New Dreyfus Book Out

From a review by Adam Gopnik on “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” by Louis Begley:

...in the fall of 1894, Dreyfus became the accidental victim of a stupid plot, which was not, in its origins, anti-Semitic. The French Section de Statistique—the Army’s intelligence service—had an agent within the German Embassy: a cleaning woman who every night emptied the wastebaskets of the military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Maximilien von Schwarzkoppen, and brought the torn-up papers to her government. From the scraps, the spies reassembled a shocking memorandum, the bordereau, in which a French officer offered to sell military secrets. The nature of the secrets to be sold seemed to point to an artillery officer, and suspicion fell on Dreyfus, not least because he made regular visits to his family in Mulhouse, then still in German hands. With the normal prejudice of the secret police in favor of their own suspicions, the Statistique had Dreyfus arrested. As always, pseudo-science came to the aid of paranoia: the Statistique called on a “graphologist” for an opinion, and he testified that the lack of resemblance between Dreyfus’s writing and that of the bordereau was proof of a “self-forgery,” and prepared a fantastically detailed diagram to demonstrate that this was so.

The bordereau had actually been written by another officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy—one of those subjects in the history of espionage who are so obviously guilty that only the geniuses of counter-intelligence could look past them. Like Aldrich Ames and Guy Burgess, Esterhazy had done everything short of wearing a nametag on his shirtfront reading “Spy.” Staggered by gambling debts, he was the debauched son of an illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate claimant to the Hungarian royal line, and had written to a mistress at length about his hatred of the French Army. Just as no one in the C.I.A. asked why Ames had the money for a sports car, no one in the Statistique seemed inclined to wonder if a man notorious throughout the Army for being a drunk in perpetual debt might be a likelier candidate to have sold secrets than a Jewish family man.

Then black comedy was piled on stupidity. It turned out that Schwarzkoppen, the German military attaché, had begun an erotic affair with Major Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché—it was not called the gay nineties for nothing—and that they wrote to each other in an allusive and sinister-sounding private code. One of their letters, stolen from a second source, included a reference to someone whom Schwarzkoppen called “this scoundrel of a D.,” and who had offered “plans of Nice”—though the whole thing may have been a bantering reference to another lover. (The letter ends, to give a taste of the whole, “Don’t exhaust yourself with too much buggery.”)

Despite its obviously louche tone, this letter was submitted to the judges in a “secret dossier,” which Dreyfus and his lawyers were not allowed to know about, let alone see. (One of the smaller ironies of the affair is that it involves the collision of two subcultures, ambiguous Jewish identity and the obliquities of gay “coding,” that did so much to make the modernist sensibility.) But on that evidence—a handwriting identification admitted to be based on an absence of resemblance, and a single initial in a playful lover’s note—Dreyfus was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

If anti-Semitism didn’t start the Dreyfus affair, it fuelled it.