Case Study: Marginalization of the "Other"
Reading:
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For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 23 AThe Responsive National State and The Nation and the People (Pgs. 773 -783) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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As we have seen throughout this course European's had a long and sad history of marginalizing different groups based on a variety of prejudices and stereotypes. However, after the Enlightenment the practice of marginalizing people based on differences began to be questioned by philosophers and intellectuals. The development of liberal ideas seemed to be gaining traction in the late 18th and early 19th century. But in the late 19th century liberal civilization came under attack and marginalization returned.
"Other" and ― "otherness" are technical terms used in the social sciences and humanities for the way people tend to view others (people or nature) that are dissimilar and separated.
1. In some cases the terms are used in a general and neutral way to signify that which is fundamental different.
2. In other cases they imply a complex system of devaluation.
"Other" and ― "otherness" are technical terms used in the social sciences and humanities for the way people tend to view others (people or nature) that are dissimilar and separated.
1. In some cases the terms are used in a general and neutral way to signify that which is fundamental different.
2. In other cases they imply a complex system of devaluation.
Guiding Question:
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Source 1 : John Rushkin, from Of Queen's Gardens
John Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critic of art and an important critic of society. His essay Of Queen's Gardens (1865), published in Sesame and Lilies, has been taken as an eloquent statement of the conservative ideal of Victorian womanhood. |
Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial: — to him, therefore, the failure, the offense, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued, often misled, and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offense. This is the true nature of home
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Source 2 : The Woman Question, Westminster Review, 1886
Written by socialists Edward Aveling and his wife Eleanor Marx Aveling |
And now comes the question as to how the future position of woman, and therefore of the race, will be affected by all this. Of one or two things we may be very sure. Others the evolution of society alone will decide positively, though every one of us may have his own idea upon each particular point. Clearly there will be equality for all, without distinction of sex. Thus, woman will be independent: her education and all other opportunities as those of man. Like him, she, if sound in mind and body (and how the number of women thus will grow!) will have to give her one, two, or three hours of social labour to supply the wants of the community, and therefore of herself. Thereafter she will be free for art or science, or teaching or writing, or amusement in any form. Prostitution will have vanished with the economic conditions that made it, and make it at this hour, a necessity.
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Source 3 : Karl Marx's Inaugural Speech to the First International Working Men's Association
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At the same time the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however, excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle-class spouters, and even keep political economists have all at once turned nauseously complimentary to the very co-operative labor system they had vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatizing it as the sacrilege of the socialist. To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor.
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Source 6 : School of Life - Friedrich Nietzsche
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Source 7 : Antisemitism - The Power and Danger of Mythical Thinking
German racial nationalists singled out Jews as a wicked race and deadly enemy of the German people. Anti-Semitism, which was widespread in late nineteenth-century Europe, provides a striking example of the perennial appeal, power, and danger of mythical thinking—of elevating to the level of objective truth ideas that have no basis in fact but provide all-encompassing, emotionally satisfying explanations of life and history. By manufacturing the myth of the wicked Jew, the radical right confirmed the insight reached by the political theorist Georges Sore that people are moved and united by myths that offer simple, clear, and emotionally gratifying resolutions to the complexities of the modern world.
Anti-Semitic organizations and political parties sought to deprive Jews of the civil rights, and anti-Semitic publications proliferated. Edouard Drumont, a French journalist, argued that the Jews, racially inferior and believers in a primitive religion, had gained control of France. Like medieval Christian anti-Semites, Drumont accused Jews of deicide (killers of God) and of using Christian blood for ritual purposes. Drumont’s newspaper (established with Jesuit funds) blamed all the ills of France on the Jews, called for their expulsion from the country, and predicted that they would be massacred. French politicians played the anti-Semitic card in order to gain popularity and votes. Fully one-third of the Chamber of Deputies wanted to deprive Jews of the civil rights that they had gained during the French Revolution.
Romania barred most Jews from holding office and from voting, imposed various economic restrictions on them, and limited their admission into secondary schools and universities. The Romanian government even financed an international congress of anti-Semites, which met in Bucharest in 1886. In German-speaking Austria, Karl Lueger, a leader of the Christian Social Party, found by conservative German nationalists, exploited anti-Semitism to win elections in overwhelmingly Catholic Vienna. Georg von Schonerer, founder of the German National Party in Austria, wanted to eliminate Jews from all areas of public life.
