From Dreyfus to Donald: Racism and Public Degradation of ‘the other’

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]

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[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.

Aristotle’s advice to Americans

Along with a number of different ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, Aristotle (384-323 B.C.) is known for moderation and avoidance of extremes of left and right in his classic work Politics, as well as in other writings.  His thinking has bearing on Donald Trump, who has divided Americans with his amoral and cruel ways, invoking crude and racialized rhetoric to mobilize populist followers and whose aim it is to retain power after the 2020 elections by these same means.    It is worth pointing out that the edition of Politics quoted below was translated by Sir Ernest Barker in England throughout most of World War II: it began in the autumn of 1940 and was finished some months before the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in May 1945.  The culture of the excluded middle prevailed throughout much of 20^th century history and thought, but not in the USA – unlike today.  Perhaps America should once again take heed of Aristotle where he warns against putting “the will of the people” ahead of the “rule of law” (See footnote 1).  Below is a discussion of some of the prerequisites to a strong constitution - among them a citizenry educated in its spirit. 

Three qualifications are necessary to those who have to fill the sovereign offices.  The first is loyalty to the established constitution.  The second is a high degree of capacity for the duties of office.  The third is the quality of goodness and justice, in the particular form which suits the nature of each constitution. (If the principle of justice varies from constitution to constitution, the quality of justice must also have its corresponding varieties.) ….

In addition to all these things, there is another which ought to be remembered, but which, in fact, is forgotten in perverted forms of government.  This is the value of the mean.  Many of the measures which are reckoned democratic really undermine democracies: many which are reckoned oligarchical actually undermine oligarchies.  The partisans of either of these forms of government, each thinking their own the only right form, push matters to an extreme.  They fail to see that proportion is as necessary to a constitution as it is (let us say) to a nose.  A nose may deviate in some degree from the ideal of straightness, and incline towards the hooked or the snub, without ceasing to be well shaped and agreeable to the eye.  But push the deviation still further towards either of these extremes, and the nose will begin to be out of proportion with the rest of the face: carry it further still, and it will cease to look like a nose at all, because it will go too far towards one, and too far away from the other, of these two opposite extremes.  What is true of the nose, and of other parts of the body, is true also of constitutions.  Both oligarchy and democracy may be tolerable forms of government, even though they deviate from the ideal.  But if you push either of them further still in the direction to which it tends, you will begin by making it a worse constitution, and you may end up by turning it into something which is not a constitution at all ….

The greatest, however, of all the means we have mentioned for ensuring the stability of constitutions – but one which is nowadays generally neglected – is the education of citizens in the spirit of their constitution.  There is no profit in the best of laws, even when they are sanctioned by general civic consent, if the citizens themselves have not been attuned, by the force of habit and the influencing of teaching, to the right constitutional temper – which will be the temper of democracy where the laws are democratic, and where they are oligarchical will be that of oligarchy.  Licentiousness may exist in a state as well as in individual persons, [and training is thus needed for states as well as for individuals].  The education of a citizen in the spirit of his constitution does not consist in his doing the actions in which the partisans of oligarchy, or the adherents of democracy delight.  It consists in his doing the actions by which an oligarchy, or a democracy, will be enabled to survive.  Actual practice, to-day, is on very different lines.  In democracies of the extreme type – the type which is regarded as being particularly democratic[1] – the policy followed is the very reverse of their real interest.  The reason for the aberration is a false conception of liberty.  There are two conceptions which are generally held to be characteristic of democracy.   One of them is the conception of the sovereignty of the majority; the other is that of the liberty of individuals.  The democrat starts by assuming that justice consists in equality: he proceeds to identify equality with the sovereign of the will of the masses; he ends with the view that ‘liberty and equality’ consist in ‘doing what one likes’.  The result of such a view is that, in these extreme democracies, each man lives as he likes – or, as Euripides says, For any end he chances to desire.  This is a mean conception of liberty.  To live by the rule of the constitution ought not to be regarded as slavery, but rather as salvation.[2]

Aristotle, Politics (Book V, Chapter IX)

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[1] [W]here it appears that these democracies are of the type in which the ‘will of the people’ is superior to ‘the rule of law’. [Editor’s footnote: See Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed., and tr. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 233, fn. 3] .

[2] Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed., and tr. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 230-234.