What Happens Next in 6 Minutes with Larry Bernstein
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Torturing the Wrong Man
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Torturing the Wrong Man

Speaker: Maurice Samuels

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Maurice Samuels

Subject: Antisemitism in France
Bio
: Professor of French at Yale and the director of their Program for the Study of Antisemitism
Reading: Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair is here

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and education. 

The topic today is Antisemitism in France.

Our speaker is Maurice Samuels who is a Professor of French at Yale and the director of their Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Maurice is the author of a new book entitled Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair.

Today’s discussion is historical. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus a Jewish French artillery officer was falsely convicted of treason for selling military secrets to the Germans. For his crimes, he was imprisoned and tortured on Devil’s Island in French Guinea. The story takes a bizarre turn when the French military learns that the real spy is at-large, and that Dreyfus is innocent. The French military establishment is too embarrassed to release Dreyfus causing a major public showdown that splits the country in two. Antisemitism is central to the Dreyfus Affair, and it is symptomatic of French society’s ambivalence with their fellow Jews.    

Buckle up.

Maurice, please begin with your opening six-minute remarks.

Maurice Samuels:

In late 1894, a Jewish captain in the French Army named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany. After a three-day court martial, in which the Army prosecutor showed the judges false and misleading evidence, he was found guilty of treason, forced to endure a humiliating public degradation ceremony in which a crowd of 10,000 people screamed “death to Judas” and shipped off to Devil's Island, a brutal prison off the coast of South America where the conditions were so lethal that Victor Hugo referred to it as the dry guillotine. Meanwhile, back in France, Dreyfus’s devoted wife and brother began a campaign to prove his innocence. They were eventually able to interest leading politicians and intellectuals in the cause, and by 1898, France was divided between Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards. Dreyfus was eventually brought back to France for a second trial, but not before anti-Semitic riots had erupted in over 60 French towns and cities.

At his second trial, Dreyfus was found guilty again despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. By this time, the French president offered him a pardon to save France from descending into a civil war. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated by French courts in 1906 and reinstated in the army. The Dreyfus affair plunged France into crisis because it raised fundamental questions about the nature of liberal democracy, the form of government that guaranteed rights to the individual through the rule of law. It raised these questions at a moment when liberal values were triumphing throughout much of the world, but also when the seeds of anti-liberalism were being planted in many of the same nations that had pioneered political freedom on its face. The affair asked whether individual citizens could claim the right to impartial justice even when this right conflicted with military or national interest. On a deeper level, it asked whether religious and racial minorities belonged in the nation at all.

Scholars have thoroughly explored many aspects of Dreyfus’s legal case, as well as dozens of other topics related to the affair. They've shown how it widened divisions between the left and the right in France, led to the separation of church and state, witnessed the first interventions by intellectuals and public matters and even changed social and gender relations in lasting ways. Surprisingly though the Jewish dimension of the affair has received relatively little attention. Scholars always mention that Dreyfus was Jewish, and that antisemitism played a role during the affair, but it's rarely the focus of scholarly study. When Yale University Press asked me to write a biography of Dreyfus for their Jewish Life series, I decided to take the assignment literally and to ask what it would mean to write a Jewish life of Dreyfus. 

I eventually decided it would mean three main things. First, it meant exploring the role of Jewishness in Dreyfus’ life and that of his family. Dreyfus is referred to as an assimilated Jew, but in the book, I reject this label because it implies that he had given up his Jewish identity, which was not the case. I prefer the term integrated rather than assimilated, and I explained in the book how Dreyfus and his family embraced a specific form of Jewish identity Franco Judaism that took shape in the 19th century as a response to the French Revolution. Writing a Jewish life of Dreyfus also meant placing the question of antisemitism front and center. I showed that if the affair raised key questions for liberal democracy at a critical moment in world history, it did so because Dreyfus was Jewish. It was not a coincidence that when the French military learned it had a traitor in its ranks, suspicion fell on the one Jew on the general staff.