Russia placed a quota on the number of Jewish students admitted to secondary schools and higher educational institutions, confined Jews to certain regions of the country, and, “to purify the sacred historic capital,” expelled about twenty thousand Jews from Moscow. Some government officials encouraged or did nothing to stop pogroms (mob violence) against Jews. Between 1903 and 1906, pogroms broke out in 690 towns and villages, most of them in the Ukraine, traditionally a hotbed of anti-Semitism. (Ukrainian folksongs and legends glorified centuries-old massacres of Jews.) The attackers looted, burned, raped and murdered, generally with impunity. IN Russia and several other lands, Jews were put on trial for slaughtering Christian children as part of a Passover ritual—a deranged accusation that survived from the Middle Ages.
Anti-Semitism had a long and bloodstained history in Europe, stemming both from an irrational fear and hatred of outsiders with noticeably different ways and from the commonly accepted myth that the Jews as a people were collectively and eternally cursed for rejecting Christ. Christians saw Jews as the murders of Christ—an image that promoted terrible anger and hatred. In the middle ages, mobs periodically humiliated, tortured, and massacred Jews, and rulers expelled them from their kingdoms. Often barred from owning land and excluded from the craft guilds, medieval Jews concentrated in trade and moneylending—occupations that frequently earned them greater hostility. By the sixteenth century, Jews in a number of lands were forced by law to live in separate quarters of the town, called ghettos. Medieval Christian anti-Semitism, which depicted the Jew as vile and Judaism as repulsive, fertilized the soil for modern anti-Semitism.
In the nineteenth century, under the aegis of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews gained legal equality in most European lands. They could leave the ghetto, vote, hold office, and participate in many activities that had been closed to them. Jews took advantage of this new freedom and opportunity.
Motivated by the fierce desire of outsiders to prove their worth and aided by deeply embedded traditions that valued education and family life, many Jews achieved striking success as entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, journalists, doctors, scientists, scholars, and performers. For example, in 1880, Jews, who constituted about 10 percent of the Viennese population, accounted for 38.6 percent of the medical students and 23.3 percent of the law students in Vienna. Viennese cultural life before World War I was to a large extent shaped by Jewish writers, artists, musicians, critics and patrons. All but one of the major banking houses were Jewish. However, most European Jews—peasants, peddlers, and laborers—were quite poor and perhaps five thousand to six thousand Jews of Galicia in Austria-Hungary died of starvation annually. Many Russian Jews fled to the United States to escape from desperate poverty.
Like other bourgeois, the Jews who were members of the commercial and professional classes gravitated toward liberalism. Moreover, as victims of persecution, they naturally favored societies that were committed to the liberal ideals of legal equality, toleration, the rule of law, and equality of opportunity. Because they strongly supported parliamentary government and the entire system of values associated with the Enlightenment, the Jews became targets for conservatives and Volkish thinkers, who repudiated the humanists and cosmopolitan outlook of liberalism and professed a militant nationalism. To Volkish thinkers, the West represented an alien culture hostile to German racial-national identity; and the Jews, an alien race, symbolized the West.
Anti-Semites invented a mythical evil, the Jew, whom they blamed for all the social and economic ills caused by the rapid growth of industries and cities and for all the new ideas that were undermining the Old Order. Their anxieties and fears concentrated on the Jews, to whom they attributed everything they considered to be wrong in the modern age, all that threatened the German Volk. In the mythical world of Volkish thinkers, the Jews were regarded as foreign intruders who could never be loyal to the father land; as racial inferiors whose genes could infect and weaken the German race and debase its culture; and as international conspirators who were plotting to dominate Germany and the world. This latter accusation was a secularized and update version of the medieval myth that Jews were plotting to destroy Christendom. In an extraordinary display of irrationality, Volkish thinkers held that Jews throughout the world were gaining control over political parties, the press, and the economy in order to dominate the planet.
The myth of a Jewish world conspiracy found its culminating expression in a notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, were written in France by someone in the service of the Russian secret police, sought to justify the tsarist regime’s anti-Semitic policies. The forger concocted a tale of a meeting of Jewish elders in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In these eerie surroundings, the elders plot to take over the world. First published in Russia in 1903, the Protocols was widely distributed after World War I and widely believed.
