French Connection: Australia's Cosmopolitan Ambitions by Alexis Bergantz

Author:Alexis Bergantz [Bergantz, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Australia & New Zealand, Europe, France
ISBN: 9781742237091
Google: YhMezgEACAAJ
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2021-07-15T23:33:06.285970+00:00

An indivisible people

The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) was a unique event in French history. It profoundly shook the body politic of the Third Republic and left an indelible mark on the nation and on many of its citizens. In 1894 the French state condemned the Jewish artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus for high treason for allegedly selling military secrets to Germany. Dreyfus was demoted and deported to Devil’s Island, off French Guiana, after a rigged and expedited first trial. Two years later, the Dreyfus Affair became a worldwide cause célèbre when his family, with the support of leading liberal and left-leaning intellectuals, denounced the real traitor and drew public attention to the state and army conspiracy that had wrongly accused and condemned Dreyfus.22 For the French, in France and overseas, the affair forced heated debates about politics and society, about the perception of France’s national decline, the body politic and anti-Semitism. It struck a nerve, affecting people in a personal as well as a public manner, deeply dividing families and friends between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.23

This ‘exceedingly complicated trial in a distant country’ attracted vast commentary in Australia, as it did in Great Britain, all the more so because it pitted the French against one another.24 The final condemnation of Dreyfus at his second trial in Rennes in August and September 1899 in particular unleashed waves upon waves of observations about the inferiority of the French, seen as a bigoted, belligerent and degenerate race. The rigged trials were seen as highlighting the failures of the French republican model, its institutions and its authoritarian army.25 Across Australia, the affair kindled sectarian tensions. A rabbi summoned his flock in Perth in 1898 to hold forth on the rot of French anti-Semitism that had taken hold of the judicial process and demoted France ‘to the last rung of civilised nations’.26 A Protestant minister in Sydney enjoined his congregation to sign a letter of sympathy to Dreyfus and his wife. He recounted witnessing anti-Semitism himself during a stay ‘at one of the continental towns, where a large military force was stationed’, and among whom the ‘gambling element was strongly in evidence’. As the money-lenders were Jewish, they became an object of hatred and scapegoats for the then penniless ‘military dignitaries’.27

The Courrier Australien steered clear of pronouncing judgment on the ongoing trials, either trying to be a unifying force for the French community or diplomatically biding its time. But it denounced the ‘revolting partiality’ of British news arriving in Australia, which piled on the Francophobia du jour ad nauseam. And it condemned the ‘simplicity’ of the people in Australia who uncritically lapped it up.28 The result of the wall-to-wall negative coverage ‘had offended a great number of people’ in the French community.29 ‘The main object’ of the eruption in the press had seemed ‘to be disagreeable to us’. At last, Dreyfus’s pardon gave the editors a sense of relief, not for the man or for justice, but because the ‘outburst’ in the press would finally stop, even if Australian newspapers looked like ‘a dog who has been robbed of a bone’.

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