A Miscarriage of Justice? The Dreyfus Affair

5 weekly sessions online, on Fridays at 10am - 12pm, starting from Friday 16 October

Overview

This course comprises a weekly 1 hour live online meeting (via MS Teams) and online learning materials for you to engage with before and after each live session.

One man. Two wrongful convictions. One of the most divisive affairs to rock French society in the nineteenth century. On 15 October 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was wrongfully accused of selling military secrets to Germany via Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen, the German military-attaché. Despite a lack of concrete evidence, Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his military honours, and exiled to Devil’s Island. Between 1894 and 1906, France essentially became divided into two camps: Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards, causing bitter divisions amongst family, friends and communities. The Dreyfus Affair has frequently been described as the greatest miscarriage of justice in nineteenth century France. This course aims to offer diversity to the curriculum by introducing participants to questions of citizenship, nationality, identity and justice in nineteenth-century France from the perspective of an individual who lived on the margins of French society and was considered as ‘the other’.         

No prior knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair is required as context will be provided each week. Participants can expect a blended lecture/seminar style approach, with audience participation strongly encouraged. Translated extracts of arguments put forth by Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards, including Emile Zola, Bernard Lazare and Maurice Barrès, will be provided ahead of classes to allow participants to explore these sources for themselves and in small groups prior to larger group discussions. At the end of the course, participants will be asked to decide whether they think the Dreyfus Affair was a miscarriage of justice or the scapegoating of a Jewish officer.           

The diversity of this topic means that it is suitable for a broad audience. It may be particularly appealing to those interested in France in the long nineteenth-century, gender history, masculinity, the role of the press in French society, the significance of visual materials in historical study, and those interested in religion and identity in modern Europe.

Recommended Reading (*=Essential reading):
•    In Our Time - The Dreyfus Affair - BBC Sounds
•    Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (2009)
•    William Fortescue (ed.), The Third Republic in France, 1870-1940: Conflicts and Continuities (2000)*
•    Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the crisis of French manhood (2004)
•    Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the affair that divided France (2010)
•    Jeanne Humphries, ‘The Dreyfus Affair: A Woman’s Affair’, Historical Reflections 31(3) (2005), 433-443.
•    Norman Kleeblatt (ed), The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (1987)
•    Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1982)
(All sources provided are in English. If there are any participants who can read French and are interested in French sources, these can be recommended). This list is not exhaustive and there are plenty of other great resources available, so participants are encouraged to read more broadly around the topic if they wish to do so. 

Syllabus

• Week one: An introduction to the Dreyfus Affair
• Week Two: What did it mean to be French in the 19th century?
• Week Three: The Dreyfusards vs Anti-Dreyfusards.
• Week Four: Reactions of the International Press.
• Week Five: The Lasting Legacies of the Dreyfus Affair.

Course lecturer

Sam Dobbie is a PhD History graduate from the University of Glasgow, where she also obtained her MA History and MLitt Modern History degrees. She specialises in the French Revolution, with particular emphasis on the role of women in revolutionary society. Her PhD thesis is entitled ‘Women’s Political Agency in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1793’. Other research interests include France in the long nineteenth-century and revolution as a process. She has most recently been a tutor at the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian University on a range of undergraduate and honours courses including France, 1789-1914: Revolution, Nation and Empire, Becoming an Historian, and the Rise of Western Societies, 1789-1914. She also offers courses to adult learners on the Lifelong Learning Dundee programme. Some of her publications include ‘The Complex Nature of Memory in Personal Testimonies from the French Revolution: The Example of Fournier l’Américain’, Esharp 31 (2024), and ‘High Profile Marriages in Revolutionary Paris: The Condorcets’, Epoch 5 (2021).

Course fee

• Standard fee: £85
• Concession fee: £45