Although antisemitism was not the sole factor leading to Dreyfus’s arrest and conviction, I argued that it was the critical one and it was also critical to why his case divided the French nation. 

There had been other cases of military espionage and of wrongful conviction before Dreyfus, and there have been others since. None turned into an affair. French people cared so deeply about this case, primarily, if not exclusively, because Dreyfus was a Jew. Finally writing a Jewish life of Dreyfus meant exploring the effect of Dreyfus’s life on the lives of Jews around the world. In his humorous short story Dreyfus in Kasrilevke, the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem satirizes, the way small town Jews and the Russian Empire obsessed over the case coming to view Dreyfus as one of their own. The effect on Jews was the same in Berlin or New York as in the fictional Ukrainian shtetl. In the story, and in my book, I explore how Jewish newspapers in French, English, German, Hebrew and Yiddish covered the case and understood its implications. I showed that the affair offered a mirror in which Jews of all political persuasions saw their fears and beliefs reflected at a moment of great transformation and upheaval for Jewish communities. And I argue that the case provides a valuable lens for exploring the development of Jewish identity on the eve of the 20th century.

Larry Bernstein:

Why was he arrested? What crime was committed? What kicked off the Dreyfus affair?

Maurice Samuels:

It's a great story. The French counterespionage service had a spy working in the German consulate. She was a cleaning lady and would regularly empty the waste baskets and deliver the contents to the French. The German military attaché had torn up a letter called the Bordereau, which was a letter by a French military officer offering to sell military secrets to Germany. The French counterespionage realized that there was a traitor in their midst and that some French officer was offering to sell these secrets to Germany. 

They made a few deductions that turned out to be wrong. One was that it was probably an artillery officer in the army's general staff. They looked at a list of the artillery officers on the general staff, and there was one Jewish name, Alfred Dreyfus. They also noticed a superficial similarity of his handwriting with that of the document of the Boredereau and decided they had their man. They accused him of treason, had this three-day court martial, and that was that.

Larry Bernstein:

They made a best guess and arrested, tried and convicted Dreyfus. They thought they had their man. 

We all have expectations. I wasn't that troubled about that. Yes, he was the one Jew on the staff, but they suspected it was a Jew who he was from Alsace. He had these German leanings.

Maurice Samuels:

The evidence against him was incredibly flimsy. He had no motive. He was from a wealthy family. He had no reason to sell secrets to Germany. Second, the handwriting was not that similar. They had expert graphologists testify at the trial. Some of them said it looks similar, but they all acknowledged that there were big differences. This one guy came up with this outlandish self-forgery hypothesis that Dreyfus must've been forging his own handwriting to create subtle differences, I mean, crazy things.

They knew that the handwriting did not prove anything, and there was nothing else linking him to the crime. They showed the military judges at the court martial a secret file that they kept secret from Dreyfus’s lawyers, which was in violation of all rules of jurisprudence. So that was illegal, and that secret file contained documents that were supposedly incriminating, but they were ridiculous. 

The main one that led to his conviction was another letter between the German military attaché and his Italian counterpart referring to that scoundrel D, the letter D, who was the traitor. But the French knew it referred to some other low level French officer. So, there was a lot of bad faith from the beginning. There was almost no evidence.

Larry Bernstein:

This wasn't some ruse on Dreyfus. The French had lost a war against Germany in 1870, and we're in the mid-1890s, so its 25 years later. Germany was their perceived enemy, and this is justified because 20 years later there would be a major war. Dreyfus was from a region called Alsace, which had been part of France, but then part of the war reparations, Alsace became Germany. The generals at this military trial were deeply concerned about this traitorous risk. Evidence is murky in these situations, it's better to decapitate and move on. 

Maurice Samuels:

You're absolutely right that this was coming at a moment of extremely high tension between France and Germany. You can't underestimate how traumatic the French defeat in the war of 1870 was, and the loss of its two eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. This was a national trauma, and everyone in France knew they were waiting for revenge, which as you said, eventually came during World War I. They were very sensitive to anything giving Germany any leg-up militarily. 

