![]() In fact, Dreyfus’s own first impulse was to refuse the offer – ‘the right of the innocent man,’ he wrote, ‘is not clemency but justice’ – but he was persuaded he would be better able to fight for his rehabilitation if he was out of prison. And for many of Dreyfus’s supporters the pardon itself was a betrayal, a ‘dishonour’, some said. For those alarmed by the army’s illegalities, the amnesty was a scandal – ‘l’amnistie scélérate’ was one lurid name for it, ‘the scoundrel settlement’. For those convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt, his acceptance of the pardon was a confession. The celebrated affair was over.Įxcept that it wasn’t. A mollifying general spoke of closing the doors of forgetfulness on the whole show. A year later an amnesty was declared that let the conspirators off completely. The verdict was rendered on 9 September 1899 and ten days later Dreyfus was formally pardoned for what he had not done. The judges couldn’t actually say this without finding the secret service, Dreyfus’s superior officers and the former minister of war incompetent or much worse, and they weren’t going to do that. He was found guilty again, but ‘with attenuating circumstances’, the chief of which was the fact that he wasn’t guilty. These sinister fantasies paraded and accepted as realities reached their anti-logical climax in 1899, when, in a climate of growing belief in Dreyfus’s innocence and calls even from those convinced of his guilt for a clarification of the legal case, the unfortunate man was brought back from Devil’s Island for a new trial. What ‘many people know’, as Duclert puts it, is merely what everybody is supposed to think and when Oriol calls Dreyfus ‘the ideal traitor’ he is ironically adopting the anti-Semite’s point of view: ‘As a Jew, Dreyfus was … the perfect guilty party.’ ![]() One of the chief players in the case, Major Du Paty de Clam, whom Thomas describes as ‘half-accomplice and half-dupe of his partners’, reversed this argument by writing of ‘very real indications arising from the traffic in false documents’. Vincent Duclert in L’Affaire Dreyfus (2006) writes of a ‘true document’ that is a ‘false proof’, and also cites the ‘original’ version of a forgery. ![]() Language itself begins to wobble under the pressure of these activities. Oriol asks whether we can ‘still talk, as one often does concerning this affair, of a “judicial error”? It really is a question of a machination.’ Chapter titles in his Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus (2014) include: ‘How one fabricates a guilty man’, ‘How one convicts an innocent man’. Like Thomas, Philippe Oriol insists on the manufactured nature of the supposed truths of this history. ![]() The French secret service, the marvellously named Statistical Section, thought it had found a spy in Dreyfus, and was not going to let a mere lack of evidence, or even probability, get in the way. We just have to immerse ourselves in what Thomas calls a ‘naive form’ of the modern spy story, full of ‘rigorous compartmentalisation, manipulation, sting operations, falsification of documents, planting of delayed-action bombs in the form of carefully elaborated “legends”’. The story is complicated but not unintelligible. Why would a French military tribunal find a guilty man innocent? What was the point of this ‘ritual theatre’, as Frederick Brown calls it in For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (2010)? The questions immediately call up another: why would an 1894 tribunal have found an innocent man guilty of the same crime? Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. The historian Marcel Thomas uses it in his remarkable book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. I didn’t find it in yesterday’s newspaper, though. T he event was ‘foreseeable and scandalous’, a wonderful combination in its way, and we might apply the phrase to many incidents in our world.
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