Into the Twenty-First Century

From the 1980s until the present, the Affair has received continuing public attention and reevaluation by scholars.

In 1985, a sculpture of Dreyfus commissioned by the French minister of culture and intended for installation in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, site of Dreyfus’s degradation and rehabilitation, was rejected by the army and finally installed elsewhere in Paris, on the Left Bank.

The centenary of the events of the Affair (1994-2006) also brought back to public attention many of the key moments of that era. Included here are journalistic tributes to Zola on the anniversary of the publication of “J’Accuse . . . !” in 1998. In 2006, on the 100th anniversary of Dreyfus’s rehabilitation (1906), French President Jacques Chirac held an official ceremony in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire at which descendants of both Dreyfus and Zola were present. Chirac warned that “the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won” and praised Dreyfus as a “patriot who passionately loved France.”

In the past five years, a number of English-language books have been published which reexamine the place of the Dreyfus Affair in the wider culture. Among them are Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (2009); Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (2010); Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (2010); and Piers Paul Read, The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two (2012). Clearly the Dreyfus Affair continues to resonate with today’s scholars. Moreover, two recent novels, Kate Taylor, A Man in Uniform (2010), and Susan Daitch, The Paper Conspiracies (2011), clearly shows the continuing hold of the Affair on the imagination of contemporary writers.  Each one of these books can be found in the circulating collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia.