• 1 3 October 1888. Cited in H.-H. Liang, The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from (...)
• 2 D. Porch, The French Secret Services (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) 30.
• 3 L. Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1935) 105–09; discussed in S. R. Suleiman, ‘The (...)
• 4 ‘The Dreyfus Affair/made me a Zionist’; cited in J.-D. Bredin, L’Affaire (Paris: Fayard/Julliard, 1 (...)
• 5 A. Pagès, Émile Zola, un intellectuel dans l’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1991) 282.
• 6 Cited in M. Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 1999) 160.

1There was nothing normal about the Dreyfus Affair—save perhaps the crime itself. Espionage was common currency between France and Germany since the 1870 war; there had been so many arrests of spies in the military in the 1880s that by 1888, the Daily Telegraph could state, ‘Traitors seem to abound in the French army [. . .] the War Office authorities are almost at their wits’ end.’1 Between 1888 and 1890, no less than five ‘military or civilian personnel employed by the French army or navy, were found to have passed plans to the German military attaché.’2 And yet when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of this offense in 1894, an Affair began which would eventually reach international proportions, and significantly alter social and political relations in France and elsewhere. Léon Blum maintained, for example, that positions taken for and against Dreyfus both dissolved existing coalitions and determined the Left/Right opposition which would dominate subsequent parliamentary politics;3 these new alliances in turn made possible the 1905 separation of Church and State; Zola’s trials led to the formation of the ‘Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen’ (1898), as well as the opposing Ligue de la Patrie Française (1899); the press demonstrated its formidable political force; Dreyfus’s trial convinced Theodor Herzl of the necessity of Zionism.4 These are but a few of the Affair’s far-reaching implications, which lead me to ask (as so many before me), why this crime, why Dreyfus? Alain Pagès wonders why this particular injustice could cause world-wide indignation when colonial France was committing crimes in Africa or in Tonkin that were ‘without a doubt a thousand times more odious [. . .] without arousing much reaction from French political opinion.’5 Hannah Arendt reminds us that ‘the harm done to a single Jewish officer in France was capable of attracting from the rest of the world a more vehement and more unified reaction than all the persecutions of German Jews a generation later.’6

• 7 A. Pagès 283.
• 8 A. Pagès 282–83.
• 9 There are numerous summaries and analyses of the case, among which those by J.-D. Bredin; M. Burns; (...)
• 10 Foucault’s work on governmentality is dispersed in several articles and lectures. See for example, (...)

2Many explanations for these many paradoxes have been offered: the Affair gripped the nation because of its ‘narrative seduction,’ as it slowly played out as a melodrama/whodunit;7 or it inflamed passions because of the bravery of those who struggled for Justice;8 usually, historians agree that this period of great turmoil served to consolidate the Republic against the old regime supported by monarchists, the military, and the Church.9 I would like to suggest and briefly illustrate another hypothesis, postulating that the Dreyfus case became the Affair, this international discursive event, because it both marked and facilitated a historical shift from discipline to governmentality as dominant mode for the exercise of power relations. If the Dreyfus case was an example of disciplinary force administered by the institution on the individual, the Affair signaled a new predominance of governmental relations between the one and the many in modern welfare states. This hypothesis draws from contemporary governmental studies, based on Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work, and it addresses some of the questions posed by our symposium on deviance and its multiple attractions.10 My paper will therefore be divided into three parts: first, I will review the case as exemplary of disciplinary mechanisms of power, and show how the nineteenth-century fascination for deviance functioned in power relations; then, I will discuss how the Affair served to elaborate new measures for the government of self and others, soon to predominate the twentieth century; finally, I will recall two major reiterations of the Affair in World War II and during the centenary celebrations, and propose that such ongoing battles demonstrate the need for alternative forms of knowledge and power relations.

• 11 Les Anormaux 17–21.
• 12 M.-C. Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse ( (...)

3Nineteenth-century discourses usually explained criminality by inserting it in the more general category of deviance: before the commission of any illegal act, there existed a constitutional defect or a mental state, which already resembled and logically led to crime. Experts sought delinquents rather than individual authors of crimes, deviants endowed with an abnormal personality or a specific syndrome, which, while not constituting either a disease or a crime, nevertheless posed a potential threat to society.11 If such perversions were considered rare in members of the middle and upper classes, they were easily and routinely discerned not only in the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, and crowds, but also in women and children—all these groups were known to be, by their very nature, close to the born criminal type, and therefore necessitated discipline above all. As I have argued elsewhere, discourse on deviance thus served to isolate and monitor a ‘social residue,’ and thus to extend the reach of power relations into families, schools, neighborhoods and factories. Across multiple discourses, surfacing in such diverse debates as those on education, public libraries, alcoholism, philanthropy, and model housing for deserving workers, the question of crime and the identification of ‘criminal man’ led to the instauration of a set of apparatuses required by disciplinary societies. Between 1875 and 1881, national penitentiary systems, universal elementary education, and a cheap, ‘free’ press were instituted in Great Britain and France as indispensable means to good government—even though the latter two traditionally had been considered enormous threats to national security. Moreover, the elaboration of ‘criminal man’ as an object of scientific knowledge equally produced, by implication and a contrario, another personage, a national, normal, consensual ‘we’.12

• 13 Cited in J.-D. Bredin 104–05 and 134.
• 14 Bredin 123.
• 15 Bredin 105.

