This is a novel about the Dreyfus case, the conviction in France in 1894 of a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for spying for Germany. Doubts about the safety of the conviction eventually led to a campaign to secure his re-trial. The case gained international attention and for a time France was split between supporters of the army, which had formulated the initial case against Dreyfus, sometimes in alliance with open anti-Semites, and those convinced of his innocence, dubbed “Dreyfusards”.
This outstanding fictional account comes from the pen of Robert Harris, author of eight other historical novels and six non-fiction books. References to “the number one bestselling author” on the glossy paperback cover might lead you to think of Harris as a maker of blockbusters, but the truth is very different. This is an exceptionally well-researched work, dense with detail, including documentary detail. The fact that some of Harris’s other novels, presumably equally thoroughly researched, concern Nazi Germany, Ancient Rome and Russia can only make you gasp with amazement at the author’s scope, industry and linguistic proficiency.
An Officer and a Spy is also intensely gripping. Readers can probably be divided into those who already know the details of the Dreyfus case and those who only have a general understanding of the case. For the latter (a group that included this reviewer), the novel will be extremely exciting as it progresses, with questions such as what will be the verdict in Dreyfus’s second trial anxiously awaited. (Queen Victoria sent the Lord Chief Justice of England as an observer, and the accused’s main lawyer was shot and wounded on his way to court). But even those with an advanced knowledge of the facts will gain much from the details — the weather, the food, the rivalry between figures in the army’s intelligence-gathering offices, and so on.
The narrator of the present-tense narrative (the head of army intelligence, Colonel Picquart, the man who first came to suspect Dreyfus was innocent) somewhere gives as his opinion that, with the arrival of typewriters, photography and the like, there was no real secrecy by the 1890s. When writing this, Harris must have been only too aware how much more true that is today, with email interception, computer hacking and online surveillance. Reading the passage, I thought that Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning was in some ways a modern Dreyfus — a member of the army punished for revealing its secrets, with homophobia a substitute for anti-Semitism, though in his case he has never denied the charges against him.
The French novelists Emile Zola and Marcel Proust were both “Dreyfusards”, Zola eminently so. His article J’Accuse, accusing the army and the state in general of a cover-up, is often cited as the most influential newspaper article ever written, though some of the Watergate revelations must run it close. Zola fled to the UK to avoid prosecution, but Proust’s involvement was altogether more peripheral. I could only find two references to him in this book, even though Harris says in his Acknowledgements that he found George Painter’s two-volume life of the novelist “useful.”
The general picture presented is of sections of the army and the state conniving in the falsification of documents incriminating Dreyfus, and then obstructing Picquart’s efforts to prove that another officer, Major Esterhazy (who also fled to the UK), was the real culprit. Against this, the work of Picquart and the sympathetic Vice President of the French Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, is supported by a swing in public opinion, previously markedly anti-Semitic, in favor of Dreyfus.
But behind it all lay France’s defeat by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which France lost its province of Alsace and part of Lorraine. The army was consequently able to claim that if its credibility were to be weakened — by, for instance, any admission that it had been wrong about Dreyfus — then the security of the whole of France would once more be threatened. Dreyfus’s family was from Alsace, he spoke French with a German accent, and he was also considered likely to be less than patriotic on account of his religion, even though there were many prominent Jews in Parisian life at the time.
Locations are wonderfully described in this novel. First there’s Paris, which Harris clearly knows well, often citing how long it takes to walk from one place to another. And then there’s Tunisia, where Picquart was posted in an attempt to stop him investigating Esterhazy, and consequently Dreyfus. There’s also Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, one of the most inhospitable places on earth where Dreyfus was imprisoned for almost five years with his legs shackled to his bed at night, and denied darkness. (Bradley Manning was also denied darkness prior to his trial).
In so many ways the Dreyfus affair ushers in the modern world. The roles of the press and public opinion were new, at least on this scale. Secret dossiers became prominent, though their contents could by then be photographed. Above all, the issue of the individual’s right to justice, even where the state is the adversary, was to characterize the modern era. Such a framework is central to understanding much of the West’s contemporary complaints against Beijing in the field of human rights, for instance.
Finally, prison sentences seem to have got longer. Dreyfus may have been initially sentenced to confinement on Devil’s Island for life, but Zola fled to the UK to avoid a possible sentence of only 12 months for a paragraph he wrote in J’Accuse. Last week, however, a doctor in the UK was given 22 years what appears to be encouraging boys in his care to stimulate themselves while he was examining them for cancer. Have we gone out of our minds? I would have thought 22 weeks would have been about right, considering the shame that would have been involved anyway. But maybe there were aspects of the case the press didn’t report.
Anyway, this is a superb novel. Despite its being over 600 pages long, I read it in two days, and was sorry when it came to the end.
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