The Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. "L'Affaire", as it is known in French, has come to symbolize modern injustice in the Francophone world, and it remains one of the most notable examples of a complex miscarriage of justice and antisemitism. The role played by the press and public opinion proved influential in the conflict.

 Alfred Dreyfus  -  Public Domain, Link

The following is a repost from The Writer's Almanac.

On February 23, 1898, the French novelist Émile Zola was found guilty of libel for writing "J'accuse" in an open letter to the French government. 

It accused the government and the military court of deliberately mishandling the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who was wrongly accused of giving intelligence information to Germany. People were eager to convict a Jewish man and Dreyfus was given a life sentence and sent into solitary confinement on Devil's Island. 

Soon after the government found conclusive evidence that another man, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was actually guilty of the crime. But to save face the military and the government produced false evidence to acquit Esterhazy and confirm Dreyfus' guilt.

Émile Zola was a prolific novelist and a well-respected public intellectual. Two days after Esterhazy was acquitted, his 4,000-word letter took up the entire front page of the French newspaper L'Aurore, with its one-word title, "J'accuse!" ("I accuse!"). Zola took apart the case, proved Dreyfus' innocence and Esterhazy's guilt, exposed the government cover-up, and directly accused government and military figures of anti-Semitism and abusing the justice system. Zola was well-known outside of France and "J'accuse" brought the Dreyfus case to the attention of the international community. After reading it, most believed that Dreyfus was innocent. 

Zola was arrested for libel and his trial got a lot of media coverage. In the courtroom, people screamed and got in brawls and mobs tried to attack Zola as he left each day. He was convicted and ordered to spend a year in jail. He escaped to England where he lived in exile.

But in less than two years, a new court reversed Dreyfus' sentence and dropped the libel charge against Zola. Both men returned to France and in 1906 Dreyfus was reinstated in the army.

 

In a Trunk at the Hôtel Ritz 1930

In 1956, Ernest Hemingway was having lunch at the Hôtel Ritz with his friend A.E. Hotchner. Charles Ritz, the chairman of the hotel, came to their table and mentioned that there was a trunk in the hotel storage room that the author had left there in 1930.

Hemingway didn’t remember leaving it there 26 years ago. He did recall a custom-made Louis Vuitton trunk that he had and misplaced. After lunch, Hemingway opened the trunk and found it filled with clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting, fishing and skiing equipment, and letters. But it was some notebooks at the bottom of the trunk that excited Hemingway.

Hemingway had been journaling regularly when he and his first wife, Hadley, had lived in Paris in the 1920s. These journals covered those years when he was a poor, struggling writer hanging out with other expatriate artists and writers. The crowd included Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein, who would call them collectively "The Lost Generation."

Hemingway didn't jump into using the journals right away. He had them typed in 1957, and then started working on what he referenced as the “Paris book” over the next years. It turned out to be his last book.

His physical and mental health was declining and he fell into depressions and tried suicide, finally succeeding in ending it all in 1961.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life,
it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

His widow, Mary, arranged to have the memoir published posthumously. The publisher was calling it "Paris Sketches," which sounded like less-than-serious writing. Hotchner, who had been there when the trunk was opened, recalled that Hemingway had once referred to Paris as “a moveable feast,” and suggested that as a title. Mary agreed and A Moveable Feast became the book’s official title.

There were other posthumous books from the Hemingway estate that had been incomplete at his death, but A Moveable Feast was the book that was closest t finished at his death.

A revised version of the memoir was published in 2009 edited by Seán Hemingway, the author’s grandson from his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer. Seán had issues with some of the changes Mary Hemingway had made to the manuscript.

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money,
nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing
of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

Hemingway's book had a resurgence in popularity in Paris, after the November 2015 terrorist attack. Paris est une fête was selling as many as 500 copies a day and mourners left copies of the memoir along with flowers at informal memorials all around the Bataclan concert hall.

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light.

But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.
When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring,
it was as though a young person died for no reason.”