6 The French Third Republic

The Republic endured because it was the form of government that divided us the least.

—Adolphe Theirs¹Close

Although by the early 1850s the democratic wave of 1848 had receded, it had introduced democracy, however briefly, to parts of Europe that had never experienced it before (see chapter 5). For the first time, many Europeans acted collectively to demand political change, participated in elections, and witnessed the convening of parliaments. This was not enough to consolidate democracy, but mass politics and pressures for political change were not eliminated by the reverse wave. The other force threatening the old order in 1848—nationalism—also did not disappear with the reverse wave. Indeed, during the last half of the nineteenth century the pressures and conflicts that had caused the 1848 wave re-emerged, albeit in new forms and combinations, eventually creating an explosive mix that would send Europe careening towards the wars and revolutions of the early twentieth century.

This chapter will examine these dynamics in France. As the birthplace of modern democracy and nationalism, France differed in important ways from the rest of Europe. The French Revolution had destroyed the foundations of the ancien régime, thereby accomplishing what in many other countries happened only after 1848. The destruction and violence of the French Revolution also, however, left behind deep social divisions that hindered the formation of a stable new order to replace the old one. During the first half of the nineteenth century France went through several political transitions: from the First Republic to the First Empire (1804–1814/5); from the First Empire to the Bourbon Restoration (1814/5–1830); from the Bourbon Restoration to the July Monarchy (1830–1848); from the July Monarchy to the Second Republic (1848–1852); and from the Second Republic to the Second Empire (1852–1870). During the second half of the nineteenth century, France experienced another transition, to the Third Republic. Reflecting the frequency of political upheaval in France, a long-standing joke had it that the National Library kept its copies of the constitution in the “periodicals” section.²Close The Third Republic was France’s third try at democracy and was more successful than the previous two, not least because of the legacies left behind by these earlier attempts. Not only had the political and legal infrastructure of the ancien régime been eliminated and a central state constructed, the Third Republic did not have to build democracy from scratch: many of the institutions and practices necessary for democracy already existed in France when another transition occurred in 1870. However, also in accordance with what by this time had become a French tradition, the transition to the Third Republic was tumultuous, leaving a large number of dead bodies and a reservoir of social resentment in its wake. Furthermore, despite turning out to be France’s longest-lived democratic experiment and the only major democracy in Europe at the time,³Close the Third Republic should not be considered fully consolidated since, despite lasting for many decades and achieving myriad accomplishments, a significant number of French citizens never accepted the legitimacy of the Republic or the democratic rules of the game.

A backlash against liberal democracy was not limited to France. Indeed, anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces that had their roots in movements that first appeared during 1848 appeared in all European countries by the end of the nineteenth century. Largely because France had made great strides in the struggle against the ancien régime and towards democracy and state-building early on, these forces were less powerful than in many other European countries. Nonetheless, forces opposed to the Third Republic, particularly of the populist, anti-Semitic, nationalist variety, did emerge with critical consequences for French political development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before examining these developments through the prism of their most spectacular nineteenth-century manifestation—the Dreyfus Affair—it is necessary to examine the emergence of the Third Republic itself.

As discussed in chapter 5, after the collapse of the Second Republic, France transitioned to the Second Empire. Although this regime has often been parodied most famously by Marx, who derided Louis Napoleon’s attempt to recapture his famous uncle’s glory as history repeating itself this time as farce,⁴Close or presented as a mere interlude between the Second and Third Republics, in fact during the Second Empire (1852–1870) France experienced important changes that contributed to the relative success of democracy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵Close Although neither liberal nor democratic, because of France’s previous history the Second Empire was also not a traditional dictatorship; today we might call it a populist or “competitive authoritarian” regime. A perverse version of popular sovereignty was embedded in the Second Empire: the constitution made the emperor “responsible to the French people,” and Louis-Napoleon claimed the people were “the only sovereign I recognize.”⁶Close In addition, during the Second Empire, French citizens gained further experience in voting and other aspects of competitive politics.⁷Close For example, although the powers of the national legislature were limited and basic civil liberties like freedom of the press and association restricted,⁸Close elections with universal manhood suffrage were held, civil society organizations existed, and a republican “counter-elite practiced in the arts of democratic politicking” developed during the Second Empire.⁹Close

Alongside the development of crucial political institutions and practices, France’s economy and society also changed significantly during this period. Louis-Napoleon was eager to promote economic development, and between 1852 and 1870 France experienced significant economic growth, its banking system was modernized, manufacturing and industry expanded, and rural migration and urbanization increased.¹⁰Close France’s class structure shifted accordingly, most notably via the continued growth of the middle and urban working classes. And public works programs transformed and tied the country together: road, rail, and port networks expanded, and Baron Georges Haussman re-designed Paris, giving Europe perhaps its first truly modern city of magnificent buildings, stunning monuments, and grand boulevards.¹¹Close

After France recovered from the disorder of the early 1850s, Louis- Napoleon began facing pressure within Parliament and from society for political liberalization. During the 1860s he moved the Second Empire into a phase of “liberalizing authoritarianism,” loosening restrictions on public assembly and the press, recognizing workers’ rights to strike and organize, expanding public education, and increasing the powers of Parliament.¹²Close These reforms were popular—in 1870 a plebiscite asking the French whether they “approve[d] the liberal reforms carried out since 1860” returned over 83 percent voting “yes” with a turnout of over 80 percent¹³Close—but Louis-Napoleon had become less so. Legislative elections held in 1869 returned strong gains for the liberal opposition, especially in Paris. Concerns about his popularity may have led Louis-Napoleon to make some risky moves.

