Jonathan Yovel, University of Haifa Faculty of Law, has The Dreyfus Affair: A Law and Literature Account of a Law and Literature Affair, which appears in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities:
How does law become public? What happens to it when it does?
Alfred Dreyfus (NYPL)
A note fished from a wastebasket, forged evidence, a secret court-martial, public humiliation and a republic stressed to its limits: in 1894–95 France convicted and degraded Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason he did not commit. Within years the Dreyfus Affair had engulfed France, reshaping politics and giving rise to a new public sphere. It was fought in courts and offices as much as in newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, open letters, and even real-time feature film.
This article reads L'Affaire as a "law and literature event," a real-time contest over meaning and performance in which novelists and essayists pleaded, lawyers turned authors, and legal performances spilled into the streets and back into a series of courts. Treating law and literature as a phenomenon, not only a method, unsettles the divide between "law in" and "law as" literature.
Through discourse analysis drawing on Bakhtin, Perelman, and Barthes, it examines Labori's carnivalesque pleading, Zola's address casting the jurors as protagonists, Lazare's forensic pamphlets, Proust's studied distance, Méliès's 1899 docudrama, and the anti-Dreyfusard Barrès' emphatic report from Dreyfus' Rennes trial, whose rhetoric of names, race, and a fictive "everyone" is a rhetorical masterpiece expressing the later "friend-enemy" foundation of Schmittian political theory. It traces how material, technological, and legal conditions shaped the construction of a mass public sphere and the ways law and legal discourse interacted within it, constructing audienceship and modes of expression and participation.
"L'Affaire" means different things to different people. It is a story of shame and of the nascent political culture that would ravage Europe, but also of courage, struggle and redemption. The paper follows L'Affaire past Dreyfus's 1906 rehabilitation into a darker, second-generation sequel: the son of his accuser, du Paty de Clam, became Vichy's Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs, while Dreyfus's granddaughter, a Resistance member, perished in Auschwitz. Vichy and Dreyfus's 2025 posthumous promotion each offer a chapter in an ongoing legal story, or stories: the article argues that "L'Affaire" has become a plurality of stories told to and by fractured audiences to this very day.
--Dan Ernst
