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A review by aiffix
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
To tell you the truth, I was put off by the title. What a strange idea… Why did Plon choose not to translate the English title, An Officer and a spy? Did they think that Officier et Espion sounded too dramatic, too thriller-ish for such a serious topic? Did they want something more directly related to the Affaire? Ah, the elitist and arcane French publishing industry…
I cannot sum up the Affaire here in a few lines. The Wikipedia entry provides ample details for those who want a basic background. “D.” actually points to the single unique material basis on which Captain Dreyfus was convinced of selling state secrets in 1895 (“Cette canaille de D…”) and sentenced to a life in exile, in the dreadful bagne of Devil Island off French Guyana. The Affaire Dreyfus was and remains a stain on French history. A stain? This is actually the wrong word. A stain can be brushed off, cleaned up, removed, erased. The Affaire Dreyfus cannot be erased. It is not that kind of stain. It is a bald spot, rather: a scratch on a varnish, revealing the underlying layer of racism and antisemitism that corrupts the heart of French culture.
In my recent review of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe 2, I broached on this topic. The list of anti-Semitic writers in France between 1870 and 1945 is damning: Edouard Drumont of course, but also Charles Maurras, Paul Valery, Paul Morand, Robert Brasillac, Marcel Jouhandeau, Jean De La Varende… Many, like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, sit on the fence. The list culminates with Louis-Ferdinand Celine obviously, but read them carefully enough and you will add to the list some names much dearer to my heart, like Georges Simenon. Even Blaise Cendrars…
Seigneur dans les ghettos grouille la tourbe des Juifs
Ils viennent de Pologne et sont tous fugitifs.
Je le sais bien, ils ont fait ton Procès;
Mais je t’assure, ils ne sont pas tout à fait mauvais.
The book itself is every bit as readable and entertaining as any of Robert Harris’s novels: the style, in Nathalie Zimmermann’s translation, is impeccable. So is the characterization. The historical context is well outlined, the portrait of Paris suitably faithful. Harris uses the Zola-esque technique of distilling his authorial opinion through descriptions. Paris, at the time of the first trial, stinks, and we are reminded of it at regular intervals. The stench had many causes boiling down to the speed of the city expansion. It was so fast that there was no time to move the excrement dumps: the Montfaucon dump, right inside Paris and abandoned since 1848, was still full in 1895; the new Bondy Forest dump was full too, its waters spilling into the Canal de l’Ourq; many industries recycled the excrements, rejecting their residues into the Seine or on Gennevilliers’ farm fields; other factories worked equally polluting material (fertilisers, tanneries, pigment makers…). Paris’s stench issue escalated to such a point that, in 1896, Paris’s prefect Lepine created the “Commission des odeurs de Paris”. Most problems were not solved before 1905. This is the exact time span of the Affaire Dreyfus. Harris plays on it in the classic fashion of a 19th century novelist: yes, the Affaire Dreyfus is a dreadful business, its emanations falling down on all French people. Oh, these despicable anti-Semites, oh the shame of France and Europe, oh, the paved road to the Holocaust. Oh…
Albeit cruelly true, the era antisemitism is a cliché which I refuse to put down to Harris’s non-Frenchness. It certainly plays a role. Suffice to read Harris’s book reviews. French and British reviews have very different approaches. While the latter are uncritical of the author’s choices, French reviewers bring a lot of interesting points to the debate. Again, one could exonerate British reviewers by saying that the Affaire Dreyfus is a French affair, but this actually doesn’t account for the fact that it has been widely studied by English and American top historians. Actually, modern studies of the Affaire are all in English and so are most of Harris’s resources, from George R. Whyte’s The Dreyfus Affair to Ruth Harris’s The Man on Devil’s Island. Putting Harris’s lack of originality in his approach on his ignorance of French context and culture is simply not true. We have to consider Harris aware of and responsible for his choices. And his choice, with An Officer and a spy, is to tell us about the Affaire Dreyfus without telling us about Dreyfus. The whole novel revolves around commandant Picquart, the French officer who risked his career and life to defend Dreyfus and fight what he – rightfully !- saw as a judicial error and injustice.
In the end, writing historical fiction is about what is left aside as much as what is being told. More than any other, historical fiction is an ideological weapon. No author is innocent. If Harris chooses to portray Picquart as a grumpy hero determined to do his duty despite his superiors and the threats on his life, and Dreyfus as a bland, slightly autistic rich boy, it is not by chance. He is well documented. But he chose to follow the main narrative, popularized by French historians ever since the end of the Affaire as a way to explain France’s hatred of Dreyfus by something else than antisemitism (“he was not a very likable man”) and to restore the French army’s image (“the army system is rotten but its spirit is pure”). One can admire Harris’s proficiency in providing his historical lessons but one cannot exonerate him from choosing the easy path. Picquart might be a hero (debatable) but heroes don’t explain history. The Affaire Dreyfus is not about Picquart. It is about Dreyfus, Judaism and France. To see these remain in the background is my only regret about this very enjoyable novel. But it is a big one.
