William Faulkner, nearly a half-century ago, speaking of the American South, said that the past “is not even past.” France has just demonstrated what that means. The Dreyfus case, which occurred exactly a century ago, has shown that it is not “past” either.
The French army’s magazine just published an article on the Dreyfus case, written by the head of the army’s historical section. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer, graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, the most highly regarded of France’s “grands ecoles.” He was accused of being a German spy on the basis of a document stolen by French counterintelligence from the German Embassy. He was convicted in 1894 and sent to Devil’s Island.
Later, another French officer, Major Esterhazy, not a Jew, was implicated and tried but acquitted. An enormous controversy ensued, and the novelist Emile Zola published his famous denunciation of French military justice, “J’accuse!”
It was discovered that the document that condemned Dreyfus had been forged by an officer of the general staff, who killed himself when this was found out. Esterhazy fled the country. A new military trial nonetheless convicted Dreyfus once again.
Ten days later, France’s president pardoned Dreyfus. He subsequently was restored by court order to his rank in the army, was decorated by order of parliament and served honorably in the first world war. He died in 1935. His court martial condemnation, however, was never revoked.
The army magazine article recapitulates this history, but then says that the defenders of Dreyfus were leftists “hostile to national military service,” who wanted to destroy the officer class. Dreyfus’ opponents were patriots who “in the context of an impending war with Germany, were attempting to prevent the destabilization of the army.”
The practical result, the article says, was to “dismantle French military intelligence and cut funding for the army at a moment when Germany was rearming.” Today, it concludes, “Dreyfus’ innocence is the thesis generally admitted by historians. However, behind the political scandal was a disinformation operation directed against German intelligence, and even now no one is in a position to say whether Dreyfus was consciously or unconsciously implicated in that.” In short, Dreyfus may, after all, have been guilty.
As soon as this article was drawn to general attention by French newspapers, the minister of defense dismissed the officer responsible.
However, what is chiefly notable in this affair is its irrelevance to the main currents in France, where the old right, traditionally hostile to the republic, to secular schools, liberalism, internationalism-and to Dreyfus- is all but dead, even inside the French army. General DeGaulle’s defeat of Petain, and Petainism, was its defeat as well.
There is a new right instead, or a new populism, which is not exclusively a French phenomenon. This movement is against “cosmopolitanism.” It says that an “obsession with anti-Semitism can only uselessly and dangerously complicate” the construction of a new Europe “of the peoples.”
It says that it is anti-Zionist, but mainly it is anti-American, since the United States stands for an undiscriminating consumerism and materialism.
In France it includes a number of people previously associated with Communism or the extreme left. One of its leaders says that right-left categories now-after the collapse of communism-are outmoded, and that the political scene should be described in terms of a center and a periphery; the center occupied by the complacent established forces of capitalist society, the periphery by all those who want radical social change.
There are links to the new nationalist-Communist alliances that have emerged in Russia, Serbia and elsewhere in the former Communist world. There powerful popular emotions of resentment and fear have been mobilized against the seemingly anonymous international forces that brought down the old order, humiliating and impoverishing those societies.
The nostalgics of the French army look back to a political tradition that was hierarchical, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic. Precisely the point about the new European right is that it makes a modern and popular, “democratic,” appeal to exclusion, nationalist emotion, national paranoia. Even though it is anti-American, its resemblance is to the populist right-wing movements repeatedly seen in America’s own history. It is not part of a past that is not yet past. Its significance is that it could be an important factor in the future.
