France’s
infamous Dreyfus Affair has bearing on Donald Trump’s apparent racism – particularly
when comparing the element of public degradation, which was imposed by the
French Army at a ceremony on the former Alsatian Jew, and which Donald Trump frequently
chooses for his political enemies, notably: the Somali-born Ilhan Omar and Elijah
Cummings, who is African-American.
The Dreyfus
Affair began in the autumn of 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and
charged with high treason. The
first Jew to do duty on the General Staff, and likely because of this – and his
traits of non-conformity - he was considered the culprit and author of the bordereau (memorandum) containing information on French
war plans, secrets that had actually been communicated to Germany. Two handwriting experts determined that only
Dreyfus could have authored the bordereau,
and at the court-martial a secret dossier,
supported by Commandant Henry, was presented to the jury while the court was
adjourned (but not presented to the defendant or to his lawyer). The Affair did not come into full public
light until Emile Zola published “J’accuse”
in 1898: the famous writer was quickly convicted of libel, Commandant Henry,
who admitted to forging the secret
dossier, was arrested and later committed suicide in jail, after slashing
his throat, and the true author of the bordereau,
Major Esterhazy, fled to England. In
1899 Dreyfus returned to France from Devil’s Island, off the coast of French
Guiana, to face another court-martial at Rennes in August where he was again
condemned “with extenuating circumstances” but later pardoned in September of
that same year.[1]
The Affair
divided the nation – almost to the point of civil war – between Dreyfusards and
anti-Dreyfusards. The defenders of the
honour of the Army faced off against the defenders of Truth, for the facts
proved an injustice had been done. Below
is an excerpt from Alfred Dreyfus’s memoire Five
Years of My Life, and I have chosen to focus on the Dreyfus degradation,
where he was publicly paraded and stripped of his rank. The atmosphere in France at the time of the
Affair (even before and especially after) was rife with anti-Semitism, and the
“howls of a deluded mob” as experienced by Dreyfus in January 1895 compare to
the racist pro-Trump rally chanting “send her back” in July 2019. Also
at work in each case is the similar effort by ‘official’ dimensions of the
respective Republics which are supposed to unite the nation – France’s Army
recalling the glory of the Revolution’s levée
en masse and the American Presidency as the so-called leading voice of the ‘free
world’ – end up dividing the country which is in no small degree pitted against
‘the other’.
Dreyfus’s
degradation was made almost complete by five years of solitude on Devil’s
Island, baking in the heat of a confined space close to the equator, cooking for himself without proper utensils and eating
out of tinned cans, guarded day and night (often immobilized in irons),
deprived and censored throughout, a physical and near mental wreck by the end, but
he never quite gave up hope – military man that he was - that his honour would
be restored to him. While Donald Trump
has not gone this far in terms of
degrading his domestic political ‘enemies’, who tend to be elected Democrats,
he is inducing violence and hate crimes against them: most recently, for
example, two police officers from Louisiana posted on Facebook suggesting that
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.[2] Members of Congress, notably four freshman
women of colour known as ‘the squad’, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar among them, now
require extra security precautions because Trump sees ‘white supremacy’ as the
path to the White House in 2020. This
pattern continued when Trump called Congressman Elijah Cumming’s constituency
in Baltimore in a Twitter rant a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess”
where “no human being would want to live”.[3] This is how the President likes to treat his foes.
In other words, the traditional
Left-Right horizontal axis of political competition since the French Revolution
is gone, replaced by Populism’s vertical axis with a so-called uncontaminated
people standing above ‘the other’ which intrudes from below.[4] Revolutionary equality has been replaced by
the idea of rank, with white men at the top of the hierarchy, and who better to
epitomize this shift in mood than a misogynist and racist billionaire President - ‘the lying King’- of the U.S.A. who
happened to inherit wealth, as well.
Here is Dreyfus remembering his own very public loss of rank at a ceremony
of degradation in fin-de-siècle France well over a century ago. Just imagine the crowd wanting to chant “send him back” to Alsace, then in German hands, where Dreyfus's father was born:
A Sergeant of the Republican Guard came up to
me. He tore off rapidly buttons,
trousers-stripes, the signs of my rank from cap and sleeves, and then broke my
sword across his knee. I saw all the
material emblems of my honor fall at my feet.
Then, my whole being racked by a fearful paroxysm, but with body erect
and head held high, I shouted again and again to the soldiers and to the
assembled crowd the cry of my soul.
“I am innocent!”
The parade continued. I was compelled to make the whole round of
the square. I heard the howls of a
deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those
people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France;
and I struggled to transmit to their hearts another thrill, - belief in my
innocence.[5]
[1] Alfred
Dreyfus, Five Years of My Life,
1894-1899. (Cambridge, MA: University Press, nd [Wentworth Press Reprint]), p. 307. See the Editor’s Preface for a general
introduction to the Affair. See also:
Ruth Harris, Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion
and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), pp. 1, 2 ff. Also helpful is: Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), p. 332 ff.
[2] Lawrence Martin, “Trump is in full
bigot mode,” The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, July 31, 2019, p. A11.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Marco Revelli, The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss, tr. David
Broder (London: Verso: 2019), p. 15.
[5] Dreyfus, Five Years of my Life, pp. 50,51.
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