In Our Time - The Dreyfus Affair

Episode Date: October 8, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Robert Gildea, Ruth Harris and Robert Tombs discuss the Dreyfus Affair, the 1890s scandal which divided opinion in France for a generation.In 1894, a high-flying Jewish staff officer in the French Army, one Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of spying for the Prussians. He was publicly humiliated: before a large Paris crowd, he was stripped of his badges of rank and his sword was ceremonially broken. Some of those watching shouted 'Down with Judas!' Then he was dispatched to Devil's Island. But when it emerged that Dreyfus was innocent, a scandal erupted which engulfed the Army, the Church and French society as a whole, exposing deep political rifts, and the nation's endemic anti-Semitism. It pitted Catholics against Republicans, provoked fighting in the streets, and led to the prosecution of the novelist Emile Zola, after his famous J'Accuse polemic against those protecting the real spy and so prolonging Dreyfus's suffering. The Affair became so divisive that it posed a serious threat to the French Republic itself. Finally, in 1905, it prompted the separation of Church and State. The scandal and the anti-Semitism at the heart of it cast a very long shadow. In 1945, when the ultra-nationalist one-time 'anti-Dreyfusard' Charles Maurras was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, he reacted by declaring that his punishment was Dreyfus's revenge. Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; Ruth Harris is Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University; Robert Tombs is Professor of French History at Cambridge University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1894, a Jewish staff officer in the French army was convicted of spying. To cries of down with Judas from a large Parisian crowd, he was publicly stripped of his badges of rank before being deported to Devil's Island.

This display of anti-Semitism was ugly enough, and years later, after heinous punishment, it transpired that the officer was innocent. This was the Dreyfus affair, and it tore France apart. The scandal of Alfred Dreyfus' treatment set Republicans against Catholics and led to the prosecution of the novelist Emil Zola. It threatened the foundations of the French Republic itself, provoked the separation of church and state,

and established the model of the French intellectual. Half a century later, during the Nazi occupation, the affair was still influencing France. To discuss the Dreyfus Fair, I'm joined by Robert Gilday, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, Ruth Harris, a lecturer in modern history, fellow of new college at Oxford, and Robert Toombs, as Professor of French History, at Cambridge University. Robert Gilder, can you set the scene for us in 1894,

beginning with the military position, because Dreyfus was in the army? The Franco-Prussian War had ended with the defeat of France in 1871, and that was still casting a long shadow. Yes, one could say probably that in 1894, France was still suffering the traumatic shocks from the 1870 defeat at the hands of Bismarck's Germany. France had gone to war in an attempt to prevent German unification under the leadership of Napoleon III. Napoleon III hoped to reinvent the glories of his uncle Napoleon I, but it all went past. shaped for him. He was captured and surrendered. And then the Republic was proclaimed, and you went into a sort of people's war. The French people under the new Republican government rose up and tried

to throw the Germans out, but it again failed. Paris was put under siege. The French government had to leave the capital. A heavy defeat, a heavy peace was imposed on the French. They lost El Sassarraine. They had to pay a huge amount of money to Germany. Germany and war became civil war because the people of Paris refused to lay down their arms after the armistice. They rose up and that was the Paris commune, an enormously bloody conflict. And in the 25 or 30 years after that, the French tried to recover a sense of national identity and national greatness. They couldn't get back at Germany. There were some people who wanted a war at war of revenge, but that was not going to be possible.

and so they decided to go out and build an empire. They built an empire in Indochina, what's now Vietnam, in Africa, and that put them in competition with the British. So by 1894, the French have got a certain amount of self-esteem back, but they were extremely concerned about anything that might threaten their own sense of themselves and their sense of their own security. Did this have a particular...

