I recently rewatched the great (Prime Video), a film by Roman Polanski that deals with the events that took place at the turn of the 20th century that went down in history as the . The richness and universality of its political and social aspects make me think that this story is worth retelling; Perhaps there are useful lessons in it for our days.
In 1894, the French military court convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason in a secret trial. The conviction was based on a sheet of paper — which became known as “borderô” — recovered from a waste basket at the German embassy in Paris that referenced secret documents from the French Army (the French counterintelligence service had an embassy cleaning employee as an informant).
Three of the five graphologists consulted thought they recognized Dreyfus’ handwriting on the border, which led to his conviction and exile on Devil’s Island, an isolated rock on the coast of Guyana, where he would spend almost five years.
On January 5, 1895, in the courtyard of the Military School and in front of the formed battalion, the captain’s degradation ceremony took place. The shocking opening scene of Polanski’s film depicts the officer in charge of the task ripping off the chevrons and buttons from his uniform and breaking the saber over his knee, in front of a livid Dreyfus. An angry mob watches the supreme humiliation from behind the courtyard bars.
To understand such indignation, it is necessary to remember that France at that time was still resentful and humiliated by the traumatic defeat by Prussia in 1870. Germany was obsessively seen as the great enemy, and all military logic was based on the hypothesis of a new war (which would effectively occur 20 years later). German espionage, in turn, was seen as omnipresent.
In this context, Dreyfus, an assimilated, polyglot, Alsatian Jewish officer (a region that France had lost to Germany in 1870), was the perfect suspect.
I open a parenthesis to refer to the issue of anti-Semitism in the episode: it was widely spread in French society at the time and constitutes the symbolic nucleus from which the suspicion against Dreyfus was formed, without which it would not have existed nor could it be understood. That said — and without minimizing this factor —, I intend to focus attention on the functioning of institutions, when injustice starts to be defended in the name of “reasons of State”.
After the conviction, Colonel Piquart, head of counterintelligence, gathers evidence that proves Dreyfus’s innocence and points to a new culprit; Major Esterhazy. The French Military Justice is closed in on itself against the re-examination of the evidence. To do so, it uses resources such as falsified documents and summary trials behind closed doors, resulting in Esterhazy’s acquittal. I will not delve into these facts here, which, for those who are interested, are very well described in the film.
It is at this moment — when the Justice system begins to prioritize its corporatist protection, to the detriment of the search for truth — that the document “J’accuse” (I accuse) appears as a watershed, without which the Dreyfus case would never have gained notoriety.
Émile Zola, already a famous writer, had sympathized with the “Dreyfusard” cause and, after some initial resistance, spoke out on one occasion or another, without producing any result other than irritating and reinforcing the strength of the French “establishment”.
On January 13, 1898, he published it in the newspaper L’Aurore, with which he completely reversed the logic of action and even the object of the “Dreyfusard” crusade.
Instead of focusing on proving Dreyfus’s innocence, Zola shifts the focus to the guilt of the soldiers involved and the vices of a corporatist and anti-Semitic Military Justice.
In the document, after directly and formally accusing several Army leaders, naming each one individually and the graphologists involved in the issue, Zola concludes with a kind of legal and political checkmate: he claims to be aware that, by making the accusations, he is subject to being sued for defamation, which in practice forces the Army to sue him. As a result, the issue leaves the secrecy of military courts and takes to the streets.
It would be great to be able to conclude by saying that the case was reopened, Dreyfus was acquitted, and everyone lived happily ever after. But, unfortunately, this is not how the processes of confronting institutional dysfunctions work. Zola is convicted and goes into exile in England.
What Zola achieves with his manifesto is not the production of new evidence nor the acquittal of Dreyfus, but the overthrow of the possibility of closing the case.
Before Zola, the Dreyfus case was a military dossier protected by secrecy, supported by “reasons of state” and institutionally closed. Through Zola, it becomes a permanent public scandal, impossible to archive, followed by the international press and politically toxic for any government.
This change results in the arrest and suicide of Henry, the officer who forged evidence, in the partial rehabilitation of Dreyfus in 1899 and in his full acquittal only in 1906, the same year in which Piquart becomes Minister of War.
In short, “J’accuse” does not directly promote justice; prevents forgetting. By preventing it, it forces the State to revisit an unjust decision indefinitely, until the lie becomes unsustainable. The role of the free press in the episode cannot be overstated; By publishing Zola’s manifesto, L’Aurore broke the deliberate isolation of the process and forced political and judicial power to confront public opinion.
In recent years, the Dreyfus case has been inappropriately invoked to challenge specific legal decisions, as if all institutional criticism implied the denial of the legitimacy of its results.
The parallel that is of interest here does not refer to the guilt or innocence of contemporary defendants, but to the way institutions react when their fairness and authority are appropriately challenged. I retell this episode not to discuss the French past, but because it seems to me to be an eloquent example of how societies react to the risk of seeing their justice systems move away from their raison d’être.
