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For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus

The Dreyfus Affair. I have always thought I knew what it was about. Someone was stealing secrets from the French military and handing them over to the Germans. A note incriminating its author was found in a wastebasket by a cleaning woman and the French military got busy finding someone to blame it on.

Not finding the traitor. Finding a man who could be presented to the public as a traitor. Who better to fill that role in 1890s France than a Jew. And so, with no evidence against him the French military convinced a court martial of the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus with faked evidence, with phony handwriting testimony (the one person who said the writing on the note was not Drefus' was not allowed to testify), and a secret forged document that was not revealed to the defense until years later.

What really convicted Dreyfus was public opinion on which the military relied heavily. I did not realize how electric the atmosphere was at the end of the 19th century in France. After the loss to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War and the civil war that erupted popular opinion divided into the few who thought France's military was simply not as good as Germany's and the many who thought the loss was punishment from God for . . . I don't remember what. It doesn't matter.

The Roman Catholic church was in decline and struggling to re-attach its wandering former members who had been exposed to Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and the German scholars who had been writing for decades that Jesus did not exist, that the Bible had no claim to authenticity, that Darwin had proven the Christian religion was based on lies. Mixed in with these disturbing discussions was a virulent resurgence of anti-Semitism in France. I read somewhere recently that if one were asked in 1900 to predict which country would take anti-Semitism to the extreme in the next 50 years Germany would be no one's guess. It would be France that was seen heading for trouble.

I always thought that a few French army officers were protecting the guilty man when they rigged the Drefus decision. It turns out the guilty man was rather well known: Walsin Esterhazy. He eventually confessed, though that seems not to have convinced the partisans on the right of his guilt. The French military was so deeply corrupt there were almost no honest officers to protest Dreyfus' railroading.

One man, Georges Picquart - remember his name - was put in charge of intelligence and realized Dreyfus' innocence. He went through channels trying to convince the military and the government that Dreyfus deserved a new trial. Not only did those above him not act on his evidence, he was shipped to a particularly dangerous assignment in Tunis in hopes he would be killed and when that didn't happen, he too was put on trial on false charges with faked evidence.

Dreyfus' brother and a handful of others who were sure of his innocence worked for years to bring the truth to light. Eventually, like the military, they realized this was going to have to be tried in the court of public opinion. Zola wrote his famous J'Accuse and was found guilty of libel in another corrupt court and fled to England. Slowly, and it must have been slow indeed for the innocent man on Devil's Island and his family waiting for justice, the weight of evidence became sufficient to convince many open-minded people of Dreyfus' innocence. But still nothing was done because the military and government were so corrupt and they had the weight of such intense anti-Semitism on their side that they were able to prevent the re-opening of the case.

Finally, in July of 1898 Godefroy Caviagnac was made minister of war and he realized the depth of the deception and the innocence of Dreyfus. So when the government demanded he state that there was no question of the man's guilt he resigned. So did the man who was named to replace him. And the man who was named to replace him. And slowly justice made her way, a new trial that found Dreyfus guilty, again with forged evidence, was overturned and he was freed.

Frederick Brown's book presents the issues that polarized the French public in the late 19th century - the fall of a Catholic bank, the abandonment of de Lesseps' Panama Canal, the social disruption of the Communards after the Franco-Prussian War. Even the building of the Eiffel Tower was highly contentious. Eiffel was routinely described as an outsider, as German Jew (he was third generation French and not a Jew.) Brown shows how the strong feelings, not to say hysteria, of a polarized society led to the tragedy of the Dreyfus Affair and the subsequent weakening of the French Army, leading eventually to the French Army's capitulation to Hitler and the Vichy government.

Gertrude Stein Writes a Mystery Novel

Simon at Stuck in a Book recently read and reviewed Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1933), a quirky mystery by Gertrude Stein based on real blood on her real floor. She doesn't do a bad job, at least not by Stein standards. Here is the review I wrote when I read it back in 2008.

It was the summer of 1933 and Gertrude Stein had just achieved real success with the publication of her famed autobiography, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. But when she returned to her desk to begin writing her next work she found herself suffering from dreaded Writer's Block.

What to do? Why, write a mystery of course. The inspiration was a telephone line cut, two cars tampered with (spark plugs removed and water in the gas tank), a piano that wouldn't play (the keys were cemented together), and real blood on Gertrude Stein's real dining-room floor in her country house. Stein was also remembering the Lizzie Borden murders fifty years earlier and throughout the book she writes, "Lizzie do you understand." "Lizzie do you mind." "Of course Lizzie you do understand of course you do."

The result of this memorable summer was Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, of which Virgil Thomson said, "It's not the finest detective story in the world, but it is very good, Gertrude." I would echo Thomson and I would add that the ending . . . well, the ending is . . . um, . . . this is by Gertrude Stein, you understand of course you do.

A Matter of Trust by Lis Wiehl

I no longer remember where I heard about this Lis Wiehl murder mystery, A Matter of Trust, but I'm grateful to the blogger who mentioned it. What a stunner.