Dreyfus’s family was in Alsace, they opted for French citizenship in 1870, but one of his older brothers stayed behind in Alsace to keep the family textile factory. But there were many Alsatians among the high officers in the French Army, non-Jewish ones, and that was not held against them. In fact, the Alsatian officers were seen as doubly patriotic and doubly French. 

Larry Bernstein:

He's convicted and there's a ceremony where they strip him of his title. To strip someone of that title in a public way is the ultimate humiliation for Dreyfus. 

Maurice Samuels:

They decided to have this public degradation ceremony in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, which is in the center of Paris in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. They brought Dreyfus out. Battalions of the army were in formation around the courtyard. There were 10,000 spectators outside the gates watching and shouting “death to Judas.” 

They made Dreyfus parade around the courtyard, and he was screaming, “I am innocent, long-live France.” And he maintained his dignity. He didn't break down. This officer came out, ripped his epaulettes and his insignia off his uniform, took his sword and the officer broke it over his knee. It was this public ritual humiliation. 

Dreyfus who was an ardent French patriot, who was innocent, to be accused of the worst crime imaginable for him. It's incredible how he maintained his composure during this ceremony. But it was so important for him to do that because he had to project the demeanor of an innocent man. He kept crying, “I am innocent, I'm innocent.”

Larry Bernstein:

He's convicted and now it's time to serve his punishment. In the French tradition, political prisoners had been expelled to New Caledonia in the Pacific, but the decision was to put Dreyfus alone on Devil's Island in a former colony of lepers in a very inhospitable malaria infested area. 

Maurice Samuels:

He should have had the right to go to New Caledonia where his wife and family could have joined him, but they were worried that the Jewish syndicate would try to rescue him from prison. So, they sent him to Devil's Island, which was surrounded by shark infested waters. He, as you said, was the only prisoner. They cleared out the lepers. They put him in this hut where he was watched day and night, and even at night, they kept a light shining on his bed the entire time. So, he couldn't really sleep. 

If you can imagine he's chained to his bed with this light shining on him that attracts these horrible insects that are crawling all over his body. It's this tropical horrible thing. He can't move to get rid of them. It's unbelievable torture. 

He was there for five years, and he had fortitude, strength, and desire to prove his innocence for the sake of his family, himself, and for France. He thought that for France that this injustice had to be revealed. So that kept him going. 

Larry Bernstein:

One strange aspect about Dreyfus is his belief in justice in France. He believed that the system works. He believed in the French military and truth and that he's coming home. 

It was that belief that allowed him to handle this daily torture. What surprises me as the story will continue is how and why did he believe that, given the Job biblical-like proportions. Even Job started questioning faith at the end. Tell me why the modern-day Job believes in these institutions?

Maurice Samuels:

France was very good to the Jews. During the French Revolution, France had been the first European country to give Jews full civil rights. This was a huge deal. Dreyfus and his family believed in the values of the French Republican revolutionary tradition that had enabled their family to rise from obscurity to prosper in France. He thought that the rise of antisemitism that started in France in the 1880s was an aberration, that that was not true France. And that they would come to their senses and right that wrong.

The French army was like many French institutions was very open to Jews. France at this time in the 1890s was the country in the world most open to Jews where Jews had gone the farthest. At a time when Jews in the United States couldn't attend prestigious universities, very few were officers in the army. In France in the 1890s, there were 300 Jewish officers in the French Army. France had this antisemitic side, but it also had this other side that was true to Republican ideals. And that's what Dreyfus believed in and was trying to bring France back to.

Larry Bernstein:

Very few Jews lived in France at this time like two tenths of 1%. Compare that with Poland where there were 3 million Jews, 10% of the population, and a third of the population of Warsaw. A third versus two tenths of 1% isn't in the same ballpark. Vienna, another example of a Jewish city was a third Jewish and was the leading Jewish community in Europe, and that wasn't not that far from France. A tiny minority and it's hard to understand the hatred when there's nobody there. Tell us about the surprising antisemitism given that it's only 20 basis points of the population.