Like his more talented uncle, Louis-Napoleon committed his empire to international glory and the “liberation of peoples” and involved France in a variety of foreign policy escapades. But by the 1860s the balance of power in Europe was changing, most crucially as a result of the rise of Prussia and its push to unify and dominate German-speaking Europe (see chapter 8). This created tension between France and Prussia, and the Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was able to manipulate Louis-Napoleon to bring these tensions to a head. Taking advantage of Louis-Napoleon’s too-easily injured honor and desire to whip up support for his empire, Bismarck maneuvered a Franco-Prussian dispute over the candidate for the vacant Spanish throne into a war, which led to France’s rapid and stunning defeat. Since dictatorships must depend on their performance (or repression) to stay in power (as opposed to democracies, which can derive legitimacy from reflecting the “voice of the people”), this international humiliation proved fatal for Louis-Napoleon. Within two days of the battle of Sedan on September 2, 1870, that ended with the surrender and capture of Louis-Napoleon, a Paris mob forced the legislature to proclaim the end of the empire, and another tempestuous political transition began in France.

After the fall of the empire, a provisional government took charge as Paris came under siege by the Germans. When the government finally surrendered in January 1871 and elections were held, they revealed an extremely divided country—Paris voted Republican and socialist, while the rest of the country voted conservative and monarchist. When the new National Assembly took office, with Adolphe Theirs as the head of a new government, conflicts began almost immediately between it and workers and radicals in Paris. By March, these had grown so intense that the Parisian rebels decided to elect their own government, which came to be known as the Paris Commune, plunging France into civil war. Karl Marx memorialized this episode in one of his most famous writings, “The Civil War in France,” in which he characterized the Commune as the first example in history of a “truly working-class government” or “dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The reality was somewhat different. Having come to power quickly and unexpectedly and during a period of chaos, the leaders of the Commune lacked a unifying ideology, coordinated plan of action, or organizational infrastructure. Nonetheless, the Commune’s perceived extremism combined with a long-standing fear in the French provinces of Parisian radicalism left it vulnerable. And indeed, when government forces began their final offensive against Paris on May 21, 1871, the Commune fell rapidly but not before a bloody week of street fighting, mass executions, and terror. Although the exact toll is unclear, certainly tens of thousands of French citizens lost their lives during this week and the brutal government reprisals that followed the Commune’s fall.¹⁴Close

The Commune and its aftermath layered on to an already divided society further bitterness and suspicion. Although it was not the harbinger of socialist paradise envisioned by some, the Commune was supported by a significant sector of the emerging working class, which viewed its fate as further proof that the bourgeoisie would never tolerate working-class or socialist government. For conservatives, meanwhile, the Commune represented a violent threat to property and order whose recurrence needed to be avoided at all cost. The Third Republic thus began with a stunning military defeat, foreign occupation, the signing of a punitive treaty which included a heavy war indemnity, the loss of two of France’s provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, and civil war. In short, the Third Republic was ushered in by a war “that shattered national myths of grandeur and cohesion” and “set off a dynamic of defeatist hysteria” and a collapse into the “worst civil violence in Europe since the 1790s.”¹⁵Close Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that the post-transition Republic got off to a rocky start.

The first National Assembly had a conservative monarchist rather than a republican majority, but because of divisions within the former camp, republicans won out.¹⁶Close As the Republic’s first leader, Adolphe Theirs, put it, the Republic initially endured not because it was enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of French citizens but rather because it was the form of government “that divide[d] us the least.”¹⁷Close However, despite its inauspicious beginnings, Theirs placed the Republic on a moderate course and support for it gradually solidified. Evidence of this came during the so-called le seize-Mai crisis, a sort of monarchist coup attempt, when the Royalist President MacMahon dismissed the prime minister and attempted to appoint a new royalist prime minister and government. The parliament passed a vote of no confidence in the new government on May 16, 1877, to which MacMahon responded by calling new elections. Much to his chagrin these elections returned a strong Republican majority. During the subsequent years the Republic expanded its reach and activity or, to use social scientific terms, its infrastructural power,¹⁸Close one reflection of which was a continued growth in the per capita revenue extracted by the state (see Figure 6.1).

