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In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a talented young Jewish officer serving on the General Staff of the French army, was accused of selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Despite the lack of evidence and motive, Dreyfus was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Over the next decade the Dreyfus affair emerged as a pivotal event in French history, as first Dreyfus's family and then an increasing number of republican politicians and intellectuals fought to correct an injustice, opposed by a coalition of army officers, Catholics, and monarchists. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, with the guilty verdict of 1894 finally overturned by the Cour de Cassation, the French Supreme Court, in 1906.
There is, unsurprisingly, an enormous literature on the Dreyfus affair, which is both a compelling story on its own terms, and an incident that illuminates many of the political and social divisions that tore apart not only France but Europe in general in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Anti-Semitism, virulent nationalism, and the fragility of democratic institutions and the rule of law were all on display in the Dreyfus affair, foreshadowing many of the toxic events that devastated Europe for the next several decades. In the past few months two other books on the Dreyfus affair have appeared: For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, by Frederick Brown (Knopf, 2010) and Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, by Ruth Harris (Metropolitan Books, 2010). Brown situates the affair in the political context of Third Republic France, divided between those who were nostalgic for a Catholic monarchy and supporters...