One Last Dreyfus Post

Were the Dreyfusards "Cringe?" — Considering the Dreyfusard Mystique

I realized I finished the series on the Dreyfus Affair without really reflecting on the legacy of the Affair. I gave a quotation from Arendt that hinted to its place as prequel of the disasters of the 20th century, but it seems to me there’s a little more to say about its meaning, particularly as it pertains to contemporary politics. I hope you’ll indulge my idée fixe for just a little while more.

The Affair was the first time “intellectuals” became widely known as such; the term was at first one of abuse, applied by anti-Dreyfusards to characterize their opponents as absurdly detached from reality, then it was quickly embraced by Dreyfusards as a title of honor. Since so much of the Affair was fought out in the press rather than in parliament, the importance of intellectuals and propagandists became paramount, and in fact, the two roles became difficult to differentiate.

A certain sense of unreality was common to writers of both camps: the anti-Dreyfusards inhabited a world of paranoia, filled with a secretive Jewish syndicate pulling the strings and pushing buttons; the Dreyfusards lives took on a heroic, or, as Reinach put it, “Wagnerian” aspect: they found themselves in a glorious adventure of high ideals that pitted the forces of light against those of darkness. It’s not surprising that a profound sense of disappointment and anti-climax permeated the ranks of the Dreyfusards when reality sank back in.

Charles Peguy, the Catholic socialist Dreyfusard who conceived of Dreyfus in almost Christlike terms, wrote “Tout commence en mystique et tout finit en politique.” — “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” The reversion of the Affair from the mystical heights to the practical bargaining of politics was a bitter disappointment to men like Peguy. His friend Georges Sorel, another Dreyfusard that readers of my blog might be familiar with, went through an even more drastic disillusionment, and eventually he converted to a kind of anti-Dreyfusism after the fact and even submitted articles to Charles Maurras’ Action Française journal.

Published in 1908, Sorel’s The Dreyfusian Revolution bitterly satirizes his former allies. Recounting the moment Picquart told Reinach that the Affair was “too much conceived in beauty,” Sorel remarks, “It would be difficult to invent a more successfully comic scene aimed at demonstrating the intellectual debility of the man who was the great hero of the Affair.” As for Zola, the judgment is similarly unsparing:

Zola was the perfect representative of the buffoonery of those times. Everyone is in agreement in recognizing that this cumbersome personage was a small spirit. He loved to hear himself called poet, psychologist and savant without possessing any of the qualities that could in any way justify any of these titles. He presented himself as the chief of a realist school but in fact he never had any idea of what constituted reality. All he ever saw of things was their gross contours, and this is why his admirers say that he was especially successful in the description of crowds: his so-called violence was entirely verbal. He excelled in the art of attracting public attention by means of a vulgar sales pitch. We can compare him to a clown parading around the fairgrounds.

Whatever we think of the fairness of these characterizations, it’s hard not to admit there’s some truth in Sorel’s general reflections on the nature of historical dramas. “Revolutions closely resemble romantic dramas: the ridiculous and the sublime are mixed so inextricably together that we are often unsure how to judge men who seem to be at one and the same time buffoons and heroes,” Sorel writes. “When the emotions appropriate to troubled times have calmed, the country is ashamed to have put up with so many things whose absurdity it hadn’t suspected. It sees with fright that it isn’t possible to separate out that which only deserves laughter and that which should continue to provoke admiration.”

Commenting on Marx’s statement on the revolution of 1848 that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” Sorel finds it to be always-already farcical:

These observations are not precisely exact. The Revolution is protected by the glory that France acquired in the wars of Liberty, but it was just as ridiculous as its imitation in 1848. As soon as the new society acquired its definitive constitution the revolutionaries’ Greco-Roman disguises were looked upon as perfectly grotesque, and the great men of Liberty were judged without the least indulgence.

To Sorel there was something absurd, ludicrous, and embarrassing about the Affair in retrospect — he seems to have felt ashamed to have associated with it and went to great pains to distance himself from it. Perhaps he tried a little too hard.

But another writer who had also been an enthusiastic Dreyfusard, Marcel Proust, found a more subtle sort of humor in the Affair, reflecting his undoubtedly deeper appreciation of the human condition. Perhaps in these posts, I have believed a little too much in the Dreyfusard mystique that looks at everything in terms of high principle, but Proust reminds that people’s motivations for taking their political positions might be quite variable and not quite so high-minded. Odette Swann, despite having a Jewish husband, finds in anti-Dreyfusism the means to social climb (her origins in the demimonde make her social position precarious) :

Mme Swann, who had realized the growing impact of the Dreyfus case and become fearful that her husband’s origins might turn to her disadvantage, had begged him never again to mention the man’s innocence. When he was not present she went a step further and professed the most ardent Nationalism; and here she was merely following the example of Mme Verdurin, in whom a latent anti-Semitism had awakened and grown to a positive frenzy. Mme Swann’s attitude had won her the right of easy entry to several of the anti-Semitic leagues of society women that were being formed, and she had established relations with several members of the aristocracy.

Despite her initial anti-Semitism, Mme. Verdurin’s salon later becomes a center for Dreyfusards, an investment that redounds to her social benefit eventually. “The Dreyfus case passed, Anatole France remained,” as Proust wryly puts it. There are many other such ironic reversals of position: a young aristocrat becomes a Dreyfusard just to rebel against his conservative family, an anti-Dreyfusard Duke suddenly changes his mind on meeting some charming ladies who have the opposite views. Yet somehow, in all his treatment of inconstancy and silliness and vanity, Proust remains more pityingly indulgent than brutally satirical to his characters: He doesn’t cringe at his characters even when they are embarrassing, but he smiles a little at their folly. This is a great writer’s retrospective view many years later, after a lifetime of observation.

Proust does seem to regret the politics of the affair and its brutality. He could not follow his fellow Dreyfusards into the politics of laïcite: even though he was a Jew, he saw, as the historian Ruth Harris writes, “France’s cathedrals and churches as central to the nation’s cultural patrimony.” Aesthetics came before politics. Proust’s character the Baron de Charlus, an eccentric and brilliant dandy for whom beauty and grace is the highest value, deplored that the Affair brought the vulgarity of politics into High Society: as a real snob, he thought it allowed many unfortunate characters and styles into the world of fashion he held dear. But one has to remember this is not quite the view of Proust, who, after all, was an artist and not a mere snob and, for whom, without the presence of the vulgar and the absurd, there would not have been the occasion for art.