An Excellent Account of Alfred Dreyfus’ Ordeal

With the publication of his latest work, Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), Norman Simms is now a leading world scholar on Alfred Dreyfus and the “Dreyfus Affair.” The author is imaginative in the wide array of sources he employs to develop the issues in this case. The “Dreyfus Affair,” as this event came to be called, had ramifications on French and, ultimately, world history. The book under consideration is Simms’ third volume on the subject he has worked on for over ten years. The first two were Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, and Midrash (Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2012), and In the Context of His Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet, and Jew (Academic Press, Boston, 2013). Simms is now working on a fourth volume. The present study deals with Dreyfus’ reentry into the army during World War I to his last days. It also describes how he and his wife Lucie lived, as well as the “midrashing processes of their Jewish traditions.” Simms promises these ideas “will explode on to the pages of subsequent studies” (325).

This volume is a masterpiece of scholarship, with its focus on Dreyfus and his supportive family. It is an exhaustive 500 pages with exceptionally small print, a mammoth work giving the reader much to ponder.

The book’s very title is striking, as it refers to Dreyfus’ arrest and conviction for treason, followed by imprisonment on the tropical Devil’s Island off the coast of South America in French Guiana. For five years he was isolated there from his wife, family, and friends.  Dreyfus was treated sadistically, with no one speaking to him in his jailors’ attempt to break him emotionally. Simms’ detailed description of Dreyfus’ time reveals an extremely harrowing ordeal. The term “phantasmagoria” is fitting indeed because to Dreyfus the entire series of events was an insane, traumatizing nightmare.

The Dreyfus Affair was a gross travesty of justice, which

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ballooned into a national and international scandal of global concern and proportion. In 1894, Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, was arrested and court-martialed on the charge of treasonously having passed secret military information to Germany. Yet, Dreyfus was devoted to the French Republic. Following the stunning defeat of France by Prussia in 1870, the Prussians annexed Alsace and the Dreyfus family moved to Paris. The defeat left the French, including Dreyfus, with a burning desire for revenge, leading him to attend elite military schools and become an army officer. After the court martial, Dreyfus could not imagine his fellow officers could be so duplicitous.

France was the most democratic country in Europe as a result of the French Revolution of 1789, which was followed by the rule of Napoleon. Jews could now serve in the French army; whereas, during the ancien régime, they had been barred from service. The inspiring slogan of this revolutionary era was “careers open to talent.”  

Simms has particularly special, if not exceptional, qualifications and credentials for writing these books. He knows the French language well, and he employs an abundance of French sources. He is very familiar with Judaism: the religion, its literature, its customs, and its language (he uses a wide sprinkling of Yiddish and Hebrew throughout the text). As he notes about himself, “my midrashic way of writing often develops as a conversation or debate between different voices—sometimes those of the authorities cited sometimes my own commentary—in the main body of the text and those in the footnotes” (1). Simms sees Dreyfus as someone who “midrashes his own life” (108). Clearly, the author identifies with Dreyfus. He is also a psychohistorian with extensive accomplishments in this field.

In the entire Affair, Dreyfus was a hapless victim, and this is of utmost significance. While psychohistorians study many leaders to examine their self-defeating psychodynamic motivations, Dreyfus should not be included in this category. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Simms shows, Dreyfus was a model of rectitude and had a family background and marital relationship that led him to be an exceptionally “well adjusted” man.

Dreyfus had a loving mother and father, a doting elder sister, and a close relationship with an older brother. He later married Lucie, who was loving, devoted, and supportive of her husband

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throughout his arrest and imprisonment.  Simms writes a great deal about the quality of their relationship, which clearly indicates the beneficial aspects of their love for each other, and how they endured this very trying separation. He describes how they “maintain their faith in one another, in their love, and in the ideals they shared as Jews” (456-457). Lucie’s active, creative role in keeping Alfred sane and in making him think beyond his present sufferings is inspiring (449).

The support of his wife and family greatly contributed to saving Dreyfus throughout the long ordeal of physical and emotional torture he experienced. Dreyfus also had astounding ego strength. To be sure, the lengthy incarceration he endured—under atrocious conditions—adversely affected him. Nevertheless, when he was finally, completely, publicly, and ceremoniously exonerated in a military ceremony that returned him to service in 1906, the crowds who attended this event shouted “Vive Dreyfus!” He dignifiedly shouted back to them “Vive la France!” (465). During World War I, Dreyfus served in the French Army, retiring after that conflict with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Although the Affair ended well for Dreyfus, with the coming of the Second World War, the defeat and occupation of France in 1940, and the Holocaust, the fate of his family, as well as that of French Jews in general, was marked by arrests and deportations. Lucie had to “go into hiding from the Vichy collaborationists” and a granddaughter and other relatives were “murdered by the Gestapo” (464). The Vichy regime, headed by Marshal Philippe Petain, included officers who were opponents of Dreyfus.

Simms pays close attention to the kind of person Dreyfus was. He depicts him as highly cultured and intellectually curious, with wide interests in literature, history, sociology, art, and philosophy. As an artillery officer and graduate of technical military schools, he was trained in math, science, and engineering. Although some critics have contended Dreyfus had ordinary intellectual tastes and was a mediocre person, that claim is the result of slander in the anti-Semitic press. The evidence, revealed in the “workbooks” he kept in prison, demonstrates quite the contrary. Someone as well informed as Dreyfus can be referred to as a Renaissance man. After graduating from the École de Guerre in 1892, he was assigned to the Army General Staff, with an exemplary career.

