Dreyfus and the Literature of the Third Republic

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer, spent twelve years from 1894 to 1906, in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. Amidst the dramatic and shifting revelations of what would come to be known throughout the world as the Dreyfus Affair, four influential authors reassessed their moral convictions on the civic questions posed by this abuse. Emile Zola, Maurice Barres, Bernard Lazare, and Marcel Proust offered fictive articulations of response to these questions. Among them, national citizenship and the roles of secularism and public education, as well as tolerance of Jews and other immigrants to France, loom largest. The four authors considered dilemmas still unresolved in the modern democratic cultures of Europe today. Since the Dreyfus Affair coincided with Europe's first efforts to design legislation that would separate religions and states, moreover, the writers in effect were teaching readers to negotiate individual desire and social purpose and to assess their own values as they and we all weather the winds of change blowing from Dreyfus.