Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8076-1175-3 $19.95 (Can: $30.00)

“…Bredin concludes this monumental work with a lesson of nuance and scruple, quite valuable in our own time when intolerance and partisanship threaten once again.”  —Le Monde

With a historian’s thoroughness and a novelist’s skill, Jean-Denis Bredin presents here a most comprehensive, sensitive, and balanced account of the Dreyfus Affair, the celebrated scandal that rocked nineteenth-century France and whose reverberations are still felt today.

On an autumn morning in 1894, Captain Dreyfus was summoned to appear for a routine inspection; instead, as he took down a letter dictated by a senior officer, he was summarily accused of high treason. So began a twelve-year series of events that included his imprisonment on Devil's Island, the publication of Émile Zola's passionate J'accuse, the Rennes retrial, and the pardon and final rehabilitation of 1906. As the Dreyfus case turned into the Affair, this history of a single military career came to display the conflicts that were tearing a country apart: an obsession with espionage in a country that recently experienced military defeat; patriotic sentiment elevated to the status of doctrine; anti-Semitic prejudice transformed to furor; the cult of the military and hopes for martial revenge; and the place of traditional values in a country still reeling from the turbulence of the French Revolution.