Well, it must have had. What effect did this have on the French Army? Well, the French army, again, was an army that had a long past of success. It was an army that had achieved greatness during the French Revolution, obviously under Napoleon. It was an army with a huge amount of self-esteem, but it was an army that found it difficult to integrate with the Republic. The Republican government was very keen to impose its own regime, and this meant that a lot of opponents of the French Republic were army officers and generals,

and there was a huge amount of tension there. So France had become a republic, and by the 1890s, a third republic as it was, was universal accepted, or were they still rumblings? Well, I think it took the French three times, times to establish a republic. The first republic ended in a bloodbath and the coup d'etat of Napoleon the first. The second republic, another crushing of a popular revolt and the coup d'etat of Napoleon the third. So the third republic, they just about got it right. I mean, it was a sort of middle

of the road, parliamentary republic, run by people who weren't radical at all. You see pictures of them, and they're all got these sort of mutton-shop whiskers, and they're rather sort of patriarchal and a bit repressed probably. they had sort of solved the problem of regime change. They'd got rid of the monarchy, they'd got rid of the empire. There were royalist pretenders and bona fardist pretenders, but they were either dead or an exile. And they'd more or less dealt with the problem of popular revolution,

which was now chattled into Marxist socialist parties that were competing in elections. They'd had a wave of anarchists outranges in the 1890s, a president of the republic had been killed by an anarchist, but by and large, by the 1890s, the Third Republic is settling down. Robert Tooms, can we just go into this Third Republic? This is the background for the Dreyfus Fair. How would you say that the nature of the Third Republic,

which Robert Gilder has just outlined, how was it, as it were, preparing us for what would happen in the Dreyfus Fair? What was it stoke? What was being stoked up? Because there was this greater eruption, which we'll come to very soon. But what was stoking it up? Well, the 1890s, as Robert said, were a time that we can see in retrospect as settling down. But at that time it didn't seem like that, I think.

There'd been a series of crises in which the Republic seemed to have shown itself as corrupt, as weak, as divisive and so on. And there was still perhaps not a large, but a very angry and determined opposition, who had some reason to think that one more push might wreck the Republic. There'd been a huge financial scandal over the building of the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal Company had gone bust. A lot of French politicians had been taking money from it to hide its financial problems.

That seemed to have proved that the Republic itself was corrupt, at least its enemies thought so. There'd been in the past a near military coup. There were, as Robert said, the president had been murdered by anarchists. In the early 90s for the first time, the Third Republic fired on a crowd of protesters and killed people. So it seemed that this was a regime that was in serious trouble,

even if we might now think that it really wasn't. And so there was a monarchist come nationalist opposition, a rather mixed bunch of people, people who wanted a more authoritarian government, who would have liked some sort of military takeover if possible. Rural, aristocratic, Catholic, the more reactionary parts of the Catholic Church, certain regions were very strongly Catholic and traditional.

And also quite a few of the upper middle class did not like a regime that seemed to them to be soft, on the left, to be allowing socialism to increase its power, and simply to be a regime that was not capable either of maintaining solid order within the country and not capable of maintaining its greatness its security in Europe and in the rest of the world. Can I return to the army, which again Robert Gilday touched on. Was it, was its nature inherently against the Republic? Was it very definitely seen to be against the Republic?

It was mentioned, as I say, by Robert Gilder, but could you push that? Yeah, sure. I mean, the army had, I mean, France is quite a military culture, and it certainly was at that time. You know, if you go to Paris on the 14th of July and see the cadets from Saint-Cia marching down the Champsélezé and see the foreign legionnaires and see Sarkozy surrounded by his generals, you still get some sort of sense that this is a country in which the army occupies an important symbolic part in public ceremonial life. And at that time, you know, you could multiply that by ten. The army was always present on great public occasions. An American tourist said the daily passage of the regiment empties every shop and leaves the whole street tingling with pride and love.

And the army had to some extent been democratised by the Third Republic, in particular the fact that everybody served, every able-bodied man served. So everybody's husband, everybody's brother, everybody's son was going to be or had been a soldier. So the army had in a sense been put in and had put itself in a position of enormous popularity. And as we'll see, no doubt later when we talk about the Dreyfus case itself, its commanders used this position to try to make themselves untouchable. So it did occupy a very important place as a sort of symbol of French identity. And it was something that all French

parties could identify with. Was Paris itself at that time thought of with pride, did that play a part? Because we regard it as the Bel-Epoch, we had as Proust, there's Matisse, this Picasso, the Sati playing the piano, March and on it goes. Did that play into the Dreyfus affair at all? Well, I think Parisians, Paris was by far the largest city in France. There was not in France really the equivalent of the large provincial cities that you had in Germany or in Britain. So Paris was to a large extent on its own as being the centre of the French economy, the centre of French cultural life, the largest centre of population and so on. And so what happened in Paris was often taken to be the thing.

that should decide what happened in the country. And so political conflict, political opposition, was certainly concentrated in Paris. So riots in Paris meant a lot more than riots in Marseille, or riots in Ren. I was just wondering whether this artistic flowering had some kind of ameliorative effect of thought to have. Ruth?

