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A man like Léon Blum-who at the time of Dreyfus's arrest was just starting out as a young lawyer and literary critic-owed his entry into politics to the passions aroused by the Dreyfus case he would lead the Socialist party for thirty years. This was true across the political spectrum. The mob did not prevail, but the question of Captain Dreyfus's guilt or innocence did emerge as the lodestar of political belief for an entire generation. The affair brought to the center stage of French politics a fateful alliance between Catholic anti-Semitism and the anti-bourgeois, anti-democratic mob-a French advance screening of the shock troops of 20th-century fascism. The affair which grew out of the Dreyfus case began as a curious 19th-century courtroom drama, but was eventually transformed into an epochal event that foreshadowed a great many of the tragic tendencies in the next century.

This circumstance would turn out to be more decisive in shaping his life than any choice made by him alone.

Although he was hardly religious, Dreyfus was also a Jew. Married, the father of two, financially comfortable-by nearly any measure, Dreyfus was pointed toward a life of the most conventional respectability. His superior officers described him as “conscientious.” He had been diligent enough in his work to win an envied position in the army, despite having finished below the middle of his class at the Polytechnique. Like others from the Alsatian bourgeoisie whose families had chosen French citizenship and exile after the German annexation of their province, he was a passionate French patriot. $24.95.īefore Captain Alfred Dreyfus was charged with high treason in 1894, he was a thirty-four-year-old, career-conscious officer on the French army general staff.