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Philosophy, Travel, and Place
 Ron Scapp · Brian Seitz
Editors

Philosophy, Travel,
and Place
Being in Transit
Editors
Ron Scapp Brian Seitz
College of Mount Saint Vincent Babson College
New York, NY, USA Babson Park, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-98224-3 ISBN 978-3-319-98225-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954965

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
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Cover image: Ashley Sandberg/EyeEm

Cover design by Akihiro Nakayama

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Contents

1 Introducing Being in Transit 1

Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz

2 Long Distances: Tourating, Travel, and the Ethics of

Tourism 7
Mary C. Rawlinson

3 Thinking in Transit 51
Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey

4 Reclamation and Reconciliation 69

bell hooks

5 Bad Dog 79
Alphonso Lingis

6 Walking the Way: Transforming Being in Transit 87

Jason M. Wirth

7 Home Schooling: Philosophy Without Travel 99

Nickolas Pappas

v
vi    Contents

8 The Night-Traveler: Theories of Nocturnal Time,

Space, Movement 113
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

9 Walking in Wild Emptiness: A Zen Phenomenology 129

Brian Shūdō Schroeder

10 Moving Wolves 151

Thomas Thorp

11 Nietzsche vagabundus or, the Good European in transitu 169

David Farrell Krell

12 Trans-Scapes Transitions in Transit 189

Irene J. Klaver

13 The Commute: The Bend in Progress, Reproduction

on The Road 209
Robin Truth Goodman

14 The Privilege of the Open Road 223

James Penha

15 American Travel Encounters with Fascist Italy 227

David Aliano

16 Flicking the Switch 261

Ron Anteroinen

17 Homo Viator: Knowledge of the Earth and Theory of the

World in the Age of the First Transatlantic Voyages 265
Peter Carravetta

Index 289
 Notes on Contributors

David Aliano is an Associate Professor of Italian and History and is

the Chair of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at the
College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. He earned his Ph.D.
and M.Phil. degrees at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York and received his B.A. degree from Fordham University. His
research specializes in transnational Italian identity, politics, and culture.
He is the author of Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina (Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2012). He has also published peer-reviewed
articles in the Ethnic Studies Review (2010), French Colonial History
(2008), Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe
(2006), and Altreitalie (2005).
Ron Anteroinen is a visual fine artist and graphic designer living in
New York City.
Peter Carravetta is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.
He has published several books, including Prefaces to the Diaphora.
Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (Purdue UP,
1991), Del Postmoderno. Critica e cultura in America all’alba del due-
mila (Bompiani, 2009), and The Elusive Hermes. Method, Discourse,
Interpreting (Davies Group Publishing, 2013). Founding editor of
DIFFERENTIA review of italian thought (1986–1999, viewable on
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/), and translator
of G. Vattimo & P. A. Rovatti’s Weak Thought (SUNY P, 2012), he is

vii
viii    Notes on Contributors

also a poet, author of The Sun and Other Things (Guernica, 1998), and
The Other Lives (Guernica, 2014). He has been Fulbright and Visiting
Professor in Madrid/Complutense, Paris/8, Nanjing, Saint Petersburg
and Rome/2. He is presently working on a book on Humanism in the
post-humanist age.
Edward S. Casey is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SUNY,
Stony Brook. Past president of the American Philosophical Association
(Eastern Division), he is the author of ten books on topics ranging
from imagination and memory to place and space. Most recently, he
has published The World at Glance and The World on Edge—two peri-
phenomenological investigations. He is currently writing a book tenta-
tively entitled Peripheral Emotions.
Megan Craig is an artist and Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Stony Brook University, where she teaches course in Aesthetics,
Phenomenology, and twentieth century continental philosophy. Her
research interests include color, synesthesia, autism, psychoanaly-
sis, and embodiment. She is the author of Levinas and James: Towards
a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2010) and is
currently at work on a book on Levinas, Derrida, and palliative care in
America. Her paintings, installations, performances, and public works
have been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Robin Truth Goodman is Professor and Associate Chair of English
at Florida State University. Her publications include: Promissory Notes:
The Literary Conditions of Debt (Lever Press, forthcoming); Gender for
the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (Routledge, 2017);
Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (edited collection;
Cambridge University Press, 2016); Gender Work: Feminism After
Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2013); Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public:
Women and the “Re-privatization” of Labor (Palgrave, 2010); Policing
Narratives and the State of Terror (SUNY Press, 2009); World, Class,
Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (Routledge, 2004);
Strange Love: Or, How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market
(co-written with Kenneth J. Saltman; Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); and
Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies (University of Minnesota
Press, 2001). She is the editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook
of twenty-first Century Feminist Theory and Understanding Adorno,
Understanding Modernism also from Bloomsbury.
 Notes on Contributors    ix

Irene J. Klaver is Professor in Philosophy at the University of North

Texas and Director of the Philosophy of Water Project. She works at
the interface of social-political and cultural dimensions of water, with
a special interest in urban rivers. Currently she is finalizing a book
about the Trinity River in North Texas (Texas A&M University Press)
and working on a monograph on Meandering, River Spheres and New
Urbanism. Klaver has been Water and Culture Advisor for UNESCO
and Co-Director of the International Association for Environmental
Philosophy. She co-edited the UNESCO book Water, Cultural Diversity
& Global Environmental Change and co-directed the documentary The
New Frontier: Sustainable Ranching in the American West and parts of
River Planet.
David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul
University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German
Studies at Brown University. His philosophical work focuses on the
areas of early Greek thought, German Romanticism and Idealism, and
contemporary European thought. His most recent scholarly books
include Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black
Notebooks (SUNY Press, 2015), The Cudgel and the Caress: Reflections
on Cruelty and Tenderness (forthcoming from SUNY), and The Sea: A
Philosophical Encounter (forthcoming from Bloomsbury). He has also
published a number of short stories and three novels.
Alphonso Lingis is an American philosopher, writer and translator, cur-
rently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.
His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, mod-
ern philosophy, and ethics.
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature at Babson College. His focus is upon tracking currents of
experimental thought in the Middle East and the West, with particular
attention to exploring the concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence,
extremism, mania, disappearance, and apocalyptic writing. He has pub-
lished six books to date, including: The Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), Inflictions (Continuum, 2012), The Radical
Unspoken (Routledge, 2013), and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian
(SUNY, 2015). His latest work on madness, titled Omnicide: Mania,
Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium, will be released with Urbanomic/
Sequence and MIT Press in 2019. He is also the co-editor of the
x    Notes on Contributors

