More than 130 years after the case that changed French history and fueled anti-Semitism in Europe, an exhibition in Paris commemorates Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French captain falsely accused of high treason and imprisoned for five years, as a modern symbol of truth.
The Museum of Jewish Art and History in the French capital is hosting the exhibition titled "Alfred Dreyfus: Truth and Justice" this week, twenty years after the last exhibition dedicated to this judicial and political case, which divided and shocked French society.
With a strong aesthetic and historical ambition, the exhibition pays more attention to the historical context, with the ultra-nationalist influence of the period, and features, as a novelty, the first-person voice of a character telling his story as a common thread.
"We're giving Dreyfus a new dimension, both historical and human," explains Isabelle Cahn, one of the exhibition's curators, adding that in these twenty years they've learned more details about the "machinations" behind the case and about his first lawyer.
These new documents are part of the sixty documents in the collection, which, along with objects and works of art, totals 250 pieces from both its own archives and the Musée d'Orsay, and, to a lesser extent, from the National Archives, the National Library of France, the Army Museum, and the Carnavalet Museum.
This museum is reviving this case, which was one of the seeds of the Zionist movement, at a time when antisemitism has gained momentum in Europe and France following the Hamas terrorist attacks against communities in southern Israel in October 2023.
In first person
Throughout a dozen rooms, Dreyfus recounts his life chronologically, interspersed with the context of a weakened French Republic following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and on the brink of the First World War.
The Jewish soldier, who was born in the Alsace region, ceded to Germany in the Versailles Armistice, wanted to maintain French nationality like his family and enlisted in the Army out of fervent patriotic sentiment.
In 1894, a court-martial found him guilty of espionage for Germany, in a trial riddled with incomprehensible irregularities, despite the growing nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic movement in France and other European countries at the end of the XNUMXth century.
On a poster from the legislative elections of 1889, five years earlier, which is part of the nearly 250 objects and documents on display, one can read one of the anti-Semitic slogans that were proliferating in France at the time: "Jews are only great because we are on our knees."
“We evoke the historical context of antisemitism at the end of the 19th century, which is a racial antisemitism,” Cahn emphasizes.
The exhibition recalls that this case was one of the reasons that led Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl, who followed the trial, to promote the concept of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel).
Before being imprisoned in French Guiana, Dreyfus was stripped of the stripes and insignia of his officer's uniform in a humiliating ceremony on the parade ground of the Military School, before the eyes of the public and readers of the newspapers, original copies of which can be seen in the exhibition.
Although neither Dreyfus himself nor his family ceased to claim his innocence and to call for the case to be reopened, it was not until the acquittal of the true culprit of treason, the Hungarian-born commander Ferdinand Walsin Esterharzy, that a strong reaction was unleashed among French intellectuals and the public.
In January 1898, the writer Émile Zola published in the newspaper Dawn a letter to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, in which he denounced the military institution's conspiracy to accuse the Jewish soldier based on false evidence that was then covered up to improve his image.
The exhibition, which will be open until July, features an original copy of Zola's famous piece, entitled "J'Accuse," which, after selling more than 300.000 copies, sparked a battleground in French public opinion, with "Dreyfusians" and "anti-Dreyfusians" clashing in the press, literature, the streets, and on popular posters.
Although the president eventually pardoned Dreyfus and he rejoined the French Army, the soldier's greatest concern was always the damage to his honor and the memory that would remain of his name, since the false label of "traitor" never left him.
Today, in a climate of post-truth and fake news, this Paris museum commemorates the impact of the Dreyfus Affair on cinema and the popular imagination, and reflects the danger and scope of lies that, driven by hateful ideas, continue to resonate today.
"Dreyfus was accused of treason primarily because he was Jewish," Cahn reiterates. EFE and Aurora
When it seemed that medieval antisemitism and the immediately subsequent antisemitism of the Spanish Inquisition had been left behind or that they were things of the backward, the relatively recent, more criminal antisemitism did not so much begin with the German Nazi criminals; the stereotypical Jew of Nazi Germany also appeared in the French antisemitic newspaper La libre parole, founded in 1892 by the well-known antisemite Édouard Drumont. La Libre parole was involved in the campaign against Dreyfus, as well as others until 1924 when it ceased publication. It also published a translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One of the best books to try to explain what was happening during the new resurgence of anti-Semitism at this time, at the end of the 2011th century, is "On the Jewish Question" (XNUMX) by Elisabeth Roudinesco, a well-known French psychoanalyst, a Jew of Romanian origin. Although the author is a leftist, as a Lacanian, it is not a reading that seems communist or of convoluted psychoanalysis, but rather conveys great knowledge. The traditional discrimination of Jews, more religious in nature, would have turned into visceral hatred towards the middle of the 19th century, precisely in cultured and enlightened France. It was surprising that in France there were so many anti-Semitic intellectuals or those who collaborated, unintentionally providing another argument for the anti-Semites. Furthermore, those who joined the cause were either left-wing or right-wing, or atheists, Catholics, Protestants, or many of these were Jews who denied being Jews. Not infrequently they contradicted each other, or used the arguments of others even though their ideologies were incompatible; their only common link was anti-Semitism. Other times they manipulated by reinterpreting in their own way very popular writers like Victor Hugo, or Nietzsche himself, when in reality he harshly criticized anti-Semites and those who used his books to justify hatred of Jews, or the one who is taken as his best friend was the Jew Paul Rée, sometimes you can even read speculation that they were lovers or that they had a threesome beyond the merely intellectual with the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé, or the Danish critic and philosopher George Brandes was also Jewish, who unlike the rara avis mentioned by Roudinesco, does not seem like he could throw stones at his own roof, that is, against the Jews. Although nihilism has the curious characteristic that everyone reinterprets it as they see fit, it is not only the disturbed fascists and Nazis, or the alarming lack of education and culture that provoke the ravings of what is simple philosophy or at most culture or art, as Nietzsche himself could well claim to have defined it. But, just like Nietzsche's nihilism, they took it out on the Jews, it got them, the same way they might have gotten into banging their heads against walls or sucking on light bulbs, and there was no way to get it out of their heads.
