The Atlantic
Polarization, anger, division French history offers a warning for what might come after Donald Trump.
Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
A Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason. A years-long psychodrama that permanently polarized an entire society communities, friends, even families. A politics of anger and emotion designed to insult the very notion of truth. A divide that only grew with time. A reconciliation that never was. A frenzied right wing that turned to violence when it failed at the ballot box.
This was the Dreyfus affair, the signature scandal of
fin de siècle France, aspects of which Americans might recognize as we arrive at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency: After decades of cascading political crises, debilitating financial scandals, and rising anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus affair saw the emergence of political surreality, an alternate universe of hateful irrationality and militarized lies that captured the minds of nearly half t