Suspensions book series with Bloomsbury, and co-founder of the fifth

(Dis)Appearance Lab (www.5dal.com).
Nickolas Pappas teaches at the City University of New York, where he
is head of the Program in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center,
and Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center and City College.
He has written Guidebook to Plato’s Republic, now in three edi-
tions (Routledge, 1995, 2004, 2013); The Nietzsche Disappointment:
Reckoning with Nietzsche’s Unkept Promises on Origins and Outcomes
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Politics and Philosophy in Plato’s
Menexenus, with Mark Zelcer (Routledge, 2015); The Philosopher’s New
Clothes: The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy’s Turn against
Fashion (Routledge, 2016). He works mainly in the areas of ancient phi-
losophy and aesthetics.
James Penha is a native New Yorker who has lived for the past
quarter-century in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction
and poetry, his LGBTQ+ stories appear in the 2017 and 2018 antholo-
gies of both the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival and the Seattle Erotic
Arts Festival while his dystopian poem “2020” is part of the 2017 Not
My President anthology. His essay “It’s Been a Long Time Coming” was
featured in The New York Times “Modern Love” column in April 2016.
Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry.
Mary C. Rawlinson is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in
the Department of Philosophy and an Affiliated Faculty in Art History
and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New
York. Rawlinson’s publications include Just Life: bioethics and the future
of sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 2016), Engaging the
World: Thinking After Irigaray (SUNY, 2016), The Routledge Handbook
of Food Ethics (Routledge, 2016), Labor and Global Justice (Lexington,
2014), Global Food, Global Justice (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015),
Thinking with Irigaray (SUNY, 2011), and Derrida and Feminism
(Routledge, 1997), as well as articles on Hegel, Proust, literature and eth-
ics, bioethics, and contemporary French philosophy. Rawlinson was the
founding editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches
to Bioethics (2006–2016) and Co-founder and Co-director of The
Irigaray Circle (2007–2017). In 2018 she was appointed Senior Visiting
Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University
College London.
 Notes on Contributors    xi

Ron Scapp is the founding Director of the Graduate Program in Urban

and Multicultural Education at College of Mount Saint Vincent, The
Bronx, where he is also a Professor of humanities and teacher education.
He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books on education,
politics and culture.
Brian Shūdō Schroeder is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and
Director of Religious Studies at Rochester Institute of Technology.
He has published widely on Contemporary European Philosophy, The
History of Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy,
The Kyoto School, Social and Political Philosophy, and The Philosophy of
Religion. He is co-editor with Silvia Benso of the SUNY Press Series in
Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Currently an associate officer of the
Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle and an executive com-
mittee member of the Society for Italian Philosophy, Schroeder is for-
merly Co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy, Co-director and Chair of the board of the International
Association for Environmental Philosophy, director of the Collegium
Phaenomenologicum, and executive committee member of the
Nietzsche Society. He is also an ordained Sōtō Zen priest and the
Buddhist chaplain at RIT, where he guides the Idunno Zen Community.
Brian Seitz is Professor of Philosophy at Babson College. He is the
author, co-author, and co-editor of many books and articles on philoso-
phy and culture.
Thomas Thorp is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Xavier University in
Chicago. In addition to essays on Homer and Greek political thought
several recent publications have drawn from fieldwork conducted in areas
where wolves have returned, the Yellowstone area and the Savoie region
of France. He is co-author, with Brian Setiz, of The Iroquois and the
Athenians: a Political Ontology.
bell hooks is an American author, feminist, and social activist. The name
“bell hooks” is derived from that of her maternal great-grandmother,
Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks’ writing has been the intersec-
tionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their
ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domi-
nation. She has published over 30 books and numerous scholarly articles,
appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She
has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality,
xii    Notes on Contributors

mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute
at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.
Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and
works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist
Philosophy, Aesthetics, Ecological Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy.
His recent books include Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth:
Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY,
2017), A Monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with
Devastated Things, Fordham 2016), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild
(SUNY, 2015), The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His
Time (SUNY, 2003), the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian
Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the
Kyoto School (Indiana, 2011), and The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-
Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature (SUNY, 2013). He is the
associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and
Continental Philosophy. His forthcoming manuscript is called Nietzsche
and Other Buddhas (Indiana, 2019) and he is currently completing a
manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well as one on indige-
nous space.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Cleopatra’s Barge, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas 11

Fig. 12.1 We had dinner at one of Venice’s canals when we saw it
coming: slow-gliding giant, moving with iron precision,
steely temporality 194
Fig. 12.2 Bicycling along the IJ Boulevard, we saw the Brilliance
of the Seas docked in the Cruise Terminal, dwarfing
all the buildings around it 195
Fig. 12.3 On our way to see a movie, we explored the new
neighborhood around the Film Museum the EYE
and found ourselves in a Venetian themed enclave 195
Fig. 12.4 Driving along wind-swept farm road 2520 in south
Texas, we encountered the first TRANSMIGRANTES
sign, forlorn in the new millennium 198
Fig. 12.5 We slowly drove into the CATS lot, a large lot run
by men from Guatemala 199
Fig. 12.6 Transmigrantes, the gleaners of transit, in transit:
towing used cars behind their own cars, all the way
back to Guatemala 200
Fig. 12.7 We were right at Anzaldúa’s herida abierta, the open
wound of the closed-fenced US–Mexican border 200
Fig. 12.8 The Rio Grande visible through the ‘controlled burnt’
thickets in Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.
We witnessed the creation of control through exposure 202

xiii
xiv    List of Figures

Fig. 12.9 Tijuana: where the wall walks into the waters
of the Pacific Ocean 202
Fig. 12.10 At the US side we saw a desolate territory, controlled
space, mocked by countless loud seagulls. At the Mexican
side we saw people enjoying the beach 203
 CHAPTER 1

Introducing Being in Transit

Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz

“The sedentary life is the real sin against the holy spirit.”
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

