7

Dreyfusard Contradictions

Anti-Dreyfusards were not the only ones to hold inconsistent views; the Affair revealed ambiguity and ambivalence on both sides, even though opponents kept on insisting that the contest was clear-cut. Emile Durkheim, for example, justified his defence of Dreyfus on the grounds of rationality, but in his professional life he pondered how to advance secular morality by exploiting the quasi-religious authority of the schoolmaster. The physiologist Charles Richet denounced the susceptibility of the masses to the ‘mental suggestion’ that Dreyfus was guilty, but he conducted flamboyant experiments on mediums who fed his need to believe in the spirit world. Joseph Reinach’s commitment to the supremacy of hard facts led him to amass the best documentary evidence on the military conspiracy, but he could not stop himself from enhancing the ‘poetry’ of the drama he set out to record.

When Brunetière criticized the penetration of Protestant and Jewish arrivistes into the educational establishment, he had in mind men such as Durkheim, the son of an Alsatian rabbi and an atheist, who began his career in the 1880s training primary schoolteachers at the University of Bordeaux.¹ Although he disliked the work, Durkheim, as Brunetière suspected, saw it as a necessary part of his wider enterprise of imposing a rational Republican morality shorn of Christian symbolism and myth.² He was a redoubtable foe because he was so adept at updating the neo-Kantianism that Barrès had mocked in Les Déracinés. He was also immensely influential: his ideas were enthusiastically taken up in the nation’s écoles normales that educated France’s teaching elite.³

While Brunetière praised literature, military glory and religion as the connective tissues of society, and Barrès celebrated the links between the living and the dead, Durkheim explored how social beliefs shaped individuals and societies.⁴ He developed the notion of a ‘collective consciousness’, an entity that persisted after any one individual’s lifetime, and later extended this notion into the idea of ‘collective representations’ of knowledge, religion and morality, the areas of belief that most interested him.⁵ Perhaps more than any other fin de siècle thinker, Durkheim argued for a shift in emphasis from individual psychology to collective sociology. In his 1897 treatise Suicide, for example, he asserted that self-murder should be interpreted as a sociological phenomenon rather than as a manifestation of individual mental pathology.⁶

Durkheim generally distanced himself from contemporary political issues, even if he acknowledged that his educational work had a strong political dimension. His intervention in the Affair was therefore all the more remarkable, as it meant relinquishing his professorial hauteur. He became an active member of the Bordeaux branch of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, the organization founded during the Affair to campaign for Dreyfus’s release and to defend the rights of oppressed men and women everywhere. ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, his 1898 response to Brunetière, was both an eloquent defence of the Dreyfusard cause and the most important statement of his liberal views. From the moment of its publication, its audience recognized that it was a kind of intellectual manifesto, and even today it is regularly included in collections of his most important writings.

The work argued that Brunetière was wrong to see an irredeemable opposition between individualism and the enforcement of social rules, and provided ‘a sociological account of “individualism” as a set of operative ideals, moral beliefs and practices, indeed as a religion in which the human person becomes a sacred object’.⁷ Durkheim credited the Enlightenment with providing the basis for the moral foundations of a Republican society, and he saw these ideas and values not as disembodied imperatives but as a sacred social inheritance that needed to be defended.⁸ In his view the court martial of Alfred Dreyfus had violated these essential values.

Without the Rights of Man, Durkheim argued, ‘all our moral organization’ would collapse, and he rebuked Brunetière for caricaturing individualism as crass utilitarianism. In contrast, he maintained that, rather than sanctioning selfishness or moral calculation, individualism reinvigorated ethical norms by creating a ‘mystique’ of sympathy infused by ‘religious feeling’.⁹ The reaction of the ‘intellectuals’ to Dreyfus’s unjust conviction was an appropriate emotional response to a transgression that was offensive to both individual and society, for not even raison d’état could justify the violation of another’s rights. Such an event should properly inspire a ‘sentiment in all points analogous to the horror felt by a believer who sees his idol profaned’.¹⁰

