9

Dreyfusards and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

Dreyfusards were almost as preoccupied with religion as their opponents. Even those who tended towards secularism, such as the Reinach brothers, were keen to defend and distil the ‘best’ of Judaism and show its compatibility with Republican ideology. Liberal Catholics also denounced the Jesuits and hoped to liberate Dreyfus so that their ‘intellectual’ version of religion could triumph over the narrowly ‘anti-intellectual’ ultramontanism they despised. Protestants who had lost their faith still saw the Dreyfus Affair as a religious war and believed that the clerico-military conspiracy heralded a return to the violence of the sixteenth century, when Catholics slaughtered Protestants in the streets. Dreyfusards constantly positioned themselves in relation to different interpretations of the Judaeo-Christian tradition through biblical reference and historical allusion, using this religious patrimony to clarify and sustain many of their ideological positions. Their vision of secularism and progress was often refracted through a religious lens.

 

The Reinach brothers were determined to show the world that Judaism’s ethical inheritance and Republican universalism were two sides of the same coin. Although insulated by wealth and education from mob violence, they were vividly aware of anti-Semitism, and throughout their careers fought against it using argument, demonstration and, when necessary, politics. The two eldest brothers, Joseph and Salomon, often worked in tandem, both in battling for Dreyfus’s release and in their involvement with international Jewry. They openly dissociated themselves from Zionism during the Affair, fearful that supporting Jewish nationalism would undermine their desire to be seen as the most patriotic of Frenchmen.

Their Jewish identity was key to almost all that they did, but a public commitment to universalism veiled a fierce clannishness typical of many Jewish families.¹ Individual family members suffered from this loyalty while none the less accepting its inevitability. In the 1880s, for example, Joseph wanted to marry ‘outside’, but his desire was quashed by family elders, whom he called ‘the Government’: ‘If the Gvt [government] were intelligent, I would be married in a month to a ravishing, cultivated and intelligent English girl, a remarkable painter, from the best family, and rich…The young girl in question is a Protestant but would accept a civil marriage. Oh! The Jews!’²

We do not know who this brilliant beauty was, but we do know that Joseph conformed to family tradition and cast her aside; he married instead Henriette de Reinach, a cousin and the daughter of his uncle, Jacques, whose papers he later seems to have destroyed to protect the family when the Panama Scandal erupted.³

Loyalty to Judaism was also central for Salomon, an internationally famous sociologist of comparative religion, who worked through the Alliance israélite universelle, a philanthropic and educational institution that campaigned for persecuted Jews in Russia and in Romania.⁴ Théodore, the youngest brother, devoted himself to the reform of Judaism within France, an intellectual, moral and aesthetic project that sought to modernize the liturgy by ridding it of the ‘oriental’ mysticism of Eastern Europe. He concentrated particularly on music, hoping to bring the Eastern chants of the synagogue into line with modern, classical harmonies.⁵

43. Salomon Reinach at his desk

As historians of antiquity, both Salomon and Théodore were involved in the interpretation of classical remains and texts in an era of archaeology suffused by national rivalry. Salomon’s Epigraphie grecque and Théodore’s translation of Aristotle’s République des Athéniens (1895) were authoritative contributions;⁶ they were at the heart of a revolution in classical studies, their grasp of languages enabling them to match the erudition of German scholars. Moreover, because they knew Hebrew and Aramaic (the language of the Talmud), as well as Greek and Latin, they were uniquely able to analyse Jewish history in the wider context of Antiquity.⁷

Their passion for classical culture was animated by their belief that France and la civilisation were the proper heirs to Greek perfection. Théodore turned his passion into stone at his villa at Beaulieu-sur-Mer near Nice. ‘Kérylos’ was almost a caricature of archaeological reconstruction in that it sought the perfection of the Greek ideal without sacrificing modern electricity and plumbing. He even found a place to conceal his beloved piano so the anachronistic instrument would not spoil the effect. He eventually donated the building to the Institut de France, ‘one of whose missions is to maintain in our country the great Greco-Latin culture’.⁸ Devotion to their Jewish inheritance matched the brothers’ passion for classicism: all his life Théodore sought to fuse Jewish and classical culture and to use the monotheistic and ethical inheritance of Judaism to ‘improve’ classical aesthetics and philosophy.

