Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [10]
They reflect a France that is richer and more complicated than the beleaguered monolith of newspaper headlines, and which cannot be accommodated by old ideas of Frenchness, no matter what its government may say or do. France, we should never forget, has the largest Muslim community in Europe, between three and five million people, and Europe’s largest Jewish community (about seven hundred thousand people) outside Russia. A third of France’s population has ancestry from outside its borders.
Beneath the crust of its mythology, France has already changed. Why otherwise would Jean-Marie Le Pen and his anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, anti-American party, the National Front, exist? And why in June would they have won 15 percent of the vote? The real challenge to France is not the Anglo-Saxon world. It is to find a new and more plural identity, freed from the burden of glorious memory.
Dreyfus Is Decorated
ON DECEMBER 22, 1894, in Paris, Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly accused of treason for passing military secrets to the Germans. The Dreyfus Affair—often simply referred to as l’affaire—was “the most celebrated affair of the Belle Époque and the conflict that helped shape the political landscape of modern France,” according to Michael Burns, author of Dreyfus: A Family Affair (HarperCollins, 1991). L’affaire inspired writer Émile Zola to write an open letter addressed to Félix Faure, then president of France, which appeared on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898. It was Georges Clemenceau, a member of the National Assembly and later prime minister, who had some influence at the newspaper and who titled Zola’s letter “J’accuse…!” The accusatory letter was scathing and landed Zola a libel lawsuit, but this was what he’d intended all along as he believed a public trial would force the military authorities to reopen the Dreyfus case, in turn revealing the military cover-up. L’affaire is also a key underlying theme in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and through its successive volumes Proust reveals which characters are for or against Dreyfus. Patrick Alexander, in Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time: A Reader’s Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past (Vintage, 2009), notes that the Dreyfus Affair “ripped French society down the middle and created enmities and cultural divisions that were to last decades.” For journalist Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew who was a Paris correspondent for the Austrian newspaper Neue Freie Presse, l’affaire would solidify his belief in a separate homeland for Jews. In 1896 he first explored this idea in a pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat, and Dreyfus’s tragedy, according to author Michael Burns, “gave his dreams added urgency. If religious tolerance and racial harmony were impossible in France, the home of the Rights of Man, they were, Herzl was now convinced, impossible everywhere.” Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, organized the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897, and fifty years later the state of Israel was established.
An excellent book that I think approaches l’affaire in a never-before-examined way is For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown (Knopf, 2010). Brown (also the author of acclaimed biographies of Zola and Flaubert) details how the Dreyfus Affair can be understood only by fully grasping what happened in France in the previous decades: the revolution of 1848, France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine, civil war, the Paris Commune, and the rise of nationalism. By the late 1800s, two cultural factions emerged in France: moderates,