For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus Book

What surprised me about Frederick Brown's For the Soul of France was its relevance to the culture wars at the beginning of the 21st century in the United States. Both fin-de-siècle France and post-9/11 America shared a static view of their respective nations. In France's case, it was Judaism that was seen as the interloper, as symbolized in the Dreyfus affair. In the United States, large segments of the population look back to an Anglo-Saxon golden age in which Evangelical religion and conservative politics presumably held sway.

Brown quotes one typical instance of Antisemitism:When in the spring of 1898, Joseph Valabrègue, a Provençal Jew tarred by the brush used against his brother-in-law Alfred Dreyfus, indignantly sent professions of patriotism to La Croix, the paper's official mouthpiece replied: "I am French, the son of a Frenchman; I shall live and die as such. But you, you are a Jew, the son of a Jew and you will die a Jew.... You know full well that all through history -- from Judas, who sold his God, to Dreyfus, who sold France -- your race has bred so much treason, iniquity, and rapacity that you must at all costs hide your name, as the escaped convict hides his red bonnet." In this ontological court, rules of evidence did not apply. Charles Maurras praised Roman Catholicism as a "temple of definitions" offering people blessed asylum from that bane of human consciousness -- "uncertainty."[Italics mine]One could imagine the same type of illogic being applied in political arguments at Tea Party gatherings.

This is an excellent book about a period of European history that is largely unknown to most Americans. We may have heard of the Dreyfus affair, the Eiffel Tower, and the failed French attempt to build the Panama Canal; but we don't have a real grasp about the decades-long war between Catholicism and liberalism, symbolized by scientists and Jews.

Today, as the French are facing a much more substantive invasion of Muslims from Algeria and other parts of North Africa, much of the conflicts of that period have become moot.