That we find ourselves running to, fleeing from or otherwise commuting

between here and there poses problems that most philosophers have so
far and for the most part seemed to neglect. We, however, are moved
by this reality, one in which the distinction between nomadism and glo-
balism, and between choice and necessity becomes somewhat obscure,
if still clearly determined while arguably equally clearly indeterminate,
whether an expression of the postmodern condition or the consequence
of modernity, or the extended, and typically gratuitous and vicious,
­exigencies of race, class, and gender.
Everyone on this expansive planet experiences what could be charac-
terized as micro-transits, typically routine and often mundane forms of
movement, the type embodied in the daily circuit to and from work,
even if it entails simply walking—but an act that gets complicated if one

R. Scapp
College of Mount Saint Vincent, New York, NY, USA
B. Seitz (*)
Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA

© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Scapp and B. Seitz (eds.), Philosophy, Travel, and Place,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98225-0_1
2 R. SCAPP AND B. SEITZ

is walking away from, for instance, genocide, a trajectory, then, toward

the only hope of survival. And then there are longitudinal time-zone
transits and latitudinal north–south transits, which often detach and
sometimes violently disrupt people from their routine and land them
somewhere else, somewhere different from where they started, some-
where frequently problematized, problematic, and dangerous, a dislo-
cation breeding alienation, on the part of both the dislocated and the
inhabitants already in place. For example, the many refugees who are
detained by government agencies such as ICE in towns and cities across
the United States, and the very residence of those towns and cities where
they are detained. This is an interruption of the very transit that both
the refugees, now detainees, and the locals, who feel put upon, if not
threaten, desperately wish would resume as quickly as possible.
Here, we are thinking about the dislocation and alienation experienced
by the many hundreds of thousands Syrians who have been forced to flee
their homes and homeland, forced, that is, to move, frequently these days
into sinking boats. At a time when we have experienced the expression of
national outrage, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment that led to
Brexit, to the election of Donald Trump, to more walls, and then to the
ever growing expansion of China’s influence with its attention to ethnic
populations within and adjacent to its borders, pivot to the resurgence of
Putin’s Russia and its “recovery” of historical peoples and the enhanced
monitoring of the movement of populations; we have also witnessed,
however fully cognizant or not we might be of it, the continued moving
and removal of capital around the world—so the question of motion is
not just the tragedy of desperate human bodies, but also the pathways of
material wealth, intensified by the obscure dynamics of cryptocurrencies.
And yet, and as if in a parallel universe, bourgeois bodies are simul-
taneously moving about, to and fro, within the always precarious and
tentative comfort and assumed security of their privileged travel. These
bodies are not necessarily unaware of those many other some-bodies
being bombarded, pushed and forced out of their homes and homelands.
Nevertheless, these passengers are apparently not moved enough by
those misfortuned transients (our term—as distinct from those “passen-
gers” who are delayed or have a flight canceled) to stop their routines,
even if disrupted; the former’s normal everyday movements to and from
where they imagine themselves that they need to be, more often than
not someplace only reachable by air, unlike their dislocated counterparts
walking their way out of the hell that was their home into the various
alternate versions of hell that are not their home.
 1 INTRODUCING BEING IN TRANSIT 3

The reality of being on the ground for refugees and travelers is obvi-
ously as different and differentiating as it could possibly be. One group
is traversing the land and the sea, negotiating borders, not knowing what
to expect at every phase, with every step. The other group is moving
along, as usual, not really traveling so much as simply getting around by
sitting in machines, sedentary casualties of the technology. What is usual
is often experienced as routine, that is, as expected, even demanded, the
very disposition of privileged mobility, possibly constituting a new nobil-
ity or social class, certainly constituting a new mobility.
Thus, for those bodies practiced in their routine of coming and going,
the phrase “ground transportation”—busses, trains, taxis, cars—is a
direct reference to security, to the concourse, and lofting above the air
to the relatively seamless systems of movement in which, secured if not
quite actually safe, inhabitants of the global city, of the World City, now
reside and move about in, unlike their unfortunate counterparts who
find themselves out of sorts, out of their routines, and moving only to
secure the possibility of another day, fortune granting—not unlike the
much publicized caravan moving its way through Mexico to the US
border that the Trump administration deemed as emblematic of all that
is wrong with US immigration policy and international law regarding
asylum seeking refugees. At the same time, not that long ago, it was a
very long boat ride, for the rich, migrants, and slaves alike. Although
now many of us, with most of us traveling in “economy,” just watch a
film or two, which on an experiential level means, paradoxically, that
it’s not really about movement at all but, as Paul Virilio has observed in
Open Sky, a peculiar form of stasis: we move while sitting in machines.
One might pass through an airport bar, an anomalous, impervious,
and typically anonymous space given that it is devoid of normal local
repeat or familiar customers, a pub that is not a true public house, a pub
that is not a pub, even if one might rub elbows with strangers there. This
is not to deny that there are in fact regulars, business travelers, who do
come through airports weekly, but only an elite of these folks who fre-
quent the various airline lounges are known on sight by the staff, includ-
ing the bartenders—think here of George Clooney’s character in Up In
The Air. At some other end of the spectrum are the “Irish pubs” that
install themselves in all sorts of places, including in airports—an ane-
mic gesture toward travel of a different sort, ultimately not that differ-
ent from the recreations offered to visitors at Disney’s Epcot Center
and various other places. So even in the ebb and flow of temporary or
transient clients coming and going, dispersed throughout an airport and
4 R. SCAPP AND B. SEITZ