Unlike some ‘intellectuals’, Durkheim allowed only a limited place for expertise, but he insisted that there was nothing wrong with ‘respect for authority’ if that authority was ‘rationally founded’.¹¹ The court did not need an expert to see that the handwriting on the bordereau belonged to Esterhazy, but he still applauded the ‘chemists, philologists,  philosophers or historians’ who insisted on their right to examine the evidence.¹² Intellectual examination was important because ‘freedom of thought is the first of all freedoms’.¹³ The professional training of the ‘intellectuals’ made them the guardians of the critical method, less inclined to the ‘seductions of the crowd and the prestige of authority’.¹⁴

For men like Brunetière and Barrès, Durkheim’s belief in critical examination was compromised by the fact that he would brook no opposition to its propagation in the nation’s schools. Others too saw contradictions and even hypocrisy in his readiness to decry obedience within the military but to praise it in the classroom when a secular instituteur was in charge. The schoolteacher was the ‘secular successor to the priest’, and Durkheim wanted to endow him with a similarly sacred authority: ‘Just as the priest is the interpreter of God,’ he wrote, ‘so he [the schoolteacher] is the interpreter of the great moral ideas of his time and country.’¹⁵

It is true that Durkheim was ambivalent about the use of pedagogical authority: on the one hand, he wanted to encourage critical thought, but on the other he recognized the power of suggestion on young minds. He likened the mental attitude of schoolchildren to that of primitive peoples, whose disorderly, superstitious and flighty tendencies needed to be eradicated. He compared the relationship between teacher and child to that between a hypnotic experimenter and his subject: ‘it is [only] necessary that the hypnotizer say, “I want”, so that subject obeys, that he feels that a refusal is inconceivable.’¹⁶ The teacher’s authority was enhanced by his ability to punish and by his right to prescribe an appropriate penance. Discipline was more than a way of maintaining order; it was the first step towards inculcating a new morality necessary for creating Republican citizens.¹⁷ Men like Barrès and Brunetière saw such methods as hateful forms of indoctrination, and despised such morality as intellectual and spiritual coercion.¹⁸

 

This struggle between incompatible ideas sometimes took a more extravagant form. As has been seen, Mathieu Dreyfus and Joseph Gibert had found it difficult to reconcile their respect for rationality with their attraction to the invisible. Mathieu was aware of the trouble his reliance on Léonie might cause for the Dreyfusard campaign, and he asked his confidant, Salomon Reinach, to be discreet about his connection to the medium.¹⁹ His enthusiasm for her, however, was fairly mild in comparison to that of the eminently scientific Dreyfusard Charles Richet, professor of physiology at the Collège de France, a leading psychologist and, in 1913, a Nobel Prize winner for his work on anaphylaxis. His more orthodox work was essential to the study of immunity and an element in the exploration of the body’s adaptive capacity. Richet also applied Pasteur’s work on immunization in animals to human beings, albeit with much less success,²⁰ and was concerned with eugenics and pacifism as methods of ‘adapting’ the race and society to the constant struggle for existence.²¹ Among all these interests, however, he prized psychical research above all others.²²

Richet became one of Brunetière’s key critics during the Affair, a fact made more piquant because they were intimately connected in so many ways. Richet lived above the offices of the Revue des Deux Mondes, his beloved sister Louise was married to Charles Buloz, Brunetière’s immediate predecessor as editor, and Richet was the editor of the Revue’s sister journal, the Revue scientifique. Moreover, he was always grateful to Brunetière for his stalwart defence of Louise, who would leave her husband when a scandal engulfed the journal:²³ it turned out that Buloz had been using the back pages to advertise for female assistants, whom he hired and then seduced. The women took their revenge by blackmailing him. In the midst of the family crisis Richet paid off his brother-in-law’s debts and bought the Revue des Deux Mondes, which Brunetière then took over.

