Let’s begin with the Dreyfus Affair, with the entrance of the intellectual into modern politics, on a question of what you call smaller truth: whether or not a man betrayed his country. A French army officer of Jewish origins was falsely accused of treason, and defended by a coalition of French intellectuals. This moment, January 1898 in Paris when the novelist Émile Zola published his famous letter “J’accuse,” is seen as the beginning of the history of the political intellectual.
