The Dreyfus Affair as a Religious War

Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp.273-279.

The clamour from the end of 1897 that Captain Dreyfus had been the victim of a miscarriage  of  justice and that his case should be reopened was a direct challenge to those

Catholics  who believed that France could be saved only by eliminating  the influence of Jews, Protestants andfreemasons.  At the head of those fighting for a judicial  review were Dreyfus' brother  Mathieu and  Joseph  Reinach, former associate of Gambetta and deputy of Digne, Bernard-Lazare and Leon Blum, which gave some substance  to the Catholic  accusation that the campaign was led by a 'Jewish syndicate'.  Zola, if not a Jew, was denounced by Barres as a 'deracinated Venetian.' [Zola;s family had originated in Italy.] The involvement of leading Protestants such as the Alsatian Auguste Scheurer-Kestner provoked parallel attacks on Protestants who were considered half-Jews  by Drumont  -- rich, clever, cosmopolitan  and therefore  traitors to the national  interest.  Polemics such as Pierre Froment's  Protestant  Betrayal and Ernest Renauld's  Protestant Peril in 1899  argued that Protestantism had stood for 'continuous revolution' in France since 1789, that Protestants had conquered all the top posts in state and society, that the godless school was an instrument of 'Protestant dechristianization' and that Protestants supported Germany and Great Britain as Protestant powers against Catholic France.53  Charles Maurras launched an attack against the Monad family of formerly Swiss Protestant pastors and professors, a 'state within a state'  who were corrupting French universities with their Germanic science and had thrown themselves into 'the hystero­epilepsy of dreyfusism'.54  Freemasons too were subjected to attacks, since the whole masonic enterprise was thought  to be a Jewish invention, notably  by Jules Lemaitre of the Ligue de la Patrie Française' in his 1899  Franc-marçonnerie.

To begin with, the big blows were struck  by the antidreyfusard camp. Emile Zola was put on trial for libel and found guilty. Outside the courtroom Jules Guerin's Anti-Semitic League fomented trouble and beat up Joseph Reinach. In the elections of 1898 Reinach failed to get re-elected  at Digne whereas Drumont was returned at Algiers and twenty-two anti-Semitic deputies took their place in the Chamber. At a  prize-giving at  the Dominican  college of Arcueil Pere Didon defended  the  army  as  'the  guardian of law, the spotless knight of justice' ,55   Six weeks  later, when Colonel Henry slit  his throat in Mont-Valerien  prison and Joseph Reinach suggested  that he had framed Dreyfus, Drumont's La Libre Parole opened  a subscription 'For  the widow and orphan of Colonel Henry  against  the Jew Reinach', to pay for her widowhood and for libel proceedings against ReinachY The  Dreyfus  case was  finally  reopened  in    899, sitting out of the way in Rennes.  Attending  it, Maurice Barres visited the nearby chateau of Combourg, where Chateaubriand had been raised, and observed, 'that  Dreyfus is capable of treachery, I know from his race.' Dreyfus was again found guilty, albeit with 'extenuating circumstances'.

'Writers, scholars, artists, professors! ... this penetration of "intelligence" filled us with joy,' Leon Blum later wrote of the Affair, which for many historians saw  the birth of the  French  intellectual, committed to a public cause.58  More powerful at the time, however, was the dreyfusards'  sense of being a small group  of apostles,  persecuted for their commitment to truth and justice, ready if necessary to sacrifice themselves as martyrs  to the cause. 'I hope that from my first article', wrote Zola, 'I became one of the band.' 'Whoever  suffers for  truth and  justice',  he told the jury at his  trial,  'becomes august and  sacred.'59   They saw themselves fighting  against both prejudice and  lies, called by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu  'the  doctrines of hatred', and against the arbitrary power of the army and for many months the state.60  They  were  refighting  the  battles  of the French Revolution, setting  up the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme at the time of the Zola trial, but they also identified with Voltaire's battles against the intolerant Catholic Church,  the single religion  of the absolutist state before 1789. . . .  Other dreyfusards went  back to medieval times to find paral­ lels   of  religious persecution.  Camille Pelletan denounced the Dominican Pere Didon as 'truly the heir of those ferocious devots whose order was founded  to massacre heretics and in the  Middle Ages put the south  of France to fire and sword', adding  that he had forged 'a holy alliance between habit and plume, between sabre and holy-water sprinkler'.63  Going  back  to Biblical times the Protestant Ferdinand Buisson, one of the founders of the Ligue des Droits  de l'Homme, condemned 'Phariseeism, which is worse  than  anti­Semitism  ... the  clerical, military,  judicial or political Phariseeism that says: there is no Dreyfus  Affair'. 6

Eventually the republican state stepped in to deal with the Catholic and  anti-Semitic assault  that was deemed to threaten not only Jews,  Protestants  and  freemasons but the Republic itself.  The Waldeck-Rousseau ministry was formed under the banner of 'republican  defence'  and  Waldeck had recourse to  law to  impose restrictions on  the  Catholic Church.