Unlike many Dreyfusards, Richet tolerated Brunetière’s notorious ill humour and appreciated his unconventionality.²⁴ He even valued his opinions: ‘When I want to know what I think, I only have to read an article by Brunetière on the subject. And I am sure in advance that I will be of the opposite opinion.’²⁵ Before the Affair, Richet attacked Brunetière’s belief in the ‘bankruptcy of science’, extolling the utilitarian benefits of research over Brunetière’s metaphysical quest, and arguing that ‘science and civilization were two identical terms’.²⁶ If Brunetière pondered the ‘why’ of existence, Richet focused on how to improve it. In his memoirs he paraphrased the debate in more jocular terms: ‘I had spoken of the benefits of serotherapy; [he] retorted that serotherapy would not prevent men from dying in the end; I claimed that electric light gives a better light than candles; he replied that we see no clearer now than we did a hundred years ago.’²⁷

Richet was involved in the Affair from an early stage because his interest in graphology prompted Bernard Lazare to solicit his opinion on the bordereau. From the moment he saw it, he was sure of Dreyfus’s innocence, and the country’s inability to accept this fact seemed proof that it had been taken over by ‘an atrocious collective suggestion’.²⁸ He was appalled that the madness also seemed to be affecting his sister, Louise, who became ill in these years and whose ‘mental degradation’ intensified as the political crisis deepened.²⁹ Indeed, he likened her harrowing dementia to the ‘mindlessness’ unleashed by the Affair.³⁰ Unlike the anti-Dreyfusards, whose ravings and groundless belief in the existence of a Jewish ‘syndicate’ proved their irrationality, a man like himself could never be duped.³¹ Richet thought that France was on the brink of self-annihilation, and that only a few great minds – people like him and other distinguished Dreyfusards – could save it.³² His polarized vision of ‘intelligence’ and ‘susceptibility’, ‘health’ and ‘aberration’, critical conviction and gullibility, summed up many of the oppositions that characterized the Dreyfusard position.

Although he believed he was utterly different, his own research methods proved that he was susceptible to other kinds of suggestions. Richet was fascinated by the occult and, like other experimental spiritualists, believed that such encounters were part of a serious exploration into the  nature of memory. Until hypnotism dredged them up from the unconscious realm of the brain’s nervous system, repressed memories had seemed irretrievable. Richet claimed that mediumic trances (or self-hypnosis) provided the experimenter with access to another temporal domain, where physical traces of memory lived on in another dimension.³³ Memory was the ‘prolongation of an excitation’,³⁴ a psycho-physiological energy trace that could be recuperated and made visible. He coined the word ‘ectoplasm’ to describe the phenomenon, and experimenters then sought to capture its image in photographs. To establish the reasonableness of such inquiries, they pointed to the telegraph and telephone as proof that such transmissions were possible, or cited the recent discovery of X-rays as evidence that unimaginable marvels in nature existed.³⁵ Richet hoped that he was on the verge of eliminating the boundary between life and death, and refused to be put off by the doubts of sceptics who laughed at him. Indeed, it was his spiritualist interests that led to his intervention in the Affair: his expertise in graphology stemmed from issues raised by automatic writing during séances.

37. Richet conducted psychical research well after the Affair. This photograph shows the Italian medium Linda Gazzera in Paris in 1909 during a séance with Professor Richet. An ectoplasmic manifestation of a hand is visible above the medium’s head halfway up the curtain

While he shared the investigation of hypnotism, spiritualism or graphology with other reputable scientists (such as Pierre Janet), many of his colleagues approached the subject critically and increasingly recognized the crucial role of their own suggestive impact on the subjects involved. Rather than trying to prove the existence of the spirit world, they instead explored the unconscious bond between operator and subject to further psychological analysis and therapeutic intervention. The insights gained formed the basis of Janet’s elaboration of ‘psychological analysis’ and were key to Freud’s development of the notions of ‘transference’ and ‘counter-transference’.³⁶

Richet, in contrast, remained remarkably unperceptive about his own role in the experimental scenarios he orchestrated.³⁷ In the 1870s he had joined in the playful fashion for suggestive theatre when he hypnotized a young artist’s model, Virginia, and uncovered her successive incarnations as an old woman, a general, a beggar and a little girl.³⁸ He worked with a renowned Neapolitan medium named Eusapia, famous for the psychic effects she created.³⁹ Later he kept as a treasured keep-sake the golden tress that he clipped from the head of a spirit that had come to visit him.⁴⁰ In his susceptibility Richet seemed as ‘decerebrated’ as the anti-Dreyfusards he criticized.

