An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
The Author’s Note at the beginning of this novel is a highly unusual disclaimer. Harris aims to “use the techniques of a novel to retell the story of the Dreyfus Affair,” which he characterizes as “perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history.” “None of the characters,” we learn, “is wholly fictional.”
In 1890s Paris, French Army officer Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, has been found guilty of spying, stripped of his rank in a humiliating ceremony, and banished to a remote island off the coast of South America.
Lured by the Minister of War with the promise of promotion, Major Piquart reluctantly agrees to replace the ailing head of the 'Statistical Section’, to oversee France’s spies.
Piquart soon learns his ‘first lesson in the “cabalistic power of ‘secret intelligence.’” His initial stab at a weekly report consists of dubious gossip, but it results in changed orders for 50,000 soldiers in the “eastern frontier region.“
Astonished by the consequences of his sloppy attempt to carry out a bureaucratic duty, Piquart observes that combining the words secret and intelligence “can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.”
He also observes that “drinking heavily is an occupational hazard of spying. Piquart assesses Foucault, the military attache in Berlin, as “a professional connoisseur of dissembling.” Forced to play the “diplomatic game” of public denial, he’s been “hardened by years of dealing with liars and fantastists.”
Besides the astonishing saga of the Dreyfus case, this well-researched volume portrays a great deal about French culture of the time. One fashion of the moment is “table tapping, fortune-telling, communing with the dead.” In desperation, Alfred’s brother Mathieu joins the many who consult the somnambulist Madame Leonie. We are introduced to Alphonse Bertillon, whose system of Anthropometry was influential in law enforcement at the time. Bizarrely, when asked to give expert testimony, he speculates that Drefus forged his own handwriting in order to mislead the court.
In a lighter moment, we accompany our protagonist Georges Piquart to a a Paris salon to hear the newly discovered Pablo Casals. We meet artists and celebrities of the time, including a fashionable woman whose “gown, with matching headdress contains a great number of feathers dyed dark green, crimson and gold.” In the middle of Dreyfus’s court martial, Georges worries that he will be unable to attend Claude Debussy’s premiere of Afternoon of a Faun, for which he has tickets.
The Paris sewers have been constructed, but summer heat still blankets the city with an unpleasant stench. Amazingly, a pneumatic network of tubes that follows the sewer system can deliver a telegram “in an hour or two.”
In Russia the Tsar is still on the throne. In a move that prefigures the alliances of WWII, France is cosying up to Russia in order to ensure they have an ally against the Germans. Preoccupied with preparing for the Tsar’s visit, the leaders of the French army — many of them veterans of colonial wars in Indochina — continue to collude with one another to bury the fact that they’ve caught the wrong “spy.” Another embarrassing scandal is not to be countenanced.
Among the Drefusards, we meet Georges Clemenceau, whose newspaper publishes the famous J’Accuse, Emile Zola’s open letter to the President of France that exposes the breathtaking lies and fakery used to convict the innocent Alfred Drefus. The corrupt cabal strikes back, hard and immediate. Employing the big lie technique in as bold and stunning a fashion as one could ever imagine, they accuse Zola himself of libel, the very crime he had exposed. Convicted, stripped of his Legion of Honour and facing imprisonment, he flees to England.
Before the decade-long debacle of the Dreyfus Affair is ended, our honest protagonist Georges Piquart faces a great many obstacles himself. For insisting that Dreyfus was framed, he is watched and his mail intercepted. Sidelined to a remote army post in Tunisia, he is ordered on a desert mission that will mean almost certain death. Finding an ally to help him, he is sneaked back to France by night under guard, publicly reviled, challenged to a duel, tried and jailed in different prisons.
What is the relevance of this a century on? The media — no longer just newspapers — are still both blessing and curse. Piquart’s “peculiar members of the general public whose pastime is attending trials” have migrated to social media platforms, where they create trials of their own, publicly judging people on evidence as flimsy as the lies repeated again and again in the Dreyfus case.
A proliferating number of nations still routinely espouse violence and practice it on their fellow nations. Politics is often still rife with corruption, and what people do and say in public does not always match what is said and done behind closed doors. The military remains a hierachical institution based on obedience, a system that exonerates people who were “just following orders’’ from moral culpability for their deeds.
Yet in spite of all this, the end of the novel reveals a surprising turn of events and offers hope that, as Joy Kogawa puts it “the long arm swings toward the good.”