Good Reads meta-data is 429 pages, rated 4.2 by 17,737 litizens.
Genre: Novel
Verdict: An incredible story well told.
This is a novel about the l’affaire Dreyfus of 1894 in which the blameless Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) spent five years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island in a prison built especially for him. His punishment took many additional forms. Were that not enough he spent another five years in a mainland prison.
His crime was to be Jewish. The accusation was that he had given military secrets to the Hun. It was but a generation since the humiliating French defeat in the War of 1870 by Prussia and the Hun was detested.
That detestation was crucial because Dreyfus’s second crime was to be from Alsace. When Alsace was ceded to Prussia at the end of the war, the population had to choose. Stay and be German, or be French and evacuate. His family chose to be French and left Alsace. In the convolutions that followed this choice was taken as evidence that he was a sleeper agent of some sort.
His third crime was to be well off, and not dependent on his army income as a captain. This made fellow officers envy him, ready and willing to be believe the worst of him to explain why he had money and they did not.
The fourth and most significant crime was to refuse to confess to something he did not do to shield the honour of the army. Its incompetence and stupidity certainly needed shielding.
It began with a scrap of paper purloined from the German embassy in Paris. It had been torn into bits and when it was pieced together the inference from it was that it referred to the passing of French General Staff secrets to the Germans.
Two questions arouse immediately. First, who could have done this deed. The second was who would do this. It could have been done only by an officer with access to the General Staff files. It would be done by a Jew. Dreyfus met both criteria. Guilty! (At times it was also alleged that as an Alsatian of German descent he was loyal to Germany. That second order point was used to explain his motivation since no money seems to have changed hand, and he did not need it. But Jews betray because it is in their blood.)
Once he had been identified no further investigation occurred. Rather all energy went into convicting and punishing him. A very great deal of expense went into his punishment by creating a prison for him alone on the otherwise uninhabited Devil’s Island near Cayenne.
Later a French counter-intelligence officer stumbled on a loose end and began to tug on it. The wagons went into a circle and the cover-up became more and more extensive and intense. An effort was made to send this officer, who just would not let it go, on a suicide mission in North Africa, but his local commander stalled that. The officer’s determination was painted as an effort to discredit the army, not to see justice done to Dreyfus, or, by the way, to apprehend the real villain who was still at large and still selling.
All in all it makes Watergate seem like a student prank.
The organisational pathologies of the army bureaucracy are mercilessly dissected in these pages. While senior officers plotted against each other for promotion, they united against outsiders who might disturb the playing field on which they schemed against each other.
There was no big bang to clear Dreyfus but a numbing series of re-trials, appeals, inquiries, and more that gradually eroded the conspiracy of the cover-up. The conspirators had to prop up the lies for ten years in both military, civil, legal, and popular arenas and in so doing they made mistakes. It is hard keeping a tissue of lies straight. The truth began to leak out, drop by drop.
But a quick spin around web sites indicates that there are today plenty contemporary nut jobs, when they take time off from denying the Holocaust, who proclaim Dreyfus’s guilt. President Tiny would doubtless declare them good people.
It is implied in these pages that at least two weak links in the cover-up were murdered as cut-outs. Certainly many involved with the matter died prematurely. Others went into voluntary exile. One lawyer for Dreyfus was shot on the way to the court and the presiding judge refused a recess to allow the defence to reorganise. A great many junior officers were suborned into lies and calumny to protect their superiors.
Only in 1906 was Dreyfus exonerated and restored to rank. Likewise the counter-intelligence officer who himself had been imprisoned was restored to rank and promoted. Both served in the Great War, 1914-1918.
I never did fathom who was responsible for the two murders. The shooting of the lawyer was perhaps a self-appointed fanatic. Although, maybe not.
Nor did I ever did fathom the behaviour of the real wannabe spy, the dissolute and brazen Ferdinand Esterhazy.
Finally, I could not quite understand how so many junior officers were suborned into the cover up with nary a leak. Suborning I get but without a leak? That part I don’t.
I do not doubt that these things happened but the novel sheds no light on them.
In keeping with the whole sad spectacle most of the original evidence has since disappeared, says the Wikipedia entry. That word ‘disappeared’ would be a euphemism for the word ‘destroyed.’ There is no longer any bottom to touch.
While I am picking nits the novel is written in the first person singular in the present tense, and I almost stopped reading it on page five because of that. Only my experience with reading and valuing previous novels by Robert Harris kept me at it, though on every page I regretted that choice on his part. For readers who do not know what the first person singular in the present tense means I recommend tuning into Channel 7Mate where the question will never arise.
I had wanted to read a biography of Dreyfus sometime ago and came up with Jean-Denis Bredin’s ‘The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus’ (1983) by a French historian so I tried that. Mistake. It started in the middle with the writing test that Dreyfus was tricked into doing. I could never get a foothold on what was going on so I stopped.
Skip to content