Maurice Samuels:

There are only about 80,000 Jews in France. Most of them Ashkenazi Jews had come from Alsace-Lorraine. Most of the Jewish population in France at this point lived in Paris. The percentage in Paris was much higher, and some of them were very visible, including Orthodox Yiddish speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who start coming to the country in the 1880s.

There were many prominent Jews who attracted attention in business and banking, but also in the arts. The most famous actress, Sarah Bernhardt was Jewish. There were many prominent Jewish playwrights and composers. There was visibility of Jews in French national life, and this causes a backlash. 

In 1886, this muckraking journalist named Edouard Drumont publishes a book called Jewish France, France Juive, that is like a thousand-page screed, denouncing the presence of Jews in French national life, viciously antisemitic. Hitler will eventually use it as a model. That book becomes a runaway bestseller in the 1880s. And it's credited with creating a new political antisemitism in France. Drumont capitalizes on the success of his book and starts a daily antisemitic newspaper, and it's not the only one.

He has competition there denouncing the misdeeds supposedly of this tiny 0.2% of the population. Drumont targets the presence of Jews in the military. He has this series of articles about the Jews are potential traitors in 1892 and that sets the stage. So you ask why did they suspect Dreyfus? Why were they so primed to suspect that the one Jew on the Army's general staff would be the traitor? And it's largely because Drumont had been saying that all the Jewish officers were traitors a couple of years before.

Larry Bernstein:

There's a break in the case. What happened?

Maurice Samuels:

There are a few breaks in the case. One is that that same cleaning lady who was the spy in the German embassy picking up the trash does it again. There's a letter on thin blue paper, which was used to send messages through the system of pneumatic tubes throughout Paris. It's like an early proto version of email. It was called the Petit Bleu because it was on blue paper, and this was a letter by the German military attaché to the French traitor who was selling them military secrets. And it had a name Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy who was an officer in the French military. 

Dreyfus was this wealthy family man. Esterhazy was the complete opposite. He was this cartoonish villain who was in debt. He was swindling everyone, in desperate need of money, and openly proclaimed how he hated France, even though he was a French military officer. He had the word guilty written across his forehead. 

Larry Bernstein:

This is where things go awry. Now, there happens to be the good guy in the story.

Maurice Samuels:

Georges Picquart.

Larry Bernstein:

A senior military official gets Esterhazy’s letter and says, I recognize this handwriting. I've seen the secret dossier that was used in Dreyfus’s military tribunal that wasn't properly shared with the defense. And this handwriting matches. He takes it up with a senior leadership and says, “I found the real traitor in our midst. It wasn't Dreyfus, it is Estherhazy. There's an innocent man being tortured on Devil's Island. It's an outrage, it's an embarrassment to France. We got to fix this this now. And the general staff says, it's just one Jew, mistakes were made. It's embarrassing. This is going to be a humiliation for the military. Let's just kill this thing. I tell you what, let's get Estherhazy, let's get rid of him, and then let's keep Dreyfus on Devil's Island. And Picquart is beyond upset about this. 

Maurice Samuels:

Picquart, who I should say was an antisemite himself, like many career officers he didn't like Jews, but he was an honest guy. So, when he saw that there was evidence of who the real traitor was Esterhazy and that meant that Dreyfus was innocent. He brings it to his superiors. And they don't seem surprised. They know that Dreyfus is innocent. They know that the evidence against him was manufactured at that point. Picquart looks at the secret dossier, sees how flimsy or non-existent the evidence was. He realizes there's been this enormous miscarriage of justice. He expects that the senior leadership, including the Minister of War, will acknowledge they made a mistake, and instead they decide to double down. 

They can't admit their mistake. They think that's going to be bad for the honor of the army. This was the fatal error that they went into. Instead of just admitting that they did something wrong, it would've been slightly embarrassing. They decide to keep Dreyfus on Devil's Island, and they try to protect Esterhazy. 

