Much has been written about the Dreyfus Affair which happened in France in 1894. The topic has also attracted a number of film makers. For Hannah Arendt, this case, to which she devotes an entire chapter in Part 1 of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, provides an early example of the manifestation of extreme antisemitism, and a dress rehearsal for the antisemitism of the Nazis. But despite the fact that, at the time, antisemitism was worse in France than in Germany, it didn’t turn into totalitarianism. French antisemites remained nationalists. Nevertheless, this was one of the significant political events in French history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In this chapter, Arendt unpicks and seeks to understand the events that led to the Dreyfus Affair. As mentioned above these are well documented, but Arendt spends the first part of this chapter outlining the facts of the case.
Part 1: The Facts of the Case
My understanding of these (in brief) from Arendt’s writing and elsewhere is as follows.
Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer of the French General Staff. He was the only Jew in the French military. When it was discovered that secret French documents were being sent by a French Officer to the German Embassy in Paris, the military determined that the spy must be a foreigner. The only person who could be classed a ‘foreigner’ in their terms was Alfred Dreyfus because he was a Jew. Spurious evidence was concocted, on the basis of dubious handwriting analysis to support the accusation of treason against Dreyfus who was charged and court-martialled in October 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Not only this but he was publicly humiliated and stripped of his military uniform and sword in front of a baying mob whose antisemitic prejudices against Dreyfus and Jews in general had been incited by Edouard Drumont writing in La Libre Parole.
Dreyfus had no hope of a fair trial. The ministry of war placed a file of secret and in some cases forged documents before the tribunal that Dreyfus’ attorney was not allowed to see. Further, unverified and false testimonies against Dreyfus were presented at the secret trial. The court quickly found Dreyfus guilty of treason. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. (Holocaust Encyclopaedia)
Alfred Dreyfus was innocent and was eventually exonerated in 1906 and reinstated in the military, but not before spending four years on Devil’s Island, then having to endure a retrial at which the military ensured he was found guilty again despite having proof that another officer, a French major, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the guilty party. Dreyfus also had to agree to a pardon (seen as an admission of guilt) in order to save his family from further humiliation and distress.
The significance of this case for Arendt’s argument is that the case divided France into supporters of Dreyfus and those against him. The anti-Dreyfusards were powerful – the military, the Catholic Church, the right wing, and antisemites in general. The military in particular were anxious about potentially losing their power by being proved wrong about Dreyfus’ guilt, and ultimately the Dreyfus Affair resulted in the Catholic Church losing its power over the state and in 1905 the formal separation of Church and State in France. Significant amongst the Dreyfusards were his family, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, who never believed Dreyfus was guilty, and Emile Zola, as well as the moderate Republicans, Radicals, and Socialists.
….. on January 13, 1898, the Socialist newspaper L’Aurore published an open letter from the novelist Emile Zola to the president of the republic, Felix Faure. Titled “J’accuse!” (“I Accuse”), the letter accused the government of antisemitism, lack of evidence against Dreyfus, judicial errors, and illegal jailing of Dreyfus. (Holocaust Encyclopaedia)
In seeking to defend Dreyfus, Zola ultimately had to flee France for England, for fear of imprisonment himself. The political implications of the Dreyfus case lasted for years. Arendt writes (p.120):
‘Down to our times the term Anti-Dreyfusard can still serve as a recognized name for all that is anti-republican, antidemocratic, and antisemitic.’
‘Jews in France and around the world were shocked that a thoroughly acculturated French Jew like Alfred Dreyfus, who had demonstrated his loyalty to the state and served in the military, could not receive a fair trial and instead became the victim of such vehement anti-Jewish hatred. For Theodor Herzl, this seemed to prove that assimilation was no defence against antisemitism, leading him to believe that Zionism and the creation of a Jewish State would be the only solution to the problem of antisemitism.’ (Holocaust Encyclopaedia)
In the 20th century hatred of the Jews and suspicion of the State continued to grow. Arendt started to research the Dreyfus Affair in 1933. She wanted to understand the relation between antisemitism in France in the late 19th century and antisemitism as it emerged in Germany. Although she thought that the Dreyfus Affair was a dress rehearsal for Nazism, she noted that French antisemitism stayed within the framework of typical 19th century ideology. It didn’t become supernational or internationalist.
Part 2: The Third Republic and French Jewry
The Panama Scandal
In the second part of this chapter, Arendt argues that the Dreyfus Affair, and the development of antisemitism in France, had its roots and origins in the Panama Affair. This related to the failed attempt in the French Third Republic in 1892 of a French company to build the Panama Canal. 800,000 French citizens had invested in this venture and ultimately lost their money. The scandal related to the corruption associated with this failure. The French government took bribes to cover up the failure, and whilst French citizens lost their money, financiers and politicians pocketed large amounts of money.
As in the later Dreyfus Affair, the French government looked about for who to blame and alighted on two Jews of German origin, Baron Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Hertz, who were not among the bribed government members or on the company’s board, but were middlemen. They were responsible for distributing the bribe money. Their actions were significant in ensuring that an obscure antisemitic daily newspaper ‘La Libre Parole’, founded by French antisemitic journalist, Edouard Drumont, was transformed into one of the most influential papers in France and thus paved the way for the Dreyfus Affair.
