While countless books have chronicled the wrongful conviction of French military officer Alfred Dreyfus, his ensuing trials, and his eventual exoneration, this distinctive volume examines France's Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) with a critical eye, analyzing the actions of its main protagonists, the rise of the public intellectual, and the Affair's continued relevance. After a brief overview of the events to establish the poisoned ideological climate of the day, the work explores how intellectuals like Bernard Lazare, Emile Zola, and others contributed to the Affair, defining both it and themselves in the process. With mini-portraits of the key players and a detailed chronology, this telling book combines rigorous scholarship with cultural commentary to demonstrate the continued relevance of the example set by Dreyfus and his many supporters.
Charting the decline of the French intellectual, from the Dreyfus Affair to Islamophobia The best-selling author of The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the troublesome figure of the French intellectual. Revered throughout the Francophile world, France’s tradition of public intellectual engagement stems from Voltaire and Zola and runs through Sartre and Foucault to the present day. The intellectual enjoys a status as the ethical lodestar of his nation’s life, but, as Sand shows, the recent history of these esteemed figures shows how often, and how profoundly, they have fallen short of the ideal. Sand examines Sartre and de Beauvoir’s unsettling accommodations during the Nazi occupation and then shows how Muslims have replaced Jews as the nation’s scapegoats for a new generation of public intellectuals, including Michel Houellebecq and Alain Finkielkraut. Possessing an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual milieu, Sand laments the degradation of a literary elite, but questions the value of that class at the best of times. Drawing parallels between the Dreyfus Affair and Charlie Hebdo, while mixing reminiscence with analysis, Sand casts a characteristically candid and mordant gaze upon the intellectual scene of today.
Intelligent, ambitious and a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, and the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies - many of them aristocratic officers in the army's High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew. In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the waste paper basket of Colonel Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen of the German embassy in Paris. When French intelligence pieced the document back together to uncover proof of a spy in their midst, Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans, found guilty of treason by unanimous verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil's Island. The fight to free the wrongfully convicted Dreyfus - over twelve long years, through many trials - is a story rife with heroes and villains, courage and cowardice, dissimulation and deceit. One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history, the Dreyfus affair divided France, stunned the world and unleashed violent hatreds and anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come. Today, amid charged debates over national and religious identity across the globe, its lessons throw into sharp relief the conflicts of the present. In the hands of historian, biographer and prize-winning novelist Piers Paul Read, this masterful epic of the struggle between a minority seeking justice and a military establishment determined to save face comes dramatically alive for a new generation.
Arguing about Empire analyses the most divisive arguments about empire between Europe's two leading colonial powers from the age of high imperialism to the post-war era of decolonization. Focusing on the domestic contexts underlying imperial rhetoric, Arguing about Empire adopts a case-study approach, treating key imperial debates as historical episodes to be investigated in depth. The episodes in question have been selected both for their chronological range, their variety, and, above all, their vitriol. Some were straightforward disputes; others involved cooperation in tense circumstances. These include the Tunisian and Egyptian crises of 1881-2, which saw France and Britain establish new North African protectorates, ostensibly in co-operation, but actually in competition; the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, when Britain and France came to the brink of war in the aftermath of the British re-conquest of Sudan; the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, early tests of the Entente Cordiale, when Britain lent support to France in the face of German threats; the 1922 Chanak crisis, when that imperial Entente broke down in the face of a threatened attack on Franco-British forces by Kemalist Turkey; World War Two, which can be seen in part as an undeclared colonial war between the former allies, complicated by the division of the French Empire between De Gaulle's Free French forces and those who remained loyal to the Vichy Regime; and finally the 1956 Suez intervention, when, far from defusing another imperial crisis, Britain colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt -- the culmination of the imperial interference that began some eighty years earlier.
