ROBERT HARRIS
Hutchinson, 2013, 483 pages, $19.99 (pb)
What do you do when you are a national security official
with access to secret intelligence and find that the shonky information and tenuous
evidence in it has been corruptly used to convict an innocent man of
treason? Join in the suppression of the case? Or expose the injustice? Major Georges Picquart, commander of France’s
secret police in 1895, faced exactly this dilemma in the Dreyfus Affair and, at
great risk of his own victimisation, chose to expose the frame-up of the French
Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus. Robert
Harris’ historical novel dramatically reconstructs the transformation of
Picquart from loyal military officer to crusading whistle-blower.
After France’s colossal defeat by Germany in the 1870
Franco-Prussian war, a scapegoat-hungry French military and political elite
found, amongst France’s vilified ‘Jews and Traitors’, a convenient fall-guy in
Dreyfus, a military officer and a Jew with German cultural roots in the German-occupied
French territories of Alsace-Lorraine.
Picquart had many misgivings about Dreyfus’ conviction for
espionage which resulted in his exile to France’s isolated Devil’s Island
hell-hole. Dreyfus, thought Picquart, had
no apparent motive. The prosecution
illegally (via Picquart) provided to the court-martial judges a secret file
which “wouldn’t withstand ten minutes’ cross examination by a halfway decent
attorney”, says a repentant Picquart once he sights the material in his
newly-promoted capacity as secret police chief.
The spy was identified solely by the letter ‘D’ (for ‘Dreyfus’, that’ll
do, thought his framers) on the one incriminating sheet of paper allegedly in
Dreyfus’ handwriting.
With resourcefulness, guile and irresistible obsession,
Picquart dug into the case and discovered that the real agent was a French Army
Major, Esterhazy, selling military secrets to pay off his gambling and mistress
debts. Making his superiors aware of the
true situation, Picquart is ordered off his personal investigation to prevent
the certain embarrassment and career ruin of Dreyfus’ judicial, military and
political persecutors, including five of France’s most senior Army Generals.
When Picquart defies his bosses, a ‘desperate and vindictive
army’ attempts to silence him. He is
spied on, interrogated, arrested, held in indefinite detention without trial,
transferred to effective exile in France’s African colonies, then dismissed
from the Army. But Picquart is never put
on trial. The ‘founder of the school of
Dreyfus studies: its leading scholar’ who knows ‘every letter and telegram,
every personality, every forgery, every lie’ of the Dreyfus Affair would be too
dangerous to its perpetrators and apologists if given a platform in court.
The limelight-shunning Picquart eventually finds his ‘solitary
burden of secrecy’ lifted when he connects with the broad and vigorous
mobilisation of social forces (led by intellectuals, left-wing politicians and
socialists) that was the essential crux on which turned the eventual victory of
the ‘Dreyfusards’ against France’s establishment conspirators, perjurers, forgers
and anti-Semites. Picquart and Dreyfus
were both exonerated in 1906, after a decade of seemingly hopeless
struggle.
The relevance of this historic triumph, well-narrated by an
industrious Harris despite some sluggish passages of weighty detail, has not dimmed
– of never giving up the slog of campaigning against heavy institutional odds, and
of the value of the system’s insiders who, with moral courage, forensic
diligence and the dogged pursuit of getting the truth out, blow the whistle on
the abuse of official power and secrecy.
No comments:
Post a Comment