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By Root 1103 0

” Hate, evil and fear encompassed them as well as courage and sacrifice. Their combat was epic and its issue was the life of the Republic. Each side fought for an idea, its idea of France: one the France of Counter-Revolution, the other the France of 1789; one for its last chance to arrest progressive social tendencies and restore the old values; the other to cleanse the honor of the Republic and preserve it from the clutches of reaction. The Revisionists, who fought for retrial, saw France as the fount of liberty, the country of light, the teacher of reason, the codifier of law, and to them the knowledge that she could have perpetrated a wrong and connived at a miscarriage of justice was insufferable. They fought for Justice. Those on the other side claimed to fight in the name of Patrie for the preservation of the Army as the shield and protector of the nation and of the Church as the guide and instructor of its soul. They assembled under the name of Nationalists and in their ranks sincere men were partners of demagogues and succumbed to methods that were reckless and brutal and terms that were foul, so that the world watched in wonder and scorn and the name of France suffered. Locked in mutual ferocity and final commitment the contenders could not disengage, although their struggle was splitting the country and fostering opportunity for the enemy at their frontiers, which every day the enemy measured.

“We were heroes,” proclaimed Charles Péguy, who transmuted and exalted the political movements of his day in mystical terms inherited from Joan of Arc. In 1910 he wrote, “The Dreyfus Affair can only be explained by the need for heroism which periodically seizes this people, this race—seizes a whole generation of us. The same is true of those other great ordeals: wars.… When a great war or great revolution breaks out it is because a great people, a great race needs to break out, because it has had enough, particularly enough of peace. It always means that a great mass feels and experiences a violent need, a mysterious need for a great movement,… a sudden need for glory, for war, for history, which causes an explosion, an eruption …” If the values and forces Péguy saw in the Affair were large, it was because they were those of that time and that experience. The Affair made men feel larger than life.

The casus belli was condemnation of a Jewish army officer for treason in behalf of Germany; the object of the battle was on the one hand to prevent, on the other to obtain, a reopening of the case. Because it was weak, the Government employed all its weight on the side of its would-be destroyers to brace and support the original verdict. It was not the stable, respected, solidly embedded government enjoyed by the English, but insecure, thinly rooted in public confidence, flouted and on the defensive. Twice since 1789 the Republic had gone down under resurgent monarchy. Emerging as the Third Republic after 1871, France had revived, prospered, acquired an Empire. She nourished the arts, gloried in the most cultivated capital, and raised, on the hundredth anniversary of the Revolution, the tallest structure in the world, the daring, incredible Tower that soared above the Seine, a signal flag of her vitality and genius.

Always, however, in political life the nation was at odds with itself, galled from within by the unreconciled, unsubdued adherents of the ancien régime and Second Empire, oppressed from without by the superior strength of Germany and the sense of unfinished war between them, hankering for revanche without the means to achieve it. In 1889 discontent with the Republic came to a head in the attempted coup d’état of General Boulanger supported by all the elements of Counter-Revolution who made up the collective Right—the Church, the two hundred families of business and finance, the displaced aristocracy, the royalists and the followers and sympathizers of these groups. Boulanger’s attempt ended in fiasco memorable for the remark of the Premier, Charles Floquet, “At your age, General, Napoleon was dead.” Nevertheless his