44. Villa Kérylos, Beaulieu-sur-Mer

The Reinachs’ world of erudition, cultivation and wealth could not have been further from that of the refugees from the shtetl, but both contributed to the imagery of anti-Semitism. In their private exchanges the brothers often played with these stereotypes:⁹ when Joseph haggled over the price of antiques he wanted to buy from Salomon, for example, he admonished his younger brother ‘be a little less Shylock and we will agree.’¹⁰ Another letter, about the sale of more art objects and Joseph’s opinion of one of Salomon’s articles, returned to the same theme:

Mr Jew, my last word on the question is 220 francs for the whole lot, eleven sovereigns which I would send you immediately and down to the last one, but I must admit that I find this haggling disgusting, and that your attitude, you blood-sucking kike, brings as many painful tears to my eyes as the brass neck with which you pass judgement on my article on the XIXth Cent.¹¹

Joseph was famously funny, with a sense of humour that verged on the crude. While sometimes he mocked his brother for his Jewish miserliness, at others he condemned him for self-denying sexual practices that conjured up images of what he believed were the bestial activities of Catholic priests:

It is quite obvious to me that you have gone mad, and that if you don’t lose double quick the ridiculous virginity that is sending you round the bend, you will end up committing some pretty bad sexual offence, which will lead you straight from the polytechnique to the magistrate’s court…you are more dirty-minded than the Catholic priests who screw chickens and goats …I am talking to you crudely. But really it is not crude words you deserve, but a good thrashing and some cold showers. Let me tell you again, in all friendliness: find yourself a hooker, or you will end up in court, unless I have you thrown into a loony bin, to avoid such a scandal. All I needed to do was to show your letter to the first policeman to come along, and you would have had it.

Vale. Lose your virginity, it’s better than losing your honour.¹²

There was no humour when they campaigned against anti-Semitism, however. For the brothers, involvement in the Dreyfus Affair was the culmination of a long-standing campaign to enlighten the French about the dangerous inhumanity of prejudice. Their efforts had been set back in the 1880s when Russian Jews, aided by Jewish philanthropists, came to France. They escaped the pogroms, only to be met by a mixture of revulsion and pity from their French co-religionists, who were repelled by their nasal Yiddish, food taboos, black hats and sidelocks.¹³

In his Histoire des israélites (1884) Théodore tried to repair the damage, arguing that such Jews only degenerated morally when under the pressure of persecution by Christian culture – an oblique reference to Russia. Jews remained the embodiment of Mosaic law, which had laid the foundations of ethical religion. Both he and Salomon emphasized the significance of the Prophets, who had transformed a heathen cult of idolatry and animistic propitiation into a monotheistic religion infused by a universal moral code. Théodore traced a line from the biblical Prophets, through the intellectual achievements of Maimonides in twelfth-century Islamic Spain, to Moses Mendelssohn in eighteenth-century Prussia.¹⁴ While Maimonides stood at the crossroads of Islamic learning and Christian society, Mendelssohn had brought together German and Jewish cultures: he translated the Pentateuch and the Psalms into German,¹⁵ and promoted tolerance of Jewish customs and law. Such men had always built bridges to the non-Jewish world: Théodore remarked with pride that when Mendelssohn died in 1786, the shops closed to honour the ‘Jewish Socrates’, an association that linked the ‘best’ of Judaism with the ‘best’ of Antiquity.¹⁶ The emancipation of the Jews brought about by the French Revolution signalled the start of another chapter of this history. Théodore believed that his vision for Franco-Judaism followed in the footsteps of such traditions by isolating Jewish rationality from the mysticism and obscurantism of the ‘oriental’ current.