Racial nationalism, a major element in nineteenth-century intellectual life, attacked and undermined the Enlightenment tradition. Racial nationalists denied equality, scorned toleration, dismissed the idea of the oneness of humanity, and made myth and superstition vital forces in political life. They distorted reason and science to demonize and condemn an entire people and to justify humiliation and persecution. They presented a pathogenic racial ideology, fraught with unreason and hate, as something virtuous and idealistic. That many people, including the educated and the elite, accepted these racial doctrines was an ominous sign for Western civilization. It made plain the tenuousness of the rational tradition of the Enlightenment and showed how receptive the mind is to dangerous myths and how easily human behavior can degenerate into inhumanity.
Anti-Semitic organizations and political parties sought to deprive Jews of the civil rights, and anti-Semitic publications proliferated. Edouard Drumont, a French journalist, argued that the Jews, racially inferior and believers in a primitive religion, had gained control of France. Like medieval Christian anti-Semites, Drumont accused Jews of deicide (killers of God) and of using Christian blood for ritual purposes. Drumont’s newspaper (established with Jesuit funds) blamed all the ills of France on the Jews, called for their expulsion from the country, and predicted that they would be massacred. French politicians played the anti-Semitic card in order to gain popularity and votes. Fully one-third of the Chamber of Deputies wanted to deprive Jews of the civil rights that they had gained during the French Revolution.
Romania barred most Jews from holding office and from voting, imposed various economic restrictions on them, and limited their admission into secondary schools and universities. The Romanian government even financed an international congress of anti-Semites, which met in Bucharest in 1886. In German-speaking Austria, Karl Lueger, a leader of the Christian Social Party, found by conservative German nationalists, exploited anti-Semitism to win elections in overwhelmingly Catholic Vienna. Georg von Schonerer, founder of the German National Party in Austria, wanted to eliminate Jews from all areas of public life.
Russia placed a quota on the number of Jewish students admitted to secondary schools and higher educational institutions, confined Jews to certain regions of the country, and, “to purify the sacred historic capital,” expelled about twenty thousand Jews from Moscow. Some government officials encouraged or did nothing to stop pogroms (mob violence) against Jews. Between 1903 and 1906, pogroms broke out in 690 towns and villages, most of them in the Ukraine, traditionally a hotbed of anti-Semitism. (Ukrainian folksongs and legends glorified centuries-old massacres of Jews.) The attackers looted, burned, raped and murdered, generally with impunity. IN Russia and several other lands, Jews were put on trial for slaughtering Christian children as part of a Passover ritual—a deranged accusation that survived from the Middle Ages.
Anti-Semitism had a long and bloodstained history in Europe, stemming both from an irrational fear and hatred of outsiders with noticeably different ways and from the commonly accepted myth that the Jews as a people were collectively and eternally cursed for rejecting Christ. Christians saw Jews as the murders of Christ—an image that promoted terrible anger and hatred. In the middle ages, mobs periodically humiliated, tortured, and massacred Jews, and rulers expelled them from their kingdoms. Often barred from owning land and excluded from the craft guilds, medieval Jews concentrated in trade and moneylending—occupations that frequently earned them greater hostility. By the sixteenth century, Jews in a number of lands were forced by law to live in separate quarters of the town, called ghettos. Medieval Christian anti-Semitism, which depicted the Jew as vile and Judaism as repulsive, fertilized the soil for modern anti-Semitism.
In the nineteenth century, under the aegis of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews gained legal equality in most European lands. They could leave the ghetto, vote, hold office, and participate in many activities that had been closed to them. Jews took advantage of this new freedom and opportunity.
Motivated by the fierce desire of outsiders to prove their worth and aided by deeply embedded traditions that valued education and family life, many Jews achieved striking success as entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, journalists, doctors, scientists, scholars, and performers. For example, in 1880, Jews, who constituted about 10 percent of the Viennese population, accounted for 38.6 percent of the medical students and 23.3 percent of the law students in Vienna. Viennese cultural life before World War I was to a large extent shaped by Jewish writers, artists, musicians, critics and patrons. All but one of the major banking houses were Jewish. However, most European Jews—peasants, peddlers, and laborers—were quite poor and perhaps five thousand to six thousand Jews of Galicia in Austria-Hungary died of starvation annually. Many Russian Jews fled to the United States to escape from desperate poverty.