It would be easy to dismiss both Richet and Mathieu’s fascination on the grounds that it was an aberration, a lapse by men who were otherwise rational. But such a conclusion would ignore the long tradition of scientific interest in the occult, which went back to Newton and Boyle’s infatuation with alchemy.⁴¹ Richet’s investigations caused embarrassment not because he engaged with spiritualism – which was common – but because of his intense yearning to connect with an ethereal sphere of beauty and mystery. In his search for emotional and aesthetic communion with another world he seemed, even to many contemporaries, to have strayed too far from acceptable positivist methods. When Maurice Barrès insisted that nationalist feeling depended on a conversation with the dead, he too expressed a similar desire to connect with another world. Once again, radically different positions on the Affair could derive from remarkably similar emotional yearnings and intellectual preoccupations.

38. ‘The complete lifting of a table: photograph taken in the salon of M. Flammarion, 12 November 1898’. The table balances clumsily in the air while an assistant hides, rather obviously, behind a cushion. The medium, Eusapia P., is stunned by the glare from a magnesium light

Historical practice during the Affair was beset by contradictions and arguments within the Dreyfusard camp. Although the expertise of Meyer, Molinier and Giry had failed to impress the judges at Zola’s trial, Dreyfusards persisted in their commitment to documentary precision, always verifying quotations, dates of letters and events. Their publisher, Pierre-Victor Stock, published around 130 books on the Affair, almost 80 of which were compilations of documents to provide the public with the ‘rational’ evidence needed to reach sound conclusions.⁴² Stock recalled how he often sent ‘volumes and brochures’ to notable people who sent them back ‘stained, soiled…or covered with obscenities and insults’.⁴³ Although shocked at the emotions behind such acts of desecration, he still believed that ‘objective’ evidence would ultimately triumph. This emphasis on facts was key to Dreyfusard self-perceptions: the young ‘intellectual’ Julien Benda, for example, contrasted pride in the ‘cult of method [la méthode]’ drilled into him by patient historical research with disgust for those ‘men of letters’ (a reference to the likes of Barrès) who distorted reason to serve their political agenda.⁴⁴ History and its rigour, he asserted, had been the discipline that turned him into a ‘natural’ Dreyfusard.

Joseph Reinach was also zealous about documentary precision,⁴⁵ but his historical work exemplified Dreyfusard ambivalence about the relationship between evidence and interpretation. He admitted that he had not been converted by evidence alone, but rather had decided Dreyfus was innocent simply because the Jesuits said he was guilty: ‘From the first day, I had the intuition that the accused was innocent. A first indication was the deliberate fury that one sensed in the newspapers of the Congregation in contrast to the indifference before other treasons.’⁴⁶

A passionate Dreyfusard in his own right, Salomon Reinach shared his brother’s views about both history and the Jesuits. In a pamphlet published in 1898, he went through Drumont’s anti-Semitic diatribes before and during the Affair, carefully listing the journalist’s errors of fact as proof of his bad faith. But Salomon’s volume was also an ideological tirade and began with a quotation from Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the goddesses who meted out punishments. Salomon wanted them to braid a crown of laurels for Picquart and brand Drumont with a red mark of infamy⁴⁷ because ‘the sentencing of Dreyfus was, for the most part, the work of La Libre Parole, a newspaper founded by the Jesuits’.⁴⁸ He ended with a vehement denunciation: ‘their diabolical work will astonish and horrify for centuries…Shame on them! Shame and execration on their names!’⁴⁹

