–Article electrifies France… Paris, (Jan 13).
In front page banner headline piece of L’Aurore, Paris Literary Newspaper, French journalist Émile Zola accuses eight generals of the French Army General Staff—by name—of covering up the innocence of (framed) Jewish artillery officer Captain Alfred DREYFUS.
Dreyfus had been exiled to Devil’s Island [off the northeast coast of South America], three years earlier in 1895, after having been ‘convicted’ of espionage by a French military tribunal in 1894. Animosity towards the Jews swept France.
From Rome, the Catholic Church in its time–honored tradition of fueling the fire encouraged the hate–fest which engulfed France following Dreyfus’s trumped–up conviction–
If there is one nation more than any other which has the right to turn to anti–Semitism, it is France…
– Vatican newspaper L’Observatore Romano, 1898
– As cited in Constantine’s Sword. p. 457 (Chapter: Alfred Dreyfus and La Croix)
In 1899 Dreyfus was re–tried and re–convicted. Dreyfus was freed by order of French President Emile Loubet and ultimately rehabilitated by the French, and made a Knight of the French Legion of Honor in July 1906.
Two years after being “knighted,” he was wounded by a would–be assassin 1908 while attending the funeral of his champion, Zola.
Note: A granddaughter of Dreyfus would be murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz four and a half decades later. (More on this in the Holocaust–related entries later)
Note: The term “J’Accuse!” in the Dreyfus context was used by British journalist and anarchist Bernard Lazare for the title of a predecessor pro–Dreyfus expose article in the French journal L’éclair September 15, 1896, one year and four months before the Zola (January 1898 ) headline article. Zola was presumably pegging–off the original article, and its headline, to “capture the energy” of the legacy of the expose.
Note: Not all Jews saw the Dreyfus affair as emblematic of organic French anti–Semitism. The Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas often cited the words of his father: “A country which tears itself apart to defend the honor of a small Jewish captain, is somewhere worth going.”
Note: A foreign Jewish journalist came to Paris to report on the 1896 re–trial of Dreyfus for his Hungarian newspaper. He was not amused. Nor, unlike Levinas’s father, did he see a silver lining in this case. His name was Theodore Herzl. Later that year, he would write his iconic work, Der Judenstaat, “The Jewish State” (more below).