was a phrase used by an Englishman of the nineties, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, secretary to the Duke of Devonshire. He felt that every child of Western civilization owed a debt to the country from which “came the impulse that dissolved the old world in agony and gave life and passion to the present.” For two years, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1899, the agony of that old dissolution returned. Rent by a moral passion that reopened past wounds, broke apart society and consumed thought, energy and honor, France plunged into one of the great commotions of history.During those “two interminable years” of struggle to secure the retrial of a single individual unjustly convicted, “life was as if suspended,” wrote Léon Blum, a future premier, then in his twenties. It was as if, in those “years of tumult, of veritable civil war … everything converged upon a single question and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships everything was interrupted, turned upside down, reclassified.… The Dreyfus Affair was a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.”It “would have divided the angels themselves,”
