Will the Epstein scandal be our Dreyfus affair?
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| by Ben Shahn |
The Epstein scandal is about sexual depravity, and the Dreyfus affair was about antisemitism, but they're both fundamentally about the abuse of power. And they both involve a series of failed coverups.
And then there's the amount of time they've chewed up. The Dreyfus affair started in 1894 and did not end until 1906. The Epstein scandal started in 2005 and, of course, is still going on. So twelve years for Dreyfus and, for Epstein, twenty and counting.
For those of you not familiar with the Dreyfus affair, here's a brief summary. A cleaning lady at the German embassy in Paris was a French spy, and she examined the contents of office wastepaper baskets as she we emptying them. Military counterintelligence decided from a paper provided by the cleaning lady that there was a spy in the French army, and they railroaded a Jewish artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old graduate of the elite Ecole Polytechnique. Dreyfus was quickly convicted on flimsy evidence and sent to Devil's Island, the infamous penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. (For a cinematic idea of what Devil's Island was like, watch the 1973 movie Papillon, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.) Dreyfus languished there from 1895 to 1899.
Even after a smart French intelligence officer figured out who the actual spy was, management stuck with the Jew as the fall guy. (The actual perpetrator, who later confessed, was the son of a bastard son of an aristocrat - a countess, actually.)
But the story would not die. The Dreyfus family, led by his wife Lucie and his older brother Mathieu, who was running the family business, wouldn't let it go. And then, in 1898, the famous novelist Emile Zola published an incendiary indictment of the perpetrators of this travesty, entitled "J'Accuse!" The old boys' network slowly started to crack, and in 1906 Dreyfus was fully exonerated and reinstated in the army. He served throughout World War I, and died in 1935, at the age of 75.
As we look back on it, the Dreyfus affair was a series of earthquakes that fundamentally unsettled French society. I think the Epstein scandal has the same potential for America.
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| Alfred Dreyfus, ca. 1930 |
See also A Shortage of Serviceable Ducks, Spindrift, Echoes of the Spanish Civil War, I'm Haunted by Ben Shahn, Jersey Homesteads.