Like other bourgeois, the Jews who were members of the commercial and professional classes gravitated toward liberalism. Moreover, as victims of persecution, they naturally favored societies that were committed to the liberal ideals of legal equality, toleration, the rule of law, and equality of opportunity. Because they strongly supported parliamentary government and the entire system of values associated with the Enlightenment, the Jews became targets for conservatives and Volkish thinkers, who repudiated the humanists and cosmopolitan outlook of liberalism and professed a militant nationalism. To Volkish thinkers, the West represented an alien culture hostile to German racial-national identity; and the Jews, an alien race, symbolized the West.
Anti-Semites invented a mythical evil, the Jew, whom they blamed for all the social and economic ills caused by the rapid growth of industries and cities and for all the new ideas that were undermining the Old Order. Their anxieties and fears concentrated on the Jews, to whom they attributed everything they considered to be wrong in the modern age, all that threatened the German Volk. In the mythical world of Volkish thinkers, the Jews were regarded as foreign intruders who could never be loyal to the father land; as racial inferiors whose genes could infect and weaken the German race and debase its culture; and as international conspirators who were plotting to dominate Germany and the world. This latter accusation was a secularized and update version of the medieval myth that Jews were plotting to destroy Christendom. In an extraordinary display of irrationality, Volkish thinkers held that Jews throughout the world were gaining control over political parties, the press, and the economy in order to dominate the planet.
The myth of a Jewish world conspiracy found its culminating expression in a notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, were written in France by someone in the service of the Russian secret police, sought to justify the tsarist regime’s anti-Semitic policies. The forger concocted a tale of a meeting of Jewish elders in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In these eerie surroundings, the elders plot to take over the world. First published in Russia in 1903, the Protocols was widely distributed after World War I and widely believed.
Racial nationalism, a major element in nineteenth-century intellectual life, attacked and undermined the Enlightenment tradition. Racial nationalists denied equality, scorned toleration, dismissed the idea of the oneness of humanity, and made myth and superstition vital forces in political life. They distorted reason and science to demonize and condemn an entire people and to justify humiliation and persecution. They presented a pathogenic racial ideology, fraught with unreason and hate, as something virtuous and idealistic. That many people, including the educated and the elite, accepted these racial doctrines was an ominous sign for Western civilization. It made plain the tenuousness of the rational tradition of the Enlightenment and showed how receptive the mind is to dangerous myths and how easily human behavior can degenerate into inhumanity.
Source 8 : The Dreyfus Affair and the Press
In the summer of 1894, a French army officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, walked into the German embassy in Paris and offered his services as a spy. Esterhazy was deeply in debt from playing the stock market and could see no other way to raise cash quickly. Over the next few months, Esterhazy passed on French military secrets to the Germans. One of his unsigned handwritten memos told about an artillery device and a new field manual. Somehow, this memo fell into the hands of the French espionage (spy) office.
French military officials did not think the memo revealed important information. But they became alarmed that a spy, probably an artillery officer, was operating inside their own general staff. Army investigators decided to compare the handwriting on the spy document with samples of writing from suspected officers. Investigators saw a similarity in the handwriting on the memo and that of a 35-year-old officer assigned to the General Staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Dreyfus made an easy target for the investigators. A stickler for military rules and regulations, Dreyfus had not gained many friends among the officer corps. More importantly, he was a Jew. Anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish attitudes) infected much of French society. It was particularly strong in the tradition-bound military. The army secretly arrested and interrogated Capt. Dreyfus, but top army leaders were unsure how to proceed. They knew the case against Dreyfus was weak. Then on November 1, 1894, a Paris newspaper broke the story with the headline, "High Treason: Arrest of the Jewish Officer, A. Dreyfus."
The newspaper, La Libre Parole ("Free Speech"), was well-known for its strong anti-semitic views. The newspaper’s editor, Edouard Drumont, stated that his information about Dreyfus had come from an anonymous source within the army. Drumont wrote that Dreyfus had made "a full confession" and that there was "absolute proof that he sold our military secrets to Germany." The sensational revelations in the press pushed the army to prosecute Capt. Dreyfus. His court martial and the events that followed tore France apart for 12 years. To a large extent, the highly competitive French press created, continued, and finally brought to an end the Dreyfus Affair.