The religious tinge to Salomon’s condemnations also appeared in Joseph’s use of historical parables to make his point. In Le Siècle, the liberal newspaper that became his main outlet, Reinach wrote of the ‘Curé de Fréjus’, an estimable priest in the early years of the Restoration who was known for his charity and integrity. When an old woman was murdered, the curé’s vestments were found covered in blood and he was arrested, even though there was no motive for the crime. Although they did not love the Church, enlightened people came to his defence, and their intuition was right. In the end a notorious brigand confessed and admitted he had stolen the vestments before committing the murder. Joseph ended the article by asking what motive Dreyfus had for betraying his country.⁵⁰ The answer was – none; like the Curé de Fréjus, he had been wrongfully accused.⁵¹

Reinach’s use of historical polemic increased after he lost his parliamentary seat at Digne (Basse-Alpes) in the elections of May 1898 because of his public position on the Affair. Thereafter he produced more articles for Le Siècle and tried from the sidelines to shift the political balance in favour of reopening the case. Despite the defeat of the Dreyfusards in the elections, the position was not hopeless: they were replaced in the chamber by a new band of rowdy anti-Semites and nationalists whose extremism forced the moderates closer together. Although the nation seemed opposed to the revision of Dreyfus’s case, the nature of political alliances within the chamber meant that in June 1898 the anti-Dreyfusard Méline government lost a vote of confidence and was succeeded by a left-leaning ministry headed by Henry Brisson.⁵²

One of the ministry’s key preoccupations was to put an end to the controversy over Dreyfus. Despite his political views, Brisson put Godefroy Cavaignac in place as minister of war. Cavaignac was an honest man who had worked against corruption in the Panama Scandals and saw the Dreyfusards as men of good faith rather than as villains. At the same time he was convinced that Dreyfus was guilty and he wanted to prove to the world that the army had been correct in its judgment. He appointed General Gaudérique Roget of the Fourth Bureau and Emile Henry’s associate Louis Cuignet to reinvestigate the case. The ministerial inquiry moved the examination of documents and their interpretation into the fore of public debate.

While the Dreyfusards hoped Cavaignac’s incorruptibility would work in their favour, the anti-Dreyfusards looked forward to the final exposure and destruction of the ‘syndicate’. On 5 July 1898 Cavaignac arranged a meeting with Justice Minister Jean Sarrien and several other members of the government to examine a selection of sixty documents culled from the enormous dossier; after going through all of the items laid out before them, the men felt satisfied there was enough proof to convince the world of Dreyfus’s guilt. Cavaignac proposed to present the evidence to the chamber and settle the matter once and for all by concentrating on three particular items. The first was a letter written by Panizzardi in March 1894, asking Schwartzkoppen to come to his home to collect interesting material supplied by a so-called ‘P’ Henry had changed the ‘P’ to a ‘D’ to inculpate Dreyfus.⁵³ The second was the ‘scoundrel D’ letter used illegally at the 1894 court martial and so important for convincing the judges of Dreyfus’s guilt. Finally, there was the incriminating faux Henry, which made sense of the previous two pieces of evidence. Cavaignac also copied the deposition of Lebrun-Renault about Dreyfus’s alleged confession just before the degradation.⁵⁴ On 7 July, after his statement to the chamber had met with a standing ovation, Cavaignac posted a copy of the speech in every commune in the nation to broadcast his position as widely as possible. This, it turned out, was one of the worst political mistakes in modern French history. So convinced was he of resolving the matter that Cavaignac also pursued Esterhazy for a series of unconnected crimes to demonstrate his impartiality.⁵⁵

For the Dreyfusards, Cavaignac’s gullible self-confidence was as tragic as it was pigheaded and his insistence that the evidence proved Dreyfus’s guilt provoked a chorus of lament from Yves Guyot in Le Siècle, Clemenceau in L’Aurore and Jean Jaurès in La Petite République, all editors in the Dreyfusard press. Jean Jaurès alone, however, understood that putting the documents – which could now be critically assessed and verified – into the public sphere would ultimately force the case to be reopened. Certainly, it did not close it down as Cavaignac had intended: within days Picquart had written directly to Brisson to remind him that the two documents from 1894 were not about Dreyfus, and that the 1896 letter had to be a forgery. The minister of war responded by arresting Picquart for divulging secret material to Louis Leblois and imprisoned him in La Santé prison on 13 July.