Things I particularly like about this mystery:

• It takes place in Seattle. Coffee at Starbucks in Pioneer Square.
• Mia Quinn is a real and likeable protagonist
• The antagonism between Mia and the detective assigned to the case with her is realistic and its outcome unpredictable
• The subplot about school bullying and the consideration of the price bullies should pay for their conduct is thoughtful
• I like Mia's children, who are real and whose problems are understandable
• You don't have to be Hercule Poirot to figure out who did what to whom and why

Her husband died recently and Mia considers herself lucky to get her old job back as a prosecutor in King County. She isn't on the job long when one of her colleagues is murdered and the elected prosecutor assigns Mia the case. Did he do this because he thought she would be more dedicated because the dead woman was a friend? Or does he want her in place to take the blame if the murder is still unsolved by election day?

As Mia works on this demanding case she is also trying to bring to justice some high school football players who have bullied a boy who killed himself. As she slowly puts that case together she has to deal with her own football-player son who is becoming increasingly difficult to manage now that there is no man in the house to back up her discipline.

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K Jerome

It's about time I read this classic of light humor, published in 1889 and sitting on my bookshelf for decades now. The author intended to write a travel guide for people who wanted to go upriver from Kingston to around Oxford: where the boater will find locks, where to stop for a picnic (and where not to stop for anything), and historic spots along the way.

It ended up a hilarious tale of the misadventures of three amateur boaters, accompanied by a feisty fox terrier named Montmorency: "Fox terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs."

With disarming faux naivete the narrator tells the reader how he hates steam powered boats and instructs him on how to block their way when possible. Then when he is given a ride on a steam boat he, once again naively, complains at the non-steam craft that impede the progress of the faster moving boat. And on it goes.

As I read Three Men in a Boat and our heros were approaching the lock at Marlow I was reminded that the cover of another book I've been reading has a picture of a lock on the cover, as it turns out, Marlow Lock itself, painted at about the same time as this book was published and the mishap-ridden holiday took place. Apparently it was quite a popular activity, to boat up the Thames in midsummer. Perhaps it still is.

City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge

Such appealing characters appear in Elizabeth Goudge's novel, City of Bells. The city of the title is Torminster in which a young man, Jocyln Irwin, whose army career is ended during the Boer War by a leg injury, decides to open a bookstore. His parents and his grandmother are aghast that he would consider going into trade. But his grandfather, Canon Fordyce, thinks it's a wonderful idea and lends him money to get him started.

"A bookseller," said Grandfather, "is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases . . . and there come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all. . . . Yes. . . . It's a great vocation."

The canon is "one of the saints of God" who has adopted a little girl from a nearby orphanage, Henrietta, who gave her friendship "with the lovely abandonment of childhood that has not learned yet to hold back for fear the love given should be scorned." Canon and Mrs Fordyce are also raising their orphaned grandson, Hugh.

Canon Fordyce says compline every evening while walking around the garden, but he can't help getting involved in the conversations he hears as he passes, breaking off in the middle of a psalm to encourage one of the children or to give his opinion on some topic of importance in the close, and then resuming his prayers where he left off.

Henrietta makes friends with a reclusive poet who disappears suddenly leaving bills behind. Jocyln falls in love with the house he was living in and sees in it a perfect place for his bookstore. Also visiting the sleepy town when Jocyln arrives is one of England's foremost young actresses, Felicity Summers. She is staying with her Aunt Adelaide who "always dresses in the colors of the Church's seasons, stockings and all. She wears purple in Lent, red at Whitsun, white during festivals and green the rest of the year."

Goudge's books are a delight and this one, published in 1936, certainly delighted me.

The Storied Life of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

The literary charm of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, the engaging characters of Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows' The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a love story as piquant as that in Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

Blurbs, as the title character of this novel says, "are the blood diamonds of publishing," and this sort of hype sets the reader up for a letdown, but in the case of Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A J Fikry you probably won't be disappointed.

Based loosely on the story of Silas Marner, The Storied Life of A J Fikry takes place on Alice, an island off the coast of Massachusetts bearing a good deal of resemblance to Martha's Vineyard. A J owns a bookstore there but as the story begins he is depressed at the death of his wife, neglecting the store, increasingly isolated, and heading for bankruptcy. An outsider who married into an old Alice family, he has made no friends and doesn't get along very well with his relatives. He doesn't care to sell anything he doesn't think is first-rate, and that consists mostly of serious literary fiction.

Enter a publisher's representative, Amelia Loman. New on the job, she wonders as she makes the lengthy trip, which includes a boring ferry ride from Hyannis on which she paints her nails yellow, whether it's worth her while to visit this bookstore, described by her predecessor as persnickety. The visit does not go well. A J is downright rude to Amelia and disdainful of the books she offers on her winter list.

The theft of a valuable first edition of Poe's Tamerlane, the sudden arrival of an unidentified orphan, a book club for police officers only (they are partial to Jeffrey Deaver mass market crime fiction), and a touching short novel by a mysterious and hitherto unknown author  all play their parts in shaping life in and around Island Books.

The exposition is clever. We learn about A J and the bookstore from the detailed notes Amelia reads on her way to her first visit to Island Books and about Amelia in a phone conversation she has with a man she met on an online dating site. A J's sister-in-law scolds him for his increased drinking and decreased interaction with his customers, revealing the backstory.

Each chapter has a short story title that suggests what is coming: "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Short comments by AJF on each of these stories leads each chapter in a format seemingly intended for a shelf sign to help the potential reader. But we soon realize the customer is not the reader AJF has in mind.

A reader's copy was provided to me by the publisher. I liked it so much I bought myself a paper copy of the book.