Dreyfus Affair Research Articles

Proust's Political Emotions

Proust's Recherche includes detailed depictions of political mentalities that reveal the critical influence of socio-economic structures without foreclosing the possibility of individual autonomy. His novel also draws attention to a factor that seems resistant to formal social-scientific analysis, namely the role of emotional contingency in shaping individuals’ political views. The capriciousness displayed by Proust's characters in their approach to the Dreyfus Affair and other political controversies comes to epitomize a broader pattern of emotional volatility within high politics during the First World War and its aftermath. That caustic vision of how politics works remains pertinent in our own time, as the rebirth of charismatic authority and performative transgression transform politics into a contest of volatile polarizing enthusiasms.

The intellectual as a sociological category: a contribution to the reflection on a new theoretical approach

The social sciences do not agree regarding the definition of the expression ?intellectual?. Proceeding from Bourdieu?s understanding of the idea of the intellectual as a free-floating, individual, emancipated from class and other social determinisms as an illusion that is accepted in some specialist circles as a professional definition of the intellectual, and from the fact that it is generally wrong to explore the social world according to esencialist categories and concepts, this article aims to demonstrate that it is necessary to conceptualize the notion of the intellectual in a spatial and relational way. Additionally, by relying on the historical, French use of the term intellectual at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and recognizing Gramsci?s conception that an intellectual is not a member of an independent social group and is not distinguished from other citizens by the character of his or hers intellectual work and values, as well as Bauman?s position that (self) definitions cannot be neutral or socially indifferent, we argue in our article for an ?empirical approach?. Such an approach leads us to reject the thesis of the need to ?pre-define? the intellectual through his or hers substantive characteristics - which mainly results in the imposition of social, professional and value elements of an essentially prescriptive definition, which arbitrarily limits the choice of who is / is not a (true) intellectual. This is why we emphasize a reflection whose object would be to determine the boundaries of the intellectual field and a sociological reconstruction of the structuring of this field in which ideas are created and reproduced, but also contested and denied within it. Such a framework opens the space for the ?depersonalization?, i.e. the ?sociologization? of the intellectual, thus shifting the main focus from specific agents and their individual characteristics to the analysis of: 1. the intellectual field in which ideas are produced and agents take positions in relation to socially important political issues; 2. the waging of operational capitals that agents possess in the ?war of position? (Gramsci) for ?symbolic domination?.

Durkheim, the Action Française and the Question of Nationalism

This article concerns Émile Durkheim’s critique of the Action Française as expressed in his seminal articles of 1898, which was an important moment in the Dreyfus Affair, where Durkheim’s active engagement serves to challenge a still widespread view of him as a latter day traditionalist and positivist, He developed epistemological and political arguments against this proto-fascist movement, which have implications for his accounts of nationalism and internationalism.

The Fruit of the Arts and the Mob

AbstractThis essay considers accounts of the Dreyfus Affair published in the newspaper Thamarat al-Funun (founded 1875) during 1898 to demonstrate how Arab writers addressed the rights of minorities in Europe and examined failed emancipatory projects. Writing about the Dreyfus Affair allowed intellectuals in the Levant to reverse the power relationship between themselves and Europe and to comment on the kinds of politics that would ensure the equality before the law of the Jewish minority in Europe. These debates further illustrate that even before the shift to electoral politics in the Ottoman Empire (after 1908) and in postwar Arab nation-states, Arab writers were preoccupied with the relationship between statecraft and majority-minority relations. They argued that democratic institutions such as parliaments and courts of law were the best venues to safeguard the rights of religious communities whose mere existence was defined as a problem. Bashkin shows how Thamarat al-Funun pointed to phenomena that endangered religious communities, such as fanaticism, racism, abuse of power by the police and the military, and mob politics.

The Dreyfus Affair’s Forgotten Hero: Bernard Lazare and the First Modern Fight against Antisemitism

The Dreyfus Affair’s Forgotten Hero: Bernard Lazare and the First Modern Fight against Antisemitism

The Affair before the Affair: Zola, Dreyfus and the Lourdes scandal

Abstract This article examines the legacy of the scandal wrought by Zola’s novel Lourdes (1894) for future controversy over the writer’s pivotal involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola’s fictional account of the Pyrenean shrine—its founding apparitions, and its miracle cures— provoked a deluge of refutations from Catholic clergymen, doctors and writers. The Lourdes scandal has been understood as a flashpoint for Catholic indignation in the ongoing ‘culture wars’ of the Third Republic—one readily reignited with Zola’s intervention in the judicial handling of Dreyfus’ case. This article offers a precise understanding of the Lourdes debates as a dress-rehearsal for the Affair that followed. It reads Catholic attacks on Zola’s naturalist novel for their shared preoccupation with proofs, expertise, authority and the status of truth and evidence, which anticipated the very terms on which his defence of the Jewish captain would be denounced. Both scandals, then, appear bound together by fundamentally literary concerns; and this article shows how quarrels over aesthetics lay at the heart of the ideological differences they described.