elsewhere, there are those who find themselves at a place where at least
someone knows their name—or at least recognizes and acknowledges
their frequent flyer number!—even if it is probably a far cry from the
greeting one gets upon entering a genuinely local drinking hole, a proper
pub. But now we’re ready or forced to take flight. Go to the gate and
board the plane!
Most modern, technologized, and otherwise privileged travelers typ-
ically experience the airplane as a machine of transport, a mere instru-
ment. But once in a while, the plane transcends instrumentality à la
Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” and provides
a vista of revelation that bursts through the limitations of the various
instrumental formations of understanding. Lofting up from Denver,
heading north, breaking through the clouds, and catching an exhilarat-
ing glimpse of Yellowstone Lake before the approach into Bozeman’s
Gallatin Airport. Descending into an endless expanse of green sur-
rounding Roberts Airport in Liberia, descending over the Thames
on the approach into London Heathrow—spectacular!—or, toward
St. Petersburg, the approach into Pulkovo, again breaking through the
clouds, coming down over the heights just outside of the glorious city,
the very heights behind which, just yesterday, Nazi artillery pounded
the city for 900 days, or now on a plane out of Aleppo, originally sched-
uled to leave Damascus, due to “turbulence on the ground.” The instru-
ment typically just has most of us anticipate the baggage carousel and
some destination on the ground. But sometimes, between the blurs, it
facilitates moments or points of contact and connection with the past,
a rich and sometimes beautiful and sometimes violent present and then
an ambiguous future—a motion of an entirely different order: nostalgia,
anxiety, hope, and resignation (depending on your inclinations, your des-
tinations past, present, and… future).
Some of us fly away from and fly away to in order to disappear and
reappear—for business, pleasure, adventure, and many other motives
and necessities. But assumed in our comings and goings is a presump-
tion of our not disappearing while traveling, and of having the luxury
of returning when we desire, an option that can quickly get negated by
natural disasters (e.g. volcanic activities, extreme weather), intentional
catastrophes (war) or a hastily imposed travel ban (however ­temporarily
enforced). The conditions of such mobility and immobility, therefore,
are far from within our control, and never will be. A moment’s thought
to various recent crashes and more specifically and dramatically to the
 1 INTRODUCING BEING IN TRANSIT 5

dematerialization of Malaysia Airline Flight 370 sends us anxiously won-

dering if “we might just disappear.” The revelation is that if the plane is
an instrument, it can also be an instrument of death (unlike the Titanic
and the Hindenburg, 9/11 changed travel forever). Pushing further,
air travel is a mode of revelation, one that includes and yet also extends
beyond the view down from up above, and the inherent superiority that
so often accompanies such a perspective.
All of this demands a rethinking of the instrumentality of flying
as such, and traveling to our doom in particular, despite or perhaps
modeling the fact that, as Al Lingis notes in his book, Death Bound
Subjectivity, we are all already always traveling toward death. We are fas-
cinated simultaneously by our access to get anywhere quickly and by the
very possibility of being gone forever, which is our universal path and
destination.
The plethora of magazines, newspaper sections, entire television
shows, websites, and even scholarly journals dedicated to “travel” indi-
cate the scope, extent, and intensity of interest, concern, and fascination
with coming and going, of being and not being here and there: to and
from home, work, vacation, along with or paralleled by experiences of
emigration, immigration, relocation, and dislocation. Some get to enjoy
travel, while many more are forced to move because of floods, warfare,
genocide, and poverty…
Each day, around the world, people commute, flee, return and recon-
sider where they are and want or need to be. Motility, as Bruce Chapman
elegantly argued in Songlines, has been one of our consistent species traits
for eons—and may want us to reconfigure and rethink race, ethnicity,
migration, and habituation—but the speed, scale, intensity, and frequency
of our movements these days have extended and accelerated the transfor-
mation of who we are and are becoming, are moving toward. The existen-
tial question, “Who am I?” gets recalibrated, “Where am I, where have I
been, and where am I going?” One’s place in the world is a perennial con-
sideration; but today it becomes a point of departure or return in a man-
ner not experienced by those who have come and gone before us. Finding
our way around today with the aid of Sat Nav, of GPS, in our phones,
with Uber, Lyft, and other overlapping and interwoven technologies and
transportation corporations that allow us to be identified, located, picked
up, and dropped off all add another experience of time and space. We
anticipate points of punctuation, points of reference that give and change
the meaning of our lives (our food, our language, our currency)—and yet
6 R. SCAPP AND B. SEITZ

the impulse for continuity remains strong and influential—how many

Sheratons, Westins, Hiltons, Marriotts around the world promise the
more or less same contextless level of service, the same quality and style,
the effect of which is something like being nowhere in particular: some
often find themselves in exactly the same place despite being thousands
of miles from home. Many others find themselves alienated, dislocated
and unsafe at home!—consider efforts and movements such as Black Lives
Matters and Red Nation documenting, acknowledging, confronting, and
addressing the very restricted mobility of citizens that encounter obsta-
cles, impasses, and death for moving about in the wrong place, in the
wrong way and at the wrong time—how you move and where you move
has always been complicated; sadly, for some almost any move can be, and
often is, their last move, for it is more frequently than not countered by an
act of permanent removal.
Movement is a condition of the arc of human subjectivity, of ancient
history and contemporary life. Philosophy, Travel and Place: Being in
Transit continues the exploration of themes either neglected or deval-
ued by others working in the field of philosophy and culture. Following
the four collections we have previously published—Eating Culture;
Etiquette; Fashion Statements; and Living with Class—Philosophy, Travel
and Place will consider the domain of travel from the broadest and most
diverse of philosophical perspectives. In being in transit, we are consider-
ing the possibilities of the very real material impact of being able to move
or stay put, as well as being forced to go or prevented from leaving. Our
time in transit, our being in transit, and our time at rest, that is, specifi-
cally being “here” and not going some place other, whether by choice or
edict, has always been at issue, always been at play (and has always been
in motion, if you will), for our species. Now, we would like to pause for a
moment, and move the philosophical discussion forward, to move it in
a direction that has, as far as we can tell, for too long has been stalled at
a place we need to move on from, if philosophy is to remain vibrant and
significant to those of us still attempting to find our way. In short, we
move about because of desire, because of necessity, because of ourselves,
and because of others. But, the fact remains (that is to say, stays put), we
move for better and for worse, and because not moving and not being
allowed to move only can occur with the context of our being in transit,
one way or another.
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 The Project Gutenberg eBook of The trial of
Emile Zola: containing M. Zola's letter to
President Faure relating to the Dreyfus case, and
a full report of the fifteen days' proceedings in
the Assize Court of the Seine, including
testimony of witnesses and speeches of counsel
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Title: The trial of Emile Zola: containing M. Zola's letter to President

Faure relating to the Dreyfus case, and a full report of the
fifteen days' proceedings in the Assize Court of the Seine,
including testimony of witnesses and speeches of counsel

Author: Émile Zola

Release date: July 18, 2022 [eBook #68561]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Benj. R. Tucker, 1898

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, Thomas Frost and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This book was produced from images made available by
the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRIAL

OF EMILE ZOLA: CONTAINING M. ZOLA'S LETTER TO
PRESIDENT FAURE RELATING TO THE DREYFUS CASE, AND A
FULL REPORT OF THE FIFTEEN DAYS' PROCEEDINGS IN THE
ASSIZE COURT OF THE SEINE, INCLUDING TESTIMONY OF
WITNESSES AND SPEECHES OF COUNSEL ***
FULL REPORT, FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES.