The Reinachs’ Franco-Judaism was inseparable from their anticlericalism,¹⁷ and they considered a monolithic Catholicism to be the source of sanctioned prejudice and ignorance. Théodore blamed it for generating ‘economic jealousy’ and for ‘slandering’ the Jews, citing as evidence the fact that even as late as 1882 a Blood Libel case could erupt at Tisza-Eszlar in Hungary, when a Jew was accused of bleeding a Christian child to make matzos for Passover.

Salomon followed this defence a decade later with a brilliant analysis of the Blood Libel, the most primal of Christian fantasies. Published in 1893, the same year that Drumont campaigned against Jewish officers in the army, the book argued that the Blood Libel had nothing to do with Talmudic law, which had a ‘horror of blood, of corpses, of all that death has made impure’. Rather, such accusations stemmed from the darkest fantasies of humanity: ‘those that accuse the Jews accuse or betray themselves; the Jew is here only to act out the dream that they have inside them; they give him the responsibility to play out, in their stead, the tragedy that both attracts and horrifies them.’¹⁸

In a masterful stroke of social-psychological insight, Salomon employed the notion of ‘projection’ to explain the growth of anti-Semitism a year before Dreyfus was arrested. Rather than exposing the horrors of Judaism, the Blood Libel revealed primal fears about human sacrifice, cannibalism and sexual abuse within Christian society. Although hardly the same as the Blood Libel accusation, the Affair seemed to release anti-Semitic passions normally associated with ‘backward’ Eastern Europe.¹⁹

Joseph and Salomon worked together once the Affair began, though Joseph was clearly the ‘chief’, ordering his younger sibling to sign registered letters, arrange money or send his pamphlets to potential recruits. He also commented freely on his younger brother’s efforts: ‘Your letter to the Evening Standard that was reproduced in the Libre Parole this morning is very good. But I urge you strongly not to reply to the Libre Parole, with whom it is impossible to have a decent dialogue.’²⁰ Joseph was the one who was always watching, analysing events and planning the next step.²¹ Often he gave Salomon the job of paying out money to publishers and helpers, demonstrations of the brothers’ inordinate financial power that even some Dreyfusards would later resent.²² He asked Salomon to arrange 13,000 francs for immediate payment and to be ready to spend another 25,800 shortly thereafter. He finished these transactions by remarking that ‘the Zola trial is big stuff.’²³ In the next letter he gave his brother further instructions about finalizing the transactions, expenditures that they undertook themselves.²⁴ As the pace of events picked up, the notes between the brothers became terse, although Joseph still paused to buoy up his brother with anti-Semitic jesting. Writing about his election campaign at Digne in May 1898, he reassured Salomon that all would be well: ‘Yid [ Jude], you should understand that my candidature here is at one with the history of the Affair, and is a necessary episode of it. Drumont has understood this very well, and so have all the black band [the clergy]. The fight has begun, but I still believe in success at the first ballot.’²⁵

In fact, he lost the election but carried on optimistically, continuing to give his brother orders and using shame and hyperbole when he thought it necessary. During the struggle, Joseph thought Salomon’s Russian wife, Rose, was becoming dangerously ‘excited’ and sent off a sharp letter to get her back into line. He wrote that because she was ‘physically at the change of life’, she was susceptible to unseemly outbursts that revealed her ‘fundamentally nihilist, and rebellious’ nature. The letter does not say what exactly Rose had done, but Joseph instructed his brother to deal with it quickly. If not, Salomon would be personally responsible for the apocalyptic consequences: allowing the outbursts to continue would be ‘a disaster for everyone, including the children, for her relations in Russia, for the Dreyfus Affair, and the intensification of persecutions of thousands of innocent Jews across the world.’²⁶

