Dreyfus-era adversaries framed the affair as a war between the military and democracy

Evidence

It is under this caption that Maximilian Harden (a German Jew) described the Dreyfus case in Die Zukunft (1898). Walter Frank, the antisemitic historian, employs the same slogan in the heading of his chapter on Dreyfus while Bernanos (op. cit., p. 413) remarks in the same vein that “rightly or wrongly, democracy sees in the military its most dangerous rival.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2121