6
The Polemic Begins
The year 1898 brought anti-Semitic riots, Zola’s first conviction and a secret move by the top brass to ‘perfect’ the case against Dreyfus. General Gonse handed the dossier to Henry and to his friend and fellow officer Captain Louis Cuignet, who weighed it down with a confusing superfluity of documentation and forgeries designed to hamper any serious investigation. By the time they were finished, the file contained around 370 items. Another ‘sub-dossier’ concerned Alfred’s supposed ‘confession’ to Captain Lebrun-Renault at the time of his degradation.1
Amid ministerial resignations, collapsing governments, newspaper invective, mass rallies and the fast-moving revelations of new evidence, Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards engaged in a war of ideas that ran alongside these events. New terminology – ‘intellectuals and ‘anti-intellectuals’ – was deployed to mark the battlelines, as polemical articles set up the moral oppositions that each side endorsed.
The day after Zola published ‘J’accuse’ on 13 January, scholars and academics (a considerable number of whom were scientists) signed a petition published in the same paper denouncing the illegalities of the 1894 court martial and questioning Esterhazy’s role in the Affair.2 The list was organized by Lucien Herr, the librarian of the Ecole normale supérieure, who had approached literary men, agrégés and professors,3 and Emile Duclaux, head of the Institut Pasteur, who had concentrated on scientists. Men from the literary avant-garde and the laboratory thus combined to protest in public,4 and their stand was followed on 15 January by another petition organized by the biologist Edouard Grimaux. On 23 January, Georges Clemenceau wrote an admiring editorial in L’Aurore using the term ‘intellectuals’ to describe men of differing disciplines and professions united by the common idea of defending justice.5
Organizing such a campaign brought surprises and disappointments. One of the most important was the failure of Léon Blum, then in his twenties and a normalien who wrote for the avant-garde Revue blanche, to win over the novelist Maurice Barrès. In his Souvenirs sur l’Affaire (1935), written shortly before he became the socialist premier of the Popular Front government in France, Blum described his admiration for Barrès as the prince de la jeunesse and his conviction that he would join the Dreyfusard campaign.6
33. Léon Blum, 1890
When they met, Barrès asked for time to think about it, but in the end refused to sign. Blum was grieved: ‘We had felt so strongly…that he could not think differently from us, that I could very nearly have promised his signature without consulting him first.’7 The rebuff was momentous precisely because it was so unexpected and seemingly inexplicable.
On 1 February 1898, a week before Zola’s trial opened, Barrès published an article entitled ‘La protestations des intellectuels!’, in which he made it clear just how completely Blum had misjudged. Barrès not only attacked the petition, but also concluded that ‘Jews and Protestants aside, the list called the “list of the intellectuals” consists of a majority of fatheads, and then of foreigners – and finally of [only] a few good Frenchmen.’8 He condemned the signatories as foolish meddlers, and throughout the Affair linked Dreyfusards with ‘disorder, degeneration and treason’.9 He dismissed the ‘intellectuals’ as short-sighted, cerebral men,10 as pontificators ‘without authority’ unable to comprehend that society’s foundations were not necessarily based on ‘individual reason’.11 Those he targeted turned the insult into a badge of honour and adopted the term ‘intellectual’ in the same way that painters had embraced the insult of ‘impressionist’ thirty years before. The word rapidly became shorthand for a new socio-political category that common French parlance has never abandoned.
The polemic created an unexpected cleavage within the French intellectual class. Divergent views on morality broke the dam of courtesy so that ridicule and disdain flowed without restraint. The exchange between Blum and Barrès showed how men who had only recently shared so much could now regard each other with outraged incomprehension. Both sides recognized that a new era of verbal violence had begun, echoing the violence on the streets. But, at the same time, the fiery polemic contrived to hide many shared assumptions and beliefs.
When Blum approached Barrès with such confidence, he was not being naive, but he was out of date. He admired Barrès’s bestselling trilogy of novels, Le Culte du moi (1888–91), which dwelt on a new generation’s yearning to reject the verities of their fathers.12 In these novels he had heralded the courage of ‘the free man’ who was at liberty to reject conventional wisdom and impose his will on the world. Blum thought this meant the author must be an anti-establishment figure who would naturally join a struggle against military authority.