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Despite the popular furor fueled by the certainty that Dreyfus—and by extension, the Jews—was guilty, the persons primarily responsible for the plot against him unconsciously admitted their guilt as it unraveled. A day after the arrest of Colonel Hubert Henry, who had forged documents to incriminate Dreyfus, Henry committed suicide in his cell. From a psychoanalytic perspective, suicide is murder of the self that is aimed at those who caused the person’s torment. In effect, Henry admitted his wrongdoing by not defending himself, as had the man he framed. Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy, the actual guilty officer passing secret information to the German Embassy, fled to England.

One officer with a conscience who played a pivotal role in re-opening the case was Colonel Georges Picquart, a new Chief of Army Intelligence; he discovered Dreyfus was innocent.

Simms also explores the group behavior in France in this period that demonstrated deep stereotypical prejudices that could be widely marshaled to incite riots. Émile Zola, the author and journalist who worked to exonerate Dreyfus, incurred the wrath of large crowds who shouted “Death to Zola” during anti-Semitic riots throughout France. It became so serious that Zola fled to England. What is also noteworthy about Zola is that he initially held the common view that Jews were insidious. After he became involved with Dreyfus’ family, he became poignantly aware of how slanderous his stereotypical views were. Simms finds that “Zola began to sense his own prejudices and took steps to rectify them” and that he began “to realize the individuality of each person, the ridiculousness of the caricature imagery” (415).

As was indicated above, Dreyfus had wide-ranging alacritous tastes and interests in artistic and academic fields, intellectual matters, and productions. One artist who receives extensive attention from Simms is Jean-Louis Meissonier, a leading painter in the second half of the 19^th century. As Simms discusses Meissonier’s appeal for Dreyfus, he states that “his conception of art on the side of rationalism and intellectual inquiry, related to both the disciplines of natural science and of formal history, both approaches requiring careful attention to detail and the ability to imagine specific persons, events, places and ideas within dynamic contexts” (332). As shown here, and in so much of his book, Simms writes like a literary, artistic, and historical critic, which reinforces that this book is not written for the general reader, but for the specialist of the period under consideration.

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Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria is certainly very informative, but Simms should have placed the Dreyfus Affair in a greater historical context. The year 1870 was quite consequential for France, as it was defeated by Bismarckian Prussia then. Prussia took extensive territories from France, among them Alsace, the Dreyfus’ ancestral home. Bismarck was instrumental in replacing the French monarchy with a republican form of government unfavorable to the Catholic Church; a republic recalled the anticlerical French Revolution of 1789. Although Bismarck was Protestant from an essentially Protestant state, he engineered this form of government because he thought that it would hinder France’s attempts to make anti-Prussian alliances with Catholic, monarchist governments.

Simms points out that many levels of French society at the end of the 19^th century still “craved the old certainties” of “King, Church, and Army” with anti-Semitism contributing to the fears (423). The defaming of an innocent person, and then a group, was not unknown in France or other parts of Europe.

There were other, remote contributors to the atmosphere that fostered the Dreyfus Affair. The French Revolution, with its “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” took a sharp and anticlerical turn, resulting in the Pope’s denunciation of the Revolution. The expulsion of Protestants (Huguenots) two centuries earlier also reflected French intolerance (Robert F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France, Vol. I: The Prologue to the Dreyfus Affair, 1950, 137-138).

These outbursts of widespread violence and barbarity show the ease with which intolerant group dynamics took over, whether the object of the group’s hatred was Protestants or Dreyfus and the Jews. One person prominent in anti-Semitism in France was Édouard Drumont, who in 1886 published a best-selling two-volume work titled La France juive (Jewish France), which held the Jews responsible for all the misfortunes in French history, including Protestantism. He even regarded the defeat of France in 1870 by Germany as a Jewish manipulation to pillage France of its gold (Byrnes, 138-139). All his anti-Semitic manifestations fed the political group-fantasies, and connected with the Dreyfus Affair. Ultimately, when these anti-Semitic fabrications were exposed as based on hateful fantasies, the French Republic was able to survive.

Simms is certainly a psychohistorian, but there is a paucity

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of psychodynamic interpretations in this book. Remarkably, he criticizes psychohistorians who do not go further. For example, in his earlier volume In the Context of His Times (2013), Simms argues that “Avner Falk gives a quick two-page resume of the Dreyfus Affair and, despite the topic of his book, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews, makes no attempt to see it in any psychological or psychiatric terms or subject it to psychoanalysis” (206). He does add that Falk recognizes that the Dreyfus Affair “was very emotional” (207). Such observations are very pertinent to the Dreyfus Affair, and Simms could have included the findings of ego psychology to go further in explaining the mentality of the large mobs engaged in widespread violence. He should have dealt with collective phenomena, marked by paroxysms of rage. Surprisingly, in his bibliography, he cites hardly any psychohistorical literature. To be sure, Simms does pay a great deal of attention to the nature of anti-Semitism, this collective phenomenon, which he recognizes as having unconscious motivations and being paranoid.

In conclusion, Simms’ work marks a significant contribution to understanding the personality of Alfred Dreyfus, his wife Lucie, his family, and the Dreyfus Affair. Simms excels as a scholar. He also contributes to understanding the person and the pivotal role of Émile Zola in taking on the culpable leaders of the French Army, as well as Zola’s elucidating the historic role of the Catholic Church. Zola, and many others, was the conscience of France. The Dreyfus Affair may be summed up as being the “shame and glory of France.”

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