4When for example, on the basis of a vague similarity in handwriting, Dreyfus was first suspected of being the treacherous author of the bordereau (a missive retrieved in pieces in a wastepaper basket in the German military attaché’s office, listing secret documents which could be made available), inquiries were made to verify his presumably dissolute lifestyle: did he gamble, cheat on his wife, drink? When that tactic proved less than successful, other aspects of his personality drew investigative attention: Dreyfus displayed a cold, arrogant attitude, he was ambitious and wealthy, he had interests in Alsace and spoke German fluently, and, of course, he was Jewish.13 None of these traits were criminal, but all together they drew a character profile that ‘resembled’ the crime, and made it highly probable: in their report, Commanders d’Ormescheville and du Paty de Clam noted that ‘his suspicious attitude present[ed] a strong analogy to that of persons who practice espionage.’14 Du Paty de Clam let it be known that ‘an adulterous husband is a potential traitor’15—such statements somehow managed to corroborate the prosecution’s case, even though no evidence of actual adultery, or gambling, or financial difficulties, or any other ‘irregularity’ could be established.

• 16 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979) 170.
• 17 A. Dreyfus, Cinq Années de ma vie, 1894–99 (Paris: La Découverte, 1994) 184.

5Once convicted, publicly degraded, and sent to Devil’s Island, an ex-leper colony off the coast of French Guyana, Dreyfus was subjected to the full extent of disciplinary relations of force. Discipline is a mode of power best exercised in built environments (such as schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons, or again an especially outfitted Devil’s Island) that are designed to distribute individuals in space, according to strict time-schedules and organized activities, with the goal of producing normal behavior, according to accepted truths. Discipline is a ‘suspicious power,’ which stabilizes meaning through techniques such as categorizing, labeling, profiling, and surveillance.16 In Dreyfus’s case, a team of up to fourteen guards, relieved every two hours, were charged with uninterrupted surveillance: twenty-four hours a day, they scanned the ocean from a tower, and watched over the prisoner (a light was kept burning at night, attracting swarms of insects). When, in a desperate attempt to keep the story in the papers when nobody cared, his brother arranged a false report of his escape, Dreyfus was shackled to his bed every night, all night, from September 8 to October 20 (1896). Eventually, his guards were ordered to record and interpret every gesture and facial expression. The prisoner admitted in his journal: ‘I do not know of any torture more unnerving, more atrocious than the one I have endured for five years, to have two eyes riveted on me, day and night, at every moment, in all conditions, without a single minute of respite.’17

• 18 Discipline and Punish.
• 19 A. Dreyfus 227; see also 155.
• 20 As noted by J.-D. Bredin in L’Affaire 175.
• 21 A. Dreyfus 228.

6Such mechanisms produce what Foucault terms ‘docile bodies,’18 individuals empowered to police themselves. And indeed Dreyfus described himself as a model prisoner (‘I submitted myself entirely, scrupulously, to everything, I defy anyone to reproach me an incorrect proceeding’), and he remained the perfect soldier throughout his ordeal.19 Never did he, or any of his defenders for that matter, object to the atrocious treatment reserved for deported French citizens; on the contrary, he wrote to his wife that a real traitor would deserve every torment he endured.20 The Captain never conceived of his case as anything other than an incomprehensible judicial error—his journal never once mentioned the word Jewish. Ironically, his only hope rested with the government, and he wrote as much to the President: ‘it is towards you, Mister President, it is toward the government of my country that I cry for help, convinced that my cry will be heard.’21 Dreyfus was never a Dreyfusard: he was far too disciplined an officer, far too patriotic a Frenchman, far too rational a man for that.

• 22 M. Angenot, Ce que l’on dit des Juifs en 1889: Antisémitisme et discours social (Saint-Denis: PUV, (...)

