ABSTRACT
The Affair stood not only at the turn of the centuries, but, for many, at a turn in political awareness as well. Despite the disparaging comments made by the urban visitors to rural France, they were no less strong in the isolated peasant than in the proximate bourgeois, and peasant indifference to the Affair had nothing to do with the lack of interest or belief in these transcendent values. After all, individual liberty and self-determination were getting stronger, not weaker, in much of the countryside at some point; antisemitism was often of local and marginal interest; abstract nationalism was of little relevance. There are a number of chords running throughout studies of the Dreyfus Affair — nationalism, militarism, antisemitism, and abstract individualism among them — that are thought to be of crucial interest to all. By 1900 the Affair was history to most of those who had been involved.
