Revolution and the Republic
Page 95
the Church and, then, the State. Charle’s detailed investigations reveal conclusively
41 Bernard Lazare, Une Erreur Judiciaire: La vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus (Brussels, 1896).
42 Lazare, Comment on condamne un innocent (1898).
43 Ibid., p. ii.
44 Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War
(Oxford, 1999).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
449
that in the latter part of the nineteenth century France’s intellectual elite became
increasingly isolated––educationally, socially, economically, and even matrimonial-
ly––from her political and business elites.45 This relative separation was greatly
aided by their own expansion in numbers (especially in higher education), and by
the increased power and wider audience of the press, journalism, and publishing in
general.
Moreover, during the decade preceding the Affair, two new forms of expression
had come into usage: the enquête, designed to elicit the opinion of notable figures
on issues of perceived interest; and the signed petition or manifesto. Jean-François
Sirinelli cites a petition signed by ‘writers, painters, sculptors, architects and art
lovers’ protesting against the building of the Eiffel Tower in 1887 as the first
example of the latter.46 Both served to foster a sense of common identity and both
encouraged the belief that it was legitimate for writers, critics, and scholars to voice
their opinion on matters of public and political concern. A new name seemed
appropriate to a new figure and that name was the intellectual. It was only now, in
the weeks immediately following the publication of Zola’s open letter, that the
noun, previously indeterminate and uncertain of meaning, came into general usage.
A national icon had been born.47
The manner in which the intellectuals intended to make use of their authority
and position for political purposes was well illustrated by Émile Duclaux, director
of the prestigious Institut Pasteur and the third of the names to appear on the
petition of 13 January.48 In his Propos d’un Solitaire, he provided a response to the
request of the vice-president of the Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, for an
assessment of the evidence used to convict Dreyfus and, as he made abundantly
clear, he did so as a ‘savant’. In reaching his conclusions, Duclaux stated, ‘I believe
that I have remained moderate and impartial. . . . I accept that Dreyfus was judged
and condemned without reference to his Jewishness . . . However, I believe that
I have shown that . . . the trial was carried out in conditions hostile to the discovery
of the truth.’49 This was not to attack the army, he insisted, but to establish that the
original investigation had ‘mistaken art for science’. It was, then, as a scientist that
Duclaux exposed judicial error and as such he phrased his argument not in terms of
the individual fate of Dreyfus but in the name of his own scientific expertise.50
45 See Charle, Les Élites de la République 1880–1900 (1987) and Naissance des «intellectuels»
1880–1900 (1990).
46 Intellectuels et passions françaises: Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (1990), 21–3.
47 See Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the
Intellectual in France (Albany, NY, 1999).
48 See Vincent Duclert, ‘Émile Duclaux: Le Savant et l’intellectuel’, Mil neuf cent, 11 (1993), 21–6;
‘Le Savant, l’intellectuel et le politique: L’Exemple d’Émile Duclaux dans l’affaire Dreyfus’, in Michel
Woronoff (ed.), Savant et société aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Besançon, 1996), 133–58, and ‘L’Engagement
scientique et l’intellectuel démocratique: Le Sens de l’affaire Dreyfus’, Politix, 48 (1999), 71–94.
49 Propos d’un Solitaire (1898), 32.
50 For a broader statement by Duclaux of the merits of science see ‘Le Rôle de la science’, Revue des
revues, 32 (15 Mar. 1900), 615–23.
450
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
Not everyone was happy to display this level of political engagement and
commitment. As Christophe Prochasson has shown in an article outlining the
contours of ‘non-engagement’,51 at the time of the Dreyfus Affair there were
eminent scientists, most conspicuously Henri Poincaré, who were painfully aware
of the contradictions between the demands of their professional vocation and the
passions and language of politics. As Prochasson also shows, this sentiment only
intensified as the disasters of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism unfolded. Many were
those who placed liberty of expression before political commitment and party
loyalty. Nevertheless, Émile Duclaux was by no means alone in believing that the
public esteem in which his academic achievements were held gave him both the
right and the duty to pass judgement on matters beyond his professional domain
and to cast himself as the defender of universal principles and verities. ‘The
practices of the intellectual’, wrote Frédéric Paulhan, father of the future editor of
the Nouvelle Revue Française, ‘tend to create a general intelligence, an ability to
understand and to appraise with less difficulty and greater certainty not only the
things that he has especially studied but also those which lie beyond the sphere of
his principal interests.’52 In an age of growing specialization and the division of
labour, it was the intellectual who could aspire to apprehend and defend ‘the
general conscience of the social body’.53
More, however, was at stake in the Dreyfus Affair than the professional autono-
my and status of the intellectual. As the eminent historian Ernest Lavisse remarked
in an article significantly entitled ‘La Réconciliation nationale’,54 the ‘grandeur and
capital importance’ of the Affair derived from the fact that it pitted ‘two rival ways
of understanding our national life’ against each other. This was already clearly
visible in Émile Zola’s Lettre à la France, written in January 1898.55 Deploying
what were to become familiar themes, Zola’s argument was that France herself was
being insulted by the daily lies associated with the Dreyfus case. ‘How’, he asked of
the French nation, ‘can you want truth and justice when all your legendary virtues,
the clarity of your intelligence, and the strength of your reason are being wrecked?’
