of another have shaken national confidence in the judicial system that has been in place since the time of Napoleon. And even on these shores, there now exists a disturbing parallel to Dreyfus in the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Many of the detainees may have planned or carried out attacks against civilians and thereby earned this designation, though officially they are merely "enemy combatants." But how many Dreyfuses are among the hundreds held at Guantánamo? How many prisoners have committed no other crime than having an ethnicity or religion different from that of their captors? A Supreme Court ruling late last month has annulled military commissions proposed by the Bush administration, which would have evaded the basic standards expected of courts-martial of prisoners of war. But this judgment says nothing about the legality of indefinite detention of civilians.

And so it would seem that, on the centenary of this tragic fiasco, celebrations should perhaps be replaced by a detailed rendition of the story of Alfred Dreyfus — with its maddening, byzantine turns of injustice — to remind us how far we haven't come in 100 years.

In September 1894, a concierge and petty spy at the German Embassy in Paris discovered a military memorandum, or bordereau, unsigned and without a named recipient, containing cryptic promises of military secrets. She conveyed the document to Hubert-Joseph Henry, an ambitious commandant, who eagerly passed it on to his superiors at the Statistical Section — the division responsible for espionage — of the General Staff. One of these men, a colonel named Fabre, claimed to recognize the handwriting of the Jewish captain and, after hasty consultation with self-styled handwriting experts who came to contradictory conclusions, on October 15, Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew with expertise in artillery, was arrested for high treason.

Following two months of imprisonment, including solitary confinement, shouted accusations and other forms of psychological torture designed (in vain) to produce a confession, Dreyfus faced a closed-session court martial. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana. While there, he suffered from malarial fever, dysentery, malnutrition and severe depression. When absurd rumors of an impending rescue surfaced, his jailors had him shackled to his bed for 40 days.

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