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THE DREYFUS AFFAIR: A LAW AND LITERATURE ACCOUNT OF A LAW AND LITERATURE AFFAIR
Yovel, Jonathan
Yovel, Jonathan
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Abstract
Law and literature is a cluster of analytical and interpretative methodologies, but it can also characterize an event, phenomenon, or process. The Dreyfus affair, or simply “L’Affaire” as it has come to be called in France, is a “law and literature event.” My topic is not the ubiquitous literature and art generated about L’Affaire, but “law and literature in action”- the real-time participation, synergy, and sometimes competition over significance and audience between law, media, and literary genres and forms. The nexus of conflict over L’Affaire shaped France’s public sphere for decades. This article treats law and literature not merely as a methodological lens for studying the interplay between legal and expressive forms, but as a phenomenon that methodology explores. I examine how L’Affaire mobilized some of the leading literary voices of La Belle Époque-Émile Zola, Maurice Barrès, Anatole France, and Bernard Lazare-across intertwined literary, journalistic, publicist, and legal strategies, making public what began as a clandestine judicial process. Not less fascinating than the literary figures were advocates who discovered the communicative potency of turn-of-century public spheres and shifted their performances from musty courtrooms to the popular press. L’Affaire can be framed as textually book-ended: it began with an 1894 finding, by the French counterintelligence agent Marie Bastian, of a handwritten note listing secret military information for sale in a wastebasket in the German embassy in Paris (later known as “the note [le bordereau]”). In 1930 a certain von Schwartzkoppen, German military attaché in Paris and Dreyfus’ supposed handler, published an autobiography that conclusively confirmed Dreyfus’ innocence (naming a different officer, Esterhazy, as the actual traitor).