Moreover, Barrès, like revolutionary Blanquists and revanchists from the Ligue de la patrie française, had come from the left wing of the Boulangist movement. Like many other discontented Republicans, Barrès took the view that the regime had done little except to replace the old aristocracy with a set of corrupt arrivistes; he scorned parliamentarianism for producing an unhealthy mix of political immobility and instability. For Barrès, General Boulanger had been a ‘new man’ deserving loyalty; Barrès had run successfully as a deputy for Nancy in 1889 on a platform that blended populist, even socialist, elements with an emerging authoritarian nationalism.
When Boulanger’s bid for power ended in flight and suicide in 1889, Barrès blamed the Jews for stitching up the election, which reconsolidated the power of the Republican political class. In the 1890s his populism inclined him increasingly to a doctrinaire anti-Semitism that targeted Jewish capital.13 By the time of Blum’s approach, Barrès was already moving towards the right, merging his hatred of Jews and foreigners with a distaste for Republican educational and parliamentary institutions. When the Dreyfus Affair erupted, he became central to the polemical battles, sneering at Dreyfus during his degradation, lobbing verbal shells at the ‘intellectuals’ and standing yet again for the Chamber of Deputies in Nancy in May 1898. He lost this battle by only a few hundred votes, but only because he was up against a conservative candidate even more anti-Semitic than he.
Blum might have realized that the novelist was in the middle of an important philosophical and political reorientation had he read Barrès’s most recent work. Les Déracinés (1897) traces the journey of seven young students from Lorraine to Paris, where they come under the spell of their Svengali-like teacher, Bouteiller.14 Bouteiller preached a rigid neo-Kantian, Republican morality that insisted his students must ‘always act in such a way that they may want their behaviour to serve a universal rule’.15
Barrès derided this Kantian ‘must’, or categorical imperative, because it was based on moral duty rather than on personal inclination or national interest.16 He argued that such cerebral abstractions diverted the young men from the vital emotional sources of their Frenchness.17 For Barrès, such feelings lay in France’s regional diversity, and he wanted the nation’s youth to rediscover their roots and then channel their renewed energies into nationalist discipline. His views were made more poignant and urgent because of his love for his native Lorraine, mutilated by defeat in 1871.
If Blum did not understand the changes in Barrès’s position that the novel indicated, others who wrote devotedly to thank the novelist did. The artist Pierre-Georges Jeanniot admired the book for the way it showed how human beings decomposed morally (and physically) when they lost the link to ‘the soil, to continue there the ancestral work’18 Jules Caplain, later a collaborator on the right-wing nationalist news paper Action française, lauded ‘strong personalities’ such as Barrès who understood the importance of the revolt against the tenets of official Republicanism;19 René Jacquet, a man with little education, was inspired to devote himself to Barrès’s interests in Lorraine after reading the volume.20
From the beginning Barrès’s attack on the ‘intellectuals’ seemed powered by unconscious projections, laying at their door the weaknesses that he feared within himself. In the 1880s he had been overwhelmed by the pleasures of poetry, drugs, alcohol and tobacco, as well as by ‘the mortal, decidedly unbearable vagueness of nihilist contemplation’.21 He had been a notorious dandy and was as ‘cerebral’ – if not more so – than the ‘intellectuals’ he now criticized. He believed he had overcome all these addictive inclinations through force of will, but also admitted that he was always torn between the desire to withdraw into introverted self-observation, and the impulse to become a man of action and a political player.22
The Polish émigré Téodor de Wyzewa, the editor of the Revue wagnérienne, sketched Barrès in a long letter, trying to tease apart his contradictions.
This man’s intelligence is prodigious…What I mean is that nobody better than him knows how to exercise his conscience, how to look into himself. He has always felt exactly what was going on in his soul, and felt it with an astonishing range of subtle nuances. And also he has always admitted it immediately, and that made keeping company with him quite difficult: for at one point or another his friends happened to bore him, and he felt it immediately, and immediately he had to announce it. This quick and sophisticated understanding of his own swiftly changing feelings is in him akin to genius.