I think that what's so interesting about Paris is that it is seen as the center of enlightenment, as the most advanced civilization, as the beauty of Europe. And actually why it's so interesting is because the Dreyfus affair is seen as an eruption of ugly anti-Semitism and reaction in the midst of this remarkable civilizing push.

And so it's the disjunction between Paris as the jewel of European civilization and the Dreyfus affair as the canker of the dark side, almost the pus of Europe, that is what makes the affair so interesting. Right, let's get to Alfred Dreyfus now. Can you just give us some background? Well, that is a very interesting story.

He's the youngest of a very large Jewish Alsatian family. So he's not just Jewish. He is also Alsatian. His father was a peddler who had made his fortune as a textile owner in Malouz. And what's interesting about him is that he didn't even speak French. He spoke Yiddish. he conducted his business in German,

and that most of the children and the family, their first language was in fact German or one of the Alsatian dialects. By the time he and his brother are finally educated, they are the only ones to receive a fully French education, and they move into this French world. For him, as for many people in Alsace,

the defeat of France in 187071 was a calamity, and he decides to dedicate his life to revenge, to getting Alsace back. And he does it through going to the Ecole Polytechnique, and then the Ecole Superior de Guerre. And it's through this meritocratic push that he wants to transform the army

into something that will be able to finally defeat Germany. So we're talking about a brilliant man because he gets the Ecolee there. He should have been second in the lists, but two of the judges said there weren't going to have any Jews, and so he got two zero votes, but he still came ninth, which is pretty high. Yeah. Very high. He was a wealthy man.

Extremely wealthy. And he went in and he just resolutely rose quite quickly in the inner circle. No, I think what happens is that he's being put in as a trainee for his meritocratic values and his excellence. And actually, what happens is he comes up within the military against the old reactionaries. Yeah, but he still gets, achieves someone, he becomes a captain, quite early on. He's on the general staff, which is very unusual.

Yes. So I'm just trying to establish that somebody, he was a bit of a star turn and he was moving forward. Very much. He's one of the 13 who were moved in right away to the general staff. How generally, before we come to be more specific about that, so there he is, on the general staff,

wealthy, brilliant Jewish. Now, what evidence was there at that moment before the affair began of anti-Semitism in France? Well, there's quite a bit of evidence. I think there's evidence of anti-Semitism growing all over Europe, but there are these banking scandals

at the beginning of the 1880s. And then, of course, there is the Panama scandal and the people who are involved in the corruption are two Jewish bankers. And there is also a campaign led by the famous Edward Drumon against

Jewish officers in the army. And it is seen as the anti-Semitic campaign is against their meritocrat. push, the idea that they are taking over jobs that belong to real Frenchmen, Catholics, aristocrats, and they are making some headway in these jobs. And so it's exactly people like Alfred Dreyfus that they want to push out. Good. So I think there's quite a lot of background now.

Let's get straight down to the Dreyfus Fair, Robert Gilder. Thank you very much, Ruth. How did the affair begin? Well, some people say it began in a waste paper basket because a cleaning woman found a document in the military offices and it turned out that it was some sort of military secret or correspondence regarding a military secret selling information to the Germans

and France was gripped by a sort of spy mania. Anyway, the route was traced back to Dreyfus and Dreyfus was accused of basically selling military secrets to the Germans, and he was court-martialed. He was paraded in the Ecole Normale, in the Ecole Militaire, in the huge courtyard, and he was stripped, ceremonially stripped of all his epaulettes

and decoration and his sword was broken in front of him, and he was sent off to, as you said, Devil's Island. Can we just go back to that initial evidence, because a lot hinges on that, Robert. So, can you... Robert Gilday, and there's two Roberts, so we have it rather formal here. What, can you develop it a little more? Waste paper basket,