“As to Europe—keep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog.”—Ayn Rand (1905–1982) thus commented on the role of Europe in her key novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). The same could be said of the way Europe features in her own biography and in the general perception of her persona. Even though Rand was born in pre-revolutionary Russia, she is nowadays considered anAmerican phenomenon, whose reach ends at the Atlantic shore. This book lifts the "gray fog" cast over her relationship with Europe, retracing the changing perception of the continent in both her fiction and thought. Her apparent lack of success with European readers is often explained by allegedly different reading tastes. However, a look at her publication history and reception shows that many factors played a role why her work found fewer European than US readers. Finally, an archipelago of European readers and admirers emerges which is testament to Rand's impact on European art and politics.
Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.
Co-published by Plunkett Lake Press and George Braziller, Inc. On an autumn morning in 1894, Captain Dreyfus was summoned to appear for a routine inspection; instead, as he took down a letter dictated by a senior officer, he was summarily accused of high treason. So began a twelve-year series of events that included his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the publication of Emile Zola’s passionateJ’Accuse, the Rennes retrial, and the pardon and final rehabilitation of 1906. As the Dreyfus case turned into the Affair, the history of a single military career came to display the conflicts that were tearing France apart: military defeat, anti-Semitic furor, and the place of traditional values in a country still reeling from the turbulence of the French Revolution. Told with an historian’s insight and a novelist’s skill, The Affairmakes fascinating and informative reading about one of the most celebrated episodes in modern history. “There have been many books about the Dreyfus Affair, but Jean-Denis Bredin's book is one of the best of them — lucid, well-organized, informed by a fine sense of drama.” — John Gross, The New York Times “[a] critically acclaimed study” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “If one is limited to a single book about the Dreyfus case and its consequences, this should be it. Bredin has told this story with precision, passion, and a vivid sense of character.” — The New York Review of Books “A brilliant and fascinating book. What is most remarkable about The Affair is the skill and sensitivity with which the author places it in its essential historical setting. It is also a gripping — though terrible — story superbly told.” — The Atlantic “This is the most judicious and absorbing account to date of the Dreyfus Case.” — The Boston Globe “This is certainly the best book on the Dreyfus case now available in the English language.” — San Francisco Examiner “Bredin is crystal clear in his gripping narrative of the complex case. His tapestry glows with all the color of the Belle Epoque and its extravagances.” — Chicago Sun-Times “There have been other books on the Affair, but I can’t imagine any of them coming even close to Bredin’s work. He is brilliant at placing the myriad elements of the Affair in context with verve and lucidity. It should be a model for future historians.” — San Francisco Chronicle
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Jean-Paul Sartre is often seen as the quintessential public intellectual, but this was not always the case. Until the mid-1940s he was not so well-known, even in France. Then suddenly, in a very short period of time, Sartre became an intellectual celebrity. How can we explain this remarkable transformation? The Existentialist Moment retraces Sartre's career and provides a compelling new explanation of his meteoric rise to fame. Baert takes the reader back to the confusing and traumatic period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath and shows how the unique political and intellectual landscape in France at this time helped to propel Sartre and existentialist philosophy to the fore. The book also explores why, from the early 1960s onwards, in France and elsewhere, the interest in Sartre and existentialism eventually waned. The Existentialist Moment ends with a bold new theory for the study of intellectuals and a provocative challenge to the widespread belief that the public intellectual is a species now on the brink of extinction.
Documents the case of a successful Jewish captain in the French artillery command who was wrongly convicted of high treason, chronicling the twelve-year effort to secure his freedom and describing period anti-Semitism.
This book addresses the ways in which the figure of the intellectuals and their relationship to the public has been theorized through the conceptualizations of bureaucracy, democracy, and communism as universal processes from the 19th century to the present. Starting with Hegel and Marx, the author looks at the rise of the figure of the universal intellectual in various forms, before turning to what is presented as a transformation of the figure of the intellectual into ‘the public intellectual’ advanced by the New Philosophies and the critical response offered by Edward Said. The study presents two comparative case studies: the Iranian Revolution and the public intellectuals in Europe, specifically in Norway, before concluding with a focus on the decay of the figure of the intellectuals and highlighting Ranciere’s critique of the intellectual/masses distinction.
