Download or read book Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters written by Louis Begley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards--committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another--against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army's top brass in order to secure Dreyfus's conviction. Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.
Download or read book The Dreyfus Affair written by Piers Paul Read and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligent, ambitious and a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, and the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies - many of them aristocratic officers in the army's High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew. In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the waste paper basket of Colonel Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen of the German embassy in Paris. When French intelligence pieced the document back together to uncover proof of a spy in their midst, Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans, found guilty of treason by unanimous verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil's Island. The fight to free the wrongfully convicted Dreyfus - over twelve long years, through many trials - is a story rife with heroes and villains, courage and cowardice, dissimulation and deceit. One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history, the Dreyfus affair divided France, stunned the world and unleashed violent hatreds and anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come. Today, amid charged debates over national and religious identity across the globe, its lessons throw into sharp relief the conflicts of the present. In the hands of historian, biographer and prize-winning novelist Piers Paul Read, this masterful epic of the struggle between a minority seeking justice and a military establishment determined to save face comes dramatically alive for a new generation.
Download or read book Dreyfus written by Ruth Harris and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the infamous scandal that shook a nation and stunned the world In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Over the following years, attempts to correct this injustice tore France apart, inflicting wounds on the society which have never fully healed. But how did a fairly obscure miscarriage of justice come to break up families in bitterness, set off anti-Semitic riots across the French empire, and nearly trigger a coup d'état? How did a violently reactionary, obscurantist attitude become so powerful in a country that saw itself as the home of enlightenment? Why did the battle over a junior army officer occupy the foremost writers and philosophers of the age, from Émile Zola to Marcel Proust, Émile Durkheim, and many others? What drove the anti-Dreyfusards to persist in their efforts even after it became clear that much of the prosecution's evidence was faked? Drawing upon thousands of previously unread and unconsidered sources, prizewinning historian Ruth Harris goes beyond the conventional narrative of truth loving democrats uniting against proto-fascists. Instead, she offers the first in-depth history of both sides in the Affair, showing how complex interlocking influences—tensions within the military, the clashing demands of justice and nationalism, and a tangled web of friendships and family connections—shaped both the coalition working to free Dreyfus and the formidable alliances seeking to protect the reputation of the army that had convicted him. Sweeping and engaging, Dreyfus offers a new understanding of one of the most contested and significant moments in modern history.
Download or read book The Dreyfus Affair written by Piers Paul Read and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the case of a successful Jewish captain in the French artillery command who was wrongly convicted of high treason, chronicling the twelve-year effort to secure his freedom and describing period anti-Semitism.
Download or read book France and the Dreyfus Affair A Documentary History written by Michael Burns and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unjust conviction of French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason started the Dreyfus affair, a major event in European anti-Semitism. “This documentary history is designed to introduce the broad outlines and significant legacies of the Dreyfus affair, from the captain’s arrest in 1894 to the 1998 centennial of J’Accuse, Émile Zola’s scathing indictment of the French military... This volume, fashioned for a weeklong assignment in a college course, reproduces the affair’s most celebrated texts, as well as less familiar, but no less telling, documents. Presented as a chronological narrative, it charts Captain Dreyfus’s case as it unfolded in time, and summarizes the major issues and debates that have survived for the past century.” (From the preface by Michael Burns) “A fresh and compelling study of the turn of the century affair in a concise and readable book... A fine compilation of well-chosen documents and lucid analysis... Beyond making this frequently told tale come to life once again (I literally could not put the book down), Burns has given it historical and cultural context.” — Donna F. Ryan, Gallaudet University “Michael Burns’s volume is imaginatively written, with a keen eye to the drama and desperation of the Dreyfus affair. Its special strength is its learned attention to the political, military, and cultural contexts. Weaving the author’s own commentary together with documents from the period, this volume is a splendid guide to one of the most important historical landmarks of our time.” — Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto “In both his analysis and his choice of documents, Michael Burns has brilliantly captured all the complexity and the passion of the Dreyfus affair. I salute his achievement.” — Benjamin F. Martin, Louisiana State University
Download or read book The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood written by Christopher E. Forth and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-02-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.
Download or read book The Affair The Case of Alfred Dreyfus written by Jean-Denis Bredin and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-published by Plunkett Lake Press and George Braziller, Inc. On an autumn morning in 1894, Captain Dreyfus was summoned to appear for a routine inspection; instead, as he took down a letter dictated by a senior officer, he was summarily accused of high treason. So began a twelve-year series of events that included his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the publication of Emile Zola’s passionateJ’Accuse, the Rennes retrial, and the pardon and final rehabilitation of 1906. As the Dreyfus case turned into the Affair, the history of a single military career came to display the conflicts that were tearing France apart: military defeat, anti-Semitic furor, and the place of traditional values in a country still reeling from the turbulence of the French Revolution. Told with an historian’s insight and a novelist’s skill, The Affairmakes fascinating and informative reading about one of the most celebrated episodes in modern history. “There have been many books about the Dreyfus Affair, but Jean-Denis Bredin's book is one of the best of them — lucid, well-organized, informed by a fine sense of drama.” — John Gross, The New York Times “[a] critically acclaimed study” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “If one is limited to a single book about the Dreyfus case and its consequences, this should be it. Bredin has told this story with precision, passion, and a vivid sense of character.” — The New York Review of Books “A brilliant and fascinating book. What is most remarkable about The Affair is the skill and sensitivity with which the author places it in its essential historical setting. It is also a gripping — though terrible — story superbly told.” — The Atlantic “This is the most judicious and absorbing account to date of the Dreyfus Case.” — The Boston Globe “This is certainly the best book on the Dreyfus case now available in the English language.” — San Francisco Examiner “Bredin is crystal clear in his gripping narrative of the complex case. His tapestry glows with all the color of the Belle Epoque and its extravagances.” — Chicago Sun-Times “There have been other books on the Affair, but I can’t imagine any of them coming even close to Bredin’s work. He is brilliant at placing the myriad elements of the Affair in context with verve and lucidity. It should be a model for future historians.” — San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Dreyfus written by Michael Burns and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1992 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the history of the Dreyfus family in an attempt to overcome the scholarly consensus which sees Alfred Dreyfus only as a symbol of cosmic issues. The Dreyfus family reflects the history of the Jews of France; namely, the commitment to the principles of citizenship and equality, and trust in France as a promised land regardless of the circumstances. Pp. 111-339 deal with the Dreyfus Affair and its aftermath. Pp. 458-491 cover the Holocaust period and the fate of various members of the Dreyfus family.
Download or read book Proust among the Nations written by Jacqueline Rose and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem. In a radical rereading of the Dreyfus affair through the lens of Marcel Proust in dialogue with Freud, Rose offers a fresh and nuanced account of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the subsequent creation of Israel. Following Proust’s heirs, Beckett and Genet, and a host of Middle Eastern writers, artists, and filmmakers, Rose traces the shifting dynamic of memory and identity across the crucial and ongoing cultural links between Europe and Palestine. A powerful and elegant analysis of the responsibility of writing, Proust among the Nations makes the case for literature as a unique resource for understanding political struggle and gives us new ways to think creatively about the violence in the Middle East.
Download or read book Conan Doyle for the Defense written by Margalit Fox and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man behind Sherlock Holmes . . . Like all the best historical true crime books, it’s about so much more than crime.”—Tana French, author of In the Woods A sensational Edwardian murder. A scandalous wrongful conviction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the rescue—a true story. After a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908, the police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater, an immigrant Jewish cardsharp. Though he was known to be innocent, Slater was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor. Outraged by this injustice, Arthur Conan Doyle, already world renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the methods of his most famous character to reinvestigate the case, ultimately winning Slater’s freedom. With “an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research” (The Wall Street Journal), Margalit Fox immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in its history, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method. Praise for Conan Doyle for the Defense “Artful and compelling . . . [Fox’s] narrative momentum never flags. . . . Conan Doyle for the Defense will captivate almost any reader while being pure catnip for the devotee of true-crime writing.”—The Washington Post “Developed with brio . . . [Fox] is excellent in linking the 19th-century creation of policing and detection with the development of both detective fiction and the science of forensics—ballistics, fingerprints, toxicology and serology—as well as the quasi science of ‘criminal anthropology.’”—The New York Times Book Review “[Fox] has an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping . . . The book works on two levels, much like a good Holmes case. First, it is a fluid story of a crime. . . . Second, and more pertinently, it is a deeper story of how prejudice against a class of people, the covering up of sloppy police work and a poisonous political atmosphere can doom an innocent. We should all heed Holmes’s salutary lesson: rationally follow the facts to find the truth.”—Time
Download or read book The Jew Accused written by Albert S. Lindemann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Jews, Alfred Dreyfus, Mendel Beilis, and Leo Frank, were charged with heinous crimes in the generation before World War I, Dreyfus of treason in France, Beilis of ritual murder in Russia, and Frank of the murder of a young girl in the United States. Quite aside from the lurid details and sensational charges, larger issues emerged, among them the power of modern anti-Semitism, the sometimes tragic conflict between the freedom of the press and the protection of individual rights, the unpredictable reactions of individuals when subjected to extreme situations, and the inevitable ambiguities of campaigns for truth and justice when political advantage is to be gained from them. In attempting to untangle myth and reality many surprises emerge; heroes appear less heroic and villains less villainous, while real factors appear more important than most accounts of the affairs have recognised.