They want Picquart out of the way. They ship him on a very dangerous mission to Tunisia where they think he'll get killed. Meanwhile, Dreyfus’s devoted wife and brother were trying to drum up proof of his innocence. But how do you prove that someone is innocent of a crime?

What happens is that a copy of the Bordereau, that first incriminating document leaks out, they get it published in a newspaper. And this is an amazing part of the story. Esterhazy’s stockbroker recognizes his client's handwriting in the Bordereau and is like, oh my God, my client is guilty of treason. This information eventually gets to Dreyfus’s brother. They know that Esterhazy is the guilty person, and eventually they're able to connect the dots, and that's when the Army realizes it has a problem on its hands. 

They must put Esterhazy on trial, but it's another military trial. He's found innocent even though it's so clear that he is guilty. People start to get completely outraged. And this is when more and more people join Dreyfus’s cause including the famous novelist, Emile Zola.

He is so outraged that Esterhazy has been found innocent. Zola was also an antisemite. A couple years before he had written this antisemitic novel about the stock exchange called Money, but he feels that antisemitism is a danger to the French Republic. He decides to write this barn burning article with the banner headline, “I accuse J’Accuse,” where he blows the lid off the case. He denounces the entire conspiracy and coverup, he accuses the army top brass of helping a guilty man and keeping an innocent man in prison. His goal there is to force them to sue him for libel, which would be in civil court. He thinks that if that happens, they're not going to be able to keep the lack of evidence against Dreyfus secret. 

That does happen. Zola is found guilty of libel; he has to flee France. But at that point, everybody knows that Dreyfus is innocent, and that's when they bring him back for a second trial.

Larry Bernstein:

It's the doubling down that is the essence of the Dreyfus affair. The military manufacturers forged documents. They know the truth that Esterhazy has always been the one, and this was incredible part of the story to me is that the senior generals say, you must trust us. We're the military. Honor is important to us. Do you want a mass resignation of the entire general staff? Which they ask in the civil trial, do you want to be unprotected from Germany? Are you willing to risk the Republic over this nonsense? Do you believe in the honor of France, which is core to our philosophy as a state and as an institution, or are you going to believe this Jew and Zola? And this the bizarre nature of the affair. When you're in the wrong, why bring in the honor of the institution itself, particularly when you've got no legs to stand on? I don't understand that.

Maurice Samuels:

That was the crucial mistake they made. They thought that if they could just cover up their crime, no one would ever find out. And that was the way to preserve the honor of the army. And what they didn't see was that once it came out that they were doing that, the honor of the army would be lost. 

It's one thing to be anti-Dreyfus at the beginning of the affair when most people assumed he must be guilty because nobody believed that the army would frame an innocent man. But what's harder to understand is why half of France continues to oppose justice for Dreyfus.

Even when all the evidence comes out, that's harder to understand, and that's where antisemitism comes into play. For a lot of French people, the honor of the army was more important than justice for the individual, and certainly more important than justice for a Jew. So maybe he's innocent, but it's important to keep him in jail because it would be too humiliating for the Army when we're going to have another war with Germany. They continue to be anti-Dreyfus. And then many people are just violently antisemitic at the time. 

When there's no proof of Dreyfus’s crime, one of the army intelligence officers decides to forge more documents to frame Dreyfus. He's a terrible forger. 

Larry Bernstein:

Herzl was the reporter for the Austrian newspaper reporting on the Dreyfus affair, and he says that this kickstarted his desire to have a modern state of Israel.

Maurice Samuels:

Herzl claimed later to have gotten the idea for Zionism when he was a journalist covering the Dreyfus affair for a German language newspaper. He witnesses the degradation ceremony of Dreyfus, and he thinks if this can happen in enlightened France, it can happen anywhere. Jews need a land of their own. He had gotten the idea for Zionism earlier, but it's definitely true that the Dreyfus affair fuels the rise of Zionism in those early years. After Zola publishes “J’Accuse,” antisemitic riots break out in 60 cities across France and colonial Algeria where people get killed.

