John Weightman, reviewingJean-Denis Bredin's monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that 'it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abcess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the "undeclared civil war" which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.' It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be 'a good thing' for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the unparalleled expression of group hatreds, brought about suicides, the ruination of careers and the fall of governments, and which produced anti-semitic riots without number in which Jews were robbed, vilified and killed. But it is worth pausing over Weightman's judgment, for it encapsulates a marvellously Anglo-Saxon misunderstanding not only of the Dreyfus Affair but of the ways in which social cleavages operate and opinion is formed and crystallised.

LRB 23 April 1987 | PDF Download