it's found by a cleaning lady, she sends it on to say, then what's on it, and just, can we be as specific as possible? Well, it was, it was basically information about military technology and strategy, but I suppose the point is, the main point is,

if military secrets were being divulged, who was responsible? And there were various people in the frame. There was a nasty young officer called Estahasi, who some people thought was guilty and who was subsequently court-martialed and then released,

and that's what drove Zola Wilde. And I suppose the big question, as far as the affair was concerned, was was Dreyf was really guilty, or was he framed by the sort of military top brass who wanted to find a consistent? convenience scapegoat and use the opportunity to teach these Jewish officers a lesson. And he was treated, Matthew Ruth Harris, he was rapidly convicted.

And as it turned out, they said, well, no, it wasn't really. He didn't really forge this. But we have other evidence which you're not going to show you or anyone else, which really does convict him. And on those grounds, he was, as I say, rapidly convicted. And Robert Gildes explained what happened to him. And then he went to Devil's Island, where he was treated for many years, poorly. Can you give us some idea of what happened to him?

Yes, I mean, they had to devise special conditions for him. He was meant to go someplace else to Guyana or to New Caledonia. But in fact, they incarcerate him alone on an island. And very soon, to make sure that he doesn't escape, they build a palisade around his compound so that he can't even look out at the sea. You can only see the sky above him. Strictor security measures are undertaken after 1896, and at night he's manacled to his bed, his arms and his legs.

He eats rotting pork, his teeth fall out, he's malnourished, his guards are not allowed to speak to him so that he loses the capacity to speak. It is a kind of imprisonment that conjures up the war. worst kind of anseum regime punishment and has nothing to do with the notion of progressive penitentiary rehabilitation. And the fact that he survives is in itself a remarkable achievement. And he does so by constantly insisting that no matter what, he is innocent and getting his family to do everything they can to find the guilty man. And that's what they're doing back in Paris, Robert Tumes, aren't they? Especially driven by his brother. Can you tell me how they've got that campaign going? He's brother Mathieu?

Yes, well, I mean the whole thing, as you know, took ten years to unravel. You know, an extraordinary kind of black comedy in which you have in officers in false beards, people fighting duels, forgeries, veiled ladies. It's sort of like

rather bad Conan Doyle. But it starts because his family won't believe he's guilty. But they have no evidence. I mean, there's a wonderful spoof of the Dreyfus Affair by Anatoe France, which says that the reason why the case against Dreyfus was so strong is that there was no evidence at all and therefore it couldn't be

disputed. So the family had no grounds, so they wouldn't believe he was guilty, but they didn't know what to do. And the thing started to unravel because a military intelligence officer called Colonel Pekar, who's one of the heroes of the story, recognized that the handwriting on the

document that had convicted Dreyfus was not in fact his. It belonged to this other chap. Esther Harsie, whom Robert Gilday mentioned. And Picard mentioned this to his superiors who said, basically forget about it. What does it matter to you if this Jew stays on Devil's Island, they say? But eventually, Picard talks, other people start talking about Esterhazy. And so the rumours start circulating in political circles and in the press that

Dreyfus maybe wasn't guilty, and this other man was. So Eserhazi demanded a court-martial. He was now being coached and protected by the intelligence service, incredibly enough. who were trying to keep him quiet and trying to make it seem, as you rightly said, that Dreyfus was guilty. There was evidence that hadn't yet been disclosed that Dreyfus was guilty and therefore it could not be disputed and that Esterhazy was innocent and there was a Jewish plot to make Esterhazy a scapegoat and so on. So it's an extraordinary black comedy really.