While Wyzewa praised Barrès’s acute sensitivity, he also noted his misanthropic nature and absorbing self-hatred:
He has no natural liking for painting, for music, for poetry, for novels, indeed for anything to do with art. He does not either love his dogs or his friends, nor his wife (this is strictly between you and me), nor anybody apart from himself; he is absolutely not capable of finding any pleasure in all the above, any more than in things to do with art. And he thinks he likes himself, but really he does not either. He is always ready to extol his great qualities, when he writes or when he speaks. But, deep down, he is full of self-contempt, as indeed are all those who – so I believe – see too clearly into their own soul.
Barrès, Wyzewa suggested, was full of yearning, but the moment he attained the object of his desire he capriciously moved on to other things. He conquered easily, but disdained those who submitted to his will. Wyzewa remarked on Barrès’s capacity to seduce women, a talent all the more remarkable as he was ‘devoid of all sensuality’ and ‘did not like the pleasures of the flesh’. He loved to smoke cigars, but even denied himself this ‘vice’ because of his belief in discipline.23 He had an almost sentimental preoccupation with the poor and weak, but his compassion was not founded on any deep feeling, a lack he concealed behind bourgeois good manners. Barrès, in Wyzewa’s view, was dogmatic because he found it so difficult to believe in anything.
Wyzewa’s sweeping statements may well have been motivated by envy of Barrès’s success, relative wealth and brilliance. None the less, the account, which praises and damns in equal measure, demonstrates the overwhelming impact of this dandy-turned-nationalist ideologue on his generation.
34. This caricature by Joseph Sirat conveys a sense of the effeminate aura that surrounded Maurice Barrès
Barrès’s attack on the intellectuals was first answered by Lucien Herr in the Revue blanche on 15 February. Herr was almost a clichéd version of a Dreyfusard, the only son of an Alsatian schoolmaster on whom his parents had lavished all their attention.24 Although he lost his Catholic faith early on, he retained ‘all his life a lay mysticism’, a powerful idealism that pervaded his socialist thinking.25 He was, moreover, a devotee of Kant and had written fragments of a book entitled ‘Intellectual Progress and Emancipation, or the Progress of Conscience and Liberty’, which summed up his belief that truth and liberty went hand in hand.26 Rather than aspiring to the professoriate, Herr became the librarian of the Ecole normale. From this vantage point he exerted a powerful influence over many of its students, becoming known for his behind-the-scenes activism and playing a key part in converting socialist allies such as Jean Jaurès, Charles Péguy and Léon Blum to the cause.27
More experienced in polemic than the youthful Blum, Herr responded by banning Barrés from the pages of the avant-garde Revue blanche, wondering how he could not be troubled by the possibility of a judicial error. Herr maintained that Barrès’s celebration of patriotisme provincial would soon unleash a tribal war. As a fellow ‘frontiersman’, he deplored Barrès’s reinforcement of ‘the real chauvinist tradition of the frontier province, the hereditary terror of the bands from beyond the Vosges’.28 And he was quite prepared to use ad hominem insult to bolster his argument. Echoing Wyzewa, he remarked that ‘when one is strong neither in nature nor in willpower or reason; when one has neither strong appetites, nor an impulsive and ardent generosity, the wisest thing is to abstain from action.’29
Above all Herr was appalled that Barrès attacked Zola’s Italian origins, rather than analysing the moral issues that the Affair had thrown up.30 In defending Zola, Herr encapsulated the Dreyfusard position that has come down to posterity: ‘What [should] concern you…is not the rhythm and appearance of my conduct, but the conduct itself, and the abstract motives that direct my conduct…it is, finally, the coherence, dignity and ethical value of my conduct.’31 Writing with uncompromising conviction, Herr asserted his Kantian creed, his absolute belief in moral duty and the need to act from the imperatives of conscience.
The language Herr used showed how the struggle was already becoming irretrievably polarized. Everyone knew that Barrès was as much an intellectual as the men he opposed, that he, along with his generation and the generation before, had knocked down old moral and religious idols. Both Zola and Barrès employed scientific notions in their fiction to explore the fragility of morality. The young were attracted to Barrèsian amoralism because it derived an avant-garde position from such ideas; materialist theories of ‘mind’, racial science and evolution implied that notions of free will and moral choice were obsolete. By taunting the intellectuals and creating an artificial divide between them, Barrès launched a ‘culture war’ that obscured the variegated reality of shared intellectual convictions and moral doubts. The famous cartoon of Caran d’Ache, an anti-Dreyfusard caricaturist, summed up the struggle. The intellectual elite of Paris became like a family that had lost all decorum and degenerated into an unseemly mêlée under the strain of the Affair.
