ABSTRACT
Historians have attached enormous importance to the Dreyfus Affair and its aftermath for the history of the Third Republic and even of modern Europe. ‘The Affair bears comparison with the greatest crises that French society has experienced’ (Mayeur and Rebérioux, 1984, p. 179); and it has been described as ‘a matter of life and death for the Third Republic’ (Snyder, 1973, p. xxii), as ‘the conflict that helped shape the political landscape of modern France’ (Burns, 1992, p. xiii), and even as ‘a kind of dress rehearsal’ for the twentieth-century anti-Semitism that climaxed with the Holocaust (Arendt, 1967, p. 10).