Worse still, France was ‘turning to the Church’ and was returning ‘to the past of
intolerance and of theocracy’, a past that her ‘most illustrious children’ had fought
‘with the gift of their intelligence and their blood’ and had believed to be destroyed.
France, he implored, wake up, rediscover yourself, become again la grande France,
‘the nation of honour, the nation of humanity, of truth and of justice’.56
Similar arguments were set out at greater length by philosopher Célestin
Bouglé.57 ‘If ’, he remarked before an audience in Toulouse in December 1899,
‘we have been so concerned to see Dreyfus return from Devil’s Island, it is because,
51 Christophe Prochasson, ‘Jalons pour une histoire du “non-engagement”’, Vingtième Siècle,
60 (1998), 102–11.
52 ‘Le droit des intellectuels’, Revue du Pal
ais (1 Oct. 1898), 742.
53 Ibid. 737.
54 Revue de Paris, 5 (Oct. 1899), 648–68.
55 Émile Zola, Lettre à la France (1898).
56 Ibid. 3.
57 See the collection of essays included in Pour la Démocratie française (1900).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
451
on the same boat, we have wanted to see return with him to their native soil a whole
body of ideas which to us are sacred.’58 These ideas were ‘the worship of the human
person considered as an end in himself . . . All are free, all are equal. . . . No individ-
ual can be treated as a means in the service of the State. . . . The sovereignty of the
law. . . . A scrupulous respect for legality.’59 Such, Bouglé declared, was the ‘French
tradition’ and such, as exemplified in the treatment of Dreyfus, were the principles
that were being flouted in the name of raison d’état. Bouglé did not go so far as to
claim that France alone had invented these ideals, but he was confident that it was
in France that they had attained their most human and popular form and in the
French language that they had received their clearest expression. Accordingly, when
the anti-Semites put on the mask of nationalism, when they invoked the old
traditions of France and spoke of the genius of the country, it was a ‘bloody
irony’ without any foundation.60 The supporters of Dreyfus, therefore, fought
‘not only for a Frenchman but for France, not only for a single citizen but for the
Republic, not only for a man but for humanity’.61
For those more obviously situated on the left of the political spectrum, rallying to
the Dreyfusard cause posed its own challenges and obstacles. Why should socialists
be concerned by acts of illegality committed by the bourgeoisie against one of its
own? Why should they side with their political opponents to defend the Republic
when it was demonstrably a corrupt regime?62 As late as December 1897, for
example, Jean Jaurès could write that ‘if the terrible sentence had fallen upon a poor
man, without family, without money, and without the means to act, the excitement
would be less great and the agitation less in evidence’. The quarrel over Dreyfus, he
went on, was a struggle between ‘two parts of the privileged class’, with the Jews,
Protestants, and Opportunists on one side and the supporters of the Church and
the army on the other.63 Once convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, however, Jaurès
put these apprehensions to one side, arguing that no one had a bigger interest in
seeing an end to the criminal illegalities committed by the French military High
Command than the working class. But Jaurès also phrased his response in terms of
the meaning of France. Through the sheer weight of the injustice heaped upon his
person, Jaurès argued, Dreyfus had ceased to be an army officer and a bourgeois and
had become ‘nothing less than humanity itself’. Faced with this outrage, only one
‘institution’ had remained upright and that had been ‘France herself ’. ‘For
a moment’, Jaurès accepted, ‘she was surprised, but she is recovering possession
of herself and, even if all her official lights are extinguished, her clear good sense can
again dissipate the night.’64 Never, he argued, had France been obliged to sacrifice
58 ‘Intellectuels et manuels’, ibid. 94.
59 ‘La Tradition française’, ibid. 18–20.
60 ‘Philosophie de l’antisémitisme’, ibid. 70.
61 ‘Intellectuels et manuels’, 94.
62 See Madeleine Rebérioux, ‘Zola, Jaurès et France: Trois Intellectuels devant l’Affaire’, Cahiers
naturalistes, 54 (1980), 266–81.
63 ‘Dreyfus-Esterhazy’, originally published in La Petite République (11 Dec. 1897): see Œuvres de
Jean Jaurès, vi. L’Affaire Dreyfus, ed. Eric Cahm (2001), 85–8.
64 ‘Les Preuves’, ibid. 709.