35. Caran d’Ache, ‘A Family Dinner’, from Le Figaro, 14 February 1898
For academics, the petition that Barrès condemned was their first collective public act. It was soon to be followed by another: a group of historians with expertise in analysing documents – Pierre André Meyer, Auguste Molinier and Arthur Giry – testified at Zola’s trial to argue that the bordereau was not in Dreyfus’s hand. These men were historians at the Ecole des chartes, the elite training ground that turned out archivists and librarians. Although it had more aristocrats than either the Ecole pratique des hautes études or the Ecole normale (archival work was seen as a gentlemanly pastime), the Chartists were not necessarily politically conservative, nor were their interests narrowly antiquarian.32
Their appearance at the trial reflected a more general reorganization of the French historical profession that had begun under the Second Empire but gained pace after France’s defeat under the leadership of Gabriel Monod. Monod founded the Revue historique in 1875 and was key in introducing German historical methodology, with its emphasis on documents and objective interpretation, into the Ecole pratique des hautes études.33 He was an inspirational figure who created a diverse network within the different centres of historical scholarship in Paris and presented the ‘new’ history at the Société historique,34 which attracted magistrates, diplomats, deputies and businessmen, as well as teachers, students and academics, who met to share views about liberal Republicanism.35
Cosmopolitan in outlook – he was married to the daughter of a Russian social theorist and revolutionary – Monod was also a dedicated international traveller who celebrated the intellectual links between Germany and France; like many other academics, he had studied in Germany. Despite French defeat and his wounded patriotism (his mother was an Alsatian), his Allemands et Français (1872) offered an unembittered account of life for both sides behind the battle lines and reiterated his view that Germany welcomed all thinking people. Just before the Affair began properly he also published Portraits et Souvenirs (1897), which celebrated his love of Wagner and commitment to European art and culture.36
Monod was consequently hardly a neutral figure when he took up the Dreyfusard cause in Le Temps on 1 November 1897. He had already been attacked in June by Charles Maurras, the monarchist and radical right-wing theorist, who denounced him as the head of a foreign, Protestant ‘syndicate’ corrupting Republican institutions for personal gain.37 The polemic between the two lasted for three years. Maurras’s assault was vicious and personal: he argued that the Monod family’s tendency to choose Protestant, Northern European wives indicated its lack of true ‘Frenchness’.38
Maurras also accused him of inaccuracy in his account of the founding institutions of French civilization. Monod had gained academic renown by discrediting the work of Numa Fustel de Coulanges, who had argued that the barbarian (Germanic) invasions had failed to destroy indigenous Roman institutions in Gaul and that France’s Latin inheritance had remained at least as important as later Germanic influence. Monod went into the archives and laid out how thoroughly Germanic Salic law had displaced Roman law in sixth-century Merovingian Gaul.39 As a Provençal regionalist and devotee of latinité, Maurras completely rejected both this interpretation and the ‘cosmopolitan’ (i.e. German) methods Monod had used to reach it. These polemics, which antedated the Affair, meant that the intellectual participants had already stored up plenty of animosity towards each other – dry tinder that the Affair set on fire.40
Monod stood in the line of attack because he had been among the first savants to doubt Dreyfus’s guilt publicly. His conscience had been pricked right after the 1894 court martial when his old pupil Gabriel Hanotaux, now foreign minister, obliquely admitted that he could not guarantee that the verdict had been correct.41 Monod then examined the facsimile of the bordereau and concluded that Dreyfus was most probably innocent.42 He published an open letter suffused with the critical scepticism of his histoire méthodique in Le Temps and Les Débats on 6 November 1897 calling for the case to be reopened on the basis of the uncertain evidence.43 For the right-wing press, the letter immediately identified him as another mastermind of the Dreyfus ‘syndicate’.
When the Chartist historians testified in favour of Zola, however, they showed that strict impartiality was not so easy to achieve. Meyer, for example, told L’Aurore before Zola’s trial that even an ignoramus would be able to see that the writing on the bordereau belonged to Esterhazy, a statement that invited the question of why, in that case, expert skills were needed in court.44 When Labori introduced him, he cited Meyer’s titles at great length,45 and the long technical disquisition that followed reinforced the portrait of academic pedantry that Barrès had mocked in his article just a few days earlier.