The Dreyfus Affair Unfolds
News of Dreyfus’ arrest and upcoming court martial produced a storm of newspaper stories. Newspapers bombarded the public with details of supposed evidence, unfounded charges, wholly invented events, rumors, and gossip. Leading this press frenzy were a number of anti-semitic journals like Drumont’s paper. Drumont wrote on November 3, 1894, "What a terrible lesson, this disgraceful treason of the Jew Dreyfus!"
By the time of the court martial, most of the public believed Dreyfus was a traitor. The military excluded the press and public from his trial. It kept the written accusation against Dreyfus secret even from him. Despite the weak evidence, seven army-officer judges unanimously found him guilty. He was sentenced to life on Devil’s Island, a fortified prison off the coast of South America, where he would be held in solitary confinement.
Before being shipped to Devil’s Island, the army put Dreyfus through a humiliating ceremony known as a "degradation." In front of assembled troops, scores of journalists, and 20,000 citizens, he was stripped of his military insignia and his sword was broken in half.
Dreyfus’ family, particularly his brother, Mathieu, refused to give up. Mathieu and a helpful army officer began to turn up evidence pointing to Major Esterhazy as the real spy and traitor. In November 1897, a newspaper published a copy of the original spy memo alongside samples of Esterhazy’s writing. The writing on both appeared to be identical.
As the case against Dreyfus began to unravel, the army officers responsible for his prosecution closed ranks. After all, they reasoned, the credibility and honor of the entire French army were at stake. One of the officers, Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry, had perjured himself at Dreyfus’ court martial. He now created false documents incriminating Dreyfus and leaked them to sympathetic newspapers.
A Press War Erupts
Unable to ignore the mounting evidence against Major Esterhazy, the army was forced to court martial him in January 1898. But if Esterhazy were found guilty, this would mean that important army officers had either made a terrible mistake, or even worse, had lied. Unwilling to accept these consequences, the court martial unanimously found Esterhazy—the real spy—innocent.
A few days after Esterhazy was acquitted, one of the country’s most famous novelists, Emile Zola, published a letter to the president of France accusing high-ranking army officers of conspiring to convict an innocent man. Zola’s now famous letter entitled "I accuse" was printed in a pro-Dreyfus newspaper published by Georges Clemenceau (who would become the premier of France during World War I).
The publication of Zola’s letter provoked a violent reaction. Fist fights broke out on the floor of the French national legislature. Riots occurred all over France. Mobs stoned Jewish shops and homes. Men fought duels, including one between Clemenceau and Drumont, the anti-semitic newspaper editor (all six shots missed). Zola himself was convicted of libel, but he fled to England to avoid imprisonment.
Zola’s "I Accuse. . . !" also proved to be the opening shot in a bloodless press war that pitted pro- and anti-Dreyfus journalists, illustrators, and photographers against one another. The pro-Dreyfus press emphasized getting at the truth, reason, and justice for the prisoner of Devil’s Island. The anti-Dreyfus journalists viewed themselves as defenders of the army and the security of the nation. Many of the anti-Dreyfus forces believed that a "Jewish Syndicate," which supposedly wanted to destroy France, was behind the Dreyfus Affair.
The press war erupted when a new style of journalism was beginning to flourish in France (and in other parts of the world including the United States). High-speed presses enabled newspapers to be printed in large numbers. In Paris, nearly 100 newspapers and journals competed for readers. "Dueling newspapers" emerged specifically to attack and counterattack one another over the latest revelations in what now was simply called "The Affair."
Newly invented graphic processes allowed newspapers and other publishers to mass-produce photographs and other types of illustrations. The press war generated numerous posters, cartoons, caricatures, comic strips, picture postcards, board games, and other items that were often little more than pro- or anti-Dreyfus propaganda. One famous poster portrayed Dreyfus as a snake-like monster with a sword labeled, "The Traitor," piercing his body.
The Affair Ends
Through the summer of 1898, most of the press and the public still remained anti-Dreyfus and pro-army. But in August one of the false documents manufactured by Colonel Henry was shown to be a forgery. Colonel Henry confessed and then committed suicide. Hearing about this, the spy Esterhazy panicked and fled to England.