In addition, during this period “peasants became Frenchman,” in Eugen Weber’s evocative phrase: nation-building took a major step forward as French society was further homogenized and millions of isolated, uneducated rural French citizens were integrated into the national polity. The Third Republic expanded France’s rail, road, and canal networks, enabling citizens to communicate and engage with each other to an unprecedented degree,¹⁹Close and free, mandatory, secular primary education was established via the Jules Ferry laws (1881 and 1882), creating a citizenry tied together by common language,²⁰Close values, and traditions and cultivating a cadre of teachers devoted to creating republican citizens.²¹Close By the end of the 1880s the Third Republic had also reintroduced universal military conscription, which provided citizens from across the country further education in a common language and socialized them into national, patriotic values.²²Close However, despite its growing strength and accomplishments, during the late nineteenth century the Republic faced significant challenges as well.

Some stemmed from the general turmoil of the era. The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period of rapid and disorienting change for France as well as the rest of Europe. During the mid- to late 1870s Europe and North America experienced a prolonged depression that ended the steady economic growth of the previous decades. So severe and prolonged was the downturn that it came to be known as the “Great Depression,” a characterization it kept until the 1930s when an even more severe downturn took over the title. This depression hit France hard and was layered on to the economic shocks generated by the Franco-Prussian war. The 1870s depression was followed by a period of economic globalization that re-ignited growth, but also generated destabilizing social trends including a decline in the relative import of agriculture and small, family-owned businesses in the economy,²³Close an unprecedented increase in migration both internally from rural to urban areas and externally from the “old” world to the “new,” and a growing sense on the part of workers, artisans, farmers, and others that the ruthless pressures of the capitalist system were leaving them further and further behind. As we will see in subsequent chapters, these developments led to a backlash across Europe, and the rise of movements on both the left and right that rejected key features of the emerging modern order.

On the left, the consequences of unfettered capitalism fed the rise of workers’ movements; by the late nineteenth century Marxism had become the dominant doctrine within most working-class, socialist parties. Marx, of course, rejected capitalism and was also skeptical about democracy since he did not believe the bourgeoisie would ever permit democracy to truly function and allow workers to take power; these views were solidified by 1848 and the Paris Commune. In France, the first truly Marxist party, the Parti Ouvrier Français (POF), was formed in 1879 under the tutelage of two of France’s best-known Marxists, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue.²⁴Close Guesde and Lafargue championed a particularly crude version of Marxism that stressed the inexorable decline of capitalism and the inevitability of class conflict, and belittled the Third Republic and democracy more generally since they were convinced that the bourgeoisie would never allow workers to truly threaten their interests. As Lafargue once put it with his characteristic bluntness, “The bourgeois republican order is the most corrupt and dishonest regime which could possibly exist.”²⁵Close To believe that it could be used to fundamentally improve the lives of workers was an illusion. Or, in Guesde’s word, it was a waste of time to pursue democratic change since “in multiplying reforms, one only multiplies shams.”²⁶Close

Alongside the growth of a Marxist left that rejected capitalism and denigrated democracy, the other and far more dangerous beneficiary of the discontent and dislocation that swept across Europe during the fin-de-siècle was nationalism. In France as well as the rest of Europe (see chapters 7 and 8), the constituency for and appeal of traditional conservative movements that aimed to revive the ancien régime diminished during the late nineteenth century; instead, the right became dominated by nationalist movements. Unlike their 1848 predecessors, who fought the ancien régime in the name of liberty, equality, and democracy, fin-de-siècle nationalist movements viewed liberalism and democracy as well as capitalism as the main threats to national unity and identity.²⁷Close In France this new type of movement first appeared during the Boulangist crisis.

General Georges Boulanger was a French general and later politician who thrived on and encouraged the generalized discontent of the era as well as the discontent with the Republic arising from scandals, bank failures, corruption, and an inability to take revenge against Germany and reclaim France’s “rightful” place at the head of Europe. Reflecting this last obsession, Boulanger was sometimes referred to as General Revenge. Boulanger’s solution to France’s problems was an aggressive anti-liberal, anti-Republican, populist, and pseudo-socialist nationalism. This odd mixture attracted the support of a broad range of dissatisfied French citizens: prominent conservatives supported the movement as well as many who viewed themselves as socialists. Indeed, within Parliament Boulangists championed policies traditionally associated with the left, supporting extensive social reforms and cooperating with socialists in Parliament; indeed, notes one observer, “the only issue which . . . distinguish[ed] the Boulangist from the socialists was nationalism.”²⁸Close In addition, Boulangists saw themselves as champions not of a narrow elite, but of France’s “disinherited” and “little people.”²⁹Close Indeed, so popular did Boulanger become that after winning a significant victory in the 1889 elections, coup rumors spread; when the time came to act, however, Boulanger hesitated, and shortly thereafter the government charged him with treason and conspiracy. To the dismay of his supporters, Boulanger fled rather than fought, and his support thereafter quickly diminished. Boulanger then died an ignominious death, committing suicide in 1891 at the grave of his mistress in Brussels.