Pogroms happen throughout France. This is shocking to people around the world because as I said, France had been the first country to give Jews full civil rights. It was one thing if antisemitism pogroms happened in Eastern Europe in Czarist Russia, we know that it's antisemitic. 

Larry Bernstein:

I want to talk about Dreyfus in the context of French history. There had been this revolution in 1789 of enlightenment and anti-aristocracy, and there was a counter-revolution, which was led by the church, the conservatives and the military. It was there that antisemitism festered.

Maurice Samuels:

You're absolutely right that the revolution creates this fault line in French national life between those who support liberal democracy, the revolutionary tradition, and those who oppose it. The army is one of the places where those down at heels aristocrats go and they become violently antisemitic. By the end of the 19th century, antisemitism becomes the unifying ideology of those who oppose the forces of modernity of democracy and capitalism.

It had been festering since the French Revolution, and it all comes to the surface during the Dreyfus affair where France, for all intents and purposes, does have an undeclared civil war between these two forces.

The Dreyfus side triumphs in the affair. Dreyfus is eventually given a pardon and then completely exonerated. The left triumphs during the Dreyfus affair, they get revenge on the right by separating church and state, which is a huge blow to the Catholic church in France in 1905.

The right wing is furious about that, but they get their revenge in World War II after the German invasion of France, and during the Vichy puppet government of France collaborates with the Nazis, and it's explicitly seen as revenge on the Dreyfus affair. They undo 150 years of Jewish emancipation, stripped Jews of their civil rights. The pendulum swung to the left at the end of the Dreyfus affair, but it swung back very far to the right during World War 2.

Larry Bernstein:

After the loss of the war, one of the first actions that the Vichy government does is they pass a law called the Statute of the Jews. And in that statute, they greatly limit Jewish rights. For example, Jews can't own a business, they define a Jew as having one grandparent. The Nazis had two out of four. 

There's a rule of pro-rata in employment. The population of Jews has risen from a fifth of 1% to around 1%. And the Jews are concentrated in their employment in a few fields. One-third of the faculty of the major universities, doctors, and lawyers are Jews. And they announced that only 1% can be physicians

After Vichy collapsed and the Germans came into Marseilles, there was a roundup, and all the Jews in Marseilles were sent to Auschwitz. And the Roundup required all the police and all the locksmiths in Southern France to go to Marseilles to do the arrests, and they end up killing a third of all the Jews in France. The French weren't on the side of the angels. 

Maurice Samuels:

Once the Germans come in, the French eagerly collaborate. It's the case that the French police are complicit with and often go beyond what the Nazis asked of them in deporting Jews. And that is something that the French have had a very hard time facing up to. It wasn't until the 1990s that Jacques Chirac President of the Republic acknowledged French complicity in the Holocaust.

So it's a sad chapter and that it's definitely the case that France has these two sides, this side that on the one hand is very open to Jews and believes in the universalist tradition where race and religion don't matter and has been very meritocratic and banishes religion from the public sphere. That is one tradition. And then there's this reactionary side that comes to the surface at different moments during the Dreyfus affair during World War 2, and that now is represented by Marine Le Pen’s Party in France. which you can draw a clear line back to the Dreyfus affair. And in fact, the motto of what the National Front Party is France for the French, that was the motto that was on the masthead of Drumont’s antisemitic newspaper during the Dreyfus affair.

Larry Bernstein:

The reactionary French right had a history of antisemitism, but today antisemitism is really the place of the left. I want to explore how that happened. 

Maurice Samuels:

First, I would say that the old right-wing antisemitism has not gone away in France. There is a long tradition in France of antisemitism on the left going back to the early 19th century where people who opposed capitalism, socialists became deeply antisemitic. 