THE TRIAL
OF

EMILE ZOLA

A DETAILED REPORT
OF THE

Fifteen Days’ Proceedings in the

Assize Court at Paris

NEW YORK
Benj. R. Tucker, 24 Gold Street
1898
 The Trial
OF

EMILE ZOLA
Containing
M. ZOLA’S LETTER TO PRESIDENT FAURE RELATING TO
THE DREYFUS CASE, AND A FULL REPORT OF THE
FIFTEEN DAYS’ PROCEEDINGS IN THE ASSIZE
COURT OF THE SEINE, INCLUDING TESTIMONY
OF WITNESSES AND SPEECHES OF COUNSEL

New York
Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher
1898
 Copyright
By Benj. R. Tucker
1898

☞ The advantages of the method of typography employed in the

composition of this volume, in which the “justification” of lines is
dispensed with, are undeniable. From the standpoint of æsthetics
it is an improvement, because by it absolutely perfect spacing is
secured. From the standpoint of economy it is almost a
revolution, since it saves, in the case of book work, from twenty
to forty per cent. of the cost of type-setting, according to the
grade of the work. If adopted in all printing-offices, it would effect
a daily saving of the labor of about two hundred thousand men.
 Contents.
The Offence 3
The First Day of the Trial 16
Second Day 33
Third Day 60
Fourth Day 81
Fifth Day 103
Sixth Day 134
Seventh Day 163
Eighth Day 181
Ninth Day 199
Tenth Day 212
Eleventh Day 229
Twelfth Day 245
Thirteenth Day 253
Fourteenth Day 282
Fifteenth Day 308
 THE OFFENCE.
On January 10, 1898, some three years after the secret trial and conviction, by a
council of war, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, then a staff officer of the French army, of
having sold French military secrets to a foreign power, in consequence of which he
was stripped of his uniform in a degrading public ceremony and sent for life to
Devil’s Island, a French penal settlement situated off the coast of French Guiana,
where he is now confined under guard, a second council of war convened in Paris
for the trial of Major Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, a French infantry
officer temporarily relieved from active service on account of poor health, the
charge against him—preferred by Mathieu Dreyfus, brother of Captain Alfred
Dreyfus—being that he was the real author of the bordereau, or itemized
memorandum, supposed to have been written by Captain Dreyfus, and on the
strength of which the latter was convicted.
The trial was conducted publicly until the most important witness, Lieutenant-
Colonel Georges Picquart, of the Fourth Algerian Sharpshooters, was reached,
when the council went into secret session, remaining behind closed doors until the
evening of January 11, when the doors were thrown open and General de Luxer,
the president of the council, announced a unanimous vote in acquittal of the
defendant.
Two days later—January 13—“L’Aurore,” a daily paper published in Paris under
the directorship of Ernest Vaughan and the editorship of Georges Clemenceau,
and having as its gérant, or legally responsible editor, J. A. Perrenx, published the
following letter from Emile Zola, man of letters, to Félix Faure, president of France:

I ACCUSE...!

LETTER TO M. FELIX FAURE, PRESIDENT OF

THE REPUBLIC.