Although the Boulangist episode was relatively brief, its significance should not be underestimated. It marked the birth of a new type of right-wing movement in France: nationalist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic, but also appropriating many of the themes, appeals, and policies traditionally associated with the left and able to attract a mass constituency. Boulangism thus represented a trend away from elite-based, traditional conservative movements on the right, aiming instead to unite a broad coalition behind a strongman who would “clean house” and eliminate the “weak” Republic.³⁰Close Boulanger’s success made clear that a significant number of citizens were at least willing to consider alternatives to the democratic status quo.³¹Close

The Dreyfus Affair picked up where Boulangism left off. As one observer remarked, “Boulangism drew up nationalism’s birth certificate, the Dreyfus Affair its baptismal record.”³²Close The basic facts of the Dreyfus case are these: in 1894 a French spy in the German embassy discovered a handwritten note in a wastebasket listing French military secrets, which became known as the bordereau, received by a German military attaché in Paris. The handwriting on the note was linked to an artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was arrested for spying, court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to degradation and deported for life to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. But rather than ending there, the Dreyfus case turned into the greatest scandal of nineteenth-century France, mobilizing and aggravating existing divisions within French society and creating almost civil war–like conditions. The reason is that although the Dreyfus Affair was ostensibly about Dreyfus’s guilt or innocence, at its heart lie a more fundamental controversy about France’s political future. The controversy penetrated almost all areas of French political and even private life—courtrooms, Parliament, the arts, the street, salons, and dining rooms became sites of heated conflict—and once again divided the country into pro- and anti-democratic camps. The Affair also made clear that despite the Republic’s many successes, significant opposition to it remained and was, moreover, no longer limited to monarchists and traditional conservative institutions like the church and military but was spreading to populist, anti-Semitic, nationalist movements.

Alfred Dreyfus’s background is crucial to understanding the controversy. Dreyfus came from a wealthy Alsatian Jewish family, which made him a double outsider. Although anti-Semitism had long been a part of European culture, by the late nineteenth century it had begun changing from a religious to a racial or national sentiment. Jews were no longer portrayed “only” as a threat to Christian beliefs and teachings, but also increasingly as “foreigners” exerting a disproportionate and debilitating influence over national life. In France, Jews were scapegoated for almost every problem facing the Third Republic, from scandals, to economic crises, to its decline vis-à-vis Germany; many members of the middle and upper classes also resented the rapid rise and success of Jews in France.³³Close Making matters worse, Dreyfus came from Alsace, a region lost by France after the Franco-Prussian war, making it a symbol of French decline and its inhabitants—particularly its Jews—of suspect loyalty to some.³⁴Close After Alsace’s annexation by Germany, the Dreyfus family moved to Paris, where Alfred attended military school. After finishing, Alfred joined the French Army, eventually ascending to the army’s general staff office in 1894, the only Jew to achieve that status. Thus, when a cleaning woman in the pay of French counterespionage found the bordereau, a document that contained information that seemed to link it to someone inside the general staff office, widespread anti-Semitism along with the “paranoia” pervading the military establishment at the time³⁵Close led many to assume Dreyfus’s guilt.

Counterintelligence officers were called in to compare the note’s handwriting to Dreyfus’s and that of others in the general staff office. Despite an inept investigation and the inability of counterintelligence officers to come to a definitive conclusion about the note’s author, Dreyfus was charged and carted off to prison. Dreyfus had little motive to commit such a crime—he was wealthy, married with children, had no known vices, and had worked his way up through elite military schools—but as a Jew he was seen by the military as “not really French” and “a traitor by nature.”³⁶Close

Although the arrest was initially secret, word leaked out and the right-wing press exploded in paroxysms of anti-Semitism. The Church, which played a crucial role in fanning anti-Dreyfus, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic sentiment, published descriptions of Dreyfus as “the enemy Jew” and an agent of “international Jewry” whose goal was the ruin of the French people. Its largest paper, La Croix, called for the expulsion of Jews from France.³⁷Close And Edmund Drumont’s La Libre Parole, perhaps the principal mouthpiece for Parisian anti-Semitism, declared Dreyfus’s absolute guilt and its certainty that he was part of a vast plot to betray the French people and deliver them into the hands of Germany.³⁸Close In addition, even before Dreyfus’s trial began, the war minister, General Mercier, declared in interviews with French papers that he was certain of Dreyfus’s culpability.

Despite the drumbeat of condemnation and the non-public trial, the lack of actual evidence against Dreyfus led the military to fear an acquittal. To avoid this, a file was concocted containing “absolute” proof of Dreyfus’s guilt and presented to the court on General Mercier’s orders in secret. Presented with this “evidence,” which neither Dreyfus nor his counsel were allowed to examine, the court found Dreyfus guilty on December 22, 1894, and sentenced him to the maximum penalty allowed by law. Before being sent off to serve his sentence on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus was humiliated by being stripped of his military insignia, badges, and sword in a courtyard filled with soldiers while a large anti-Semitic crowd called for blood outside. The nationalist Maurice Barrés described the scene:

Judas! Traitor! It was a veritable storm. . . . The poor wretch releases in all hearts floods of intense dislike. His face that marks him as a foreigner, his impassive stiffness, create an aura that even the coolest spectator finds revolting . . . he was not born to live in any society. Only the branch of a tree grown infamous in an infamous wood offers itself to him—so that he could hang himself from it.³⁹Close

At this point the case might have ended but for two factors: the unwillingness of Dreyfus, his family, and a small band of supporters to accept this miscarriage of justice, and a fortuitous change in counterintelligence personnel.

After Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction, his brother Mathieu continued to proclaim Alfred’s innocence. Mathieu did not find much of an audience until 1895, when Colonel Georges Picquart became the new head of counterintelligence. Soon after taking over, Picquart was given another document discovered by the same French spy in the German embassy who had found the original bordereau. This document, which came to be known as the petit bleu, was addressed to a Major Walsin Esterhazy, a dissolute and dishonest gambler and swindler who was however Catholic and aristocratic, and had high-level military connections. Eventually coming to suspect that Esterhazy might be the author of the original bordereau, Picquart collected samples of his handwriting. Realizing that Esterhazy’s handwriting matched that of the bordereau, Picquart began an inquiry which led him to conclude that Esterhazy had indeed been working for Germany. However, when Picquart reported the results of his investigation to his superiors, they made clear that they had no interest in exonerating Dreyfus. General Charles-Arthur Gonse, deputy head of the general staff, asked Picquart, “What do you care if that Jew rots on Devil’s Island?”⁴⁰Close Picquart was told to keep quiet; soon after he was removed from his position and then shipped off to Tunisia. In addition to getting rid of Picquart, the military gave Major Hubert-Joseph Henry the task of strengthening the case against Dreyfus. Unable to do so legitimately, Henry manufactured further evidence, in particular a letter naming Dreyfus as the German spy, which came to be known as “le faux Henry.”

By this point, the case was becoming increasingly difficult to control. In order to protect himself, Picquart gave the results of his investigation to a lawyer friend named Louis Lebois, but asked him not to publicly reveal his findings, probably because he did not want to be seen as betraying the army to which he had devoted his life. Lebois then met with the vice president of the Senate, Auguste Scheuer-Kestner, who was also an Alsatian, who then began his own investigation; Scheuer-Kestner also eventually concluded that Dreyfus was innocent and Esterhazy the real culprit. However, like Picquart, Scheurer-Kestner’s initial attempts to convince others of Dreyfus’s innocence met with little success; indeed he became the subject of vitriolic attacks in the anti-Semitic press. In November 1896 Dreyfus’s small but growing band of defenders received two boosts with the publication of Barnard Lazare’s brochure “A Judicial Error: The Truth about the Dreyfus Affair,” which picked apart the case against Dreyfus and the French daily newspaper Le Matin’s publication of a leaked copy of the original bordereau which enabled several people who knew Esterhazy to recognize his handwriting. One of these, a banker named Castro, contacted Mathieu Dreyfus. Mathieu then went to Scheurer-Kestner and asked him to confirm that he too believed Esterhazy to be the author of the bordereau—an identity Scheurer-Kestner had not originally wanted to reveal because of promises of secrecy made to Lebois. Armed with growing evidence, Mathieu made an open complaint about Esterhazy.

With the charges now public the military felt compelled to open an investigation, which amazingly concluded that Picquart rather than Esterhazy was the true culprit. By this point, interest in the case had grown. When Le Figaro published a series of letters by one of Esterhazy’s former mistresses in which Esterhazy proclaimed his hatred of France and faith in Germany at the end of 1897, the general staff became convinced that only a full trial of Esterhazy could bring the uproar to an end. The trial occurred in January 1898 behind closed doors and resulted in the rapid acquittal of Esterhazy. After this, Émile Zola, perhaps the most influential French novelist of the day, published his famous “I accuse . . . !” (J’accuse . . .!): an open letter in the newspaper L’Aurore to the president of the Republic, Félix Faure, which accused key figures in the military of lies, cover-ups, and anti-Semitism and those in the government who supported the military or simply allowed its miscarriage of justice to stand of betraying the Republic. “Truth and justice,” Zola wrote to Faure, “have been slapped in the face.”

France’s cheek has been sullied . . . and History will record that it was during your Presidency that such a crime against society has been committed. . . . The Republican government should take a broom to that nest of Jesuits [in the military] and make a clean sweep! . . . what a den of sneaking intrigue, rumour-mongering and back-biting that sacred chapel has become—yet that is where the fate of our country is decided. People take fright at the appalling light that has just been shed on it all by the Dreyfus Affair, that tale of human sacrifice! Yes, an unfortunate, a “dirty Jew” has been sacrificed. . . . [These officers] have crushed the nation under their boots, stuffing its calls for truth and justice down its throat on the fallacious and sacrilegious pretext that they are acting for the good of the country! . . . [They have also] led public opinion astray, manipulat[ing] it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert[ing] it to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the humble, ordinary people, to whip reactionary and intolerant passions into a frenzy while sheltering behind the odious bastion of anti-Semitism. France, the great and liberal cradle of the rights of man, will die of anti-Semitism if it is not cured of it. . . . The Affair is only just the beginning, because only now have the positions become crystal clear: on the one hand, the guilty parties, who do not want the truth to be revealed; on the other, the defenders of justice, who will give their lives to see that justice is done. I have said it elsewhere and I repeat it here: if the truth is buried underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open with it. Time will tell: we shall see whether we have not prepared, for some later date, the most resounding disaster.⁴¹Close

