The Dreyfus Affair

8 Oct, 2009 940 History of Europe

the Dreyfus Affair, the 1890s scandal which divided opinion in France for a generation.In 1894, a high-flying Jewish staff officer in the French Army, one Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of spying for the Prussians. He was publicly humiliated: before a large Paris crowd, he was stripped of his badges of rank and his sword was ceremonially broken. Some of those watching shouted ‘Down with Judas!’ Then he was dispatched to Devil’s Island. But when it emerged that Dreyfus was innocent, a scandal erupted which engulfed the Army, the Church and French society as a whole, exposing deep political rifts, and the nation’s endemic anti-Semitism. It pitted Catholics against Republicans, provoked fighting in the streets, and led to the prosecution of the novelist Emile Zola, after his famous J’Accuse polemic against those protecting the real spy and so prolonging Dreyfus’s suffering. The Affair became so divisive that it posed a serious threat to the French Republic itself. Finally, in 1905, it prompted the separation of Church and State. The scandal and the anti-Semitism at the heart of it cast a very long shadow. In 1945, when the ultra-nationalist one-time ‘anti-Dreyfusard’ Charles Maurras was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, he reacted by declaring that his punishment was Dreyfus’s revenge.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Robert Gildea 5 episodes
    Professor of Modern History at Oxford University
  • Ruth Harris No other episodes
    Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University
  • Robert Tombs No other episodes
    Professor of French History at Cambridge University

Related episodes

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

Programme ID: b00n1l95

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n1l95

Auto-category: 944.081 (History of France—Third Republic, 1870-1940)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. In 1894 a Jewish staff officer in the French army was convicted of spying.