39. ‘Cavaignac: This is what patriots expect from him’. Cavaignac’s intervention was seen as targeting Zola and Reinach, both depicted here with simian attributes by the illustrator Fertom. From Le Pilori, 3 July 1898

As Picquart’s ‘martyrdom’ became central to the Dreyfusard campaign, Reinach sought to enlist scholars to support his effort to free the ‘second hero’ of the Affair. This strategy illustrates how willing he was to use the reputation of ‘factual’ history to further his political campaign. He recruited Jean Psichari, a Greek philologist at the Ecole pratique des hautes études who was also Renan’s son-in-law, to write a panegyric that made Picquart out to be a ‘total’ man, a cultivated and refined hero worthy of the Dreyfusard cause:

You have sacrificed in the battle everything that you loved; you have marched bravely into danger, with your head held high, at the risk of your life, as a soldier, as a citizen and a man…You, my friend, have enduring heroism, and your heroism goes hand in hand with the most exquisite courtesy, with supreme urbanity, and constant serenity…When you were weary, to console yourself you went to the Louvre to look at a master’s painting, or, whenever you could, you listened to music for a little while. For indeed your critical spirit, your faculty of observation and analysis are not purely intellectual. In [the process] your heart plays its part.⁵⁶

Not all ‘intellectuals’ were willing to do Reinach’s bidding.⁵⁷ He later approached Gaston Paris, the professor of medieval languages at the Sorbonne, to ask him if he would write ‘an article…on Picquart, recounting what he has done as if he was a bishop of the Middle Ages or a knight of the Round Table’. Such an account might provoke scepticism if written by a politician or a man of letters, but Reinach believed the public ‘would bow before the word of an historian and a scholar who has never served the interests of any political coterie, who has only lived for science and is a member of two Academies and director of the Collège de France’.⁵⁸

Reinach may have thought of Paris because he had already signalled his sympathies in his review of The Trial of Guichard, Bishop of Troyes (1896) by Abel Reigault, which argued that the medieval bishop had also been the victim of forgery, sentenced wrongly to death for the murder of Queen Jeanne in 1305.⁵⁹ Talking of the times of Philippe le Bel (and by implication of August 1898 when the review was published), Paris had remarked that ‘it is one of the saddest moments of our history …[w]hen a people no longer believes in the incorruptible integrity of its judges’.⁶⁰

Reinach therefore had reason to hope that Paris would lend his reputation to create the legend of Picquart. But his request essentially asked Paris to transgress the very methods on which that reputation was based. In his review Paris had weighed the historical evidence, spoken about the bishop’s good and bad qualities, assessed the protagonists and events. He balked at portraying an army officer he had never met as a noble knight of flawless perfection and refused the request.⁶¹

The rebuff shows that there was no single approach to the use of evidence among Dreyfusards. Unlike Paris, Reinach saw no necessary divorce between engagement and scholarship, and believed that he had the requisite objectivity and the moral qualifications for both. Many Dreyfusards agreed; the playwright Ludovic Halévy addressed him as ‘you who have been so insulted, so vilified…and who have reported on all of this with such a rare and courageous serenity’.⁶² Emile Gallé, the art nouveau glassmaker and ceramicist, told him that

in this battle of ideas against instincts, you have given sentiment its rightful place. You have proven that the brotherly sense of solidarity between men can be as strong as the passion of love for those who have been vilified and persecuted…And yes, your appeals to men’s conscience, to equity and pity, have followed the rhythm of (the beatings of) your sincere heart. They are the poetry [iambes] of these unforgettable days.⁶³