Within twenty-four hours, hundreds of thousands of copies of the newspaper had been sold. J’Accuse rallied intellectuals, socialists, youths, and others into a Dreyfusard movement, and demands for a retrial of Dreyfus grew. However, rather than gaining Dreyfus a retrial, Zola was charged with libel. Zola’s trial was mobbed, anti-Semitic riots broke out across France, Catholic and Church groups protested “this Jewish campaign besmirching France,” “ ‘France for the French’ became a ubiquitous slogan,” Jewish stores and synagogues were attacked, and Jews were assaulted in the streets with the police often standing by. According to reports “the crowds were not only crying slogans related to the Dreyfus Affair, but also ‘Death to the Jews.’ ”⁴²Close

Zola’s trial and then conviction for libel further inflamed and divided the country into lines familiar since the revolution—between the supporters and opponents of liberalism, democracy, and the Republic, now in the guise of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. The anti-Dreyfusard camp included, of course, traditional conservative forces like the military and the Church but much of the sound and fury surrounding the affair—the constant anti-Semitic and anti-Republic protests—came from new populist, right-wing movements.⁴³Close Drumont, for example, the founder of the anti-Semitic La Libre Parole and the author of a number of extremely popular anti-Semitic tracts, including the runaway hit La France Juive (Jewish France)—which sold 100,000 copies in 1886 alone and was premised on the idea that “France was falling under the control of Jews [who were] responsible for every French ill”⁴⁴Close—founded the Anti-Semitic League of France (Ligue antisémitique de France) during the Dreyfus Affair to disseminate anti-Semitic literature and mobilize demonstrations against the Republic. The Patriots’ League (Ligue de la Patrie Française), meanwhile, originally formed to promote nationalism and revenge against Germany, morphed during the Dreyfus Affair into an anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfusard movement that staged disruptive and sometimes violent protests against Zola and the Republic. And Action Français, which would go on to play an important role during the early twentieth century, also had its origins in the Dreyfus Affair, calling for a “purification” of France’s “foreign elements,” attacking democracy and joining “the popular radicalism of nationalism with the reactionary elitism of the royalists.”⁴⁵Close

In the summer of 1898 a new cabinet came to power with Godefroy Cavaignac as minister of war. Cavaignac wanted to end the controversy and so dug up the old file of evidence originally compiled against Dreyfus and presented it to the Chamber of Deputies as proof of Dreyfus’s guilt, not knowing that it was fake. In August Captain Louis Cuignet from Cavaignac’s staff was going through evidence and realized that a key document—“le faux Henry”—was a forgery. When confronted by Cavaignac, Henry immediately confessed and was sent to a military prison but before he could incriminate any higher-ups, he was found dead, an apparent suicide, his throat slashed by a razor. Henry’s death elicited an outpouring of anti-Semitic vitriol from the nationalist right. Common among nationalists was Charles Maurras’s view of Henry as a “hero of the state” and his vilification of the Republic for its “Jewishness.” (Maurras would go on to become the chief ideologue of Action Français.) Henry’s death occasioned an “orgy of anti-Semitic insults and calls for the massacre of French Jews.”⁴⁶Close Typical was the following declaration from the Jeunesse Antisémitique (Young Antisemites):

To the Nation!

Citizens!

For a year the hirelings of foreign enemy powers, all enemies of our race, have been unleashed against our army, which alone stands above our unhappy country, looted and dishonored by Jews for the last century. . . . The youth of France will march in tight ranks around the flag . . . [and] will chase the foreign hordes from the soil of France.⁴⁷Close

A fund was taken up for Henry’s widow, and Drumont’s La Libre Parole launched a campaign to erect a monument to him.

After the confession and death of Henry, Cavaignac resigned⁴⁸Close and Dreyfus’s family once again petitioned for a retrial. During the last months of 1898 and first months of 1899 conditions reached a fever pitch, as the Dreyfusards made political headway and the country was rocked by anti-Semitic and anti-Republic demonstrations. In February 1899 Faure died suddenly in office and was replaced by Èmile Loubet, who was sympathetic to the Dreyfusard cause. Loubet was bitterly attacked by the nationalist right, and members of the Patriots’ League attempted a coup soon after he came to office. However, in the summer of 1899 Loubet and the Dreyfusards were strengthened by the formation of a “government of Republican defense” under Prime Minister René Waldeck-Rousseau, which included representatives from across the political spectrum, including Alexander Millerand, the first socialist to serve in a “bourgeois” government.