Well, it's also a bit of a black tragedy. Yes, is too, yeah. But did Colonel Picker, whom Robert Toombs referred to, Robert Gilda, He's a very interesting card in all this, isn't he? He is anti-Semitic. He is the old guard, and yet he notices that the spying is going on. So having put Dreyfus on Devils Island, hasn't got them anywhere. And then he sails in with a particular sort of integrity,

and he's shunted off to Morocco. Well, I think one of the factors is that he's of an Alsatian background. I mean, there's a... All this will be developed in Ruth's new book, which will be coming out in June. there's a sort of Alsatian connection of, you know, the Dreyfus families from Alsace, Pekar is from Alsace,

Pekar gets in touch with a young, with a lawyer called L'Ollbois, who is also from Alsace. They get in touch with one of the most influential men of the time an aging Republican senator called Shera Kessner. And so, although, you know, someone like Pekar as a military man, he has this Alsatian desire, because Alsace, as I said at the beginning, and was now lost to Germany,

so it was part of German territory. And these Alsatians who were, Alsatians had to opt in being a part of Germany, all coming to live in France. And the Alsatians who came to live in France were, in a sense, more patriotic than any other kind of French person. So Pico himself is curiously,

he's actually anti-Semitic in many ways. He's an army officer, and yet, I think partly because of this Alsatian connection and this super patriotism, and he does have a slightly different take on the affair. Ruth Harris, when, they got Esther Harsi into court and done, why didn't that end the scandal?

Well, Estahasi was the real spy. They got him into court, he was court-martial, but he was exonerated. Yes, they bring him into the court-martial because they want military judges to whitewash him. They stitch it up utterly, and the court-martial is done within two days, and it is precisely because of that

that the Dreyfussar realized that the army has actually lined up against them utterly, so that all they want is a public display of acquittal, but they have absolutely no intention of punishing the guilty man. In fact, they are now conspiring with the guilty man to keep Dreyfus on Devil's Island. And of course, it's this outrage to justice, which brings Zola to write his famous letter of Jacques. Let's just get the date. He was accused at the end of 84 Dreyfus. When is the Esterhazee Court Marshal? The Esterhazi Court Marshall is at the very beginning of January

in 1898. So we're four years on? We're almost four years on. Davis goes at the beginning of 1890. And Draffes has been walking away in Devils Island. They've been trying to get things going. And they're held up with getting the case going, partly as Robert Toombs pointed out,

because nobody knows, literally nobody knows anything. And partly because there's this, nobody wants to disturb this. It's all worked out okay for the establishment. They want to keep it down. And that is almost a conspiracy. across the board, right and left, isn't it? It is a conspiracy across the board,

and it is also, as you point out, there are many people on the left who are very uninterested in Dreyfus' plight. There is as much anti-Semitism on the left as there is on the right. Many people from the socialist left at this point think, oh well, why should we support a rich Jewish officer?

All Jews are capitalists. They are not interested in our plight. There is absolutely, it's very hard to find a groundswell of support for this man who is seen as either a man of the syndicate undermining France or a Jewish capitalist. So four years on, we're still, as it were,

if I was much as the brother and the French, getting nowhere, really. And then Zola comes into the, Emil Zola, eminent writer, Jaamin al-Bestern book over here, I presume, and he takes up the case when Esther Harsie is acquitted so flamboyantly and disgracefully

corruptly, he writes this pamphlet, Jacquesus, I accuse, which sells, or gives away, I don't know what she does, is it gives away, 300,000 copies, and then it roars off. Can you just describe that, please? Yes, well, this is, I think, the 13th of January 1898, and

it's originally, it comes out in Clemoso's newspaper, Lorre d'Orne, Clemenceau is a Republican politician who, you know, when Dreyfus was first condemned, said they should have guillotined but he subsequently changes his mind

and he becomes a sort of patron of the Dreyfussars the Jacquez is actually an open letter to the present of the Republic and it's addressed to the present of the republic and it's six or eight pages long and I think the point of, as you say,

Zola was a man who had a huge reputation as a novelist. His book sold between the 50 and 100,000 copies. Probably by this period he's passed his best in terms of writing, but he's a bit of a fighter. He got involved in the 1870s

defending the Impressionists when they were not highly esteemed by the artistic establishment. And he decides to launch this letter, which in a sense completely transforms the situation. Until now, it's been a question of waste paper baskets, handwriting experts, Fudges, and of course, as Robert Toom said,

because the army has this wonderful presence, and everyone has been through the army, and the army is constantly paraded with spurs and banners and so on, no one can really imagine that, in backrooms, people are forging and conspiring at the top echelons of the army. And so what Zola's letter does, Zola basically goes through, name by name, the military top bronze.