7The Affair was fought on different grounds. In many ways, it began before the arrest and trial with a campaign led by Édouard Drumont’s paper La Libre Parole, which excoriated the presence of Jewish officers in the military, as all Jews were known to be, by their very nature, potential traitors. Dreyfus’s arrest was seized as proof positive of the validity of these concerns; the banner title announced ‘High Treason. The Jewish Traitor Alfred Dreyfus Arrested.’ In his study of anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle France, Marc Angenot situates this discourse as part of a more general gnoseology that apprehended the self and others through the identification of biological features marked with value judgments. Predictably, in polite conversations or crude jokes, in elite Republican circles and in boulevard songs, in the new anthropological and social sciences as in history and literature, in press reports and political speeches, any difference (be it sexual or cultural or social or national) was normally associated with an essential biological determinant. From this analytical perspective, anti-Semitism was never only the special preserve of lunatics on the fringe, but rather (more disturbingly) a particularly efficient systematization of commonplaces.22 However such ways of knowing always implicated relations of power: norms used to identify racial or congenital differences also served to justify interventions in the governance of the life of each citizen and of the population as a whole, as argued by Foucault.

• 23 M. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’ 98.
• 24 P. Veyne, ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History,’ in A. I. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and His Interlocutor (...)

9Whereas discipline operates in built environments designed to produce normal behavior, governmentality operates on given demographic, economic, political, even geographical conditions, which must first be studied and then inflected to obtain desired results. Its goal is to foster the life of the population as a whole and of each of its individual members. All aspects of life are of concern to modern welfare states; expert knowledge allows estimations of current and future needs in terms of health, education, and employment, but also of leisure and sports activities, psychological counseling, retraining, diet, conflict management . . . very little is beyond the reach of governmentality, as the economic and political health and happiness of the nation are at stake. Governmentality seeks to conduct the conduct of self and others, to direct everyday life through what Foucault calls a capillary form of bio-power extending everywhere, from the production of normal individual needs and desires to the determination of national immigration quotas. Individuals therefore do not constitute the object of governmental power relations, nor do they stand in opposition to potential state incursions into previously private domains: rather, individuals and their identities are the effect, both the result and the means through which power relations are exercised.23 Instead of having the individual at one end, and the State or the Institution at the other, with, as Paul Veyne would say, ‘a bit of string called ideology in the middle,’24 Foucault begins with the middle, with multiple, local centers of power/knowledge (such as families or ligues, presses or trade unions), to then comprehend individual subjectivities and state programs as the end results of the correlations among these multiple matrices.

• 25 M. Foucault, ‘Il faut défendre la société’ 228.
• 26 Cited in Z. Sternhell, ‘Le nationalisme organique de Maurice Barrès’ in G. Leroy (ed.), Les écrivai (...)

11But how can a form of government responsible for the continuum of life acknowledge economic, political, and social differences among citizens? Foucault argues that ‘if the power of normalization wishes to exercise the old sovereign right to kill [or to differentiate and exclude], it must pass through racism.’25 Racism is required by the government of life; it is an intrinsic component of its operations that induces a war-like form of reasoning and interacting: in order for the nation to live, its enemies must die; in order for the race to be strong and pure, the weak must die [or be excluded or prevented from exercising power, and so on]. So it went with the Dreyfus Affair, described by Maurice Barrès as ‘a war between races,’ and ‘a question of life or death for the nation.’26 In this battle for truth and justice, everyone seemed compelled to take a stand or rather to identify themselves in relation to the convicted criminal, in the name of the biological-racial-sexual differences characterizing their chosen group. What we now call the new social movements emerged on the international scene during the Affair. Intellectuals, women, socialists, workers, ‘came out,’ as it were, as intellectuals, women, socialists, workers—their political position in relation to Dreyfus rested on their knowledge of themselves, on their identity, as delimited by differential relations of bio-power.

• 27 H. Auclert, La Fronde, December 13, 1897.
• 28 J. Benda, ‘L’Affaire Dreyfus et le principe d’autorité,’ La Revue Blanche 20 (1899): 195; cited in (...)
• 29 Cited in Z. Sternhell, ‘Le nationalisme organique de Maurice Barrès’ 127.
• 30 J. Benda, La Jeunesse d’un clerc (Paris: Gallimard, 1936) 204; cited in S. R. Suleiman, ‘The Litera (...)
• 31 J. M. Berlière, ‘La généalogie d’une double tradition policière,’ in P. Birnbaum (ed.), La France e (...)