These remarks show how Joseph in particular was constantly on guard. He was wary too of being accused of a lack of patriotism. In September 1897 he felt obliged to speak out against Zionism, which he denounced as ‘a trap set by anti-Semites for naive or unreflective minds’. He enjoined his brother to do the same and to make sure that Théodore followed suit. During the furore that erupted when Scheurer-Kestner intervened in the Affair, he warned that it was ‘indispensable’ that the Jews should not be seen as going against French interests.²⁷

Salomon remarked later in a letter to the Marquise Arconti-Visconti, a Dreyfusard salonnière, that even enlightened intellectuals believed that Jews were somehow in cahoots with one another. He cited as an example the fact that his colleagues were always asking him to introduce them to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, assuming that, because they were both Jewish, they knew each other.²⁸ The Reinach brothers realized that, despite their efforts, even well-disposed colleagues unconsciously held stereotyped views of them. None the less, although they complained of the view of themselves as tribal, they did depend on each other, particularly during the Affair. The family circle provided a zone in which they could tease each other and reveal their anger, pain and fear. Among themselves they could temporarily forget the public face of refined culture and civilization that they presented to the world.

*

The Reinach brothers were not the only Dreyfusards whose support was intertwined with religion. A small but valiant group of liberal Catholics also joined the struggle, impelled by their Christian consciences and Republican beliefs. Their non-conformity often cost them dearly, as they were ostracized by some Dreyfusards for defending the Church and detested by many Catholics for defending Dreyfus. These men banded together into a Comité catholique de droit founded by the historian Paul Viollet and were frequently marginalized or demoted by the hierarchy, their careers permanently damaged by their stand.²⁹

Prominent among this group was the Abbé Joseph Brugerette, a journalist and a philosophy professor who took a stand in his native Franche-Comté when Jewish shops were defaced and mobs demonstrated outside the grand rabbi’s house in early 1898.³⁰ Brugerette hoped to free Dreyfus and reform Catholicism at the same time; alongside his work for Dreyfus, for example, he also campaigned against the Assumptionists, believing that their obscurantist piety was in part responsible for Catholics turning their back on Christian duty by becoming anti-Dreyfusards.

Part of his attack was to criticize the renewed cult of Saint Anthony of Padua, pushed by the Assumptionists through their weekly news paper, Le Pèlerin, which published letters from readers who believed that the saint had interceded to find them servants, get them a good price on firewood or win a pay-rise. Brugerette was appalled that reverence for the thirteenth-century Franciscan – known above all for his teaching and the wisdom of his sermons – had been diverted into ‘a saintly tombola where one sells blessings as one would cheap bric-a-brac’.³¹ He believed such practices intensified a servile and infantile mentality.³²

He had a breadth of vision shared by few on either side of the divide: ‘we [the Catholics] play on the Masonic threat in the same way that our political adversaries play on the clerical one. Those two phantoms haunt French thought equally.’³³ Such rare even-handedness meant that, while he despaired of the intellectual climate within Catholicism – he sometimes wrote under a pseudonym to protect himself – he did not often find an adequate substitute within the secular ranks of the Dreyfusards.

None the less, he began looking for kindred spirits outside the Church, and his search led to him to Louis Havet, a philologist and classicist at the Collège de France. Havet and his wife, Olympe, fierce Dreyfusards, were close to Lucie and Mathieu, and especially to Picquart. Havet regarded the campaign as a life-and-death crusade ‘to tear France herself away from suicide’.³⁴ When he spoke publicly at Dreyfusard meetings, he maintained that France was inherently ‘liberating’, with Saint Joan of Arc and Descartes both embodying the nation’s uniqueness.³⁵ He was a complex mixture of dogmatic passion and liberalism.³⁶ Unlike some Dreyfusards, he welcomed men of good conscience whatever their creed in the same way that Brugerette appreciated morally righteous freethinkers such as ‘that powerful master, Emile Zola…who gave to all the French and to all men such a noble example of civic virtue’.³⁷