Moreover, the experts were not even unanimous. Another Chartist, Emile Coüard, spoke for the military and argued that, although his venerable colleagues might be experts on medieval manuscripts, such knowledge did not equip them to interpret nineteenth-century handwriting. As someone who regularly intervened in current legal proceedings, he insisted that his expertise trumped Meyer’s narrow, academic credentials. Meyer’s colleague Auguste Molinier then countered by pointing to the applicability of a universal critical method: knowledge of thousands of documents from different eras did indeed qualify someone to judge the bordereau.46
Because of the adversarial process used in libel cases, this intervention was followed by another challenge, this time from Robert Lasteyrie, a fellow professor, member of the elite Institut de France and also a deputy. He accused Meyer and Molinier of ‘bad method’ by commenting on a document ‘that they only know from a crude facsimile’. He added, ‘I can scarcely understand how they could have forgotten to such an extent all the critical traditions honoured at the Ecole des chartes.’47 In fact, as Monod remarked in a letter to Gaston Paris, another medievalist, the point was specious, as facsimiles were frequently ‘used by Chartists as if they were identical to originals’.48 He was also annoyed that Lasteyrie had tried to score a cheap point, as Meyer and Molinier had used a photograph only because the army would not let them see the original. They were further horrified when Lasteyrie published a counter ‘manifesto of the Chartists’ in L’Eclair on 22 March 1898 with fifty-five signatories, all of whom dissociated themselves from the colleagues who had defended Zola.
The foray of the Dreyfusard historians into the public forum of the courtroom was anything but a resounding success. In fact, their presence only heightened the debate over the role of ‘intellectuals’ in French society and prompted another polemicist, Ferdinand Brunetière, to enter the fray. Brunetière was the editor of the highbrow Revue des Deux Mondes and published his provocative ‘After the Trial’ to keep the conflict going.49 Brunetière was already controversial. An audience had applauded his 1893 lectures on nineteenth-century lyric poetry,50 but booed him a year later for his praise of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the great seventeenth-century rhetorician who embodied French literary classicism.51 Brunetière was difficult to classify, and he enjoyed provoking with unexpected views.
36. Ferdinand Brunetière
In ‘After the Trial’, Brunetière queried the implied link between specific technical expertise and the authority to pronounce on moral questions; he then derided the Dreyfusard historians as pedants whose intervention diverted attention away from deeper moral truths. He also attacked Emile Duclaux, the head of the Institut Pasteur, who had helped Herr assemble the signatures of scientists for the petition. Duclaux was different from the many scientist-politicians – men such as Georges Clemenceau, for example – who had taken their positivist outlook into politics.52 Scheurer-Kestner had consulted him precisely because the microbiologist’s position as Pasteur’s successor insulated him from controversy.53 With his scientific brilliance and rhetorical gifts, he epitomized the perfect savant.54 In early January 1898 he argued that Dreyfus had been convicted on a series of suppositions and coincidences that no true scientist would ever accept, confident that his opinion would settle the matter.55
Brunetière, however, was far from persuaded; instead he insisted that science had hubristic pretensions and was neither morally absolute nor necessarily progressive. In ‘After the Trial’ he reminded his readers that ‘in every scientific work’ there was something ‘precarious’ and ‘contingent’.56 Citing Duclaux’s admission that science was in a state of constant revision,57 Brunetière pointed out that even Duclaux’s pathbreaking microbiological work might well be obsolete in a decade. How could such an uncertain and impermanent a discipline have anything useful to say about the verdict of the court martial?58
The attack showed once again how the Affair brought to the boil simmering – and long-standing – social and intellectual resentments. Although his erudition was vast and his influence considerable – he had been elected to the Académie française in 1893 – Brunetière possessed no university qualifications. He had made his name outside the meritocratic professional structure that supported the likes of Monod and Duclaux. Unlike many of the people he attacked, he failed to get into the Ecole normale, and had become a mere instructor in literature for science students at the famous Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Many others shared his distaste for the university establishment, and he was bombarded with letters of congratulations for attacking it in ‘After the Trial’. These admirers focused on the Dreyfusards’ perceived elitism and their tendency to distance themselves from the lives of ordinary citizens. The constitutional jurist and historian Maurice Deslandres, for example, condemned the ‘proud spirits who want to admit neither discipline nor authority’.59 A certain Robert Duval complained that the intellectuals ‘served only as reserve officers’, unwilling to assume the ‘same duties as the simple worker or the modest peasant!’60 A seminary student said Brunetière’s polemics ‘circulated here from cell to cell’, acting as a kind of clandestine manifesto to encourage intelligent Catholics in their struggle against Republican cultural hegemony.61
Brunetière thus articulated the grievances of those who disliked clever university men instructing them on anything, above all on questions of morality. He also focused on the arrivistes who, in his view, dominated the Republic.
