“The Dreyfus Affair” [by David Lehman]

Louis Begley writes well and is a good guide to one of modern history's great tragic causes celebres, the court-martial of French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus [left] on trumped-up charges of treason in 1894. The evidence was fabricated, the trial closed to the public, and Dreyfus was convicted and imprisoned on Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana. His real crime was that he was a Jew and France was embracing anti-Semitism with the lust of a pimp eyeing Catherine Deneuve. Emile Zola (J'Accuse] and others rose to Dreyfus's  defense. Nevertheless, Dreyfus suffered five years of solitary confinement before the verdict was overturned. In 1906 the French high court exonerated Dreyfus. Despite his mistreatment by the French army, the assassination of his character, and the degradation and suffering he endured in prison, Dreyfus wanted nothing more than to return to active military service. He served at the front in World War I with an artillery command close to Verdun, was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and was decorated with the Legion d'honneur.

Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters is published as part of a "why it matters" series by Yale University Press. it is a cogent little book, certainly worth reading, though my disquietude was awakened by the jacket copy that asked whether the Dreyfus case was "merely another illustration of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism." That merely bothered me, and I note that the preface of this brief book, the last eighteen pages of its opening chapter, and its coda strongly imply that the lesson of the affair, the reason it matters to us today, is that it warns us against such "crimes and abuses" committed against "some Guantanamo detainees" in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001. 

Is that really what makes Dreyfus relevant to us here, now? Or isn't the resurgence of a virulent  anti-Semitism -- the demonizing of the Jews and of Israel (Islamic dictatorships and religious authorities make no distinction between them); the chorus of voices calling for the annihilation of Israel; the campaigns of hatred and violence targeting Jews; the re-surfacing of the vicious Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the murders; the beheading of an American journalist after forcing him to tell the camera that he is a Jew and that his mother was a Jew, as if that were a capital offense; -- isn't all that reason enough to recall the Dreyfus Affair in its unhappy detail? Do you mean to tell me that this infamous episode in modern history, this outrageous injustice, is not finally about the Jews and those who would vilify them but about something else entirely, the depredations of the Bush Administration? I fear that this sort of reasoning may itself be evidence of the phenomenon that it evades.

BTW, this is the publisher that has withdrawn, from a book just weeks away from publication, the Danish newspaper cartoons that offended Islamic bigots in 2005. The book, by a Brandeis professor named Jytte Klausen, is called The Cartoons That Shook the World. Reproduction of the illustrations would seem to be an inevitable and indispensable part of any study of them. To withdraw the pictures is a craven act of self-censorship founded on no principle nobler than the adage to let sleeping dogs lie, especially when they are killers. Let the pictures be published. If enough people make enough of a fuss, maybe Yale University Press will buckle to the pressure. They seem to be good at that.

-- DL 

from the archive; first posted on September 18, 2009 at 07:12 PM

Comments

[Michael C. Rush]

Appalling behavior on the part of Yale University Press.

[David Schloss]

Thanks, David, for calling out Yale on this. And the misdirection of Guantanamo prisoners equated with Dreyfus, Pearl, et al.

[Mindy Aloff]

Just checking, as someone who hasn't seen this book: You call out its preface, some of its opening chapter, and its coda for what is, apparently, a specious analogy between the French army's treatment of Dreyfus and the Bush Administration's treatment of the prisoners at Gitmo. Are you critiquing the author, Louis Begley, and using Yale UP as a stand-in for him, or are you critiquing both Begley for writing the book that way and the press for publishing it? If the latter is the case, David, what would you do if you were running the press, had assigned the book to Begley (whose background is appropriate to the topic), and then were faced with the manuscript as he turned it in? Would you refuse to publish it, ask him to change it, or publish it as it was? Also, university press books are peer-reviewed. What happens if an authority serving as peer reviewer made an impassioned case for including the analogy above? I don't have a right answer; I'm perplexed myself as to the ethics of the sitch and should welcome your thoughts.

[David Lehman]

Mindy, in my piece (which we originally posted in September 2009), I praised Louis Begley, who "writes well and is a good guide to one of modern history's great tragic causes celebres, the court-martial of French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus." I do not fault Yale UP for publishing this "cogent little book." I fault the author for the politically orthodox but silly note that marred the preface. The striving for relevance, which distorts the truth, is reflected in the jacket copy, i.e., as part of a sales pitch. I fault Yale UP for deleting the cartoons from a different book the press published, "The Cartoons That Shook the World" by Jytte Klausen. Omitting the cartoons gave the lie to the title of the book.
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[Leah Martinson]

Who at Yale UP made the craven decision to erxclude the cartoons? It is rumored that Fareer Zakaria was on the board and voted in favor of censorship.