I cannot sum up the Affaire here in a few lines. The Wikipedia entry provides ample details for those who want a basic background. “D.” actually points to the single unique material basis on which Captain Dreyfus was convinced of selling state secrets in 1895 (“Cette canaille de D…”) and sentenced to a life in exile, in the dreadful bagne of Devil Island off French Guyana. The Affaire Dreyfus was and remains a stain on French history. A stain? This is actually the wrong word. A stain can be brushed off, cleaned up, removed, erased. The Affaire Dreyfus cannot be erased. It is not that kind of stain. It is a bald spot, rather: a scratch on a varnish, revealing the underlying layer of racism and antisemitism that corrupts the heart of French culture.
In my recent review of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe 2, I broached on this topic. The list of anti-Semitic writers in France between 1870 and 1945 is damning: Edouard Drumont of course, but also Charles Maurras, Paul Valery, Paul Morand, Robert Brasillac, Marcel Jouhandeau, Jean De La Varende… Many, like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, sit on the fence. The list culminates with Louis-Ferdinand Celine obviously, but read them carefully enough and you will add to the list some names much dearer to my heart, like Georges Simenon. Even Blaise Cendrars…
Seigneur dans les ghettos grouille la tourbe des Juifs
Ils viennent de Pologne et sont tous fugitifs.
Je le sais bien, ils ont fait ton Procès;
Mais je t’assure, ils ne sont pas tout à fait mauvais.
The book itself is every bit as readable and entertaining as any of Robert Harris’s novels: the style, in Nathalie Zimmermann’s translation, is impeccable. So is the characterization. The historical context is well outlined, the portrait of Paris suitably faithful. Harris uses the Zola-esque technique of distilling his authorial opinion through descriptions. Paris, at the time of the first trial, stinks, and we are reminded of it at regular intervals. The stench had many causes boiling down to the speed of the city expansion. It was so fast that there was no time to move the excrement dumps: the Montfaucon dump, right inside Paris and abandoned since 1848, was still full in 1895; the new Bondy Forest dump was full too, its waters spilling into the Canal de l’Ourq; many industries recycled the excrements, rejecting their residues into the Seine or on Gennevilliers’ farm fields; other factories worked equally polluting material (fertilisers, tanneries, pigment makers…). Paris’s stench issue escalated to such a point that, in 1896, Paris’s prefect Lepine created the “Commission des odeurs de Paris”. Most problems were not solved before 1905. This is the exact time span of the Affaire Dreyfus. Harris plays on it in the classic fashion of a 19th century novelist: yes, the Affaire Dreyfus is a dreadful business, its emanations falling down on all French people. Oh, these despicable anti-Semites, oh the shame of France and Europe, oh, the paved road to the Holocaust. Oh…
Albeit cruelly true, the era antisemitism is a cliché which I refuse to put down to Harris’s non-Frenchness. It certainly plays a role. Suffice to read Harris’s book reviews. French and British reviews have very different approaches. While the latter are uncritical of the author’s choices, French reviewers bring a lot of interesting points to the debate. Again, one could exonerate British reviewers by saying that the Affaire Dreyfus is a French affair, but this actually doesn’t account for the fact that it has been widely studied by English and American top historians. Actually, modern studies of the Affaire are all in English and so are most of Harris’s resources, from George R. Whyte’s The Dreyfus Affair to Ruth Harris’s The Man on Devil’s Island. Putting Harris’s lack of originality in his approach on his ignorance of French context and culture is simply not true. We have to consider Harris aware of and responsible for his choices. And his choice, with An Officer and a spy, is to tell us about the Affaire Dreyfus without telling us about Dreyfus. The whole novel revolves around commandant Picquart, the French officer who risked his career and life to defend Dreyfus and fight what he – rightfully !- saw as a judicial error and injustice.
In the end, writing historical fiction is about what is left aside as much as what is being told. More than any other, historical fiction is an ideological weapon. No author is innocent. If Harris chooses to portray Picquart as a grumpy hero determined to do his duty despite his superiors and the threats on his life, and Dreyfus as a bland, slightly autistic rich boy, it is not by chance. He is well documented. But he chose to follow the main narrative, popularized by French historians ever since the end of the Affaire as a way to explain France’s hatred of Dreyfus by something else than antisemitism (“he was not a very likable man”) and to restore the French army’s image (“the army system is rotten but its spirit is pure”). One can admire Harris’s proficiency in providing his historical lessons but one cannot exonerate him from choosing the easy path. Picquart might be a hero (debatable) but heroes don’t explain history. The Affaire Dreyfus is not about Picquart. It is about Dreyfus, Judaism and France. To see these remain in the background is my only regret about this very enjoyable novel. But it is a big one.