Lessons from the Dreyfus affair

 I have recently taken an interest in the Dreyfus affair, as have many others. The affair was huge in France between 1894 and (roughly) 1906. It split the country down the middle, with a bitterness and acrimony that, even in our divided times, are difficult to comprehend today. As such, I find it a relevant historical precedent to help us understand what is happening in the U.S. today.

Quick historical reminder

If you're like me, you've heard of the Dreyfus affair, but you may be a bit fuzzy on the details, so here are the Cliff's notes. 

1894: evidence is discovered that an officer in the French army has been sending highly classified documents to German intelligence. An investigation is conducted and concludes that Captain Alfred Dreyfus is the guilty party. A court-martial condemns him to twenty years of hard labor. As it turns out, Dreyfus is Jewish.

1896: a new chief of intelligence realizes that the investigation was botched, perhaps even on purpose, and that the real spy was in fact another officer, captain Esterhazy. His superiors don't want to hear about it. 

1897: word gets out that this entire affair has been badly mishandled. Several newspaper articles are published, people start to take notice.

1898: Emile Zola, famous novelist, publishes his article "J'Accuse!", denouncing Dreyfus' treatment and directly naming several generals. This creates an enormous amount of controversy. Zola is tried for libel, condemned to prison, and leaves into exile in England. Huge numbers of articles and books are now published for and against Dreyfus. Most people in France take a position, with conservatives tending to be against Dreyfus and liberals supporting him. Families are split, life-long friendships are ended. Esterhazy flees the country.

1899: Dreyfus is tried again, and found guilty again, with extenuating circumstances. The president pardons him shortly thereafter.

1900: The national assembly passes a law of amnesty for Dreyfus and Zola.

1906: After years of bitter controversy, Dreyfus is finally cleared of all wrongdoing, he is re-established in his rank and promoted to major.

What was that all about?

With historical distance, it seems like a relatively simple case. There was a mistake, the wrong man was accused and found guilty, but the real culprit was eventually found, and the innocent party was cleared. All's well that ends well.

But that doesn't come close to describing how profoundly this affair divided French society. Huge numbers of people, mostly on the conservative/royalist/military side, refused to accept that Dreyfus was not guilty. He had been tried by a court martial and found guilty, therefore he was guilty. There was also a lot of very nasty and crude antisemitism. Dreyfus was guilty because he was Jewish, no matter what the evidence said. "I can read his guilt on his face", wrote a particularly vicious journalist.

In the cold light of logic, this is really difficult to understand. The real spy was found, he eventually confessed. It took much longer than it should have to clear Dreyfus, but he was eventually cleared. So why did so many people continue to believe in his guilt, against all evidence?

I think cold logic is of no help here. Whenever two people are screaming at each other, with veins popping out on their foreheads, you can bet good money that whatever they're screaming about is not the true crux of the disagreement. They're mad (perhaps not even at each other) for some other, much deeper reason, and the argument is about something superficial that, to an observer, seems baffling.

The discord was not about Dreyfus, it was about national identity. The question was not "is Dreyfus guilty?", but rather "who are we as a people?". And for a disturbingly high number of people, that answer could not include a Jew, even one who dedicated his life to the defense of his country. France had suffered a humiliating defeat against Germany in 1871, and lost the province of Alsace to Germany (Dreyfus was born in Alsace when it was still French, which made his loyalty questionable to some). The loss of Alsace was hugely humiliating, and France nursed its resentment for decades afterwards, which contributed to World War I and the savage treatment of Germany in the Treaty Of Versailles in 1919, and I don't need to tell you where that led.

There were other forces at play. The failure of the Panama canal company (1893), which affected a lot of small investors, was blamed on Jewish speculators -- a more convenient target than the real reasons for the failure (the project was far more difficult and costly than anticipated).

It's hard to understand how ingrained antisemitism was at the time. It was everywhere, in a way comparable perhaps to the kind of crude, flagrant racism we had in the U.S. at the time. There were grotesque caricatures in newspapers, books were written about the supposed dangers of international jewry (whatever that means), and people were really quite adamant about this.

A dark portent

I believe our current situation has some similarities. The U.S. is changing rapidly. We used to be a white-dominated country, with non-white people tacitly understood to be tolerated but certainly not in charge -- a reality challenged like never before by the election of Obama. A high school graduate who was willing to work hard could make a decent living, afford a home and a couple of cars, and get a reasonable retirement. The U.S. used to be (by far) the dominating influence in the world. All of these factors are now changing, and a lot of people are anxious and upset. Donald Trump has found a way to tap into this boiling undercurrent of anger and anxiety, but he is only a symptom (he's just not that interesting). When we're screaming at each other about him, we're really expressing our anxieties about a changing world.

The Dreyfus affair, strictly speaking, ended in 1906 with the rehabilitation of Dreyfus, but in fact it lingered on for decades afterwards. Fifty years later, you could still find old animosities and bitterness about it. It truly ended when everyone involved died out.

That is probably the most depressing aspect of this whole business. It never went away, the tears in the social fabric were never repaired. It took the death of all the actors before this sad episode faded away and became a baffling bit of history.

I wish I could tell you that things are going to get better for us, and that we're going to experience a national reconciliation. But I just don't think that's going to happen. If the Dreyfus affair can teach us anything, it's that these deep divisions cannot be healed. They disappear when the people involved disappear. My hope is that the next generation will look back at us with the same bewilderment we feel when we look at the Dreyfus affair. May they be wiser than we were -- they're going to need it.