Monsieur le Président:
Will you permit me, in my gratitude for the kindly welcome that you
once extended to me, to have a care for the glory that belongs to
you, and to say to you that your star, so lucky hitherto, is threatened
with the most shameful, the most ineffaceable, of stains?
You have emerged from base calumnies safe and sound; you have
conquered hearts. You seem radiant in the apotheosis of that
patriotic fête which the Russian alliance has been for France, and
you are preparing to preside at the solemn triumph of our Universal
Exposition, which will crown our great century of labor, truth, and
liberty. But what a mud-stain on your name—I was going to say on
your reign—is this abominable Dreyfus affair! A council of war has
just dared to acquit an Esterhazy in obedience to orders, a final blow
at all truth, at all justice. And now it is done! France has this stain
upon her cheek; it will be written in history that under your
presidency it was possible for this social crime to be committed.
Since they have dared, I too will dare. I will tell the truth, for I have
promised to tell it, if the courts, once regularly appealed to, did not
bring it out fully and entirely. It is my duty to speak; I will not be an
accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the spectre of the
innocent man who is atoning, in a far-away country, by the most
frightful of tortures, for a crime that he did not commit.
And to you, Monsieur le Président, will I cry this truth, with all the
force of an honest man’s revolt. Because of your honor I am
convinced that you are ignorant of it. And to whom then shall I
denounce the malevolent gang of the really guilty, if not to you, the
first magistrate of the country?
First, the truth as to the trial and conviction of Dreyfus.
A calamitous man has managed it all, has done it all—Colonel du
Paty de Clam, then a simple major. He is the entire Dreyfus case; it
will be fully known only when a sincere investigation shall have
clearly established his acts and his responsibilities. He appears as
the most heady, the most intricate, of minds, haunted with romantic
intrigues, delighting in the methods of the newspaper novel, stolen
papers, anonymous letters, meetings in deserted spots, mysterious
women who peddle overwhelming proofs by night. It is he who
conceived the idea of dictating the bordereau to Dreyfus; it is he who
dreamed of studying it in a room completely lined with mirrors; it is
he whom Major Forzinetti represents to us armed with a dark lantern,
trying to gain access to the accused when asleep, in order to throw
upon his face a sudden flood of light, and thus surprise a confession
of his crime in the confusion of his awakening. And I have not to tell
the whole; let them look, they will find. I declare simply that Major du
Paty de Clam, entrusted as a judicial officer with the duty of
preparing the Dreyfus case, is, in the order of dates and
responsibilities, the first person guilty of the fearful judicial error that
has been committed.
The bordereau already had been for some time in the hands of
Colonel Sandherr, director of the bureau of information, who since
then has died of general paralysis. “Flights” have taken place;
papers have disappeared, as they continue to disappear even today;
and the authorship of the bordereau was an object of inquiry, when
little by little an a priori conclusion was arrived at that the author
must be a staff officer and an officer of artillery,—clearly a double
error, which shows how superficially this bordereau had been
studied, for a systematic examination proves that it could have been
written only by an officer of troops. So they searched their own
house; they examined writings; it was a sort of family affair,—a traitor
to be surprised in the war offices themselves, that he might be
expelled therefrom. I need not again go over a story already known
in part. It is sufficient to say that Major du Paty de Clam enters upon
the scene as soon as the first breath of suspicion falls upon Dreyfus.
Starting from that moment, it is he who invented Dreyfus; the case
becomes his case; he undertakes to confound the traitor, and induce
him to make a complete confession. There is also, to be sure, the
minister of war, General Mercier, whose intelligence seems rather
inferior; there is also the chief of staff, General de Boisdeffre, who
seems to have yielded to his clerical passion, and the sub-chief of
staff, General Gonse, whose conscience has succeeded in
accommodating itself to many things. But at bottom there was at first
only Major du Paty de Clam, who leads them all, who hypnotizes
them,—for he concerns himself also with spiritualism, with occultism,
holding converse with spirits. Incredible are the experiences to which
he submitted the unfortunate Dreyfus, the traps into which he tried to
lead him, the mad inquiries, the monstrous fancies, a complete and
torturing madness.
Ah! this first affair is a nightmare to one who knows it in its real
details. Major du Paty de Clam arrests Dreyfus, puts him in close
confinement; he runs to Madame Dreyfus, terrorizes her, tells her
that, if she speaks, her husband is lost. Meantime the unfortunate
was tearing his flesh, screaming his innocence. And thus the
examination went on, as in a fifteenth-century chronicle, amid
mystery, with a complication of savage expedients, all based on a
single childish charge, this imbecile bordereau, which was not simply
a vulgar treason, but also the most shameless of swindles, for the
famous secrets delivered proved, almost all of them, valueless. If I
insist, it is because here lies the egg from which later was to be
hatched the real crime, the frightful denial of justice, of which France
lies ill. I should like to show in detail how the judicial error was
possible; how it was born of the machinations of Major du Paty de
Clam; how General Mercier and Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse
were led into it, gradually assuming responsibility for this error, which
afterward they believed it their duty to impose as sacred truth, truth
beyond discussion. At the start there was, on their part, only
carelessness and lack of understanding. At worst we see them
yielding to the religious passions of their surroundings, and to the
prejudices of the esprit de corps. They have suffered folly to do its
work.
But here is Dreyfus before the council of war. The most absolute
secrecy is demanded. Had a traitor opened the frontier to the enemy
in order to lead the German emperor to Notre Dame, they would not
have taken stricter measures of silence and mystery. The nation is
awe-struck; there are whisperings of terrible doings, of those
monstrous treasons that excite the indignation of History, and
naturally the nation bows. There is no punishment severe enough; it
will applaud even public degradation; it will wish the guilty man to
remain upon his rock of infamy, eaten by remorse. Are they real
then,—these unspeakable things, these dangerous things, capable
of setting Europe aflame, which they have had to bury carefully
behind closed doors? No, there was nothing behind them save the
romantic and mad fancies of Major du Paty de Clam. All this was
done only to conceal the most ridiculous of newspaper novels. And,
to assure one’s self of it, one need only study attentively the
indictment read before the council of war.
Ah! the emptiness of this indictment! That a man could have been
condemned on this document is a prodigy of iniquity. I defy honest
people to read it without feeling their hearts leap with indignation and
crying out their revolt at the thought of the unlimited atonement
yonder, on Devil’s Island. Dreyfus knows several languages—a
crime; no compromising document was found on his premises—a
crime; he sometimes visits the neighborhood of his birth—a crime;
he is industrious, he is desirous of knowing everything—a crime; he
does not get confused—a crime; he gets confused—a crime. And
the simplicities of this document, the formal assertions in the void!
We were told of fourteen counts, but we find, after all, only one,—
that of the bordereau. And even as to this we learn that the experts
were not in agreement; that one of them, M. Gobert, was hustled out
in military fashion, because he permitted himself to arrive at another
than the desired opinion. We were told also of twenty-three officers
who came to overwhelm Dreyfus with their testimony. We are still in
ignorance of their examination, but it is certain that all of them did not
attack him, and it is to be remarked, furthermore, that all of them