12To return now to my initial question: why did this particular case launch an international affair? Because Dreyfus provided a formidably effective prism for the multiplication of identities within the political body. No doubt, he saw himself only as a French soldier and patriot, a husband and father—in other words, a man. However this firm, individual identity functioned as prism to all others. To his immediate superiors, he was not the real deal, not a true military man, but one of the new generation of Polytechnique graduates who won their stripes in school contests rather than on the battleground (or through their noble blood); moreover, as one of the first Jews to be admitted in the inner circle of the General Staff, Dreyfus was easily perceived as a foreign body invading the corps. To nationalists, he was not really French, but a German-speaking Alsatian; to Catholics and anti-Semites, he was not one of them, but a Jew, a harmful, deviant, effeminate invader; to the new women of La Fronde, his persecution was but the normal destiny of all women, deprived before birth of their rights;27 to Socialists and trade unionists, he was not one of them, but a member of the capitalist exploiters—his fight meant nothing, except another tempest in the bourgeois teapot. Finally to intellectuals, who emerged as a group with their petitions and manifestos for and against Dreyfus, he was not a simple individual, but neither humanity itself (a position Jaurès and socialists would also eventually adopt), or the symbol of the degeneration threatening the very soul of the nation. All who took part in the debate situated themselves through their biological essence, in the name of race and nation. Julien Benda perhaps said it best when he maintained, ‘the Affair is, at heart, a biological war,’ for it is in ‘the physiological complexion of the individual that we must seek the ultimate cause of one’s attitude regarding the Affair.’28 And through this civil war for essential, vital, biological truth, new governmental relations of subjection and subjectivity were established. Thus Maurice Barrès elaborated his ‘organic nationalism,’ not only as a public doctrine but ‘as a general discipline, a way of conceiving life.’29 Benda remembered this battle as a kind of liberation: ‘One rarely has such an occasion to make a clear-cut choice, at the threshold of life, between two fundamental ethics, and to know immediately who one is.’30 Others saw it differently, maintaining that the new regime had fundamentally altered republican values to mean ‘Liberté, Égalité, Carte d’Identité.’31 Visibility continued to play an important role: as disciplinary mechanisms are panoptic and produce normalized individual behavior through surveillance, governmental mechanisms are prismatic—they secure individual and group identities into fields of actions acceptable for their band width in the spectrum of allowable margins of difference.

• 32 J. D. Bredin 106–07; also A. Pagès 190–91.
• 33 M. Foucault, Les Anormaux 12–14.

13Thus the Dreyfus affair can be considered not as the last great case of the nineteenth century, but rather as the first of the twentieth, when new governmental relations between individuals and institutions were established. Interestingly, this shift can be traced in one of the key documents of the Dreyfus trial, the famous Bertillon diagram explaining his theory of ‘auto-forgery.’ Inventor of the anthropometric system of measurements for the identification of criminals, and founder of the ‘Service de l’Identité judiciaire,’ Alphonse Bertillon was a prize witness for the prosecution, asked to certify that the bordereau was indeed written by Dreyfus. Bertillon was not a handwriting expert and he did not believe in their value for the identification of criminals. His system of proof was of an entirely different nature, resting, as it did, on intricate calculations of probabilities, risks, and security measures. At trial, under oath, he argued as follows: the suspect is an intelligent spy, who took measures to protect himself from discovery by forging his own handwriting, using words written by different members of his family to create an underlying grid, itself modified by various displacements. Calculating the risks and probabilities of interception, he developed a handwriting which both resembled and differed from his own. In this way, if an espionage document were seized at his domicile, the similarities would prove his innocence (the exculpating theory being that someone had tried to set him up, but had not completely succeeded in the forgery); conversely, if a document were seized outside of the domicile, the differences would prove his innocence. The entire explanatory system was illustrated in a diagram of a military citadel holding a besieged spy who planned to defend himself with graphic rebuses against attacks coming from the left or the right, at home or elsewhere. While the citadel itself reiterated disciplinary spaces, Bertillon used governmental police methods in order to demonstrate not the criminal’s nature, but his conduct in relation to others, calculated according to certain probabilities of present situations and future possibilities. The theory and the diagram have always provoked both general mirth and consternation. Everyone agreed, from Dreyfus to his lawyers to journalists to the President of the Republic, that Bertillon must have gone mad.32 And yet, this grotesque document constituted the third expert evaluation that authorized the condemnation of an innocent man (two of the five experts consulted maintained Dreyfus’s innocence). Foucault describes grotesque texts that exercise power while disqualifying the scientists and experts who wield them as ‘ubuesques,’ and he maintains that their primary function is to demonstrate the inevitability of relations of power.33 And yet...

• 34 M. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ 336.

15And so it goes, on and on, repeated with every generation or so, as though the battle could never be over, could never be won, as though it were an integral part of the maintenance of peace. The story of the always reiterable truths of the Dreyfus affair leads me to believe that transformative resistance and agency cannot come from any form of identity politics, for these are the very mechanisms of governmentality. As Foucault suggests, ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are [. . .]. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state.’34 Thus we the governed should work to reject the fictions of identity that tie us to hegemonic power relations, and elaborate new practices of the self. One could do worse than follow this difficult suggestion.