● An Officer and a Spy By Robert Harris Knopf, 448 pages, $27.95 ● Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century By Ruth Harris Picador, 572 pages, $28 Why is it that people named Harris tend to have affairs with the Dreyfus Affair? Just three years ago, the British historian Ruth Harris published…
A letter handwritten by Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish soldier who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, was sold at auction for nearly half a million dollars. The sale went through even after a Dreyfus heir urged the seller to give the letter to a museum instead. The letter, which Dreyfus sent from prison…
A letter written by Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish soldier who was wrongfully convicted of spying, is expected to fetch at least $130,000 at an auction in Paris. The letter will be sold at auction next month by Sotheby’s Paris branch. Dreyfus, a captain who was cleared of accusations that he spied for Germany, sent the…
Long before the advent of DNA evidence, it was the trail of ink, not blood, which often provided detectives with a direct, chemical connection between criminals and their crimes. A century ago, David Nunes Carvalho, a renowned expert on ink, handwriting and print, became a central figure in some of the world’s most sensational investigations,…
France’s Defense Ministry has posted online hundreds of documents from the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish soldier whose wrongful espionage conviction was a determinant in the genesis of political Zionism. The historical department of the French Ministry of Defense, SHD, placed online this week the entire military file that was used to convict Dreyfus…
In the 140th anniversary year of his birth on April 9, 1872, the French Jewish statesman Léon Blum is more timely than ever. In April, during France’s latest presidential election, Les éditions Albin Michel reprinted a short exhortatory text, “In Order to be a Socialist,” which Blum wrote in 1919 when he was 42. It…
Once again, France is having an affair with the affair — the Dreyfus Affair. On November 4, Le Monde published a controversial essay by Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, titled “Israel: Justice or Tribalism,” in which she views contemporary Israel through the prism of this 19th-century event. Israel, she concludes, lacks the political and legal ingredients…
It’s déjà vu all over again at the Academy Awards: The nation that gave us motion pictures stands to sweep the Oscars, which will be broadcast February 26. Leading the new wave of French-made or French-inspired movies this year is, of course, Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” with 11 nominations. Through the use of new technologies like…
