In France a century ago, the system finally worked, as they used to say after Watergate. The Dreyfus affair matters not because of the parallel with our time but because it was one of the first tests of modern pluralist liberalism and its institutions-a test that those institutions somehow managed to pass and fail at the same time. The degradation of the prisoners at Guantánamo was essentially private and utilitarian: talk or we’ll subject you to unspeakable humiliations. That hideous degradation ritual is at the heart of the Dreyfus affair it was meant to be public and demonstrative-this is what happens to faithless Jews. a wreck from the ghetto,” the journalist Léon Daudet wrote. “His face is grey, flattened and base, showing no sign of remorse. Far from being faceless, he was all face: the haters never tired of describing and drawing his hideousness. Yet a parallel can be potent without being, point by point, persuasive: Dreyfus was not the Faceless Foreigner but the Enemy Within. He wants to arraign Americans, and particularly those who fetishize the Dreyfus case without grasping its principles: that every accused person should be able to face his accusers in a fair trial, and that national panic makes bad policy and false prisoners. Begley, as he recounts the story of the Parisian fin-de-siècle legal drama, also spends many pages showing that among the prisoners in places like Guantánamo are many Dreyfuses-innocent, as he was, and, on the whole, much worse treated. The Dreyfus affair matters, he believes, because we have, in the past decade, made our own Devil’s Island and hundreds of new Dreyfuses-the Dreyfus affair matters because we’re still in the middle of it. Brave because Begley wants to use the occasion not for French-bashing, or for reciting the enduring history of European anti-Semitism, bleak as it is, but as a pointed warning and reminder of how fragile the standards of civilized conduct prove in moments of national panic. The Dreyfus affair never goes away, and is the subject of a brave new book by the novelist and lawyer Louis Begley, “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” (Yale $24). The Dreyfus affair was the first indication that a new epoch of progress and cosmopolitan optimism would be met by a countervailing wave of hatred that deformed the next half century of European history. The very improbability of such an act’s happening at such a time-to an assimilated Jew who had mastered a meritocratic system and a city that was the pride and pilothouse of civic rationalism-made it a portent, the moment where Maupassant’s world of ambition and pleasure met Kafka’s world of inexplicable bureaucratic suffering. Yet it took place in the immediate shadow of the monument of modernity, the Eiffel Tower, then six years old, which loomed at the north end of the Champ-de-Mars. His insignia medals were stripped from him, his sword was broken over the knee of the degrader, and he was marched around the grounds in his ruined uniform to be jeered and spat at, while piteously declaring his innocence and his love of France above cries of “Jew” and “Judas!” It is a ceremony that seems to belong to some older, medieval Europe, of public torture and autos-da-fé and Inquisitions. On a January day in Paris, in 1895, a ceremony was enacted in the courtyard of the École Militaire, on the Champ-de-Mars, that still shocks the mind and conscience to contemplate: Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish artillery officer and family man, convicted of treason days earlier in a rushed court-martial, was publicly degraded before a gawking crowd. Dreyfus was convicted on the evidence of handwriting identified as a “self-forgery,” and a single initial in a playful lover’s note.
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