In the case of the French anti-Semitic Drumont, according to the author, his book "Jewish France" is still part of "the trilogy of hatred" along with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Hitler was the one who took to the extreme or made the desire of all this anti-Semitism that began in cultured France come true, although the majority of the French did not initially harbor such criminal aims, they were more intellectual or theoretical. It is equally surprising that today, in the 21st century, even with the Internet and so many advances, there is room for such anachronistic ideas, repeating the same absurd arguments without any basis. France went from being the country of the Enlightenment, of the Revolution, of the Republic and democracy, to being dragged along by this gang of reactionaries, absolutist monarchists, ultranationalists, Catholic and Christian racists, taking France back in time to some point in history that they considered ideal, in the case of France to the Middle Ages, like the Spanish fascists and Nazis, although these crazy Spanish people also make many other space-time jumps, probably with alien technology, copying other friends, including trips to ancient Rome, or to the Celtic times of the witches or druids of their superior Aryan race of the Galicians, or surely many others go to other planets or to the Moon where, according to some among the most disturbed, the German Nazis reside and have UFOs, it's just that the current democratic powers keep it hidden from the world with their great manipulative power. According to Roudinesco, "Although he proclaims himself European in his crusade against the Jews, Drumont calls everything that is not "French" Jewish. Consequently, the immigrants are Jews. But this is not enough. For a non-Jew to be equated with a Jew, he will have to be either a Freemason, or an atheist, or a Republican, or a Protestant, or a Jacobin. Thus, Cambacérès is considered Jewish because he considers himself a Freemason, and the same happens with Léon Gambetta, because he is a Republican and of Italian origin. By the work and grace of this reasoning, France was "Judaized" on all four sides, since, because of Voltaire and the Abbé Grégoire - the first for being anti-Christian and the second for being apostate - the Jews took over everything because of their emancipation. With this last term he is referring to the tendency among Jews of the time to integrate into the secular societies of European states, dressing and behaving like the Europeans in the country, even allowing themselves the luxury of being atheists. Emancipation was either a common custom among Jews or an update to the times that ultimately made things even worse for them compared to the persecutions Jews had previously experienced in Europe. Today's fascists and Nazis are no different from those criminals who led Europe to the brink, those who threw all European values overboard. It didn't matter to them since they, along with their ideologies and beliefs, would be above all else. To achieve their fundamentalist ultimate goals, the means didn't matter. Elisabeth Roudinesco mentions in her book not only the origins of antisemitism, but also of denialism or the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which unites various apparently antagonistic ideologies: Islamists who support Arab terrorist groups, fascists, neo-Nazis, leftists, anarchists, etc., for example the well-known left-wing guru Noam Chomsky is a fervent anti-Zionist who wrote the prologue to a book by the antisemite Robert Faurisson, the book that gave rise to the most modern denialism or its intellectual justification. We mustn't forget that communists and anarchists, all over the world and even the Spanish, not only tend to believe all the nonsense Chomsky spouts, they also tend to repeat the worldwide conspiracy of Jews and Judeo-Masonics, for example through secret sects like the infamous Bilderberg Club. Perhaps the communists are somewhat more focused on the global economic domination aspect, while the fascists and Nazis, or even the ultra-Catholics, like to mix everything up in those same conspiracies. That is, they mix money with political control, with control of the population's health and mind control through pharmaceuticals, as well as with the occult, paranormal powers, or with kidnappings, orgies, rapes, and child sacrifices for the worship of the Devil.
The profound exclusionary nationalism of 21st-century France, and until at least the first half of the 20th century, produced such intense racism that antisemitism, for all its cruelty, is only the tip of the iceberg. No one who wasn't quite French was spared Gruyère cheese, including its holes.