The Dreyfus Affair
Source: Charles Maurras, Au Signe de Flore. Paris, Grasset, 1933;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2007.
No figure on the French far-right was as influential as Charles Maurras. His organization and newspaper, “L’Action Francaise,” were the focal point for an odious mix of royalism and anti-Semitism that was to bear fruit in every fascist and collaborationist group before and during World War II.
An affair of state broke out in this country that had almost no state.
For the crime of treason the brevet Captain of the General Staff, Alfred Dreyfus had been condemned to perpetual detention and sent to a penal colony. He had been there for two years. Around the middle of 1897 a rumor spread around Paris: that officer had been condemned as Jew; the bordereau that he was accused of having written had been written by another, and the Jews, proof of his innocence in hand, were going to move heaven and earth to prove it. The designated apologist was another Jew named Bernard Lazare.
This Lazare had just written a book on “Anti-Semitism, its History and its Causes,” whose argument rested on two quite luminous principles, for it reconciled, while at the same time explaining, Marx and Rothschild, Bleichroeder and Lasalle: The Jew is a revolutionary agent; the Jew is a conservative as regards himself.
It would be difficult to find a better definition.
The French were warned.
The following autumn, after two pamphlets by Lazare had prepared certain strata of opinion, the campaign begun in the cellars of parliament extended to the major press. In just a few days it became so lively that the object of it was nearly covered over by the passions he excited. The degraded captain disappeared beneath the agitation provoked by his image. The Dreyfus Affair became simply the Affair.
Where was the Affair going to lead a state so weak, a nation so divided, an army so exposed?
The Minister of War affirmed at the tribune that Dreyfus had been justly and regularly condemned and, his dual word of honor thus produced, he found neither in the laws nor in himself the means to effectively put down a slanderous and anarchic defamation. In the half measures attempted one after the other we can see the fear of the great remedies that alone would have worked. Opinion was divided into two camps: one cried out “Truth! Justice!” while producing only fables and insults; the other “Fatherland, Honor, Flag” without proposing anything practical or rational.
Nevertheless, two or three newspapers, expressly founded for this purpose qualified the army and its chiefs in a tone and in language that troubled the French of 1897. When seeing soldiers gathered at the gates of barracks to read in l’Aurore or La Petite République the filthy litany of invective against the braided and the saber draggers you had the right to ask if we weren’t headed for another Commune. More simply, it was the butchery of 1914 that was being prepared.
Since 1870, despite or because of Boulangisme, the French masses had remained attached to their army. All the maneuvers of anti-military propaganda had failed, for the country had maintained its feeling for the need for a permanent defense against Germany. On this we were united...
Anti-patriotism remained circumscribed within refined philosophical circles. Despite Gourmont, who declared himself unable to sacrifice for the re-taking of Alsace either his right hand, which held a sacred quill, or the little finger of his left, which served to shake off the ash at the end of his cigarette, we continued “to be hypnotized by the blue line of the Vosges,” despite the counsels of Jules Ferry. Bétheny’s review had inspired enthusiasm in the country, and no one doubted that the prompt re-raking of Strasbourg and Metz was the common objective of M. Felix Faure and Tsar Nicholas. The army credits were always voted unanimously, and unwavering esteem was accorded to all its chiefs.
Opinion was thus still healthy; few Frenchmen imagined what a prodigious about face the spirit of public without teachers or chiefs was exposed to, or whose teachers and chiefs lacked principles, influence and activity. At the first lightning bolt of the Dreyfus Affair the old acquired knowledge of tradition and custom, all our remnants of patriotic affection, of chauvinist pride seemed to fall like rubble, torn apart, razed, carted away. We could get ourselves back in hand, but the first minute had put all in question.
Paris gazed at itself. The Jewish salons were its master. The newspapers it opened were Jewish newspapers. We though that Jewry only had a hold on money. Money had delivered everything over to it: an important sector of the university, an equivalent sector of the judicial administration, a lesser but still appreciable sector of the army, of the highest reaches of the army. At the General Staff, at the intelligence service, the Jews had their man, Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, quickly unmasked but so well placed that he was able to do all.