Download or read book For the Soul of France written by Frederick Brown and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Émile Zola (“Magnificent”—The New Yorker) and Flaubert (“Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely written”—The New Republic) now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching book—a perfect joining of subject and writer: a portrait of fin-de-siècle France. He writes about the forces that led up to the twilight years of the nineteenth century when France, defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, was forced to cede the border states of Alsace and Lorraine, and of the resulting civil war, waged without restraint, that toppled Napoléon III, crushed the Paris Commune, and provoked a dangerous nationalism that gripped the Republic. The author describes how postwar France, a nation splintered in the face of humiliation by the foreigner—Prussia—dissolved into two cultural factions: moderates, proponents of a secular state (“Clericalism, there is the enemy!”), and reactionaries, who saw their ideal nation—militant, Catholic, royalist—embodied by Joan of Arc, with their message, that France had suffered its defeat in 1871 for having betrayed its true faith. A bitter debate took hold of the heart and soul of the country, framed by the vision of “science” and “technological advancement” versus “supernatural intervention.” Brown shows us how Paris’s most iconic monuments that rose up during those years bear witness to the passionate decades-long quarrel. At one end of Paris was Gustave Eiffel’s tower, built in iron and more than a thousand feet tall, the beacon of a forward-looking nation; at Paris’ other end, at the highest point in the city, the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, atonement for the country’s sins and moral laxity whose punishment was France’s defeat in the war . . . Brown makes clear that the Dreyfus Affair—the cannonade of the 1890s—can only be understood in light of these converging forces. “The Affair” shaped the character of public debate and informed private life. At stake was the fate of a Republic born during the Franco-Prussian War and reared against bitter opposition. The losses that abounded during this time—the financial loss suffered by thousands in the crash of the Union Génerale, a bank founded in 1875 to promote Catholic interests with Catholic capital outside the Rothschilds’ sphere of influence, along with the failure of the Panama Canal Company—spurred the partisan press, which blamed both disasters on Jewry. The author writes how the roiling conflicts that began thirty years before Dreyfus did not end with his exoneration in 1900. Instead they became the festering point that led to France’s surrender to Hitler’s armies in 1940, when the Third Republic fell and the Vichy government replaced it, with Marshal Pétain heralded as the latest incarnation of Joan of Arc, France’s savior . . .
Download or read book Dreyfus Affair written by Peter Lefcourt and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1993-04-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best-hitting, best-fielding young shortstop in America, Randy Dreyfus is his country's hero, but when his affair with second baseman D.J. Pickett is discovered, nothing will ever be the same again.
Download or read book The Dreyfus Affair written by Émile Zola and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living novelist, Emile Zola. This book is the first to provide, in English translation, the full extent of Zola's writings on the Dreyfus Affair. It represents, in its polemical entirety, a classic defence of human rights and a searing denunciation of fanaticism and prejudice. Zola's texts constitute a unique and outstandingly eloquent primary source that is essential for a complete understanding of the Dreyfus Affair. They shed brilliant new light on the official mind.
Download or read book The House of Fragile Things written by James McAuley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.
Download or read book The Dreyfus Case written by Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Affair of State written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: President Bill Clinton’s year of crisis, which began when his affair with Monica Lewinsky hit the front pages in January 1998, engendered a host of important questions of criminal and constitutional law, public and private morality, and political and cultural conflict. In a book written while the events of the year were unfolding, Richard Posner presents a balanced and scholarly understanding of the crisis that also has the freshness and immediacy of journalism. Posner clarifies the issues and eliminates misunderstandings concerning facts and the law that were relevant to the investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and to the impeachment proceeding itself. He explains the legal definitions of obstruction of justice and perjury, which even many lawyers are unfamiliar with. He carefully assesses the conduct of Starr and his prosecutors, including their contacts with the lawyers for Paula Jones and their hardball tactics with Monica Lewinsky and her mother. He compares and contrasts the Clinton affair with Watergate, Iran–Contra, and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, exploring the subtle relationship between public and private morality. And he examines the place of impeachment in the American constitutional scheme, the pros and cons of impeaching President Clinton, and the major procedural issues raised by both the impeachment in the House and the trial in the Senate. This book, reflecting the breadth of Posner’s experience and expertise, will be the essential foundation for anyone who wants to understand President Clinton’s impeachment ordeal.
