Sometimes justice gallops, sometimes it crawls. Sometimes it is cosmetic, done to conceal other, more current crimes: to soothe those who stand and watch.In an exquisite metaphor for Jewish history, the Dreyfus Affair, a famous example of the Jew as mirror to the wider civilisation and depositary for its crimes, winds on. Alfred Dreyfus was, of course, the Jewish army captain falsely accused of spying for the Germans during the French Third Republic in 1894. The French army was weak, and this is how it made itself strong: with Jewish pain. Scapegoated for his Jewishness, Dreyfus was publicly dishonoured before a crowd that shouted, “Death to Judas, death to the Jews!” and sent, with awful irony, to Devil’s Island in French Guiana.
The novelist Emile Zola took up the case and was possibly killed for it: he died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902 and rumours abounded that his chimney was blocked by an anti-Dreyfusard stove fitter. It’s stupid enough to believe.
The real spy was identified, and Dreyfus was eventually pardoned, then exonerated. Now, steps are taken to promote him to the rank he would have had if the Dreyfus Affair had not happened. He will likely become a brigadier general and may be reburied in the Pantheon of French heroes.
Dreyfus has a new posthumous destiny. I predict there will be other fates for Dreyfus, other uses, because he was in life, and remains, a vehicle by which France, the first European nation to emancipate its Jews, chooses to divine itself. Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards knew themselves by their attitude to the case, an early form of culture war. The essential point, though, is this: Dreyfus died in 1935. We are talking, in all seriousness, about reparations to a corpse: a thing that cannot be lauded or harmed. Europe is filled with such cosmetic memorials, such reparations and apologies to Jewish corpses. Is it meaningful, or helpful? As ever with such matters, I think: what about the living?
Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister who presented the bill, wrote: “Promoting Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general would constitute an act of reparation, a recognition of his merits, and a tribute to his commitment to the republic.” I paused on his wording. His commitment to the Republic was never in question. It was not about Dreyfus’s worthiness, but his enemies’ lack of it. Even so: behold the worthy Jew among you! The Dreyfus case is an important pre-Shoah study of Europe and the Jew; even so, it attracts surprisingly little interest. That is Roman Polanski’s fault, apparently. His film about the Dreyfus Affair, An Officer and a Spy (2019), based on Robert Harris’s 2013 novel of the same name, has effectively been suppressed: though it was released in France to both pickets and support, it has never been widely released in the Anglophone world. I understand why the works of Polanski, who admitted he performed unlawful sexual acts with a 13-year-old girl in 1973, are suppressed. Except they aren’t. Chinatown (1974) is as beloved as ever, even if people fail to understand that it is, like all Polanski’s work, about the impossibility of hope after the Shoah. Polanski lived in Krakow and saw, as a child, his father taken for deportation; his pregnant mother was murdered in Auschwitz. Chinatown is not suppressed.
It was 50 last year, and there were celebratory screenings and articles naming it the best film ever made, written by people who did not understand that all Polanski’s films, in the words of Martin Amis, are “with their emphasis on terror, isolation and madness… no more than a demonic commentary on his life”. Chinatown has no hope, but it is oblique. Only the Dreyfus film – a useful one, detailing pre-Shoah Jew hatred, a rebuke to fools who think the catastrophe came from nowhere – is suppressed.
The Pianist (2002), a lesser film, is allowed to remain of Polanski’s explicit work on antisemitism, but, for me, The Pianist, is speechless: a film about a speechless Jew amid the rubble of Warsaw, because Polanski cannot meet the Shoah head on. Dreyfus was not speechless: he was angry, and immaculate, and wronged by people who were not Nazis. The suppression of Polanski’s Dreyfus film is convenient: if antisemitism is a mirror, people do not wish to look, especially at a Jew who is a soldier and patriot. It’s the way.
If Alfred Dreyfus – the real Alfred Dreyfus – is promoted as a ghost, and if this ghost enters the Pantheon of French heroes, an idea that makes me laugh, what will change for French Jews, whose community is the largest in Europe, and who are moving to Israel in record numbers? Read the French press and it’s the same awful tale: laconic European Jew hate meets newer Jew hate from the Arab world, and we have murders, defacements, and a community in terror.
Don’t console Alfred Dreyfus by promoting him 130 years too late. He can’t hear you. Stand up for the living, not the dead. I write this with fury, but no hope.