Havet believed in the separation of Church and state on the grounds that the Church confused ‘spiritual and political power’ and suppressed critical thought.³⁸ Brugerette adopted the same position, although he did not believe that the Church was set on imposing political clericalism. He maintained instead that Catholic reluctance to engage in critical historical and theological discussion was essentially defensive, and feared that an overly precipitate break between Church and state would deliver the Church into the hands of ultramontanists who wanted to impose a rigid, doctrinaire Catholicism that prevented intellectual pluralism.³⁹

These attitudes permeate Brugerette’s historical and philosophical work, and he was more than ready to give examples of the sort of Catholic intolerance he detested. In his history of France and Europe, he described clerical abuses and condemned the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which ended almost a hundred years of toleration and forced many Protestants into exile.⁴⁰ He was proud of his book, although he apologized to Havet for its timidity: it was not, he said, because his opinions were uncertain but because he had been obliged ‘to attenuate [in the work] numerous passages…so as not to shock beyond measure the scruples of a clerical publisher…the ultramontanist loyalty of a Jesuit inspector…and the prejudices of a clerical clientele’.⁴¹

Even more than Catholic intolerance, Brugerette abhorred anti-Semitism, holding that most Jews were patriots who sinned no more or less than other men.⁴² He was prepared to use the arguments of Catholicism against the anti-Dreyfusards, denouncing as hubristic the belief that the verdict of the 1894 court martial was a settled matter about which further argument was useless. Only the Pope, he argued, possessed such authority and deserved such trust. He dreamed of a Catholicism that was more tolerant because it was without fear, and saw the Affair as an opportunity to join with like-minded people wherever they were: ‘You are free thinkers, no doubt; but your free thought cannot frighten, because we on our side are free believers, and we prefer the Rights of reason, of justice and of truth. We reject all intolerance and we are…the adversaries of anti-Semitism, nationalism, militarism.’⁴³

He paid a high price for his views: he was dismissed in July 1899 in a manner he denounced as ‘Jesuitical’⁴⁴ and tried, without success, to find a post in the lay university system with Havet’s help.⁴⁵ When this came to nothing, he was instead taken on by the Institution des lazaristes – ‘one of the most important teaching establishments in Lyons’ – but on New Year’s Eve 1903 he was ‘struck a second time for having stood up in favour of Truth and Justice’.⁴⁶ The following year he appears to have been sacked from a third school, this time on trumped-up charges of dishonesty.⁴⁷ Brugerette wrote that the tale was so grotesque that he burst out laughing; he was gratified that the bursar later admitted that his dismissal was really because of his ‘intervention in the Dreyfus Affair’.⁴⁸

 

While men such as Brugerette have often slipped into obscurity, historians of the Affair have tended to eulogize men such as Scheurer-Kestner, Louis Leblois and Gabriel Monod, all Protestants inspired by the petite musique huguenote, the soft but persistent melody of conscience.⁴⁹ Many Protestants did indeed flock to the Dreyfusard cause and identified with his plight. The Affair stirred old memories of persecution going back to the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion,⁵⁰ rekindled fears of attacks by Catholics and offered the tempting possibility of revenge on their old tormentors.

If Scheurer-Kestner wanted to recapture the youthful ardour of his opposition to the Second Empire, other Protestants wanted to revive the enthusiasm that had galvanized them in the early days of the Third Republic. Félix Pécaut and Ferdinand Buisson had both abandoned Protestant ministries to become key figures who laid out the secular system of education designed to foster the youth of the new Republic. Both held that the Catholic Church was inherently authoritarian and thus incompatible with a Republic based on rational morality.⁵¹ Their educational programme was thus explicitly designed to extirpate its influence.