and says, you know, you are guilty, reactionary, pro-Catholic conspirators who, you know, who are years out of date and you are trying to condemn this man unjustly. And in a sense, he transforms the conspiracy and the sort of black comedy that Robert Tunes has been talking about into a sort of huge moral and political drama. He actually says, you know, this is now going to be a struggle between good guys and bad guys. Now the army, he says, the army top brass are the bad guys, the small number of intellectuals who are campaigning to reopen the trial are the good guys. This is a struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between the reactionary past and the hopeful future. And he says this act of writing this letter is going to,

it's a revolutionary act, he says, that's going to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. And in a rather naive way, he's all actually thought that, you know, the next day of all we'll wake up and say, my God, you know, Draper's innocent. we must open the trial again. In fact, what you have to remember is that most people didn't care about truth and didn't care about justice. Rather than justice, they wanted, rather than justice, they wanted punishment to revenge against this Judas figure who was betraying the country.

Rather than truth, they were just, you know, they were more driven by fear or suspicion or hatred or prejudice. And so Zoli himself found himself on trial for defaming the army. And outside the courtroom, outside the Palli de Justes, there were anti-Semitic mobs, chanting things like, you know, down with the Jews, drown the yids. These were not times of great political correctness. And Zola himself was then condemned to a massive fine and a year in prison.

He appealed, and then he disappeared off to England. He escaped, Richard Witton. Robert Tooms, so this started another phase of it completely, didn't it? And this began to rock the stability of the state. Yes, but it would all come out into the open? Yes. I mean, the affair is constantly being brought out into the open and then closed down again. So with Zola's condemnation, it looks as though once again the Dreyfussar have lost.

But then what happens is another sort of great coup de Teartre. There's a new minister called Kavignac who wants finally to end the affair by proving that Dreyfus is guilty. So he makes a brilliant speech in Parliament saying that Dreyfus is guilty and quoting this secret evidence that the army has. Unfortunately, the secret evidence the army has is a forgery. and one of Kavignac's aides, it actually examines the document, holds it up to the light,

and realizes it's made of two different sorts of paper. It's clear that it's been forged by someone in the army. They arrest an officer in the intelligence service. He admits his guilt, he then cuts his throat. So now, of course, the whole thing can't be hidden. It's been posted up in every village in France. But nevertheless, the anti-Drefussar side are far from giving up. What they've now come up with is this idea that Ruth alluded to that somehow there's a great Jewish conspiracy.

So everything that happens can be explained as the result of bribery by the Dreyfus family or by secret inferences of the Jews. The officer who forged the document was really doing it for patriotic reasons because there's really even more secret evidence that's even more damaging if it's brought out into the open. But it isn't brought out in the open and it doesn't there? It doesn't brought out of the open because it's not there. It never existed. But of course there are all sorts of stories that there are letters to Dreyfus from the Kaiser or. others, and that if the Germans, if this is published, the Germans will declare war on France. So the Army High Command now is pulling out all the stops, abusing their position as popular figures, as guarantors of French security, to say, you know, if you don't believe us,

if you try to reopen this case, we'll resign, Germany will declare war and France will be invaded. It's really got to this kind of crazy level of threat in which the army is abusing its position quite shamelessly. Ruth Harris, we, as Robert Toombs mentioned, Major Henri, admitted to the forgery, was sent to prison, and I think the day later cut his own throat and killed himself off. Now, instead of people saying, well, whatever they would say,

he, the right, said he was a martyr, and his wife, money was collected for his widow, sorry, and family, and this man was a martyr, this forgerer was a martyr, So he'd got to that, I think that's why Robert Wim's early was talking about the comedy, I'd got to that crazy stage. But I think that actually that is when it goes from comedy into something very, very dark indeed, because when they are collecting the money for the wife,

who is the poor widow and her son, there's a great outpouring of donations, and accompanying these donations are notes. And in these notes, are all vicious anti-Semitic fantasies. And it's all about how we are going to murder these Jews and defend the cause of Christian solidarity with the wife and the child.

And it is that that I find remarkable. The other thing that goes on is that Henri is seen as a martyr, and Charles Moro-Waz, who's later head of the Action Frances, says these blades that are used are now the new relics of the nation. The razor blades that are used to have the name. Seged relics, secular relics.

