France claims to remember The Dreyfus Affair, but reality proves otherwise

When Georges Clemenceau — future Prime Minister of France and, at the time, editor-in-chief of the newspaper L’Aurore — sat down to plan the January 13, 1898, edition of his daily, he made a fateful decision. On an average day, L’Aurore printed 30,000 copies. That morning, however, Clemenceau ordered a print run ten times that amount. Three hundred thousand copies would be distributed across Paris — an audacious gamble, perhaps, but one that would succeed in rattling the very bones of the French Republic.

It may be a bit much to say that Clemenceau foresaw that the moment would become historic, as it did. But he surely sensed the explosion it would trigger in an already volatile society. The Dreyfus Affair had reached a boiling point. Just two days earlier, a military court had acquitted the actual traitor — the man who had transmitted confidential military documents from the French army to the German embassy in Paris. Meanwhile, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer from Alsace, remained the scapegoat, falsely accused and already exiled to the notorious Devil’s Island.

That bitter January morning, Parisians opened their newspapers over breakfast and found a thunderclap on the front page: an open letter by Émile Zola, one of the most celebrated literary figures of the era, in which he mounted a direct assault on the president of the Republic, Félix Faure. Zola’s voice — piercing, indignant, unrelenting — articulated what many had long suspected but feared to say aloud: that Dreyfus had been sacrificed at the altar of military honor and nationalist prejudice.

The letter’s title, “J’Accuse…!”, now immortalized, was reportedly chosen by Clemenceau himself. In just two words, it summoned the full moral authority of the French intellectual tradition against the machinery of political corruption. Zola accused the generals, the ministers, the judges — and the very soul of the Republic.

In time, truth emerged victorious. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, reinstated into the army, and awarded the Legion of Honor. Yet the stain of anti-Semitism has lingered in the French conscience ever since, stubborn and unresolved.

Now, 130 years later, France finds itself once again wrestling with that legacy. While President Emmanuel Macron’s party is proposing to officially commemorate the Dreyfus Affair, in the same breath, Macron announced that France will formally recognize a Palestinian state — a move widely perceived as a tacit reward for Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic attacks have once again become common on the streets of Paris.

Can France, home to half a million Jews and the cradle of liberté, égalité, fraternité, finally break with its long history of anti-Semitism? Or is it still trapped in the same moral maze that Zola exposed more than a century ago?