## PROLOGUE

What you are about to read is the first of several new book-length studies of Alfred Dreyfus. This first in the series clears the ground of many assumptions, guesses set out as facts, and interesting ideas that have not been followed through to their logical conclusions. What are new are not so much facts as two new factors: to begin with, my concern is much less about the Dreyfus Affair than it is about the man's life and personality, along with that of his wife, Lucie, and of their closest relatives and friends. But my book is neither a biography of the Dreyfus family and its association with the Hadamards, Lucie's family, nor a social or intellectual history of the *fin de siècle* in France, the setting of the Affair. This is because of the second new factor, my concern with the intellectual, emotional and spiritual qualities of the man Alfred Dreyfus as evidenced in his writings—his letters to Lucie and hers to him, his several journals, and his prison workbooks composed on Devil's Island, approximately half of which have been saved from destruction. In other words, I am presenting a book about Dreyfus as a late nineteenth-century writer, a thinker, a scientist and a poet, a critic and a historian, and, not least, as a Jew.

The essential approach to Dreyfus's achievements I take is similar to the parameters established by Vincenso Calfa, the translator of Jules Michelet's *The Bible of Humanity*:

> The circumscribed frame of the narrative is broken.... history becomes a poem, and even when he keeps within the limits of pure narrative, his vivid imagination is not slackened. The images are so lively, the manner so rapid, the quick invention so happy and so wild that the objects appear to be born again with all their colors, motions, and forms, and pass before our eyes as a phantasmagoria of luminous pictures.<fnref n="1" />

<footnote n="1">1 Vincenso Calfa, “Life and Works of Michelet” in Jules Michelet. *The Bible of Humanity* (1864), trans. Vincenzo Calfa (New York: J.W. Bouton and London: B. Quarditch, 1877), xvii.</footnote>
Though Calfa's remarks deal specifically with Michelet's style of writing, as much in his historical studies as in his more adventurous books on aspects of nature and people, there are at least two reasons why it is appropriate to cite them in regard to the life of Alfred Dreyfus. First, because Dreyfus describes what happened to him during the period from 1894 to 1906 as a phantasmagoria; and second, because Michelet is one of the writers he singles out as most influential to the nineteenth century and by implication to himself. In addition, when the love letters written by Lucie and Alfred to one another are carefully studied for the dynamics of their energy, intimacy and implied creation of a mystical relationship, and also when we examine closely the three-fold phenomena of his fifteen surviving *cahiers*—the essays and commentaries on a variety of historical, scientific, aesthetic and moral issues; the formulae and equations of mathematics and physics he works out; and the thousands of strange drawings that fill up scores of pages—there seems no better word to describe the results than phantasmagoria. Finally, his biography itself, with all of its starts and interruptions, its periods of seeming ordinariness, its outbreaks of nightmarish pain and humiliation, and its many disturbing blank spots, may also be appropriately designated by this same term.

In the second volume of this projected series, I will examine more closely the letters, journals and workbooks to see how they stabilize the now standard view of Alfred Dreyfus. Rather than being out of the picture as an individual of no particular intellectual merits and achievements, he will be shown to be a remarkable man who, under the extreme constraints of his imprisonment—exile, solitary confinement, and physical torture—prevented himself from going mad by discovering in his own mind a rational and critical consolidation of nineteenth-century philosophy and aesthetics. He was not an advanced author, but he was a deep thinker. He was also not a practicing Jew but he was a Jewish thinker. In other words, as his writings define him, instead of the rather middle-class conformist and technician most historians have assumed him to be, if they spent any time at all on his personality and feelings during the long ordeal he went through, close reading of his epistles and *cahiers* reveal an interesting man who was anything but ordinary.

In the third volume in this series, there will be a study of Alfred Dreyfus as a lover, a poet, a moral historian and a midrashist. All of these
unexpected aspects of his personality will then be set in the context of his favourite European authors, not merely the figures of William Shakespeare and Michel de Montaigne, who historians have claimed were the sources of his thought, but the four writers he repeatedly cited and claimed as his key influences—Jules Michelet, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Paul Bourget. Interestingly, Dreyfus hardly mentions any of the authors who emerged during the Affair to be his chief supporters, such as Emile Zola, Bernard Lévy and Marcel Proust. Moreover, thanks to his wife Lucie's influence and the circle of relations and friends on her side, the Hadamards, Alfred knew what was happening in the arts, music and literature, although his tastes were not for the *avant garde*, and his standards stemmed from the rabbinical culture of Alsace where his family had its roots. The mystery remains, however: why, given the great range of writing displayed in the prison *cahiers* and the meticulous record of his struggle for complete rehabilitation, does Alfred Dreyfus virtually fade from view after 1906, with only a few appearances in public until his death in 1935? From the time he was restored to his service in the Army and awarded the *Legion d'honneur*, we know more about his wife Lucie and their children Jeanne and Pierre than we do about Alfred. What can explain this? Was he a broken man, too exhausted by his ordeal, too depressed by his failures, to receive the full recognition he felt he deserved, and therefore unable or unwilling to speak in public, or to write to a public he could no longer trust?
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