Exactly. And he actually comes up with almost a whole idea of Henri as a saint, and also that his deception is a patriotic forgery. So what happens is that he becomes elevated from someone who is, a forger into a new hero for the right. Can you give us some idea? We're into 1899 here Robert Gilday, so it's five years on,

and we've still got to remember Dreyfus out on Devil's Island being ill-fed, and for some extraordinary reason not going out of his mind. It must have been an amazing person as he was in many ways. Where is the country? Is the country feeling shaken by it? I said at the beginning, and in introduction earlier, this shook the country.

in various ways. Now, could you add more flesh to that, please? Well, I think there's a massive turning point in the middle of 1898. Because until France has these regular elections

and elections were due in 1998. And until that point, you just had this minority of intellectuals and campaigners who had a very strong sense of themselves as a sort of isolated band. And the rest of the country was not bothered.

And if anyone came out and said, you know, we're a Dreyfers. If any politician came out and said, you know, we think Dreyfus is innocent, you know, they were shafted in the elections. And in these elections of 98, about 22, you know, self-confessed anti-Semites were actually elected to Parliament. But after that and after the suicide of Henri, there really is a sort of left-right division that forms in the country. Because until then the left had been just as anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus as anybody else.

Yes, as Ruth said, there were plenty of socialists who, in a sense, indulged in what sometimes people call the socialism of fools. Anti-Semitism was a perfectly natural option. If you thought, you know, capitalists were Jewish and capitalists were screwing you, and, you know, socialism and anti-Semitism went together in a sort of powerful populism. that we may find difficult to understand. But so there were just as many anti-seemites on the left as on the right. But the great socialist leader, Jerez, says after the elections,

he says that, you know, reaction has now formed a block, and revolution was formed a block. And Jerez, this wonderful intellectual socialist, sort of tries to form a coalition of left-wing people in defence of Dreyfers and in favour of reopening the case. And the case is reopened. Robert Toombs, and Dreyfus is, can you tell us how Dreyfus is, excuse me, retried, found guilty again, then pardon. Can you take a sue with that? Yeah, well, it happens again with a dissent into farce. The President of the Republic, Felix Ford, dies in his mistress's arms, in full performance of his functions, as one newspaper put it.

And he was opposed to opening the case. His successor was not so opposed to opening the case, but more important, at his state funeral, the Nationalist tried to stage a coup d'etat. They tried to get the military escort to march on the Elyze Palace, a complete farce again. But it scared the left into doing something. So a new government was formed, a government of Republican defence of all the parties of the left, and they decided they would finally have to put an end to this whole business. And so they ordered a retrial for Dreyfus, but it had to be another court-martial. And the court-martial, and now this is... So they brought him back from Delos Armand.

Yeah, he brought back to Ren, well away from Paris, and he's tried again by court-martial and again found guilty. and yet, but with extenuating circumstances, that was the verdict. So a crazy verdict, as everyone knew. And by this time that, I mean, this has become a world, a worldwide scandal. Everybody's interested in this by now. Queen Victoria, for example, sends the Lord Chief Justice to observe the trial and report back to her. She called him a martyr, and she sent him.

The British trial found him was extremely pro-Dreyfus. As was the Kaiser. I mean, all foreign governments knew the truth by this time. And so the fact that Dreyfus had been frustrated, found guilty was generally regarded as a scandal, except, of course, to the hardcore of anti-drefussar campaigners. The government, therefore, offers him a pardon. This is the way of trying to calm things down and end the scandal. And Dreyfus and his family decide to accept this because of the state of his health. Ruth knows much more about this than I do. Some of his keenest supporters

are disappointed by this. They want the crusade to go on. And one of them says, rather cruelly, we were willing to die for Dreyfus, but Dreyfus wasn't willing to die for Dreyfus. But it's become, as Robert was saying now, it's gone far beyond the fate of one individual. It's become a great crusade within France between the right and the left. And also, as I understand it, from your notes, Ruth, he was in such a bad way physically, that his brother thought that if he stayed in jail for much longer, that would be that. As you've mentioned, no teeth, he was a skeleton, he couldn't speak because he hadn't used his voice for years now, and so on.

