In Europe

militaire
.
    Before long the affair was being monitored breathlessly all over Europe. After Émile Zola forced a reopening of the case on 13 January, 1898 – his fiery ‘
J'Accuse!
’ in
L'Aurore
was intended primarily to provoke charges of libel – scores of other European writers and intellectuals became involved. What was more important? The rights of the individual, or the prestige of the army and the nation? The progressive principles of the Enlightenment, or the old values of the counter-revolution, of the days of glory from before 1789?
    The Dreyfus affair, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, was ‘the death-struggle of the old world’. ‘In those years, life seemed to have been temporarily suspended,’ wrote the future prime minister, Léon Blum. It was ‘a human crisis, not as far-reaching or long-lasting as the French Revolution, but no less violent for that … It was as though the whole world revolved around one affair, and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships all was interrupted, all was disrupted, all was seen through different eyes.’
    Friends stopped seeing each other: Dreyfus lay between them like a live grenade. Family members avoided each other. Famous salons fell asunder. A certain M. Pistoul, manufacturer of wooden crates, was taken to courtby his mother-in-law after a family row over Dreyfus. He had called her an ‘
intellectuelle
’; she had accused him of being a ‘monster’ and a ‘traitor’; he had struck her; her daughter had filed for divorce. During Dreyfus’ retrial, Marcel Proust sat in the public gallery each day with coffee and sandwiches, so as not to miss a moment. He and his brother Robert helped to circulate a petition,‘The Intellectuals’ Protest’, and collected 3,000 signatures, including those of that notable arbiter of good taste Anatole France, and of André Gide and Claude Monet. For Monet, the petition meant the end of his friendship with his colleague Edgar Degas, and an enraged M. Proust Sr refused to speak to either of his sons for a week.
    The Dreyfus scandal, like those surrounding Oscar Wilde and Philipp zu Eulenburg, had been drawn to the public's attention by a newspaper. And it was, above all, a clash of the papers. The affair's unprecedented vitality was due to the phenomenon of the ‘high-circulation daily’ appearing all over Europe, sensation-hungry papers with hundreds of thousands of readers and a distribution network that stretched to the remotest corners of the country. Around the turn of the century, Paris alone had between twenty-five and thirty-five dailies reporting and creating a wide variety of news. Berlin had sixty papers, twelve of which appeared twice a day. In London, the
Daily Mail
cost twopence, and had a circulation of 500,000: eleven times that of the staid and respectable
Times
. There arose in this way a new force, the force of ‘public opinion’, and it did not take the newspaper magnates long to learn to play on popular sentiment like a church organ. They inflated rumours and glossed over facts, everything was allowable for the purposes of higher sales, political gain or the pure adrenaline of making the news.
    Yet the question remains: why was French public opinion so susceptible to this particular affair? Anti-Semitism definitely played a part. The anti-Dreyfus papers ran columns every day about the perfidious role of the ‘syndicate’, a burgeoning conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, socialists and foreigners who were out to tear France apart with their deception, lies, bribery and forgeries. When Dreyfus was first court-martialled, the crowd at the courthouse gates shouted ‘
À mort! À mort les juifs!
'The Viennese
Neue Freie Presse
's Jewish correspondent in Paris was so shocked that he went home and penned the first sentences of his tract
Der Judenstaat
: the Jews had to be given a country of their own. The correspondent's namewas Theodor Herzl. And so the first seed of what was to become the state of Israel sprouted here, at the Dreyfus trial.
    But that was not all. What was really taking place, in fact, was a collision between two Frances: the old, static France of the status quo, and the modern, dynamic France of the press, public debate, justice and truth. Between the France of the palaces, in other words, and the France of the boulevards.
    Strangely enough, the affair also blew over almost as quickly as it had arisen. On 9 September, 1899 Dreyfus was convicted once more, despite