Their Affair and Our Affair
R.W. Johnson, 23 April 1987
The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus
by Jean-Denis Bredin, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman.
Sidgwick, 628 pp., £20, March 1987,0 283 99443 6 Show More
by Jean-Denis Bredin, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman.
Sidgwick, 628 pp., £20, March 1987,
Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France
by Zeev Sternhell, translated by David Maisel.
California, 416 pp., £38.25, December 1986,0 520 05207 2 Show More
by Zeev Sternhell, translated by David Maisel.
California, 416 pp., £38.25, December 1986,
“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be ‘a good thing’ for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the unparalleled expression of group hatreds, brought about suicides, the ruination of careers and the fall of governments, and which produced anti-semitic riots without number in which Jews were robbed, vilified and killed ... ”