452
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
‘the legal guarantees that she instituted for all her children and her duties as a
civilized nation’ in the interests of ‘the humiliating calculations of a false interna-
tional prudence’. Justice was required in the name of ‘the salvation of the innocent,
the punishment of the guilty, the education of the people, and the honour of the
patrie’.65
Yet no sooner had the intellectuals intervened to call for Dreyfus’s release and
to defend the honour of France than their act was denounced by those Jaurès
described as ‘the reactionary intellectuals’, by those who, in his memorable phrase,
would only be completely happy ‘when science has been repudiated by the scientist,
when the spirit of criticism has been repudiated by the critic, and when thought has
been prostituted before force’.66
Leading the way was Ferdinand Brunetière.67 Already a controversial figure
because of his article ‘Après une visite au Vatican’, Brunetière now added fuel to
the fire in March 1898 with his anti-Dreyfusard article ‘Après le Procès’.68 Here
he addressed three issues: the causes of anti-Semitism, the place of the army in
France’s democracy, and, finally, the claims of the ‘intellectuals’. His response to
the first was that the Jews themselves were ‘not entirely innocent’ and he did not
disguise his sympathy for the ‘thirty-eight million French people’ who felt them-
selves displaced by ‘the last arrivals, the most recent members of the family’.69
On the second, his contention was not only that the army was compatible with
the existence of democracy but that, in terms of its traditions and composition, ‘the
army of France, today as before, is France herself’. It was in perfect harmony with
the ‘genius’ of the country.
It was Brunetière’s answer to the third question that was the most controversial.
Against the intellectuals, he denied their special authority to speak out on ‘the most
difficult questions concerning human morality, the life of nations, and the interest
of society’. What, he mocked, could a professor of Tibetan be able to teach his
fellow citizens about politics and why did knowledge of the properties of quinine
confer a right to be obeyed?70 But there was, he believed, an even greater danger
lurking behind the protestations of the Dreyfusard intellectuals. ‘Scientific method,
the aristocracy of intelligence, respect for truth, all these fine phrases’, he argued,
‘only serve to conceal the pretensions of Individualism.’71 And it was individualism
and not parliamentarism, socialism, or collectivism, according to Brunetière, which
was ‘the great sickness of the present time’. In short, when ‘intellectualism’ and
individualism reached ‘this degree of self-infatuation’ the result was anarchy.
65 ‘Les Preuves’, 691.
66 ‘La Classe intellectuelle’, ibid. vii. 515. This article was first publ. in La Petite République (7 Jan.
1899). See Vincent Duclert, ‘Anti-intellectualisme et intellectuels pendant l’affaire Dreyfus’, Mil Neuf
Cent, 15 (1997), 69–83.
67 See p. 378 above.
68 Revue des Deux Mondes, 146 (1898), 428–46; repr. as Après le Procès: Réponse à quelques «intellectuels»
(1898).
69 Brunetière was consistent in his refusal to endorse a physiological th
eory of race. See esp. his
review of Drumont’s La France juive in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 75 (June 1886), 693–704.
70 See also Brunetière’s review of Zola’s novel Paris, Revue des Deux Mondes, 146 (1898), 928.
71 ‘Après le Procès’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 445.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
453
The broader import of this argument becomes all the clearer if we look at other
of Brunetière’s pamphlets and speeches, most notably L’Idée de patrie72 from 1896
and Les Ennemis de l’âme française73 from 1899. Also of great interest is a speech
delivered in 1899 entitled Le Génie latin.74 In the first of these texts, Brunetière
argued that the idea of a homeland had three composite parts: ‘le Fondement
Naturel’, ‘le Fondement Historique’, and ‘le Fondement Mystique’. The homeland
was natural in the sense that we could neither survive nor flourish without it. It
had a history and it was this history that made France into a reality and a person and
that defined her character such that she had possessed a ‘general intention’ that had
remained unchanged ‘over ten centuries’. The mystical basis of the nation, accord-
ing to Brunetière, was precisely that aspect which escaped analysis, which defied
reason, and which drew upon instinct. At its heart was ‘the religion of the dead’.
Contrary to what was believed, Brunetière argued, such an idea of the patrie was not
in decline but it was under attack from those ‘individualists’ who believed in ‘the
worship and idolatry of themselves’.
The basic premise of Les Ennemis de l’âme française was that there existed such a
thing as the French soul and that it could be defined as a ‘hereditary communion of
sentiments and ideas’. The idea of a homeland, on this account, was not something
transitory or unstable and therefore Brunetière bluntly dismissed Renan’s notion of
the nation as a ‘daily plebiscite’, pointing out that it would justify all manner of
separatist claims. Rather, there were three traditions that informed this soul and it
was these that ensured the continuity of France. The first was France’s military
tradition. Reacting against what he saw as the Dreyfusard attack on the army,
Brunetière declared that there would be ‘no nation without an army’.75 The second