Part 3: Army and Clergy Against the Republic
In Part 3 of this chapter Arendt discusses the role of the army and the clergy in the Dreyfus affair and how
‘The refusal of the state to democratize the army and to subject it to the civil authorities entailed remarkable consequences’ (p.130)
Throughout the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the republic never dared to dominate the army and the clergy. Both the army and the Church were instrumental in promulgating the antisemitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, but ultimately both lost their political influence over the state as a result of the Dreyfus case.
Part 4: The People and the Mob
In this part Arendt develops ideas which she will come back to later in the book. She starts this section of the chapter by writing that it is a fundamental error to regard ‘the mob as identical with rather than as a caricature of the people’ (p.138). She goes on to define the mob as:
‘…. primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob will always shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.’ (p.138)
It was high society and politicians of the French Third Republic, with their scandals and frauds that produced the mob.
‘There can be no doubt that in the eyes of the mob the Jews came to serve as an object lesson for all the things they detested. If they hated society they could point to the way in which the Jews were tolerated within it; and if they hated the government they could point to the way in which the Jews had been protected by or were identifiable with the state. Whilst it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews, the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims.
Excluded as it is from society and political representation, the mob turns of necessity to extraparliamentary action.’ (p.139/140)
The army, the Church and the police were all complicit in organizing and inciting the mob, such that the cry ‘Death to the Jews’ swept the country (p.144). And the Catholic Church used the Catholic Press to spread antisemitism across France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, being the first to link antisemitism to imperialism.
The intellectual elite came to be nihilists, thinking the world was so corrupt that society had to be destroyed. Out of moral repugnance they came to support the mob in their desire to tear society down. A few people tried to protect France from the mob, for example Picquart (the French army counter-intelligence chief who eventually proved that Dreyfus had been wrongly accused) did not feel that the end justified the means and tried to do what was right for his country and for Dreyfus. But according to Roger Berkowitz and Hannah Arendt, the hero of the story is not Picquart, nor Dreyfus, but Clemenceau, French statesman and Prime Minister of France from 1906-1909, who fought for Dreyfus’ acquittal, not because there had been a miscarriage of justice, but on the basis of ‘abstract’ ideas such as justice, liberty, and civic virtue. Clemenceau believed that ‘an infringement of the rights of one man was an infringement of the rights of all’ (p.147).
There are two more parts in this chapter in which Arendt briefly discusses The Jews and the Dreyfusards (Part 4) and The Pardon and Its Significance (Part 5). In her final paragraph to this final chapter of Book 1. Antisemitism, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes:
‘Thus closes the only episode [The Dreyfus Affair] in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement – the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.’ (p.156)
The only answer for the Jews was to leave and form their own country.
Final Note
This is the fifth and final post about Hannah Arendt’s Book 1 in The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she focuses on unpicking and trying to understand the rise of antisemitism, which ultimately led to totalitarianism in Europe. Here are the links to my previous posts.
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Prefaces
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Chapter 1: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense
I think it is worth noting, before moving on to the next book in The Origins of Totalitarianism in which Arendt tries to understand the role of imperialism as an origin of totalitarianism, that Arendt’s work on antisemitism was not without its critics.
See for example this paper Hannah Arendt’s Analysis Of Antisemitism In The Origins Of Totalitarianism: A Critical Appraisal. by Peter Staudenmaier, Marquette University
The Abstract of this paper reads as follows:
Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with an extended study of the history of antisemitism. Many of Arendt’s arguments in this groundbreaking text have been challenged by other scholars. Examining the chief contours of Arendt’s account of the rise of modern antisemitism, Staudenmaier offers detailed reasons for approaching her conclusions sceptically while appreciating the book’s other virtues. Arendt’s repeated reliance on antisemitic sources, her inconsistent analysis of assimilation, her overstated distinction between social and political dimensions of anti-Jewish sentiment, and her emphasis on partial Jewish responsibility for antisemitism indicate fundamental problems with her interpretation of the historical record. A thorough critical appraisal of Arendt’s argument offers an opportunity for both her admirers and her detractors to come to terms concretely with the contradictory aspects of her historical legacy.
Despite this, I admire Arendt’s courage and willingness to put her head above the parapet in her attempt to understand antisemitism, its origins, and how this could ultimately lead to totalitarianism. Even more so because she herself was subject to antisemitism. Furthermore, it seems to me that some of her text speaks so directly to what we are witnessing in the world today. For example:
While people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob will always shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.’ (p.138)
References
Hannah Arendt (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House, UK
Hannah Arendt Center: Origins of Totalitarianism (#5, 2023) The Dreyfus Affair
Holocaust Encyclopedia. Antisemitism
Acknowledgement
I would not be able to read Hannah Arendt with much understanding, or write these posts, without the support of The Hannah Arendt Center’s Director, Roger Berkowitz’s talks and explanations.