French Intellectuals And Politics From The Dreyfus Affair To The Occupation

A companion volume to Drake's Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (2002), French Intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation traces the political positions adopted by French writers and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Liberation. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it offers a clear and accessible analysis of the intellectuals' engagement with nationalism, pacifism, communism, anti-communism, surrealism, fascism and anti-fascism, which is located within the evolving national and international context of the period.

The Dreyfus affair remains one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in modern times. Eric Cahm's study does justice to the human drama, whilst also throwing light on the wider society and politics of the Third Republic in the traumatic years after the Franco-Prussian War. This wide-ranging survey - the only short modern account in English anchors the Affair in its full social and political context. Organised round a narrative of events, it offers portraits of all the main characters, substantial extracts from key sources in fresh translations, a comprehensive bibliography and a detailed chronology.

The Dreyfus affair--the famous account of French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus unjustly convicted of treason in 1894--was the most significant political and social crisis of fin-de-siècle Europe. This book, designed to introduce the broad outlines and significant history, deftly interweaves text with documents, tracing the events of the affair and highlighting militant nationalism, socialism, the birth of modern Zionism, the separation of church and state, and the emergence of the "intellectual" in the political arena. The 66 documents offer a broad range of sources, including newspaper editorials, letters, trial testimony, and diary entries. The Dreyfus affair--the famous account of French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus unjustly convicted of treason in 1894--was the most significant political and social crisis of fin-de-siècle Europe. This book, designed to introduce the broad outlines and significant history, deftly interweaves text with documents, tracing the events of the affair and highlighting militant nationalism, socialism, the birth of modern Zionism, the separation of church and state, and the emergence of the "intellectual" in the political arena. The 66 documents offer a broad range of sources, including newspaper editorials, letters, trial testimony, and diary entries.

While countless books have chronicled the wrongful conviction of French military officer Alfred Dreyfus, his ensuing trials, and his eventual exoneration, this distinctive volume examines France’s Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) with a critical eye, analyzing the actions of its main protagonists, the rise of the public intellectual, and the Affair’s continued relevance. After a brief overview of the events to establish the poisoned ideological climate of the day, the work explores how intellectuals like Bernard Lazare, Émile Zola, and others contributed to the Affair, defining both it and themselves in the process. With mini-portraits of the key players and a detailed chronology, this telling book combines rigorous scholarship with cultural commentary to demonstrate the continued relevance of the example set by Dreyfus and his many supporters.

Intelligent, ambitious and a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, and the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies - many of them aristocratic officers in the army's High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew. In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the waste paper basket of Colonel Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen of the German embassy in Paris. When French intelligence pieced the document back together to uncover proof of a spy in their midst, Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans, found guilty of treason by unanimous verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil's Island. The fight to free the wrongfully convicted Dreyfus - over twelve long years, through many trials - is a story rife with heroes and villains, courage and cowardice, dissimulation and deceit. One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history, the Dreyfus affair divided France, stunned the world and unleashed violent hatreds and anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come. Today, amid charged debates over national and religious identity across the globe, its lessons throw into sharp relief the conflicts of the present. In the hands of historian, biographer and prize-winning novelist Piers Paul Read, this masterful epic of the struggle between a minority seeking justice and a military establishment determined to save face comes dramatically alive for a new generation.

Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.

The Dreyfus Affair comprises attempted assassinations, suicides, perjury, forgeries, invective, stunning reversals and abortive coups d'etat, involving the honour and destiny of an individual and of France. It is also a mystery tale that reveals the preoccupations and divisions of France and Europe at the turn of the 19th century. At its centre is the unjust imprisonment upon Devil's Island of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew convicted of a crime he did not commit, who was in part the victim of an ancient prejudice.

Who exactly are the ‘intellectuals’? This term is so widely used today that we forget that it is a recent invention, dating from the late nineteenth century. In Birth of the Intellectuals, the renowned historian and sociologist Christophe Charle shows that the term ‘intellectuals’ first appeared at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and the neologism originally signified a cultural and political vanguard who dared to challenge the status quo. Yet the word, expected to disappear once the political crisis had dissolved, has somehow endured. At times it describes a social group, and at others a way of seeing the social world from the perspective of universal values that challenges established hierarchies. But why did intellectuals survive when the events that gave rise to this term had faded into the past? To answer this question, it is necessary to show how the crisis of the old representations, the unprecedented expansion of the intellectual professions and the vacuum left by the decline of the traditional ruling class created favourable conditions for the collective affirmation of ‘intellectuals’. This also explains why the literary or academic avant garde traditionally reluctant to engage gradually reconciled themselves with political activists and developed new ways to intervene in the field of power outside of traditional political channels. Through a careful rereading of the petitions surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, Charle offers a radical reinterpretation of this crucial moment of European history and develops a new model for understanding the ways in which public intellectuals in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States have addressed politics ever since.