Freemasons, Protestants and Jews, who all had the great advantage of not being tied by any commitment to the past, thus rushed in a crowd through the door that was opened to them: they entered and seized politics, administration and education; they reign over all those and, if we wanted to be sincere…anti-Semitism is but a name to disguise the strong desire to dispossess them.62
The anxiety in these remarks resembled the fears that had greeted Dreyfus and the other military stagiaires when they joined the General Staff. The old guard had regarded them as inexperienced young upstarts ‘stealing’ the positions of others. In Brunetière’s mind, Jews, Freemasons and Protestants were usurpers of cultural production and social power. Their ‘method’ and ‘scientific’ spirit’63 were nothing more than the ‘pretentions of individualism’, a characteristic Dreyfus manifested when he went against military custom and tradition by attaining promotion through intellectual attainment rather than through feats of arms. Brunetière believed that the existence of an elite, whether in the army, in the administration or in the educational system, weakened democracy. The rise of such men to power and influence, he argued, came from the excessive elevation of meritocracy as the only source of social eminence.64 He mockingly concluded that he did not see what ‘entitles a professor of Tibetan to govern his equals, nor what rights to obedience and respect from others are conferred by a knowledge of the properties of quinine or of cinchonine’.65 Brunetière expressed a sense of invasion and a desire to take back what he saw as rightfully his. He was a democrat insofar as he wanted to popularize the taste for literature, but he believed that he, rather than graduates of the Ecole normale, should decide what literature was.
Charles Benoist, a constitutional historian and a Catholic, agreed with Brunetière’s dislike of the arrivistes when he vented his spleen against Protestant educators, politicians and journalists who had made their careers as leading Republicans (and later as important Dreyfusards).66 Several on Benoist’s ‘blacklist’ had chosen exile in Geneva to escape Napoleon III, finding in Calvin’s city a refuge where they could develop their new evangelical creed: pedagogical science.67 When they returned after the Empire collapsed, they set up an educational system that was intensely hierarchical, with its elite trained at the Ecoles normales and then sent out as cultural soldiers to civilize and Republicanize France’s schools and lycées. Brunetière and other conservative intellectuals believed that the Protestant arrivistes had perverted the study of history and literature for their own ends;68 for Catholics and the right, the call for critical thought and inquiry was code for state coercion, an attempt to marginalize traditionalists who wanted to preserve their own role in shaping the nation’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
Brunetière’s assault on the ‘intellectuals’ also touched on literary debate itself. He owed his early notoriety to his hostility to Zola, which he expressed in Le Roman naturaliste (1883). Brunetière was a literary formalist who detested what he saw as Zola’s utter lack of beauty or idealism, his tendency to sacrifice ‘form to substance, design to colour and sentiment to sensation’.69 He also disdained Zola’s scientism as intellectual pretentiousness. How, Brunetière asked, could Zola maintain he was conducting an experiment, when he was engaged in nothing more than his own imaginative constructions? The repetitive emphasis on the relationship between milieu and heredity was boring, reductive and, above all, distasteful.70 Brunetière believed that Zola lacked subtlety and revelled in vileness, and he criticized the novelist for ignoring people’s ordinary human impulses, and concentrating instead on pathological extremes and violence. For Brunetière, Zola’s intervention in the Affair was as base as his fiction, an exhibitionist attempt to sully the army and degrade the nation.