I don't want to talk about it

 When the pandemic started, I took an interest, like so many others, in the Spanish flu epidemic. I'd heard of it, of course, but I was not all that familiar with its full extent, which was vast. Between 50 and 100 million people died around the world in less than two years. About 675,000 people died in the US alone. The population of the US at the time was just over 100 million, so roughly one in 150 Americans died of the flu. This means everyone knew someone, or more likely multiple people, who had died from it. My own great-grandfather died of it. This was a world-wide tragedy -- all of us, no matter where we are from, have connections to the Spanish flu among our ancestors.

And the U.S. had it relatively easy. In Tahiti, about two-thirds of the native population was killed. It was a massacre.

And yet, until the current pandemic, many people had not even heard of the Spanish flu. Why did we not talk about it more? We've all learned about World War I, yet the Spanish flu, which was far more devastating than the war in the U.S., is only briefly covered in most history books.

Based on my (admittedly spotty) research, I've come to think that the historical importance of the Spanish flu was kept to a minimum because the people who went through it didn't want to talk about it. It was a miserable time for everyone, there was civil unrest, enormous dissension -- sound familiar? And death, death everywhere. 

I also suspect that people were not necessarily proud of how they behaved during the pandemic. A contagious disease is a unique kind of disaster. Most natural catastrophes tend to bring people together. We all have a tendency to help each other in a time when everyone is having a tough time. That's what makes this type of pandemic so cruel: we cannot hug each other; crying on one another's shoulder could be deadly, so we are forced to retreat into ourselves. We do have a huge advantage over our ancestors: we can at least communicate easily. Imagine going through Covid in 1990, when all we had was the telephone. Now take away the telephone, and you've got 1918-1919 for most people. But regardless, are we in fact doing everything we can to take care of the most vulnerable members of our society? The question answers itself, doesn't it? The Spanish flu affected mostly young people, but this time, it's the oldest and feeblest among us who are hit the hardest. Will we look back upon this time and tell ourselves that we did the right thing?

Assuming the current Covid crisis is more or less resolved by the end of 2021, will it mostly vanish from our collective memory? I hope not. It's far from over, but at least we can begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As far as we can tell at this point, when it's over, it will probably be not as bad as the Spanish flu. But it'll be plenty bad.

Above all, I think I will remember the astonishing politicization of this calamity. If you'd told me ten years ago that we, as a nation, would disagree on straightforward matters of public health, purely based on party affiliation, I would have laughed it off as absurd. But here we are. As we now enter a tough winter, with many, many more deaths ahead of us, I project myself into the future, look back at today, and shake my head in disbelief. This crisis has unveiled an astonishing amount of nonsense, and I see little evidence that we're going to learn from it.

Such a tiny sacrifice

Like most people in the US, I am morbidly fascinated by the slow-motion disaster unfolding now in this country with Covid. It's a vast landscape of pain and death, and sometimes I feel like it's simply too much to contemplate. But I'd like to focus on a very specific aspect of our current national drama: the wearing, or not wearing, of a mask.

When we look back at the Spanish flu years, it's easy for us to feel a condescending pity. Ah yes, these poor souls, they didn't have modern medicine, and thus were lambs to the slaughter. But you know what? Our ancestors at least tried to manage the devastation of the flu. Masks were not only strongly encouraged but, in many places, legally required. If you were not wearing a mask, you could be arrested and thrown in jail. There was a lot of social pressure to wear a mask, everywhere. Was that overreaction? Was that hysteria?

Why is it hysterical to demand that people wear a mask, a very minor, and temporary, inconvenience, but perfectly reasonable to demand that people remove their shoes at the airport, or submit themselves to intimate pat-downs by the TSA? Airplane terrorism has killed fewer people than a couple of days of Covid in this country.

For that matter, why is no one howling at the fascist thugs who force us to wear pants in public? What a heinous attack on our precious freedoms! Down with the trouser nazis!

Obviously, it doesn't help when the loudest voice in the country casts doubt on the disease itself, and on the simple measures we can take to keep it in check. Donald Trump could not be bothered to wear a mask for months after Covid flared up in the U.S., and this appalling lack of leadership probably caused tens of thousands of deaths. It would have cost him nothing to wear a mask, to be an example to rest of the country. But not only did he consciously decide not to do that, he actually made fun of people who did wear a mask. This is criminal negligence at the very least, and more likely murderous idiocy. 

Think about it. The simple act of putting a piece of cloth over his mouth and nose would likely have made a significant difference in the evolution of this disease in the U.S. I cannot think of a smaller gesture having a larger impact, and it would have cost him nothing -- all he had to do was wear a mask in public, thereby giving permission to millions of his followers to do the same. But he simply could not be bothered. Apparently, he was concerned that it would make him look weak.

And now we are reaping the whirlwind. Almost three thousand Americans died of Covid yesterday. Probably even more will die today, and this agony will keep going until the vaccines start to take effect, or we start to take this disease seriously. And Donald Trump is golfing. At least he's no longer telling us that this disease is just going to go away. Surely, some part of him must realize that, in the light of history, the last year of his presidency is going to be seen as a tragedy of biblical proportions. I will remember it as the worst lack of leadership we have ever experienced, and a tragedy made much worse by a lazy, incompetent, cowardly, vicious and sad man. May he disappear into his abyss of self-pity, ignorance and corruption. He will not be missed.

I am nauseous at this waste of human life, at this immense amount of suffering, which will go on for years for many people. A lot of it was preventable. We could not avoid Covid, but we could have done a far better job of managing it and reducing its impact. Can you think of a smaller ask than to add, temporarily, one small piece of clothing? We would have been much better off if we had made pants optional but masks mandatory. No one has ever died from seeing someone naked.