The product of an old and distinguished Huguenot family, Pécaut had intended to become a missionary among the Catholic Basques in his native region, but soon found himself in conflict with his Church when he expressed his belief in Christ’s humanity.⁵² He went instead in the 1860s to join Buisson in exile in Protestant Switzerland, where both found asylum from the Bonapartist regime they detested. During their time there both men increasingly shifted their loyalties from religion (which, in France, they believed, fostered Catholicism) to a lay vision of moral improvement based on ‘liberty, solidarity, human dignity, sincerity, uprightness, justice, respect for the rights and duties of the moral life …[and] progress’.⁵³ Their Republicanism evolved from their Protestantism, which infused every aspect of their educational philosophy, combining an enduring belief in the power of critical thought with an equally strong conviction in their moral righteousness.

They were well placed to put these ideas into effect when the Empire collapsed: Buisson eventually became director of primary education in 1879 (a post he held until 1896) and drafted the 1881 laws that established free, compulsory, secular primary education in France. In 1880 he also installed his friend as head of the Ecole normale at Fontenay-aux-Roses outside Paris, an institute dedicated to training the female teachers who were to fill the new schools. Pécaut believed that the Republican educational programme was crucial precisely because France had failed to embrace the Reformation. Because the aristocracy and clergy were beholden to the Catholic Church, they had kept France in a state of moral infantilism and the politics of the nation in arrested development. For both men the Republic was part of the new Reformation, with the battle for hearts and minds to be fought out in schools rather than in churches. So, in the cloistered walls and gardens of the Ecole normale, Pécaut sought to instil in his students the highest moral standards, so that many later recalled his almost terrifying impact on their lives.⁵⁴

 

As a state bureaucrat, Pécaut kept a proper silence about the Affair but in private was increasingly appalled by the way it developed. Eventually he resigned from his position so as to be able to speak out in favour of reopening the case. In failing health, he none the less became a devoted Dreyfusard, even leaving his retirement in the south-west, where he was being nursed by his son Elie, to return to Paris for Zola’s first trial.⁵⁵

Elie had never had the confidence to operate on the national stage in such a way. He had also abandoned Protestantism for a mode of freethinking that differed little in moral tone from his religion; he wrote some works on pedagogy and produced a commentary on the separation of Church and state in 1903. But he could not even live in Paris without being overcome by homesickness and had spent the previous quarter of a century in his small village of Ségalas in the Lot-et-Garonne in south-western France.⁵⁶ The Affair, however, gave him the opportunity to find a role in the Dreyfusard movement. He collected the signatures of Protestant and liberal teachers for Elie Halévy’s petitions of January 1898.⁵⁷ Above all, he persuaded Ferdinand Buisson to become an active Dreyfusard.

He accomplished this task at the behest of Joseph Reinach, who astutely realized that Elie’s grief over his father’s death in July 1898 might make Buisson susceptible to persuasion.⁵⁸ Elie used raw emotion and shared Protestant references to win over the nation’s chief pedagogue and educational politician. Elie returned to the example of the martyred Calas and his legatees – Scheurer-Kestner and Zola – who had brought the Affair into the political arena. He insisted that Buisson behave like a pastor in charge of his flock rather than as a politician gauging his interests.⁵⁹ By referring to his father’s public advocacy, Elie implied that Buisson’s silence showed weakness: ‘truth is simple…particularly moral truth.’⁶⁰

The mixture of high morality and emotional manipulation worked, and when Buisson delivered the eulogy at Félix’s funeral in early August 1898 he described the dead man’s Dreyfusard stance as a culmination of a life-long ethical position. Buisson also spoke of his own willingness to continue his old friend’s fight.⁶¹ Elie was delighted; Buisson was still the man of his childhood memories – ‘so noble, true and brave’ – and his conversion was ‘a consolation, a ray of light in the midst of the deep and heavy gloom that obscures all horizons – motherland, family, Republic’.⁶² Elie Pécaut was also proud of himself: ‘You know that I was the one who converted him. This conversion is my contribution to the sacred work.’⁶³ Buisson did in fact become an ardent and important Dreyfusard.⁶⁴