During the summer of 1899 a new trial for Dreyfus was ordered, but because the situation in Paris had become so volatile, it was moved to Rennes in Brittany. However, by this point much of the rest of the country, including Rennes, had become a tinderbox: a week or so into the trial one of Dreyfus’s lawyers was shot by a fanatic, and police and the military had a hard time containing anti-Dreyfusard demonstrations. When the military court once again found Dreyfus guilty of treason despite the fake evidence, the confessions of Henry and Esterhàzy, and all the rest, albeit this time “with extenuating circumstances,” neither Dreyfusards nor anti-Dreyfusards were satisfied: fears grew that France was sinking into civil war–like conditions. Worried about the explosive domestic situation as well as the damage being done to France’s reputation abroad, the government decided to pardon Dreyfus to placate the Dreyfusards while also passing an amnesty law, protecting all those involved in the Affair from prosecution, to placate the military. Dreyfus’s pardon did not, however, exonerate him, and he and his supporters continued to fight for a declaration of innocence—something he only received in 1906.⁴⁹Close

Why does the Dreyfus Affair merit so much attention? First, because it revealed important weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the Third Republic. Even in France, the country with the longest democratic tradition in Europe, a significant number of citizens were so dissatisfied with the Republic that they were willing to support anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and often violent opposition to it. Second, and relatedly, the Affair profoundly impacted the main political actors in France. On the left, the Dreyfus Affair forced socialists to confront head-on their ambivalence about liberal democracy: Should socialists defend the Republic because liberal democracy was critical to the achievement of socialism, or stay on the sidelines because the fate of the bourgeois state did not really concern them and had little to do with socialism’s ultimate victory? On one side stood Guesde and Lafargue, who simply could not defend the bourgeois Republic and accept the open modification of their understanding of socialism that defense would entail. They insisted “the proletarians have nothing to do with this battle which is not theirs.”⁵⁰Close On the other side stood those for whom the institutions and ideals of the Republic were a critical component of their socialist vision. The undisputed leader of this camp was Jean Jaurès, who argued,

the democratic Republic is not, as our self-styled doctrinaires of Marxism so often say, a purely bourgeois form . . . it heralds Socialism, it prepares for it, contains it implicitly to some extent, because only Republicanism can lead to Socialism by legal evolution without break of continuity.⁵¹Close

Jaurès’s defense of the Republic during the Dreyfus Affair thrust him into the political spotlight. Indeed, from then until his assassination in 1914, he became one of the most important and beloved figures in the French and international socialist movements. The anti-Republican fervor stirred up by the Affair helped Jaurès convince a majority of French socialists that their overriding goal had to be protecting democracy from anti-Dreyfusard forces. This is part of the backstory to the formation of the “government of Republican defense” in 1899 under Prime Minister René Waldeck-Rousseau mentioned above. In return for socialist support, Waldeck-Rousseau asked the socialist Alexandre Millerand to join his cabinet. This request triggered a crisis within the socialist movement since having socialists not merely support but actually join a non-socialist government indicated an acceptance of cross-class cooperation and the bourgeois state that challenged the reigning Marxist orthodoxy head-on. In response, Guesde, Lafargue, and other socialists called for the convocation of France’s first all-socialist congress since 1882. Not surprisingly, at the congress Jaurès emerged as the strongest defender of Millerand and of socialist support for democracy. The congress’s outcome was ambiguous. Two resolutions were adopted, the first declaring the participation of socialists in a bourgeois government incompatible with the principle of class struggle, and the second saying that under “exceptional circumstances” such a tactic might be permitted. The controversy continued to simmer even after Millerand’s departure from the government, and spilled over into International Socialist meetings. The Affair and its aftermath marked a crucial stage in the grappling of French as well as European socialists with democracy.⁵²Close

In addition to forcing socialists to confront head-on their views of democracy, the Affair convinced all Republicans that defending the Republic required more concerted and coordinated effort. The Dreyfus Affair thus “rekindled the Republic spirit” and helped spur the formation or expansion of a number of pro-Republican organizations, including the Masons, Libre-Pensée (Free Thought) groups, and the League of the Rights of Man (Ligue des droits de l’homme et du citoyen), that provided meeting grounds for Republicans from different parts of the political and class spectrum.⁵³Close Perhaps even more important was the formation of the Radical party in 1901. This party was pro-republic, national in scope, and positioned itself in opposition to conservatives and monarchists as well as socialists by adopting a socially conservative, pro-property, and individualistic stance that enabled it to attract middle-class, lower-middle-class, and peasant support. The Radical party became the largest party for much of the remainder of the Third Republic, serving in almost all its governments and providing significant stability.⁵⁴Close Also notable was that the Radicals were willing to work with other pro-Republican groups to defend democracy. Particularly consequential was Radical participation in a 1902 left-wing bloc (Bloc des gauches) that included socialists and enacted critical legislation, most notably the 1905 law separating Church and State that formed the foundation of France’s twentieth-century commitment to laïcité.