There is a tradition of anti-Zionist antisemitism. Not all opposition to Israel is antisemitic. There are ways to criticize Israeli policies that are not antisemitic, but there is a form of opposition to Israel that does cross the line into antisemitism. People who exaggerate all of Israel's crimes, who use antisemitic stereotypes to criticize Israel or who deny Jews the right to national self-determination, that to me is unfair to Jews and is antisemitic. And the seeds go back to Soviet-era propaganda against Israel from in the post-war era beginning in the 1950s and sixties. There's the third-world ideology that's opposed to Israel. A lot of what we're seeing now is the outgrowth of that ideology.

Larry Bernstein:

In the last 30 years, there's been terrorism against Jews living in France. Jews have emigrated out of France as a result. They've come to the United States, they've gone to Israel. Netanyahu after terrorism activity in France prior to the October 7th went to France and made a speech announcing that it isn't particularly safe for Jews to live in France, and they should consider immigrating to Israel where they would be met with open arms. 

Maurice Samuels: 

Prime Minister Manuel Valls after the Charlie Hebdo attack gives this very moving speech in the French Parliament saying that a France without its Jews would not be France. 

Larry Bernstein:

In 1940, when France was conquered by the Nazis, a Vichy government was organized in Southern France.  One of their first newly passed laws was the Statute of the Jews that reduced the civil rights of Jews and in some cases terminated their citizenship.

In modern France the rights of minorities like Muslims and Jews are tenuous. I think this makes the Dreyfus affair relevant today. 

Maurice Samuels: 

Yeah, definitely. Do minority groups, mainly Jews, belong in the nation at all? That was ultimately what was at stake in the case for French people who believed that France was for the French, that meant France for white Catholics There are two ways of conceiving the nation. There's where the nation is an ethnonationalist state where the citizen belonging in the nation is defined by blood and soil, as the Germans put it. That is the German model. 

Or there's the universalist model of the nation where the nation is composed of anyone who wants to be part of it. That's the American model. You could say France during the revolution became like the United States. It became a universalist nation where immigrants could come to the nation. Everyone had an equal claim on being French, but there was always this countervailing side that never believed that and struggled against it. That's what came to the surface during the Dreyfus affair, those two conceptions of the nation. And that's what in a sense, France fought over during World War 2i.i. They reduce the nation to blood and soil to white Christians. because they included at that point, Protestants too, but, denied citizenship to Jews. 

You could argue in a similar thing is happening in relation to Muslims in France who now make up 10% of the French population. There's an enormous amount of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment that echoes the things that people said against Jews during the Dreyfus affair.

Larry Bernstein:

I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to the history of Dreyfus, and it means for antisemitism in France?

Maurice Samuels:

One of the big lessons of the affair is that extreme polarization can dissipate. Once Dreyfus is exonerated there is a general amnesty for all the wrongdoers during the affair. It allows for the dissipation of tension and hatred. 

France had been on the verge of civil war in 1898, but then in the early 20th century, things calmed down and France comes together during World War I. This unifying event in France does offer some hope for our current moment of extreme polarization.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Maurice for joining us today.

If you missed our previous podcast, check it out. The topic was How Change in Function Drives Evolution. Our speaker was Neil Shubin who is a Professor of Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago and the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is the author of a new book entitled Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

On the podcast, we discussed Neil’s discovery of an ancient fish that millions of years ago walked out of the water and who we are all distantly related to. We learned why fish developed lungs and nascent limbs that allowed them to breathe, walk, and survive on land that facilitated the transition from life in water to life on land. 

I would now like to make a plug for our next week’s podcast about creditor-on-creditor violence.  Our speaker will be Jay Newman who is an expert in sovereign debt and was instrumental in the litigation against Argentina’s unwillingness to pay its debt claims. Jay is also the author of the novel Undermoney which we discussed previously on this podcast.

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, good-bye. 

Check out our previous episode, How Change in Function Drives Evolution, here.

Thank you for reading What Happens Next in 6 Minutes with Larry Bernstein. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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What Happens Next in 6 Minutes with Larry Bernstein
What Happens Next in 6 Minutes
What Happens Next offers listeners an in-depth investigation of the most pressing issues of the day. Visit https://www.whathappensnextin6minutes.com/ for all the links and to subscribe