The Dreyfus case’s real hero was Clemenceau and its origin was the Panama scandal.

Evidence

The Dreyfus case, therefore, is more than a bizarre, imperfectly solved “crime,” an affair of staff officers disguised by false beards and dark glasses, peddling their stupid forgeries by night in the streets of Paris. Its hero is not Dreyfus but Clemenceau and it begins not with the arrest of a Jewish staff officer but with the Panama scandal. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 286

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt’s reframing here is provocative: the Affair begins with Panama, not the arrest. Worth chasing how Panama corrupted the Republic to make the Affair possible.