The Dreyfus Affair survived two world wars as a living French political cleavage

Evidence

Even stranger is the fact that neither the first nor the second World War has been able to bury the affair in oblivion. At the behest of the Action Française, the Précis de l’Affaire Dreyfus2 was republished in 1924 and has since been the standard reference manual of the Anti-Dreyfusards. At the premiere of L’Affaire Dreyfus (a play written by Rehfisch and Wilhelm Herzog under the pseudonym of René Kestner) in 1931, the atmosphere of the nineties still prevailed with quarrels in the auditorium, stink-bombs in the stalls, the shock troops of the Action Française standing around to strike terror into actors, audience and bystanders. Nor did the government—Laval’s government—act in any way differently than its predecessors some thirty years before: it gladly admitted it was unable to guarantee a single undisturbed performance, thereby providing a new late triumph for the Anti-Dreyfusards. The play had to be suspended. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 278

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the affair stay so live for decades? Arendt seems to suggest the state never settled it legally, but there may be a deeper structural reason about French national self-image worth chasing.