After this success Elie threw himself into politics and campaigned in the area around Ségalas. His example showed how the Affair could change a life, for involvement energized him, allowed him to shed his fears and connect with the leading campaigners in Paris and around the  world. He kept up his correspondence with Reinach, swapping quotations in Latin and asking for references to bolster his political pamphlets. He contacted Protestant scholars abroad and acted as an intermediary between Reinach and the Oxford classicist Frederick Conybeare, one of England’s most active Dreyfusards.⁶⁵ In one of his letters Conybeare urged the Dreyfusards to ‘agitate, agitate without respite’, and Elie enthusiastically asked Reinach to have it published. Only later did he consider that perhaps such a call from a Protestant of a rival nation might be counter-productive.

As with so many other campaigners, however, excitement alternated with melancholy, according to the Affair’s vicissitudes. Elation over Buisson swiftly turned to horror at the ‘fanatical hatreds’ poisoning his village. Elie dreamed of retreating deep into the mountains to breathe the ‘cold and pure’ air.⁶⁶ He brooded over Picquart’s imprisonment in August 1898, fearing that the officer, like Dreyfus before him, would be consigned to a living death.⁶⁷ His view of the Affair was strongly influenced by a Protestant vision of Original Sin, even though he claimed to reject the notion as ‘that barbarism, that fatal regression from antique rationalism’, which led people ‘to cowardice, [self-]interest, fear, inertia’.⁶⁸ Because of this belief, he saw the world as inescapably prone to darkness; the descent into the abyss of transgression could be fought only by the ‘elect’, ‘the elite of thought and of free conscience’ – hence his view that he and the Dreyfusards were engaged in a kind of redemptive struggle.⁶⁹

As the end of 1898 turned into 1899, Elie’s vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between darkness and light intensified. He grieved for his father and worried lest he lose his other ‘father’, the Republic, which seemed to be drowning in a spiritual and moral quagmire.⁷⁰ When he learned that Dreyfus would be retried at Rennes – that Catholic backwater, that ‘city of Saint Bartholomew’ – he was horrified. Images of the massacre of 1572, when Catholic mobs murdered, brutalized and mutilated thousands of Huguenots in a frenzy of violence, overwhelmed him.⁷¹ He dwelt also on the upheavals that had followed, in Rennes, Angers and Nantes, where Catholic Leagues mobilized large swathes of the population against Protestants in 1589.⁷² Rennes in the sixteenth century was a military town, dominated by fanatical Catholic officers dedicated to controlling the city. Pécaut was afraid that in 1899 they would unleash the same hatreds. In conjuring up this long-lost era of religious and political turmoil in a letter to Reinach, Elie projected on to the present a world of Catholic theocratic authoritarianism at its most violent and dangerous.

Elie also believed that unless such people were stopped France would sink to the level of Spain or Paraguay, where the military supervised a quiescent population subjugated by religion. He used the metaphor of the tomb, but was perhaps speaking also of himself, when he wondered if France was up to the ‘effort of raising the gravestone of the Roman tomb [to] emerge among the living’.⁷³ Like a fiery preacher, he called for ‘punishment, pitiless legal punishment’ of Dreyfus’s enemies.⁷⁴ He rightly believed that the conspiracy went to the very top of the military and included men such as de Boisdeffre, and he called for radical surgery to cut away the moral gangrene.⁷⁵ Reinach’s great fault, in his opinion, was that he loved the army too much.

The Affair both intensified religious fears and exposed the fault lines that existed within religious communities: the Reinach brothers combated ‘backward’ Judaism in the same way that Brugerette condemned Catholic ‘Jesuitry’. These men engaged in the Affair to combat injustice, but also wanted to divest Judaism and Catholicism of erroneous beliefs and practices that they believed chipped away at the ‘true’ foundations of religion. Pécaut’s Protestant notion of high-minded conscience coexisted with darker impulses of fear, recrimination and hatred. On the whole, the Dreyfusards tried not to be overwhelmed by these negative currents; their most radical opponents among the ‘anti-intellectuals’, however, made no such effort.