Retrying the Dreyfus case, France flirts with a Jewish candidate’s antisemitism
JVL Introduction
We have the bizarre situation, in France, where a Jewish candidate, TV pundit Éric Zemmour, is riding high in the Presidential race, threatening to outflank Marine le Pen, the Front National candidate, from the antisemitic and racist right!
To get a flavour of the man, here is how a writer in the New York Times described him recently:
- He has portrayed himself as a truth-teller in a news media dominated by politically correct, left-leaning journalists. He has railed against the immigration of Muslim Africans, invoking the supposed existential threat of a “great replacement” — a loaded term that even Ms. Le Pen has avoided — that will overwhelm France’s more established white and Christian population.
Bizarrely, Zemmour has chosen to make his mark by calling into question the acquittal of Jewish military officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of spying in 1894 and only vindicated and rehabilitated twelve years later in one of the greatest antisemitic scandals of all times.
Benjamin Ivry reports on the Forward website
This article was originally published by Forward on Thu 4 Nov 2021. Read the original here.
Retrying the Dreyfus case, France flirts with a Jewish candidate’s antisemitism
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Where on earth does the author get the idea that left-wingers would be attracted to Zemmour’s politics? This looks like slander to me.
The ghost of Captain Dreyfus will long continue to haunt France and Eric Zemmour is a good example of this.
In 1944, at the end of his trial and conviction for collaboration, the monarchist Charles Maurras, founder of the fascist Action Française, said, “This is the revenge of Dreyfus.”
The Dreyfus injustice prompted republican groups in France to push for the final separation of Church and State in 1905, an achievement proclaimed by leading anti-clerical republicans.
Benamin Ivry is correct to report that in some French military and integralist circles, there is a festering loathing of the ‘disaster’ that the Dreyfus’affair brought about. In 1906, a year after the enactment of the Secular Law, Dreyfus was formally acquitted and rehabilitated into the army, being given the Légion d’Honneur to boot.
A bitter result for the anti-Dreyfusards.
Zemmour’s efforts to retry Dreyfus reminds me that thought the Republic has exonerated Dreyfus, the army has not. In theory the army still finds Dreyfus guilty and when Chirac proposed that there should be a statue to Dreyfus in the very place where he was publicly stripped of his officer’s uniform, the army refused.
The other big issue is that game is Zemmour playing with Vichy. Vichy collaborated with the Nazis to deport over 75,000 Jews from France. Vichy also ‘aryanised’ (!) Jewish property, and denaturalised Jews who were naturalised after 1927, thereby making them more likely to be deported. The game that Zemmour is playing with Vichy is that Vichy should be seen to have protected French Jews. This is a way of describing that over 20,000 French Jews were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps! 20,000 is protecting, apparently. His justification for this is that if you were a ‘foreign Jew’, it was relatively more likely you would be deported than if you were a ‘French’ Jew.
Why is Zemmour minimising Vichy’s role in the Holocaust? To frenchify the narrative of French history, as if to say, ‘Vichy looked after its own and so would I’ (!). We can ask how patriotic was Vichy? It shipped out 100s of thousands of French workers to work on farms and in factories in Nazi Germany. It was just short of being slave labour. It’s called the STO scheme engineered by Pierre Laval (executed after the war).
My father’s uncles and aunt were deported to Auschwitz, thanks to Vichy.
1896. Seems like only yesterday, as the past never ends.
It is worth remembering that Maud Gonne got her first political education as an anti-Dreyfusard. And much later, Constance Markievicz was briefly in favour of Mussolini. Both women were socialists as well as nationalists (and feminists, and role models for angry old women everywhere). They were able to learn and develop their politics. Erecting a huge zero-tolerance wall between political opinions makes it much harder for anyone to grow.
The Zemmour phenomenon is pretty well known isn’t it? Emir Kusturica, the Bosniak film maker who backed the government committing genocide against his own people; Vidkun Quisling et al; maybe even our own Maajid Nawaz could be viewed in this light by some.
I’m sorry, I TOO was upset when the massacred children of Toulouse were sent to be buried in Israel. I was angry at the apparent success of the disgraceful inducements Netanyahu had been offering to make diaspora Jewish communities view Israel as their homeland.
I thought the fictional French series ‘Paris Police 1900’ (still available on BBC iPlayer), in which French antisemitism and the Dreyfus scandal are central elements, was very good – and seems (with some significant degree of artistic licence) to provide a fairly accurate account of how grotesque the whole affair was.