belonged to the war officers. It is a family trial; there they are all at
home; and it must be remembered that the staff wanted the trial, sat
in judgment at it, and has just passed judgment a second time.
So there remained only the bordereau, concerning which the experts
were not in agreement. It is said that in the council-chamber the
judges naturally were going to acquit. And, after that, how easy to
understand the desperate obstinacy with which, in order to justify the
conviction, they affirm today the existence of a secret overwhelming
document, a document that cannot be shown, that legitimates
everything, before which we must bow, an invisible and unknowable
god. I deny this document; I deny it with all my might. A ridiculous
document, yes, perhaps a document concerning little women, in
which there is mention of a certain D—— who becomes too
exacting; some husband doubtless, who thinks that they pay him too
low a price for his wife. But a document of interest to the national
defence the production of which would lead to a declaration of war
tomorrow! No, no; it is a lie; and a lie the more odious and cynical
because they lie with impunity, in such a way that no one can convict
them of it. They stir up France; they hide themselves behind her
legitimate emotion; they close mouths by disturbing hearts, by
perverting minds. I know no greater civic crime.
These, then, Monsieur le Président, are the facts which explain how
it was possible to commit a judicial error; and the moral proofs, the
position of Dreyfus as a man of wealth, the absence of motive, this
continual cry of innocence, complete the demonstration that he is a
victim of the extraordinary fancies of Major du Paty de Clam, of his
clerical surroundings, of that hunting down of the “dirty Jews” which
disgraces our epoch.
And we come to the Esterhazy case. Three years have passed;
many consciences remain profoundly disturbed, are anxiously
seeking, and finally become convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus.
I shall not give the history of M. Scheurer-Kestner’s doubts, which
later became convictions. But, while he was investigating for himself,
serious things were happening to the staff. Colonel Sandherr was
dead, and Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart had succeeded him as chief
of the bureau of information. And it is in this capacity that the latter,
in the exercise of his functions, came one day into possession of a
letter-telegram addressed to Major Esterhazy by an agent of a
foreign power. His plain duty was to open an investigation. It is
certain that he never acted except at the command of his superiors.
So he submitted his suspicions to his hierarchical superiors, first to
General Gonse, then to General de Boisdeffre, then to General
Billot, who had succeeded General Mercier as minister of war. The
famous Picquart documents, of which we have heard so much, were
never anything but the Billot documents,—I mean, the documents
collected by a subordinate for his minister, the documents which
must be still in existence in the war department. The inquiries lasted
from May to September, 1896, and here it must be squarely affirmed
that General Gonse was convinced of Esterhazy’s guilt, and that
General de Boisdeffre and General Billot had no doubt that the
famous bordereau was in Esterhazy’s handwriting. Lieutenant-
Colonel Picquart’s investigation had ended in the certain
establishment of this fact. But the emotion thereat was great, for
Esterhazy’s conviction inevitably involved a revision of the Dreyfus
trial; and this the staff was determined to avoid at any cost.
Then there must have been a psychological moment, full of anguish.
Note that General Billot was in no way compromised; he came
freshly to the matter; he could bring out the truth. He did not dare, in
terror, undoubtedly, of public opinion, and certainly fearful also of
betraying the entire staff, General de Boisdeffre, General Gonse, to
say nothing of their subordinates. Then there was but a minute of
struggle between his conscience and what he believed to be the
military interest. When this minute had passed, it was already too
late. He was involved himself; he was compromised. And since then
his responsibility has only grown; he has taken upon his shoulders
the crime of others, he is as guilty as the others, he is more guilty
than they, for it was in his power to do justice, and he did nothing.
Understand this; for a year General Billot, Generals De Boisdeffre
and Gonse have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept
this dreadful thing to themselves. And these people sleep, and they
have wives and children whom they love!
Colonel Picquart had done his duty as an honest man. He insisted in
the presence of his superiors, in the name of justice; he even
begged of them; he told them how impolitic were their delays, in view
of the terrible storm which was gathering, and which would surely
burst as soon as the truth should be known. Later there was the
language that M. Scheurer-Kestner held likewise to General Billot,
adjuring him in the name of patriotism to take the matter in hand, and
not to allow it to be aggravated till it should become a public disaster.
No, the crime had been committed; now the staff could not confess
it. And Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart was sent on a mission; he was
farther and farther removed, even to Tunis, where one day they even
wanted to honor his bravery by charging him with a mission which
would surely have led to his massacre in the district where the
marquis de Morès met his death. He was not in disgrace; Gen.
Gonse was in friendly correspondence with him; but there are
secrets which it does one no good to find out.
At Paris the truth went on, irresistibly, and we know in what way the
expected storm broke out. M. Mathieu Dreyfus denounced Major
Esterhazy as the real author of the bordereau, at the moment when
M. Scheurer-Kestner was about to lodge a demand for a revision of
the trial with the keeper of the seals. And it is here that Major
Esterhazy appears. The evidence shows that at first he was dazed,
ready for suicide or flight. Then suddenly he determines to brazen it
out; he astonishes Paris by the violence of his attitude. The fact was
that aid had come to him; he had received an anonymous letter
warning him of the intrigues of his enemies; a mysterious woman
had even disturbed herself at night to hand to him a document stolen
from the staff, which would save him. And I cannot help seeing here
again the hand of Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam, recognizing
the expedients of his fertile imagination. His work, the guilt of
Dreyfus, was in danger, and he was determined to defend it. A
revision of the trial,—why, that meant the downfall of the newspaper
novel, so extravagant, so tragic, with its abominable dénouement on
Devil’s Island. That would never do. Thenceforth there was to be a
duel between Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart and Lieutenant-Colonel
du Paty de Clam, the one with face uncovered, the other masked.
Presently we shall meet them both in the presence of civil justice. At
bottom it is always the staff defending itself, unwilling to confess its
crime, the abomination of which is growing from hour to hour.
It has been wonderingly asked who were the protectors of Major
Esterhazy. First, in the shadow, Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam,
who devised everything, managed everything; his hand betrays itself
in the ridiculous methods. Then there is General de Boisdeffre,
General Gonse, General Billot himself, who are obliged to acquit the
major, since they cannot permit the innocence of Dreyfus to be
recognized, for, if they should, the war offices would fall under the
weight of public contempt. And the beautiful result of this prodigious
situation is that the one honest man in the case, Lieutenant-Colonel
Picquart, who alone has done his duty, is to be the victim, the man to
be derided and punished. O justice, what frightful despair grips the
heart! They go so far as to say that he is a forger; that he
manufactured the telegram, to ruin Esterhazy. But, in heaven’s
name, why? For what purpose? Show a motive. Is he, too, paid by
the Jews? The pretty part of the story is that he himself was an anti-
Semite. Yes, we are witnesses of this infamous spectacle,—the
proclamation of the innocence of men ruined with debts and crimes,
while honor itself, a man of stainless life, is stricken down. When a
society reaches that point, it is beginning to rot.