The ferocity of the polemic should not blind us to what the novelist and critic shared, however. Although always divided by aesthetic differences, they had both been attracted to the defining intellectual trends of the second half of the nineteenth century. Brunetière’s L’Evolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature (1890) owed as much to evolutionary theory as did Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. Zola’s work had focused on the adventures of his fictional family, and the impact of heredity in shaping their degenerative tendencies and native talents. Brunetière, in his public discourses, showed his own susceptibility to evolutionary metaphors, his intention to trace the emergence and affiliation of literary genres, which mutated in much the same way as plants and animals.71
In the series Discours de combat, which he wrote just before and during the Affair, Brunetière set out the programme of cultural nationalism and anti-individualism that attracted many to the anti-Dreyfusard cause. For him, the nation was constituted by history and language.72 There was an essential esprit gaulois that could be marshalled through literature, and he wanted the French to experience ‘a tragedy of Racine, a sermon of Bossuet, a comedy of Molière, a story of Voltaire’73 in the way the English experienced Shakespeare.74 In March 1899 he characterized Dreyfusard humanitarianism with its vision of fraternity as the true enemy, and stressed instead the virtues of military prowess. This – not ‘reason’ or the ‘Rights of Man’ – sustained France, and the sight of military officers in blue uniform, with kepi and moustache, should, he argued, touch the soul. Whereas in Britain and elsewhere in Europe societies were unified by links to the Old Regime of monarchy and Church, the French had abolished or weakened these institutions and so had to rely on the nation in arms to embody their patriotism. Unlike many right-wing thinkers, Brunetière did not reject the Revolution, but, like Barrès, accepted those elements of France’s past that supported his cultural project. He also showed his growing distrust of critical thought more generally, praising the military narrowness and rigour that sought to imprison the intellectuals’ ‘liberty of thought’ within strict limits.75
His vision of national identity was unthinkable without an equal commitment to Catholicism. Over the years Brunetière had abandoned his passion for scientific concepts, and in 1895 he publicly attacked the ‘bankruptcy of science’ in a famous article in his review.76 This assault came at the same time that he embraced the faith in Rome, a public act that rocked the close-knit intellectual world of Paris.77 His return to Catholicism exemplified a generational change in elitist sensibility;78 while Republican old-timers such as Scheurer-Kestner recalled their oppression at the hands of the Church and Empire with something approaching nostalgia, younger right-wing intellectuals went back to Catholicism to resist the pressures of secularization.79
Religion thereafter became the final component of his traditionalism. France was great only when it propagated the superiority of Catholicism: ‘Protestantism, England, Orthodoxy, Russia’ and ‘Catholicism, France’.80 Noting that anticlerical governments had encouraged missionary work in France’s colonies, he concluded that even Republicans sensed at some level that French civilization was incomprehensible without its religious heritage.81 For him, the French / Catholic connection was indissoluble, and, while many Protestants would also insist their roots were in French soil, Brunetière disagreed.82 He did not deny Protestants or Jews their right to practise their religion, but he did reject any association of their traditions with the French national ‘soul’.83
Brunetière’s rejection of reason and his embrace of a populist militarism and traditionalism were common enough within the anti-Dreyfusard coalition. And yet he was more complex than first impressions suggest. In fact, if his attacks wounded it was because Brunetière had been widely seen as a liberal who held views in common with his opponents; he had, for example, roundly denounced Drumont’s La France juive in 1886 and Reinach had viewed him as an ally.84 Former associates could not understand how he could prefer to belittle the Chartists rather than accept the need to re-examine the evidence against Dreyfus.
Brunetière’s stance was all the more striking because, unlike many combatants on both sides, he was not motivated by racial theory. In ‘After the Trial’ he criticized all arrivistes equally – Masons, Protestants and Jews. His polemic also targeted Ernest Renan, author of the best selling Vie de Jésus (1863). In Renan’s account, Jesus was no longer the son of God but a charismatic teacher whose life and work inspired the world. As expected, the now-Catholic Brunetière condemned the historicized account of Christ’s life in ancient Judaea as a dangerous milestone in the process of secularization.85 But he also condemned it for stereotyping Semites as incomplete, dogmatic and inferior to the physically robust and morally superior Aryans of Europe.86 Equally, he disliked Renan’s many remarks on the differences between Negroes, Asians and Caucasians, which he regarded as dangerous scientific racism.87
Scientific race theory had a long pedigree in France. It enjoyed currency despite the universalist values of the French Revolution and perhaps even because of them: egalitarian, Republican political doctrines often coexisted with an equally strong perception of the innate and ineradicable differences between classes, sexes and racial groups. With the end of the Old Order in Europe, scientists and men of letters deployed the authority of Nature to explain what they saw as the obvious differences in intellectual and moral attributes and to affirm hierarchies of race based on science.
