Retrial

THE DREYFUS CASE (400 pp.)--Guy Chapman--Reynal ($5).

"About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right," T. S. Eliot once wrote, "and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong." The Eliot dictum applies just as handily to the great controversies of history, among which the Dreyfus case ranks high. British Historian Guy Chapman would like to change the conventional way of being wrong about the case, not by suggesting that the French artillery captain was guilty after all, but that those who shaped the treason charges against him were not so guilty as half a century of pro-Dreyfus literature makes them out to be. Among Author Chapman's more debatable points: "AntiSemitism played little, perhaps no part in the arrest of the unhappy victim or in his trial."

Even when the evidence seems to refute such arguments, Chapman pursues the Dreyfus case like a detective, tries it like a judge, and breathes life into it like a good novelist. If his book sometimes lacks the courtroom dramatics of Captain Dreyfus by Hungarian Journalist Nicholas Halasz (TIME, Aug. 1), it is because Chapman is busy with a more telling drama on a larger stage--the kind of France in which a Dreyfus case could happen.

Tragedy of Errors. France was restless and unhappy in the 1880s and early 1890s. The army was still licking its wounded pride over Germany's blitz victory of 1870-71. Church and state intermittently sniped at each other. Sixteen Cabinets formed and fell in a dozen years. It was an edgy and suspicious age, and no one was edgier or more suspicious than the staff of the innocuously named Statistical Section, the French army's counterintelligence agency:

"No spy was wholly trustworthy, and thus . . . counter-espionage staffs began an elaborate industry in the fabrication of false reports and misleading plans to be deliberately sold to the enemy. By 1893, so involved had the practice become in the Statistical Section, that it is doubtful if its members knew what documents were secret, which were genuine and which of the low-lived creatures they paid were in their own service or that of the enemy."

One document the Statistical Section did recognize as the work of a bona fide traitor was a list of French military secrets that it ran across in September 1894. Historian Chapman ably retells the story of how, with a few slipshod handwriting comparisons, a War Office clique decided that studious, impersonable. wealthy and unpopular Captain Alfred Dreyfus was the logical culprit. Author Chapman argues that Dreyfus' court-martial and imprisonment at Devil's Island were mostly a tragedy of honest errors, not a conspiracy of racial malice.

Legacy of Terror. Chapman has little use for Dreyfus' famed defender, Emile J'Accuse) Zola. In his view, for all of Zola's courage, the man behind the pen was little more than a pompous, vainglorious donkey. Zola helped bring about Alfred Dreyfus' exoneration in 1906, but it did not really turn out to be the victory his supporters had hoped for. Dreyfus pleased his friends no better than his :oes: he irked them by not becoming a "Dreyfusard." Wrote Charles Peguy, who had fought the anti-Semite gangs in the streets: "We might have died for Dreyfus; Dreyfus has not died for Dreyfus." Dreyfus lived to fight another day, and well, at Chemin des Dames and Verdun in World War I, before dying at 75 in 1935.

While Author Chapman convincingly clears Dreyfus' enemies of any monstrously calculated "clerico-military plot," he fails to see that they lie under the shadow of a greater guilt than simply abetting a miscarriage of justice. Many a hand raised against Dreyfus was, in reality, ready to strike down the Third Republic.

But, Historian Chapman believes, the hands raised for Dreyfus did not necessarily help the Republic, in the long run. What began as the righteous fight to save an individual from the stupidity or malice of other individuals was turned into an ideological campaign against the army as a whole, against nationalism, against the church. Waving the bloody shirt--or torn epaulets--of Captain Dreyfus, generations of French liberals of all shades inveighed against "militarism" or "clericalism." The rejoinders from the right were correspondingly bitter. Thus reality in French politics became increasingly obscured by a kind of vicious, ideological sentimentality, and the long-existing split in French national life was deepened. That split has again and again threatened to place French democracy at the mercy of a pack of authoritarian intransigents, from the extremists in Dreyfus' day to the Communists and Poujadists of today. That is the real tragedy still evoked by the Dreyfus case.

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