What a singular hour! The various renegades, public or secret, of the army and the fatherland could follow with their worried half-smile the sordid parade of defamations, slanders, outrages against all they claimed to still serve and respect. They could hardly have dared this, but they had calculated the consequences and the profits. As for the foreign minority though whom the new morality was constituted, it didn’t hide either its contempt for its elders, the passions of its aesthetic anarchism, or its ambition to tear everything down. A Jewish lady asked: “Really, they always say that we should never touch the army. Why handle it more gently than anything else? I just don’t understand.” It had been understood up till then: the men who bore the responsibility for the life or the death of millions of others should have a corresponding authority. The ferocious folly with which such clear views could be either transgressed or neglected caused in us our first shivers...
I don’t want to go into the debate on innocence or guilt. My first and last opinion on this was that if by chance Dreyfus was innocent he should be named Maréchal of France, but we should execute a dozen of his principal defenders for the triple harm they caused France, peace, and reason...
What was the origin of the political machination? It was complex, and the internal and external agents were quite varied. If Jewish pride, the Jewish spirit of domination and anarchy operated on the first line, they were very effectively served by the old republican doctrine. The Panama scandals had chased from power an old republican party that was burning to return. The Affair gave it an occasion for revenge, and its hostility towards the military sprit, its hatred for tribunals of exception found themselves stimulated by the alimentary interest to re-conquer the official posts to which rallied Catholics were already flowing, who dreamed of being associated with the government and administration of M. Meline. They counted on eliminating the newcomers and they succeeded in this by setting the republic in solidarity with the Jewish mob and the campaigns against the army. How, however much he had rallied to them, could a former officer like M. de Mun put up with so many insults to the flag? In his own words he classified himself a bad republican.
Outside of France it was probably not Germany that at first favored the agitation of the Dreyfuses. In 1897 the relations between the two countries were almost good. Since Kiel (1895) the Russian alliance had worked at a rapprochement between us and Berlin. But neither rapprochements, nor alliances of state prevent armies from spying on each other: Russia surely spied on us! Germany did the same.
Its first impulse was not to take joy in the Affair or to exploit it against us. Either it didn’t at first see the fortunate consequences for it, or its amour-propre suffered upon seeing itself taken and compromised in the person of its ambassador and its military attaché. Germany attempted at first to put a halt to it all with saber rattling. The first encouragement for the Dreyfusards, perhaps even the first inspiration, and certainly the money, came to them from England. This is because at the time England was in the position of a half-enemy: worried by our colonial policies it felt itself targeted by the Marchand mission which, having left the mouth of the Congo in July 1896, was to reach Fachoda at the end of the summer of ‘98, at the height of the Dreyfusian crisis. Everything happened as if, watch in hand, the London government had prepared and machinated this coincidence of our success in Africa and our Parisian impotence, which gave entire satisfaction to the English.
Let us render this justice to the men of Wilhelm II: they were able to quickly see what advantage they could obtain from out civil struggles, not only for the unhindered progress of their empire, but for our enfeebling; and we can establish with certainty that from 1898-1912 they never ceased profiting from our internal embarrassments and our disarmament issuing from the Dreyfus Affair....
Whenever that fable of the victim of a judicial error was again flung at me with tremolos that still sicken me I pictured in thought a battlefield, doubtless less spacious and terrible than that which the greatest of wars was to arrange. But even so, as well as I could imagine, I saw the funereal pile of those beautiful children of France “laying cold and bloody on their poorly defended land” because the oriental mob, having overturned the ramparts and smashed the arms, they had been forced to oppose their bare breasts to the artillery. This million and a half dead and dying constitutes quite a charnel house. Those who built or enlarged it through foolish imprudence have not yet repented enough to inspire pity. As for those who coldly, by policy or fanaticism, had constructed this bloody mystification, their band will never cease receiving my malediction.