Brunetière’s blanket rejection demonstrated that attitudes to race on their own were insufficient when trying to anticipate whether an individual would become a Dreyfusard. Many Republicans, particularly between 1850 and 1880, had subscribed to racial science, excited by the power of such ideas to challenge Christian belief in the immateriality of the soul. It allowed anticlerical polygenists (those who believed that each race represented a separate species) to reject the biblical view of a common Adamic ancestry and to argue instead that racial intermixing produced sterility.88 Even theories positing a common human origin were often equally pessimistic; they sometimes regarded the existence of ‘inferior’ races as proof of the degeneration of human stock all over the world. Such ideas were appropriated by men like Drumont and blended with religious prejudice to flesh out his anti-Semitism,89 concluding that Jewish avarice and disloyalty arose from a pathological biological substratum.
The last decade of the century brought great debate about the relationship between such ideas and moral philosophy, but no consensus.90 During the Affair the journalist Henry Dagan conducted an inquiry into anti-Semitism that revealed the Dreyfusards took a range of positions on racial theory. The anthropologist Charles Letourneau, for example, condemned both Brunetière and the excesses of racial science, but then asserted that Jewish ‘tribalism’ had been ‘fixed in the blood’ by Christian persecution. Letourneau’s remarks indicated a tendency to retain racialist reasoning within a neo-Larmackian perspective.91
Only a few others had Brunetière’s clarity on the subject. Célestin Bouglé, Durkheim’s disciple, argued that even if important racial differences existed, they should not serve as the basis of Republican democracy,92 and during the Affair wrote a seminal article condemning racial science.93 Brunetière’s opinions cut across both sides of the political divide, so that in 1900, as the passions of the Affair were fading, Bouglé contacted him to propose an alliance to combat ‘the claims of anthropo-sociology’.94 Bouglé acknowledged their differences, but he still regarded Brunetière as a natural colleague in this area.95
Nothing illustrates the difficulty of classifying Brunetière as much as his friendship with Flore Singer, a Jewess he had known for more than a decade. They first came into contact when she wrote to thank him for his hostile 1886 critique of Drumont’s La France juive, and he, in turn, helped her to establish her salon. She was a remarkable figure, a cousin and once the fiancée of Alphonse Ratisbonne, who converted to Catholicism in 1842 after seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary in Rome. This experience was a deep embarrassment to his Jewish Alsatian family, especially when he and his brother Théodor set up Notre-Dame de Sion, an order dedicated to the conversion of the Jews.96
Flore castigated Brunetière when he became an anti-Dreyfusard and was disappointed by his attack on the intellectuals, arguing that, whatever the subtleties of his argument, the overall effect would be to bolster anti-Semitism:
That article astonished me profoundly and truly grieved me: you know, dear friend, that birds when they fly through the air go against the wind: I would have thought that you, with your powerful wings, would be able to brave the storm and stand firm against the nasty wind that blows from a multi-voiced press and carries a name that sounds scientific, but is only stupid and barbaric: Anti-Semitism!97
She, in contrast, had braved the wind by remaining Jewish, even though conversion would have brought many benefits, and she reminded Brunetière of the ‘grandeur’ of the Jewish refusal to succumb to Christian blandishments.98 She tried to remain friends even after the Affair, when Brunetière was marginalized in academia by triumphant Dreyfusards.
Brunetière tried to mould the anti-Dreyfusard position to his liking, but ultimately his efforts left him isolated from both camps. And, despite his stand against scientific racism, Flore was right: his polemics did contribute to the anti-Semitism that he claimed to disavow. When Gabriel Monod attempted a reconciliation after the Affair he cannily described Brunetière as ‘the most important representative of authoritarian agnostic Catholicism’.99 A verbose label, but it summed up how difficult Brunetière was to categorize. One correspondent asked him how he could be a ‘freethinker and a sceptic’ who also defended Catholicism.100 In embracing the Church, he claimed to accept its precepts unquestioningly, but he was never able to divest himself of the ‘critical spirit’ that he attacked so vehemently in the Dreyfusards.