Introduction

After his most successful book, La mentalite primitive (), Levy-Bruhl published in The Criterion , a journal then directed by poet T. S. Elliott, an article entitled “Primitive mentality and gambling” whose French version, “Mentalite primitive et jeu de hasard,” was published two years later in the Revue de Paris . In this introduction to the forum around the reedition of this text, I contextualize this and other works by this author not only within the intellectual currents of the day, but also within events in broader French society in the period leading up to WWI, and particularly the “Dreyfus Affair,” which directly affected him. My interpretation is the following: while Dreyfus was accused by the army with arguments whose rationality was borrowed from magic and witchcraft, and the dreyfusards had to use the rationality of the Enlightenment to defend him, Levy-Bruhl and his fellow socialists had to « think like primitives » when they engaged in the war as in a gamble.

Chaplin, the Dreyfusard

:Chaplin's Limelight and A King in New York uncover how political trials often deploy a guilt‐by‐association strategy. In denouncing such politically motivated charades of justice, Chaplin becomes a Dreyfusard, a term that reminds one of Emile Zola for the anti‐establishment stance he maintained during the Dreyfus Affair.

‘A crooked, passion-laden mirror’: ‘Jews’ and ‘Muslims’ as a European question beyond religio-secularism

ABSTRACT In this article, Jansen attempts to demonstrate that addressing the religious practices of Jews and Muslims from the perspective of a religio-secular framework in today’s European context underestimates the complexity of semiotic relations between Muslims, Jews and other Europeans. She discusses this complexity in terms of ‘intercultural semiotics’ between the three groups. In particular, she focuses on what she calls ‘mirroring relations’, drawing on an expression from Yirmiyahu Yovel about a ‘crooked, passion-laden mirror’ characterizing the ways in which modern Europeans imagined their Jewish neighbours in early twentieth-century Europe. In order to further explain this, Jansen analyses a passage from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, which concerns a group of people in late nineteenth-century France, following the Dreyfus Affair, who are perceived by the narrator as Jewish. Thereafter, drawing on Gil Hochberg’s notion of the ‘re-membering’ of the Semite, Jansen analyses semiotic mirroring in the work Projet Deburkanisation (2017) by the Belgian author Rachida Lamrabet, which she reads as a contemporary meta-reflection, involving Muslims, on the mirroring relations between Jews and other Europeans first discussed via her reading of Proust.

Wilde, Zola, Dreyfus, Christ

Oscar Wilde and Émile Zola are conventionally opposed as the figureheads of, respectively, the aestheticist and the naturalist literary trends. Yet they exhibit a number of uncanny similarities—not least the turn both made in their last years toward religious themes and imagery, and especially those of martyrdom and the Passion. This article explores such images in the later life, work, and public persona of each writer and sets them within the context of the dizzying proliferation of references to Christ and martyrdom in fin de siècle culture. It examines the “entailments”—the unexpected consequences, meanings, and echoes—that these overdetermined themes brought in their train from the wider literary field and shows how those entailments were exacerbated by the massive politicization of “martyr” discourse around the time of the Dreyfus affair, when the theme acquired its fullest significance.

French Antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair

We are pleased to publish one of the last pieces that Robert Wistrich wrote, which is on antisemitism in France at the time of Alfred Dreyfus. It is published with an introductory essay by David Hirsh which looks at how the issues Wistrich highlights around the Dreyfus affair may be read in the contemporary context of the reemergence of antisemitism and populism into mainstream discourse.

Charles Péguy’s flu: the metaphor of diagnosis on the crossroads of historical, sociological and philosophical discourses in 1900

Abstract: This article examines how the French socialist thinker Charles Péguy (1873-1914) used the metaphor of diagnosis of social ills in De la grippe (1900). This text serves as the entrance point into the complex history of the metaphor of diagnosis around the beginning of the twentieth century, as it dwelled in the border regions of historical, sociological and philosophical discourses. Péguy seems at first to follow the contemporary tendency to use the metaphor of diagnosis as a means to denounce ready-made historical and sociological theory. However, the metaphor of diagnosis also foregrounds aspects irreducible to epistemological concerns. The diagnostician thus introduced a paradigm for the frank communication of inconvenient truths from an engaged position, at the same time as the Dreyfus Affair imprinted the persona of the “engaged intellectual” on the modern social imaginary.

Why Harry Met Sally: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian Power, and the Rhetoric of Modern Love

Why Harry Met Sally: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian Power, and the Rhetoric of Modern Love

Entre Boulanger e Dreyfus: luzes e sombras da Terceira República francesa na reflexão dos Quaderni

Como testemunhado por numerosos trechos dos Quaderni del carcere, a França é para Antonio Gramsci um laboratório político excepcional. A análise pretende explorar a sua compreensão de dois momentos específicos da história francesa recente: a tentativa de golpe de estado pelo general Georges Boulanger em 1889 e o caso Dreyfus. Através de uma análise filológica cuidadosa dos textos e de uma reconstrução precisa das fontes e referências historiográficas, serão investigadas as reflexões históricas e teóricas que o pensador sardo desenvolve a partir destes dois momentos da Terceira República Francesa, lançando também uma nova luz sobre a relação entre Gramsci e França.

French Antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair

We are pleased to publish one of the last pieces that Robert Wistrich wrote, which is on antisemitism in France at the time of Alfred Dreyfus. It is published with an introductory essay by David Hirsh which looks at how the issues Wistrich highlights around the Dreyfus affair may be read in the contemporary context of the reemergence of antisemitism and populism into mainstream discourse.

In Memoriam: Robert S. Wistrich, 1945–2015

We are pleased to publish one of the last pieces that Robert Wistrich wrote, which is on antisemitism in France at the time of Alfred Dreyfus. It is published with an introductory essay by David Hirsh which looks at how the issues Wistrich highlights around the Dreyfus affair may be read in the contemporary context of the reemergence of antisemitism and populism into mainstream discourse.

“The Black Race's Dreyfus Affair”

AbstractThis article examines the dissimilation of Guadeloupean citizens of color in the early twentieth century and their marginalization within the French republic. Focusing on the “troubles” in Guadeloupe and the scandals surrounding the black deputy Hégésippe Jean Légitimus, the author shows how Guadeloupeans were gradually excluded from full citizenship. These incidents reveal a key moment in the construction of race in the early Third Republic and, above all, the consolidation of an imperial form of republicanism based on difference and political exclusion in the period prior to World War I.« L'affaire Dreyfus de la race noire » examine la dissimilation et la marginalisation des citoyens de couleur guadeloupéens au début du vingtième siècle. Cet article explique comment les « troubles » en Guadeloupe et les scandales entourant son député noir, Hégésippe Jean Légitimus, ont entraîné l'exclusion des Guadeloupéens des droits de citoyenneté. Ces incidents, je soutiens, révèlent un moment clé dans la construction d'idées raciales pendant la Troisième République et surtout, la consolidation d'une forme impériale de républicanisme fondée sur la différence et l'exclusion dans les années avant la Première Guerre mondiale.

Visual Rhetoric of the Truth in the Dreyfus Affair: A Semiotic Approach

At the turn of the twentieth century, French society was shaken by a scandal that affected it at many levels to varying degrees and that is still considered as a symbol of injustice, miscarriage of justice and antisemitism. The Dreyfus Affair started in 1894 when an artillery officer of Jewish descent was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for communicating military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Only years later was Alfred Dreyfus exonerated and rehabilitated, due mainly to the role of the media and the famous article by the novelist Emile Zola, “J’accuse”. The press, in general, played a fundamental role in the narration of the event and in the complex chemistry that led a confidential case of espionage to become a broad public debate, exemplifying the constant struggle against prejudice and irrational impulses that implies democracy. From the impressive volume of publications, I selected two drawings issued when the truth about captain Dreyfus’s innocence began emerging. One is by Félix Vallotton, “That’s why she was not coming out!”, the other by Gustave-Henri Jossot, “She was too naked”, and they both give an interpretation of the truth and of the reasons why it—the truth—came out so late. The semiotic approach of the drawings and of Zola’s pamphlet in terms of visual message leads us to distinguish three aspects. The first is iconic and consists of establishing the links between a signifier, a signified and a referent in order to recognize the immediate message but also the connoted signification; the second is linguistic and consists of the captions; and the third is plastic, focusing on size, colors and shapes. These analyzes of the mode in which visual artefacts produce meaning and provoke an interpretative process are made in terms of rhetoric insofar as rhetoric is considered, not only in terms of figures of speech, but as a method of persuasion and argumentation.

Political Unity and the “Existential Meaning” of Conflict. On Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (with some remarks on The Dreyfus Affair in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism)

Political Unity and the “Existential Meaning” of Conflict. On Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (with some remarks on The Dreyfus Affair in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism)

We Spring from that History: Bernard Lazare, between Universalism and Particularism

This paper examines the evolution of Jewish identity in the works of writer and critic Bernard Lazare. It suggests that Lazare’s oeuvre elucidates one of the central tensions in modern Jewish thought: the division between those thinkers who use the reputedly universalist Greek philosophical tradition as a lens to analyze and critique Judaism, and those who use the Jewish textual tradition to challenge and reconceive non-Jewish philosophy. Lazare situated himself on both sides of this divide during his life. In his early work, he used the universalist, laical ideology of French republicanism to attack what he perceived as the inflexible, regressive, anti-modernist character of Talmudic Judaism. Lazare’s thought later shifted in the wake of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, and he sought to reclaim an ethnic, nationalist conception of Jewish identity as the source for a communal Jewish political response to rising anti-Semitism. Yet through a close reading of Lazare’s writings, the paper suggests that Lazare’s intellectual evolution was never as complete or totalizing as he perhaps wished. His earlier work occasionally used Jewish sources to critique philosophical universalism, while hints of philosophical critiques of the particularism of Jewish texts such as the Talmud remained in his later revalorization of Jewish identity. Lazare thereby reveals how universalism and particularism remain mutually implicated within modern Jewish thought. The paper thus suggests avenues for Lazare to be productively read within the broader canon of modern Jewish thinkers.