In June the following year, a Paris journalist found and interviewed Esterhazy in London. Esterhazy admitted that it was he who had written the spy memo that had started the whole Dreyfus Affair. But he claimed that he had done this on orders from his superior to prove that Dreyfus was a traitor. On June 3, 1899, the day that Esterhazy’s confession appeared in the Paris papers, the government decided to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for a new court martial. Dreyfus had been in prison for four-and-a-half years.
Dreyfus’ second court martial was probably the world’s first big media event. Hundreds of journalists, photographers, celebrities, and ordinary people from many nations wanted to witness the trial. Reporters covering the proceedings tried, but were not permitted, to take motion pictures (invented a few years earlier). On September 9, 1899, in a 5-2 judgment, Dreyfus was again found guilty. This time he was sentenced to only 10 years in prison due to "extenuating circumstances."
About a week later, amid a storm of international protest over the guilty verdict, the French government decided to pardon Dreyfus. For the next half-dozen years, Dreyfus and his supporters in the press continued to try to prove his innocence. Finally, he was granted another court hearing. In 1906, the highest court in France cleared Dreyfus and reversed his convictions. The army reinstated Dreyfus and, to make amends, made him an officer in the Legion of Honor. He received this high military honor in a ceremony that took place on the same grounds where he had been degraded nearly 12 years before. Dreyfus, who eventually rose to the rank of major, stayed in the army until retirement and even returned to serve his country during World War I. He died on July 11, 1935, and was buried on Bastille Day, the French patriotic holiday.
French military officials did not think the memo revealed important information. But they became alarmed that a spy, probably an artillery officer, was operating inside their own general staff. Army investigators decided to compare the handwriting on the spy document with samples of writing from suspected officers. Investigators saw a similarity in the handwriting on the memo and that of a 35-year-old officer assigned to the General Staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Dreyfus made an easy target for the investigators. A stickler for military rules and regulations, Dreyfus had not gained many friends among the officer corps. More importantly, he was a Jew. Anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish attitudes) infected much of French society. It was particularly strong in the tradition-bound military. The army secretly arrested and interrogated Capt. Dreyfus, but top army leaders were unsure how to proceed. They knew the case against Dreyfus was weak. Then on November 1, 1894, a Paris newspaper broke the story with the headline, "High Treason: Arrest of the Jewish Officer, A. Dreyfus."
The newspaper, La Libre Parole ("Free Speech"), was well-known for its strong anti-semitic views. The newspaper’s editor, Edouard Drumont, stated that his information about Dreyfus had come from an anonymous source within the army. Drumont wrote that Dreyfus had made "a full confession" and that there was "absolute proof that he sold our military secrets to Germany." The sensational revelations in the press pushed the army to prosecute Capt. Dreyfus. His court martial and the events that followed tore France apart for 12 years. To a large extent, the highly competitive French press created, continued, and finally brought to an end the Dreyfus Affair.
The Dreyfus Affair Unfolds
News of Dreyfus’ arrest and upcoming court martial produced a storm of newspaper stories. Newspapers bombarded the public with details of supposed evidence, unfounded charges, wholly invented events, rumors, and gossip. Leading this press frenzy were a number of anti-semitic journals like Drumont’s paper. Drumont wrote on November 3, 1894, "What a terrible lesson, this disgraceful treason of the Jew Dreyfus!"
By the time of the court martial, most of the public believed Dreyfus was a traitor. The military excluded the press and public from his trial. It kept the written accusation against Dreyfus secret even from him. Despite the weak evidence, seven army-officer judges unanimously found him guilty. He was sentenced to life on Devil’s Island, a fortified prison off the coast of South America, where he would be held in solitary confinement.
Before being shipped to Devil’s Island, the army put Dreyfus through a humiliating ceremony known as a "degradation." In front of assembled troops, scores of journalists, and 20,000 citizens, he was stripped of his military insignia and his sword was broken in half.
Dreyfus’ family, particularly his brother, Mathieu, refused to give up. Mathieu and a helpful army officer began to turn up evidence pointing to Major Esterhazy as the real spy and traitor. In November 1897, a newspaper published a copy of the original spy memo alongside samples of Esterhazy’s writing. The writing on both appeared to be identical.
