Notorious Dreyfus Affair is given a detailed examination by Maurice Samuels

Non-fiction

Alfred Dreyfus with his wife and family. Photo: Getty

JP O’Malley

In the beginning of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) Josef K, a 30-year-old bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find himself arrested, even though he has committed no crime. Alfred Dreyfus suffered a similar fate in October 1894. His superiors in the French military accused him of selling military secrets to Germany and he was imprisoned for five years.

“The Dreyfus Affair plunged France into a domestic political crisis because it raised fundamental questions about the nature of liberal democracy — the form of government that guaranteed rights to the individual through the rule of law,” writes Yale historian Maurice Samuels, in Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Centre of the Affair.