The separation of the social and political goals of the French Revolution that the Radical party represented and the growing acceptance of democracy by the middle classes and peasantry that this separation facilitated was a striking difference between the First, Second, and Third Republics. As one influential observer put it, during the Third Republic, “The Republic and the left stopped identifying with each other . . . and consequently the right and hostility to the Republic were no longer confused. There was now, and would be for a long while, a republican right or, if you prefer, republicans on the right.”⁵⁵Close The strengthening and broadening of the Republic’s support base was accompanied by a weakening of its traditional enemies. Monarchism, for example, “if not dead, had been routed and relegated to the camp of lost causes.” The Church and the army were significantly weakened, and “the system of national education was completed, expanding the Republic’s ability to shape the norms and values of its citizens.”⁵⁶Close In the years after the Dreyfus Affair, in other words, the Third Republic made significant progress.

Nonetheless, threats remained. In addition to strengthening the resolve and accomplishments of pro-Republican forces, the Affair influenced the anti-Republican right. Although some of the organizations that had flourished during the Affair declined after it was resolved, others did not, and the ideas and strategies they employed during the Affair remained part of French political life during the early twentieth century. In addition, the Affair marked a transition on the right: the traditional forces opposed to the Republic—monarchists, Bonapartists, the Church, and the military—were no longer the “cutting edge” of the anti-democratic movement. Instead, these forces continued to decline or became subsumed into more modern and dynamic nationalist movements. These nationalist movements took from the Affair the lesson that overthrowing the Republic would require more proselytizing, organizing, and political activity. And so as opposed to previous anti-democratic movements, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist movements became mass-based, populist, and cross-class. Particularly useful in this regard was anti-Semitism, which allowed nationalist movements to appeal to traditional religious prejudices, resentment of post-emancipation Jewish success, and the large numbers of citizens discomforted by what they viewed as France’s decline. These movements and appeals would eventually form part of the foundation upon which the fascist and National Socialist movements of the interwar period would be built.

The Dreyfus Affair’s status as the most spectacular manifestation of the growing power and popularity of anti-Semitism in Europe during the fin-de-siècle is another reason it warrants attention. Indeed, the Dreyfus Affair opened up a new chapter in the history of Jews in Europe. Although, as noted above, religious anti-Semitism had long existed, it took on a new, more virulent, and more dangerous form during the late nineteenth century as part of a more general backlash against democracy, liberalism, capitalism, and other aspects of modernity. That this new form of anti-Semitism appeared even in France, Europe’s most democratic nation, where Jews had been emancipated early on and had accordingly achieved a comparatively high degree of assimilation, highlights how pervasive and portentous this trend was.⁵⁷Close Dreyfus and his family represented precisely the type of assimilated, secular, patriotic Jews that many hoped were paving the way for full Jewish integration into European culture and society. But the Dreyfus Affair and the paroxysm of anti-Semitism it unleashed forced many to reconsider the future of European Jewry. Among those influenced by the Dreyfus Affair was Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent for the Vienna newspaper, the Neue Freie Press. Herzl was Jewish, but he came from a family that took pride in its secular, assimilated nature. By the end of the nineteenth century Herzl was dismayed by rising anti-Semitism in his native Vienna, but his experiences in France during the Dreyfus Affair shocked him: if acceptance and assimilation were impossible in France—the home of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment—how could there be hope for it elsewhere? The Affair thus helped convince Herzl that Jews had no choice but to establish a state of their own. After the Dreyfus Affair Herzl went on to become a father of modern Zionism: penning some of the movement’s foundational texts, organizing and becoming president of the World Zionist Organization, and tirelessly pursuing international support for a Jewish state.⁵⁸Close

A final reason the Dreyfus Affair merits attention is that it reflected pathologies and problems facing not only France but, as subsequent chapters make clear, much of the rest of Europe as well. The Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard camps sprang from and represented divisions in French society that reached “back to the French Revolution and forward to the Holocaust.”⁵⁹Close  Dreyfusards were the defenders and anti-Dreyfusards the opponents of democracy and liberalism, that is, the ideals of the French Revolution in general and the Third Republic in particular. As we have seen, to some degree the former triumphed with the Third Republic, which turned out to be the longest-lived and most successful French regime since the revolution and the only democracy in a major European country at the time. Nonetheless, the Third Republic faced significant threats from traditional defenders of the ancien régime, like monarchists, the Church, and the military as well as from the growing populist, anti-Semitic nationalist organizations that drew energy from the anti-Dreyfusard struggle. These organizations reflected a portentous shift in the nature of nationalism and the right that occurred across Europe: the former morphed from a progressive force arrayed against the ancien régime into an opponent of liberalism and democracy, and the latter became increasingly dominated by populist, anti-Semitic nationalist movements. This transformation of nationalism and the right profoundly influenced European political development, perhaps nowhere more so than in Italy and Germany, the cases to which this book now turns.