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France and l'affaire Dreyfus revisited

Vaiju Naravane

The 100th anniversary of the rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus is an occasion for an analysis of past wrongs. This can be salutary at a time when France is in the process of re-examining its criminal justice system.

A HUNDRED years ago, on July 12, 1906, France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation, finally rehabilitated Captain Alfred Dreyfus, giving him back his honour, snatched on December 22, 1894, when he was falsely accused of high treason. The court thus closed one of the darkest chapters in French judicial history, setting right a wrong that has been described not as a "miscarriage of justice" but as "a judicial crime."

To commemorate the centenary of its own "rebirth" and rehabilitation as an institution of the Republic that guarantees justice to its citizens without fear or favour, the Cour de Cassation has organised a seminar entitled "Justice in the Dreyfus Affair." Open to the public, it brings together jurists, historians, military and constitutional experts in the very room where the Jewish officer was finally exonerated of all charges and reinstated.

At a time when France is in the process of re-examining its criminal justice system with the establishment of a special parliamentary commission to enquire into a high-profile paedophile trial that wrongly imprisoned and condemned 13 innocent persons — some were kept in preventive detention for over three years — because of the dogged determination of the examining magistrate and systemic failures within the judiciary, such an analysis of past wrongs can but be salutary.

Guy Cavinet, the Court's president, told The Hindu : "In the last analysis, not one particle of the charges against Dreyfus holds up. The significance of this Court's verdict is the same today as it was on the day of its pronouncement. It continues to affirm and demonstrate the total innocence of Captain Dreyfus and his wrongful conviction on two successive occasions. The Court's decision to quash his convictions stands as a sentinel to us today, we who are the direct inheritors of that legacy — magistrates, lawyers, and intellectuals who must confront political threats and manoeuvres, the ignominy of odious press campaigns and the violence of crowds unleashed by nationalism and anti-Semitism."

The institutionalised anti-Semitism that led to Dreyfus' condemnation did not go away. On the contrary, it was strengthened in the period just before the Second World War and during the occupation when France's collaborationist government operating from Vichy passed anti-Jewish legislation, going far beyond what the Nazis asked of it. The anti-Semitic extreme right continues to prosper in France and now a new layer of anti-Jewish sentiment has been added to the mix in the form of hatred for Israel (and by extension of the Jews) as expressed by French Muslims of mainly immigrant extraction espousing the Palestinian cause.

The seminar also coincides with the European Union's criticism of France for its overcrowded prisons, its treatment of immigrants in custody, and the widespread and abusive use of preventive detention as a tool to extract confessions.

"The Dreyfus case illustrates what can happen when a democracy becomes a tyranny. But the courage of Dreyfus' supporters, especially men like Bernard Lazare, the first to take up cudgels against the War Council that condemned Dreyfus, Leon Blum, Jean Jaures or Emile Zola, whose open letter to the French president on January 13, 1989, in the form of a front page editorial against the army's despicable manoeuvring entitled J'Accuse ... ! in the newspaper L'Aurore unleashed a furore in the western world, stands out as an example of how democratic forces can win back their democratic rights," said Vincent Duclert, a renowned historian who has just published a remarkable biography of Alfred Dreyfus.

The Cour de Cassation's decision in 1906 to declare Dreyfus innocent and rehabilitate the officer was a courageous one. In the first civilian trial in 1898, a court in Rennes found him guilty a second time (the first was his conviction and degradation by a military court in 1894). Anti-Semitism was the flavour of the day, judges were under attack and the government and parliament for "reasons of state" were both against Dreyfus' reinstatement despite clear evidence of his innocence.

For the Captain and his family it was the culmination of a 12-year-long battle for justice. His conviction, deportation, retrial and re-conviction for a crime committed by another brought down shame and opprobrium on France, a country that saw itself as a unique upholder of justice and human rights.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus came from a wealthy Jewish family in Alsace, northeastern France. The family was so much a product of the Enlightenment and so well integrated in the fabric of French society that its members thought of themselves as progressive liberals, French first, Jewish later. A brilliant student, Alfred Dreyfus decided to serve his country by joining the army where he quickly climbed up the ladder and in 1892 was appointed to Army Headquarters where he was the only Jew.

France and Germany were hostile neighbours and the French realised a traitor was selling army secrets to the Germans. Suspicion immediately fell on Dreyfus because he was a Jew. His trial opened on December 19, 1894, and on December 22, on the basis of fabricated evidence, he was convicted of high treason and ordered to be deported to Devil's Island, one of the world's harshest penal colonies located in shark-infested waters off the coast of French Guyana.

As he was being stripped of his epaulettes in a "degradation" ceremony before elite troops at France's Military Academy, Dreyfus cried out "My countrymen, I am innocent."

The Dreyfus case divided France straight down the middle. The "Dreyfusards" who stood for a republic based on the values of the Enlightenment, on tolerance and the notion that all men are equal despite differences of religion, birth or social rank were fighting for justice and truth. The "anti-Dreyfusards" who were mainly Christian conservatives harbouring a deep suspicion and hatred of the Jews whom they saw as the embodiment of the Anti-Christ, tended to side with the army "for reasons of state."

With intellectual heavyweights like Emile Zola and Jean Jaures taking up their quills to defend the Captain, the Dreyfus affair unleashed a furious public debate in France that was to continue for over a decade and which gave the French press its finest hour. Dreyfus' supporters faced formidable odds in the form of vicious attacks launched by extreme right wing movements like Action Francaise and anti-Semitic newspapers like La Libre Parole, which played a major role not just in the 1894 conviction but in all subsequent attempts to overturn the first guilty verdict.

Obsessed with revenge

One of the reasons the Dreyfus affair so divided French society was because of the phenomenal rise in nationalism and anti-Semitism, much of it linked to the French defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1871. The population was obsessed with revenge and suspicious of foreigners and this hatred of the "outsider" or "the other" crystallised around the figure of The Jew, the quintessential traitor who would sell his soul for 30 pieces of silver. For those of this hue, the Army, perceived as the institution that would bring about revenge and save the national honour, therefore became sacrosanct, to be protected at all costs.

Today, the need to go back a hundred years is evident. Commenting on the parliamentary commission established in the wake of the gross miscarriage of justice in the paedophile case, the influential daily Le Monde had this to say: "Justice is done in the name of the French people and the people have the right to demand explanations and expect reforms. Only the legislative powers of the country can fulfil those demands. The paedophile affair has an emotional dimension comparable to that of the Dreyfus affair a century ago, when the army and the judiciary considered `un-attackable' were forced to give in. It raises an essential question about judicial practice in France: the possibility for the examining magistrate to extort confessions from a suspect, presumed innocent under law, by twisting the letter of the law. This careless recourse to the religion of confessions and torture is unacceptable in a civilised nation."

The parliamentary commission has made several recommendations, including a reduction in the period of preventive detention where a suspect is imprisoned without charge for long periods, a reform of the Magistrates Council, which oversees the work of judges, and the videotaping of interrogations.

Michel Puechavy, a human rights lawyer, told The Hindu : "While these recommendations go in the right direction, they do not go far enough. In France the weight and the power of the state is truly crushing and individuals are often hapless and helpless victims. We need an entire overhaul of our policing methods which are brutal to say the least as well as our penal and judicial systems.

"The Dreyfus anniversary reminds us that constant vigilance is required to protect and preserve human rights which are regularly trampled upon in this country."

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