The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two in The Year of Reading Proust

Jun 01, 2013 Brian rated it really liked it

A decade ago I attempted a tandem read of Proust's In Search of Lost Time with a reading friend; he made it through all of the books, I hit the wall in Guermantes Way and fell out. My issues began with the Dreyfus Affair - I just had no idea what the fuss was about, and in the days before Wikipedia, any of the online resources about the Affair were thin, at best. Not able to wrap my mind around the Affair, I soon lost my way amongst Proust's description of Parisian society and ultimately slogged ...more

25 likes · Like · see review

May 11, 2012 Mike Clinton rated it really liked it

I wrote a review of this book for the journal The History Teacher, which should appear in an issue or two. Here are parts of that review:

For over a century, the ordeal endured by Captain Alfred Dreyfus has fascinated, appalled, and inspired generations well beyond the borders of France, where the events of “the Dreyfus Affair” transpired. So much has been written about the Affair that a reader might reasonably ask what any new book has to contribute to our knowledge of it. Piers Paul Read, an ac I wrote a review of this book for the journal The History Teacher, which should appear in an issue or two. Here are parts of that review:

For over a century, the ordeal endured by Captain Alfred Dreyfus has fascinated, appalled, and inspired generations well beyond the borders of France, where the events of “the Dreyfus Affair” transpired. So much has been written about the Affair that a reader might reasonably ask what any new book has to contribute to our knowledge of it. Piers Paul Read, an accomplished novelist and non-fiction author, offers an engaging account that conveys the drama and suspense of the Affair, making it a commendable choice for the general reader, although students and scholars will find no new insights or substantial scholarship to draw their attention.

Read traces the origins of the Dreyfus Affair back to the French Revolution, which inaugurated the long struggle between the values of a secular republic and those of traditional French institutions. After an uneasy consensus created the Third Republic, the army became one of the last bastions of the forces of tradition, wedding aristocracy and Catholicism to the officer corps. It was this segment of French society that felt itself under siege by the Dreyfusards during the Affair. Read, who is forthright in the preface about the difficulties the Affair poses for his own identity as a Catholic (p.4), depicts the Dreyfusards’ post-Affair rise to political power as a destructive period for the Catholic Church as an institution in France. Anti-clerical policies sought to neutralize the influence of the Catholic Church in education and other areas of civil life and subvert the reactionary, anti-republican, and anti-Semitic sensibilities that guided the behavior of so many Catholics and their leaders – lay and clerical – during the Affair. Read portrays the Radicals’ campaign as a vindictive over-reaction that only deepened rather than healed the cultural scars that afflicted France. While one might not feel as much sympathy as Read does for the plight of French Catholicism during this era, he does convincingly advance the point that the dynamics in the Affair were more complex than generally characterized.

Read synthesizes and comments on a considerable array of secondary works on the Affair – some of it in French, most in English – but relies upon hardly any primary sources. His personal perspective as a Catholic seeking to come to terms with this episode of history and his talents as a writer are his main contributions to the literature on the Dreyfus Affair. ...more

Like · see review