Everybody Loves Dreyfus

The opening minutes of An Officer and a Spy unfold in eerie silence. It is January 5, 1895, and in the wintry courtyard of the Parisian École Militaire, thousands of soldiers stand in formation alongside a hushed crowd of civilian onlookers, all assembled to witness the ceremonial degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.  Aside from the improbable silence, this first scene of Roman Polanski’s 2019 film is historically accurate: having been wrongly convicted of treason in closed-door military court proceedings, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the French Army was publicly humiliated on that date and in that place, stripped of his uniform decorations, his sword snapped in half. The film’s Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) ably portrays what the historical Dreyfus himself later described as a moment of sheer anguish, suffering an unjust punishment in view of the entire army, while still mustering the strength to address the audience: “Soldiers, they are degrading an innocent man!”

The degradation is one of only a handful of scenes in the film that allows us to understand what the Dreyfus Affair was like for Dreyfus, or indeed for his fellow French Jews at the time. Polanski offers us no other Jewish characters, no other glimpses into the real costs of the scandal and the years of antisemitic politics and culture that ensued. Instead, we witness the film’s events through the eyes of Major Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), the antisemitic army intelligence officer who both helped to convict Dreyfus and then—years later—to liberate him, once he discovered the real traitor was someone else. It is Picquart whose narrative centers the film, just as it does the 2013 novel by Robert Harris from which the film was adapted (it was reviewed in JRB here). And it is Picquart’s voice that interprets the opening scene for us, likening Dreyfus standing at attention while golden ropes and buttons are ripped from his uniform to “a Jewish tailor weeping over his lost gold.”

It is hard to make such an antisemite a sympathetic character, to endear him to an audience as a hero who manages to advance the cause of justice for a Jew while retaining antisemitic views—but that is just what Polanski does. When Picquart’s effort to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for a retrial is challenged by one of his superiors—“We know your views on the Chosen Race, what do you care about one Jew stuck on a rock?”—Picquart makes only a quiet reply, asking whether he is expected to keep the truth a secret. Here, as elsewhere in the film, Picquart’s antisemitism is simultaneously confirmed and smoothed over. It is he, not Dreyfus, who is glorified as the titular “officer and a spy,” brave enough to pursue the truth and confront the powers that be, even though the benefactor of these efforts is a Jew. In this way, the broad culture of antisemitism that made the Dreyfus Affair possible in the first place is revealed, but never really challenged. 

An Officer and a Spy took the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Venice Film festival and won four of its 12 César nominations in 2020 (including for Best Director), but it is debuting in the US only now, and, so far, only for a two-week run at the Film Forum in New York. The film failed to secure American distribution when it was first released after the Hollywood #MeToo movement resurfaced the terrible details of Polanski’s 1977 arrest for the rape of a thirteen-year-old actress. Polanski plead guilty to unlawful sex with a minor but fled to France in 1978 to avoid prison. In press interviews, Polanski has suggested that his own legal troubles—he has successfully fought several attempts by U.S. authorities to extradite him—are part of what drew him to the Dreyfus story:

I can see the same determination to deny facts and condemn me . . . I am familiar with many of the workings of the apparatus of persecution shown in the film, and that has clearly inspired me. 

Polanski is not alone. Dreyfus has, of late, become a useful ally for others hoping to gain public sympathy. As fresh waves of antisemitism sweep across Europe, the French government has undertaken several grand gestures of atonement for Dreyfus’s treatment 130 years ago. In June, the French National Assembly voted to promote Dreyfus to the rank of Brigadier General. Even more recently, French president Emanuel Macron announced that July 12 will be observed as an annual day of commemoration for Alfred Dreyfus, “for the victory of justice and truth against hatred and antisemitism.” Unfortunately, this show of support for one of France’s most famous dead Jews offers cold comfort to those living French Jews who regularly endure antisemitism and may be only more unsettled by France’s preemptive recognition of a Palestinian state.

Nevertheless, the recent show of front-page love for Alfred Dreyfus does offer a kind of closure that has been lacking in his story, both in film and in history. The last scene of An Officer and a Spy aptly captures the unresolved tensions in a final meeting between Dreyfus and Picquart that took place in 1906.  Twelve years had elapsed since the military court first found Dreyfus guilty, and the supreme court of France had only just exonerated him, allowing his reinstatement to the army.  Picquart, meanwhile, had become a national celebrity and been promoted several times over, before being named Minister of War.   Dreyfus enters Picquart’s cabinet office to ask for a promotion to the rank he would have earned had he not been wrongfully imprisoned for five years and banned from the military for seven more. Picquart’s answer, of course, is no.  He is still an antisemite, and though he offers an apology, it is an empty atonement; instead, it subjects Dreyfus to a kind of second ritual humiliation.

At 132 minutes, An Officer and a Spy offers a valuable, if slightly too long, opportunity to experience the casual anti-Jewish hatred that allowed the Dreyfus Affair to take place. It also invites us to ask why everybody loves Dreyfus now, and whether present-day atonements can do more than tie a bow around past and ongoing antisemitisms.