There you have, then, Monsieur le Président, the Esterhazy case,—
a guilty man to be declared innocent. We can follow the beautiful
business, hour by hour, for the last two months. I abridge, for this is
but the résumé of a story whose burning pages will some day be
written at length. So we have seen General de Pellieux, and then
Major Ravary, carrying on a rascally investigation whence knaves
come transfigured and honest people sullied. Then they convened
the council of war.
How could it have been expected that a council of war would undo
what a council of war had done?
I say nothing of the choice, always possible, of the judges. Is not the
superior idea of discipline, which is in the very blood of these
soldiers, enough to destroy their power to do justice? Who says
discipline says obedience. When the minister of war, the great chief,
has publicly established, amid the applause of the nation’s
representatives, the absolute authority of the thing judged, do you
expect a council of war to formally contradict him? Hierarchically that
is impossible. General Billot conveyed a suggestion to the judges by
his declaration, and they passed judgment as they must face the
cannon’s mouth, without reasoning. The preconceived opinion that
they took with them to their bench is evidently this: “Dreyfus has
been condemned for the crime of treason by a council of war; then
he is guilty, and we, a council of war, cannot declare him innocent.
Now, we know that to recognize Esterhazy’s guilt would be to
proclaim the innocence of Dreyfus.” Nothing could turn them from
that course of reasoning.
They have rendered an iniquitous verdict which will weigh forever
upon our councils of war, which will henceforth tinge with suspicion
all their decrees. The first council of war may have been lacking in
comprehension; the second is necessarily criminal. Its excuse, I
repeat, is that the supreme chief had spoken, declaring the thing
judged unassailable, sacred and superior to men, so that inferiors
could say naught to the contrary. They talk to us of the honor of the
army; they want us to love it, to respect it. Ah! certainly, yes, the
army which would rise at the first threat, which would defend French
soil; that army is the whole people, and we have for it nothing but
tenderness and respect. But it is not a question of that army, whose
dignity is our special desire, in our need of justice. It is the sword that
is in question; the master that they may give us tomorrow. And
piously kiss the sword-hilt, the god? No!
I have proved it, moreover; the Dreyfus case was the case of the war
offices, a staff officer, accused by his staff comrades, convicted
under the pressure of the chiefs of staff. Again I say, he cannot come
back innocent, unless all the staff is guilty. Consequently the war
offices, by all imaginable means, by press campaigns, by
communications, by influences, have covered Esterhazy only to ruin
Dreyfus a second time. Ah! with what a sweep the republican
government should clear away this band of Jesuits, as General Billot
himself calls them! Where is the truly strong and wisely patriotic
minister who will dare to reshape and renew all? How many of the
people I know are trembling with anguish in view of a possible war,
knowing in what hands lies the national defence! And what a nest of
base intrigues, gossip, and dilapidation has this sacred asylum,
entrusted with the fate of the country, become! We are frightened by
the terrible light thrown upon it by the Dreyfus case, this human
sacrifice of an unfortunate, of a “dirty Jew.” Ah! what a mixture of
madness and folly, of crazy fancies, of low police practices, of
inquisitorial and tyrannical customs, the good pleasure of a few
persons in gold lace, with their boots on the neck of the nation,
cramming back into its throat its cry of truth and justice, under the
lying and sacrilegious pretext of the raison d’Etat!
And another of their crimes is that they have accepted the support of
the unclean press, have suffered themselves to be championed by
all the knavery of Paris, so that now we witness knavery’s insolent
triumph in the downfall of right and of simple probity. It is a crime to
have accused of troubling France those who wish to see her
generous, at the head of the free and just nations, when they
themselves are hatching the impudent conspiracy to impose error, in
the face of the entire world. It is a crime to mislead opinion, to utilize
for a task of death this opinion that they have perverted to the point
of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the little and the
humble, to exasperate the passions of reaction and intolerance,
while seeking shelter behind odious anti-Semitism, of which the
great liberal France of the rights of man will die, if she is not cured. It
is a crime to exploit patriotism for works of hatred, and, finally, it is a
crime to make the sword the modern god, when all human science is
at work on the coming temple of truth and justice.
This truth, this justice, for which we have so ardently longed,—how
distressing it is to see them thus buffeted, more neglected and more
obscured. I have a suspicion of the fall that must have occurred in
the soul of M. Scheurer-Kestner, and I really believe that he will
finally feel remorse that he did not act in a revolutionary fashion, on
the day of interpellation in the senate, by thoroughly ventilating the
whole matter, to topple everything over. He has been the highly
honest man, the man of loyal life, and he thought that the truth was
sufficient unto itself, especially when it should appear as dazzling as
the open day. Of what use to overturn everything, since soon the sun
would shine? And it is for this confident serenity that he is now so
cruelly punished. And the same is the case of Lieutenant-Colonel
Picquart, who, moved by a feeling of lofty dignity, has been unwilling
to publish General Gonse’s letters. These scruples honor him the
more because, while he remained respectful of discipline, his
superiors heaped mud upon him, working up the case against him
themselves, in the most unexpected and most outrageous fashion.
Here are two victims, two worthy people, two simple hearts, who
have trusted God, while the devil was at work. And in the case of
Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart we have seen even this ignoble thing,—
a French tribunal, after suffering the reporter in the case to publicly
arraign a witness and accuse him of every crime, closing its doors as
soon as this witness has been introduced to explain and defend
himself. I say that is one crime more, and that this crime will awaken
the universal conscience. Decidedly, military tribunals have a
singular idea of justice.
Such, then, is the simple truth, Monsieur le Président, and it is
frightful. It will remain a stain upon your presidency. I suspect that
you are powerless in this matter,—that you are the prisoner of the
constitution and of your environment. You have none the less a
man’s duty, upon which you will reflect, and which you will fulfill. Not
indeed that I despair, the least in the world, of triumph. I repeat with
more vehement certainty; truth is on the march, and nothing can stop
it. Today sees the real beginning of the affair, since not until today
have the positions been clear: on one hand, the guilty, who do not
want the light; on the other, the doers of justice, who will give their
lives to get it. When truth is buried in the earth, it accumulates there,
and assumes so mighty an explosive power that, on the day when it
bursts forth, it hurls everything into the air. We shall see if they have
not just made preparations for the most resounding of disasters, yet
to come.
But this letter is long, Monsieur le Président, and it is time to finish.
I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the
diabolical workman of judicial error,—unconsciously, I am willing to
believe,—and of having then defended his calamitous work, for three
years, by the most guilty machinations.
I accuse General Mercier of having made himself an accomplice, at
least through weakness of mind, in one of the greatest iniquities of
the century.
I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands certain proofs of
the innocence of Dreyfus, and of having stifled them; of having
rendered himself guilty of this crime of lèse-humanité and lèse-
justice for a political purpose, and to save the compromised staff.
I accuse General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse of having made
themselves accomplices in the same crime, one undoubtedly