Gallé was correct in his assessment: Reinach did believe that documents and ideas were not enough; the quest for Truth and Justice also required an exploration of the sentimental. He saw it as his task not just to bring about Dreyfus’s release but also to write the definitive history of the Affair. Although they trumpeted facts and ‘method’, Reinach, like many other Dreyfusard historians, remained inspired by Jules Michelet, the great Romantic historian who had hoped to strengthen the Republic with a proud vision of the evolution of French institutions and liberties. All historians in France saw understanding and guiding France’s unique national trajectory as central to their discipline. It was for this reason that they, more than other intellectuals, experienced the crisis of the Affair so deeply.⁶⁴

While the government and anti-Dreyfusards suppressed, misinterpreted or falsified the evidence, Reinach marshalled thousands of documents to counter their fabrications and to write his seven-volume history, which was finally published between 1901 and 1908. He was indefatigable, asking Lucie and other family members to record their earliest impressions; searching out documents with Dreyfus’s lawyer Demange;⁶⁵ locating ‘informers’ in the army to solicit testimony and verify documents;⁶⁶ and finding agents who went to places such as the Auvergne to uncover information about Henry’s family and reputation.⁶⁷

His zeal for documents was heroic, but his enterprise remained romantic in conception and ideological in inspiration. He was aware that his approach was not shared by others, and he later teased both Alfred and Mathieu for their dogged precision and for not appreciating the ‘poetry’ of his undertaking: ‘You are scientists [savants] and I am a musician.’⁶⁸

Indeed, it was the Dreyfusard music that Reinach strained to compose, as he mixed into his narrative accounts of monarchists and Catholics who had converted to the cause; of estranged Jews who offered their ‘confessions’ of lycée teachers and women, both famous and obscure, who told him of their feelings. Reinach replied to many, never seeming to get annoyed when they added little requests – whether it was the need for his encouragement, a free copy of his book or a quotation from his library. Rather than seeing letters from inconnus as irrelevant to his project, he saved them all as precious documents that would contribute to his analysis.

Between Dreyfus’s pardon in September 1899 and his rehabilitation in 1906, Reinach kept the Affair alive by publishing his volumes. Friends and associates recorded their responses to his book and their attempt to straddle the division in their minds between science and inspiration, between the ‘hard facts’ that they cherished and the ‘novel’ that they could not put down. The Catholic Dreyfusard Léon Chaîne pronounced that the monumental work was ‘in itself an historical fact’ and added that ‘one of the qualities of your history (and not one of the lesser ones) is…that it reads like a novel’.⁶⁹ A German reader congratulated Reinach for having written ‘a psychological history of the French people’.⁷⁰ Mary Duclaux, the English wife of the microbiologist, noted the book’s blend of critical distance, deep learning and moral passion, the whole tempered by a rueful appreciation of humanity’s failings.⁷¹ All these assessments articulated a crucial aspect of the Dreyfusard sensibility that embraced the methodology of positivism but refused to forgo consideration of human passion. Reinach’s history intrigued and satisfied its audience precisely because it displayed these writerly qualities, which other historians may have condemned as unscientific at best and blatantly ideological at worst.⁷²

The contradictions in the work of Durkheim, Richet and Reinach reveal the flaws in their system-making and suggest that their claim to be creating an unassailable system of liberal, rational and scientific values was overblown. They were as emotionally invested in their ideology as the anti-Dreyfusards; indeed, as Reinach’s history shows, this passionate involvement was precisely what his readers admired when they complimented him on distilling the moral lessons of the Affair. While the Dreyfusards might acknowledge differences of opinion within their own camp, they were often unable to appreciate the philosophical hazards of the deeper tensions in their position. They insisted that their opponents alone were guilty of muddled thinking and obscurantist tendencies. This belief was central to creating, and intensifying, the gulf between the two sides.