So he'd every right to accept the pardon, but some of them didn't accept it. And yet that didn't quite end the matter, did it? still rumbles, it was still rumbling on after he'd been pardoned. How did it play into the state this pardoning? His acceptance of the pardoning. Well, in a sense, in a sense the solution was a fudge, a political fudge. And the president of the prime minister, Veldic Rousseau, was very much in favour of fudge. Because if Trafers have been found innocent, then the army was in the dock.

And if the army was in the dock, the fear was they'd actually would launch a coup d'etat, not a pantobime coup d'etau, Robert Tooms has mentioned, but a real coup d'etat. And so the fudge was that the drafers would be pardoned, and an amnesty bill was passed, pushed through Parliament, and everyone was amnesty. And this meant the army would not face proceedings, more court-court-martials, the top brass was let off the hook.

And in a sense, the people who got it in the neck were the Catholic clergy, because some of the most powerful anti-dreyfussards were assumptionist clergy, Jesuits, and right down to people who called themselves Christian Democrats were just as anti-Semitic as anyone else. And so in a sense, what the government did was to say, well, we're going to let the army off because it's too dangerous, and we're going to vent our spleen on the Catholic clergy.

And they attacked the Catholic Church in 1905 and cut it off from state support and put it into a much worse position that it had been hitherto. Well, yeah, I mean, in a sense, there were two stages. The first was basically to complete the work of taking the church out of education. I mean, French education had long been dominated by, there was the state system of lisees and so on, but the church was very powerful,

people like the assumptionists and the Jesuits in secondary education, people like the Christian brothers, and of course legions of nuns teaching in primary schools. And the government decided basically the time was up and that the education system was going to be secularised and the church was no longer going to have an influence. But the separation of church and the state that you mentioned was actually was a cut both ways.

On the one hand, it meant that the state was no longer paying the salaries of clergy, but it also meant that the state was not going to interfere in things like the appointments of bishop. So on the one hand, the church was cut loose and had to fend for itself. On the other hand, it actually regained a kind of independence from the state. Curiously enough, Adreyfus was joined the army again and fought very gallantly in some of the bloodiest theatres there called in the First World War, was promoted then, won medals and so on,

and then he died in 1935. But I'd like to talk now, as we're very near the end, about how this ran into the Second World War, the Dreyfus thing didn't die back. Can I start with you, Robert too. Well, the anti-Drefussar Wright, who formed, at the core of them was a group called Action Franca, which I think Ruth mentioned.

They have a newspaper. They have a highly intellectual leadership. They remain as a sort of thorn in the flesh of all liberal French governments between the wars. I mean, there's not very many of them, and you can sort of laugh at them, some people did, but the fact is they were there as a very nasty, festering

presence. In 1940, when France is defeated by Germany, these people at last have their chance to come back and they're able to mount, or at least they want to inspire a kind of counter-revolution which will put back France to where it was, as they see it, in a sense in the 18th century, a Catholic, authoritarian, anti-democratic system. And that's their big chance. And Robert Gilday, they introduce more punitive laws against the Jews than the Germans asked them to. Yes, I mean, as Robert Tum has said, I mean, the Vichy regime is, in a sense, the victory of the anti-Dreyfussars, and they introduce various Jewish.

statutes which basically kick Jewish people out of academic jobs and jobs in the media, the law courts, the medical profession, and of course, then, of course, Vichy has its own part in the deportation of Jews to the death camps. Ruth Harris, how would you describe Dreyfus, to come back to the man? How would you describe his last years? He mentioned in one of the notes that he died in obscurity in 1930. was he forgotten, although the idea is persisted? Yes, I think he is largely forgotten.

I mean, as you say, he does amazingly during World War I, but he doesn't fully recover ever from his ordeal. And what's interesting is that he reemerges with the Popular Front government when Leon Blum, who had been the Adre Fusar, describes the early affair and says, we need to be inspired. We on the left, in an anti-fascist coalition, by the example of the affair.

And that is where his legacy is seen. But at the same time, they underrate him. They think he was just a victim. They don't actually appreciate his human struggle. Well, thank you very much, Ruth Harris, Robert Gilday and Robert Toombs. Next week, we'll be talking about the death of Elizabeth I first and the long shadow it cast. Thank you for listening.

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