George Floyd is our Alfred Dreyfus

Finding historic parallels can be juvenile, dangerous and misleading and is usually the work of sloppy academics or political dissimulators. Reduced to short hand every scandal becomes a gate, every victim can claim to be lynched or compare her plight to the Shoah and any serious analysis is reduced to a Santayana quote. But by God, the United States is in the midst of its Dreyfus moment; the struggle for society and its future between reactionaries and progressive forces hangs in the balance.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was from an Alsatian jewish family. He chose a career in the French military rather than follow in the family business. Patriotism motivated him particularly in light of France’s crushing defeat by Prussia and the new German State in 1871 and its subsequent annexation of Alsace. France’s revolutionary identity was crystalized in the Rights of Man which freed the individual from communal, religious and class identity; specifically Jews became de jure full and equal citizens of the nation. Napoleon spread this notion throughout Europe by conquest, though he took back the notion for black people and reimposed slavery in the West Indies, specifically Haiti. Despite Napoleon’s colonial racism, and the subsequent revivals of the monarchy, the ascension of Napoleaon III and steady efforts of reactionary forces in France to undo the Revolution throughout the 19th century, the concepts and habits of liberty and democracy grew in France. Dreyfus’ victimization was the catalyst for progressive forces to seize control of France’s political agenda. This is what is happening in the United States and largely via the same dynamics.

First, let us dispel the Dreyfus Case from its current use as a shorthand for longstanding European anti-semitism, as the link between the bloody, primitive and religiously motivated millenia of anti-semitism and its modern and even bloodier form in the Shoah (and the parallel effort to destroy Jewish life throughout Europe, including the Soviet Union). The immediate outcome of the Dreyfus case was to discredit anti-semitism in France and the anti-revolutionary interests — the Catholic Church, nobility, royalists, land owners and other vested French property interests- which supported the persecution of Dreyfus. The Fourth Republic governments that followed Dreyfus’ rehabilitation were led by Dreyfus’ defenders. These governments enacted a raft of reforms in education, the work place, social policy which for the first time concretely realized the aspirations of the Revolution. A high point of this period was including laicite — securalism — as the fourth element of France’s creed — joining liberte, fraternite et egalite.

So what happened? Dreyfus was charged and court martialed falsely for providing secrets to Germany. The accuser was the noble born Esterhazy whose lack of credibility was positively Trumpian (more current analogy than Chamberlain and his pumpkin papers that did in Alger Hiss in the 1950s). Nonetheless the right wing media (much in the pay of foreign interests), the Catholic press, the Church and the panoply of reactionary politicians and thinkers and the French officer corps outdid each other in their lies and anti-semitism to destroy Dreyfus. There was a stab in the back angle — Dreyfus and the Jews of Alsace had betrayed France in the 1871 war. There was the insult to France, its nobility and Catholism of having a jewish General Staff Officer. There was the resentment and fear of established elites having their privileges taken away by new forces of industry, commerce and knowledge. The right wing had picked a battle it would lose; its ham handedness was in full display including the army’s creation of further forgeries to support Esterhazy’s accusations, to throw the scent off of Esterhazy’s own spying for Germany.

Emile Zola wrote “J’Accuse” to document the forces and interests arrayed against Dreyfus and the threat they posed to France and its modernization in tune with Revolutionary ideals and democratic government. The emerging urban middle class, industrial labor, intellectuals, academics, protestants, free masons and yes, Jews, joined in the fight. Dreyfus was convicted and sentenced to 10 year’s imprisonment on Devil’s Island; though he was returned to France and freed he never recovered from the blood libel, betrayal and cruelty to which he had been subjected. But his case galvanized France to reclaim and act on its ideals in political and social form.

A truism of the United States is that oppression, kidnapping and enslavement of Africans and their descendants, codified in the Republic’s founding documents, is the nation’s original sin (worth of God’s punishment as Lincoln argued in his Second Inaugural Address). While Native Americans have every reason to argue this point, their genocide by our American forefathers literally removed them from society early on. African Americans, on the other hand, as slaves, became central to America’s economy and the social organization of the South.

The growth and incorrigibility of slavery, despite (perhaps because of) the abolishment of the international slave trade foreshadowed in the Constitution, was an affront to America’s ideals, and increasingly to Christians and free labor.

In the analogy between Dreyfus and Floyd, the Civil War served a parallel function to France’s Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; ending slavery in the US (and universalizing the Bill of Rights) and ending feudalism and absolutism in Western Europe in favor of the Rights of Man. In both cases, the reaction to these innovations was fierce, unrelenting and quite successful for a hundred years. In the US Jim Crow, sharecropping, racism and unequal application of the law, as well as episodic terror suppressed African Americans. In Europe, the last hurrah of the aristocratic order reimposed royalty on France, and reenforced the status quo throughout Europe in the face of reform movements in labor, the arts, industry and education and widescale unrest, as in the revolutions of 1833 and 1848. It is likely the European, particularly German refugees to the US from these revolutions, helped turn the tide in support of abolition and the rights of man in the US.

Reaction to reform and right wing coups and revolutions are the common denominator between where France found itself in 1890s and the United States finds itself today. In both situations a critical mass of each society has said enough with the transparent lies, greed and moral and ideological bankruptcy of the right. But a catalyst was needed to illuminate the rot and hollowness of the right.

In the case of Dreyfus, the persecution of a blameless and upright Jew, doing his patriotic duty, revealed the lack of patriotism and outright treachery of France’s aristocratic, landed and religious elites. The destructiveness of their efforts to fight land reform, universal and secular education, worker rights and social progress, combined with their savage efforts to reestablish and preserve their pre-Revolutionary privileges became too obvious of a dead weight on France. Everyone in public and civil life had to take a side.

And so with George Floyd and the movement catalyzed by his murder. George Floyd’s flagrant and public murder by a police officer illuminated the lengths to which America’s moneyed, religious, media and professional elites will go to keep America from progressing. The constant demonization of African Americans and the deprivation of their rights is now seen as part and parcel of the right’s effort to oppress not just African Americans but all Americans. The divide and rule policies of the right, the fetishism of white owned guns and a militantly conservative law enforcement establishment have become too much of a weight for society to bear, particularly since they serve to obfuscate the privileges and wealth amassed by an entrenched and nearly exclusively white elite.

The middle ground and the equivocation that was possible for most of us to cling to is no longer tenable. Many years ago a prominent Chicago rabbi used the holiest night and service of the Jewish calendar to effusively welcome Michele Bachman to the service as a true public servant and friend of Israel. At the same service, the rabbi’s sermon, in the form of a skit, ridiculed President Barack Obama as being woke and not a friend of Israel.

I contacted the rabbi to say that there were only two sides in America as to the future of our actual country — rather than the fate of a country in the Middle East. He had made his decision and announced it, though he still claimed to be informed by Jewish values when it came to public policy. Like the jury, all Americans have a binary choice, to stand with George Floyd and what he now represents, or to stand with Chauvin (from the french word?) and the repressive and reactionary capitalism which has effectively supported the terror he visited on George Floyd. Like the Chicago rabbi, we each need to make a choice and announce it and so do our leaders in religion, industry, the media, education and in all walks of life.

And decisions are being taken. I for one saw candidate Biden through the lens of his very long career in public life which has been a straddle between supporting America’s ideals but actually voting for America’s entrenched elites. George Floyd and his movement have obliged President Biden to take a side, like French leaders did at the turn of the 20th century. And he has chosen the future, not reaction.