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“... book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. Why would a French military tribunal find a guilty man innocent? What was the point of this ‘ritual theatre’, as Frederick Brown calls it in For the Soul of France: Culture ...”

“... the Germans. The military authorities were baffled as to the source, but suspicion fell on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, at the time serving in a probationary capacity on the General Staff. The ‘bordereau’ was submitted secretly to handwriting experts, the first expressing doubts that it was by Dreyfus, the second ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century ...”

“... section of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, reading documents which were relevant to the Dreyfus Affair. After I had returned to England I received a letter, sent to my university address, which told me that if, in any forthcoming book on Dreyfus, I wished to avoid the mistakes which had been made by so many ...”

“... as we strive, in all kinds of ways, to deny or freeze the mobility of our souls.In her book on the Dreyfus Affair, The Man on Devil’s Island (2010), Ruth Harris insists that no ‘dark teleology’ links the 1890s in France with the years between the two world wars. ‘There is no straight line that can be drawn from the conflicts of the Fin de Siècle to ...”

“... which launches from Kourou in French Guiana. (Devil’s Island, the site of the penal colony where Alfred Dreyfus and many others were held in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is a few miles off the coast.) From ‘Europe’s spaceport’ in South America, rockets are launched east over the Atlantic on a trajectory designed to reduce the risk of ...”

“... artillery captain, the rising star at the headquarters of the General Staff of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus. To put it simply, Dreyfus had been framed. In 1894, he was court-martialled, convicted of treason and then in 1895 deported to Devil’s Island, the tiniest of three tiny Iles du Salut, or Salvation ...”

“... The great affair of his father’s life – a prosperous textile merchant – was, inevitably, Dreyfus. Mendès père, a secular, radical republican, rallied to Dreyfus as a passionate democrat more than a Jew and, as a furious anti-Prussian, had the honour to serve in the First World War under ... Colonel ...”

“... On this model, and on our topic, we might say something like: Suppose some time between 1895 (when Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil’s Island) and 1919 (the date of the Treaty of Versailles) – or if you prefer, between 1908 (the date of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday) and 1915 (the date of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps) – the world ...”

“... is best in academic rigour; he later helped analyse the documents which led to the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus. The History of William Marshal contains nearly twenty thousand lines of Norman-French verse, around which Meyer constructed three volumes of commentary, heroically shaping the task, which Asbridge has continued, of deconstructing an exercise ...”

“... defeat and French responses to it – including the modernisation of the army in which the Jewish Alfred Dreyfus could become an officer. Jeanne was pregnant during the Commune, a time of harsh repression of a chaotic popular movement, where burning buildings could be seen almost everywhere in Paris. Marcel Proust was born in 1871, his brother Robert two ...”

“... cosmopolitanism’ the same thing as the cosmopolitanism invoked by the enemies of Alfred Dreyfus? Péan asked in Libération what ‘sans frontières’ could possibly mean if not ‘cosmopolitan’. He also cited a 1985 article that Lévy had co-signed with two other intellectuals, in which the three declared: ‘Of course, we are ...”

“... also ran into intrigues from ‘philosophers of Being’ in the government office presided over by Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the 20th Century. They launched an attack on him in the Party press, which included the claim that he was ‘the leader of a Jewish clique’. This of course was malicious nonsense. In fact, as Ott points out, Heidegger’s ...”

“... resonance, because Basch was president of the League of the Rights of Man, a former supporter of Dreyfus as well as a close collaborator of Léon Blum and a Freemason. The bodies were discovered in a quarry, with a piece of paper attached to them on which was written: ‘Terror against terror. The Jew always pays ... Down with de Gaulle.’ There was some ...”

“... not only was Tissot the more successful, but so were two of Degas’s other painter-friends, Alfred Stevens and Giuseppe de Nittis. There was also the case of Giovanni Boldini, who had first made his name as a portrait painter in London before moving to Paris in 1871. Stevens’s fame was based equally in Brussels and Paris, and perhaps bi-location would ...”