As the case against Dreyfus began to unravel, the army officers responsible for his prosecution closed ranks. After all, they reasoned, the credibility and honor of the entire French army were at stake. One of the officers, Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry, had perjured himself at Dreyfus’ court martial. He now created false documents incriminating Dreyfus and leaked them to sympathetic newspapers.
A Press War Erupts
Unable to ignore the mounting evidence against Major Esterhazy, the army was forced to court martial him in January 1898. But if Esterhazy were found guilty, this would mean that important army officers had either made a terrible mistake, or even worse, had lied. Unwilling to accept these consequences, the court martial unanimously found Esterhazy—the real spy—innocent.
A few days after Esterhazy was acquitted, one of the country’s most famous novelists, Emile Zola, published a letter to the president of France accusing high-ranking army officers of conspiring to convict an innocent man. Zola’s now famous letter entitled "I accuse" was printed in a pro-Dreyfus newspaper published by Georges Clemenceau (who would become the premier of France during World War I).
The publication of Zola’s letter provoked a violent reaction. Fist fights broke out on the floor of the French national legislature. Riots occurred all over France. Mobs stoned Jewish shops and homes. Men fought duels, including one between Clemenceau and Drumont, the anti-semitic newspaper editor (all six shots missed). Zola himself was convicted of libel, but he fled to England to avoid imprisonment.
Zola’s "I Accuse. . . !" also proved to be the opening shot in a bloodless press war that pitted pro- and anti-Dreyfus journalists, illustrators, and photographers against one another. The pro-Dreyfus press emphasized getting at the truth, reason, and justice for the prisoner of Devil’s Island. The anti-Dreyfus journalists viewed themselves as defenders of the army and the security of the nation. Many of the anti-Dreyfus forces believed that a "Jewish Syndicate," which supposedly wanted to destroy France, was behind the Dreyfus Affair.
The press war erupted when a new style of journalism was beginning to flourish in France (and in other parts of the world including the United States). High-speed presses enabled newspapers to be printed in large numbers. In Paris, nearly 100 newspapers and journals competed for readers. "Dueling newspapers" emerged specifically to attack and counterattack one another over the latest revelations in what now was simply called "The Affair."
Newly invented graphic processes allowed newspapers and other publishers to mass-produce photographs and other types of illustrations. The press war generated numerous posters, cartoons, caricatures, comic strips, picture postcards, board games, and other items that were often little more than pro- or anti-Dreyfus propaganda. One famous poster portrayed Dreyfus as a snake-like monster with a sword labeled, "The Traitor," piercing his body.
The Affair Ends
Through the summer of 1898, most of the press and the public still remained anti-Dreyfus and pro-army. But in August one of the false documents manufactured by Colonel Henry was shown to be a forgery. Colonel Henry confessed and then committed suicide. Hearing about this, the spy Esterhazy panicked and fled to England.
In June the following year, a Paris journalist found and interviewed Esterhazy in London. Esterhazy admitted that it was he who had written the spy memo that had started the whole Dreyfus Affair. But he claimed that he had done this on orders from his superior to prove that Dreyfus was a traitor. On June 3, 1899, the day that Esterhazy’s confession appeared in the Paris papers, the government decided to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for a new court martial. Dreyfus had been in prison for four-and-a-half years.
Dreyfus’ second court martial was probably the world’s first big media event. Hundreds of journalists, photographers, celebrities, and ordinary people from many nations wanted to witness the trial. Reporters covering the proceedings tried, but were not permitted, to take motion pictures (invented a few years earlier). On September 9, 1899, in a 5-2 judgment, Dreyfus was again found guilty. This time he was sentenced to only 10 years in prison due to "extenuating circumstances."
About a week later, amid a storm of international protest over the guilty verdict, the French government decided to pardon Dreyfus. For the next half-dozen years, Dreyfus and his supporters in the press continued to try to prove his innocence. Finally, he was granted another court hearing. In 1906, the highest court in France cleared Dreyfus and reversed his convictions. The army reinstated Dreyfus and, to make amends, made him an officer in the Legion of Honor. He received this high military honor in a ceremony that took place on the same grounds where he had been degraded nearly 12 years before. Dreyfus, who eventually rose to the rank of major, stayed in the army until retirement and even returned to serve his country during World War I. He died on July 11, 1935, and was buried on Bastille Day, the French patriotic holiday.