Protestors hold signs as they march towards the White House during a Free Kilmar Abrego and a nationwide “Hands Off!” protest. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky
April 21, 2025
On the morning of Oct. 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a staff member of the French Army’s High Command, was at home with his wife and two young children when he was unexpectedly and summarily requested to report to the Ministry of War. Upon arriving, the unsuspecting Dreyfus was accused of treason.
The evidence? The notorious bordereau, a wrinkled leaf of paper revealing French military plans, found in a trash basket at the German embassy in Paris. The hand that wrote the bordereau, the investigating officers concluded, despite jarring discrepancies between the two styles, belonged to none other than Dreyfus.
Any doubts were dynamited by one absolute certainty: Dreyfus was the sole officer in High Command who happened to be Jewish.
Locked in a cell where he battered his head against a wall in disbelief and despair, Dreyfus was quickly sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement. His destination was a bleak rock, aptly named Devil’s Island, part of the (ironically named) Salvation Islands off the coast of French Guyana. But first came a stunning son et lumière that fed the furies of nationalism and antisemitism.
Marched into the courtyard of the École militaire, the military academy overshadowed by the recently erected Eiffel Tower, Dreyfus underwent a ritual of public humiliation. As orders were barked, a hulking officer first snapped over his knee Dreyfus’ sword — broken and soldered back together with tin the night before — then ripped off his insignia — whose threads were already loosened — while a dense crowd howled “Mort au traître juif!” The Jewish traitor was then quickly bundled off to near-certain death in his new and malarial home.
Over the next three years, while Dreyfus slowly rotted away in his cell, doubts over his sentence deepened and widened. Though pressure mounted on the government for a new trial, the military authorities began to manufacture evidence to bolster their nonexistent case. But this rearguard action was shattered at the end of 1897, when the famous novelist Émile Zola began to publish a series of editorials that thoroughly undermined the army’s case. The climatic article was, of course, J’Accuse, which forced the government’s hand and led to the return and retrial of Dreyfus.
The subsequent eruption of passions on both sides transformed an affair into The Affair. On the streets and boulevards, over dinner tables and café counters, in the national assembly and newspapers, two equally impassioned camps confronted one another, each armed with immovable and indubitable claims. On one side, the Dreyfusards, paragons of reason, defended la Vérité and la Justice and held that France was defined by the abstract principles of equality and liberty. On the other side, the anti-Dreyfusards, proponents of unreason, insisted France was made of la Terre et les Morts — the soil and generations of dead buried in it. For the former, objective facts, attested to Dreyfus’s innocence; for the latter, subjective convictions confirmed Dreyfus’ guilt. Ironically, Zola’s battle cry “La vérité est en marche, et rien ne l’arrêtera!”—“Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it!” — not only galvanized both sides, but also revealed that both sides held radically different conceptions of truth with a small “t.”
The second trial concluded almost like the first: Dreyfus was again, shockingly but unsurprisingly, found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances. (It is unlikely that the military judges considered rabid antisemitism to be one of those “circumstances.”)
In her brilliant book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, the Oxford historian Ruth Harris describes how the critical pursuit of truth and justice on behalf of an innocent man soon metamorphosed into a crippling passion for Truth and Justice. The Affair unified the previously warring parties on the French left, as intolerant as those on the far left in our country, which then laid siege to the Catholic church, expelling even those orders and convents which had nothing to do with politics. This republican government also gave us the sorry event known as the affaire des fiches when the Ministry of Defense secretly created files on more than 25,000 officers who, because of past involvement with the Church — including charitable activities — were now considered potential enemies of the state.
This brings us to America’s present moment, one that historians might call “the Kilmar affair.” The facts are clear: Last month, ICE agents arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old from El Salvador who, in 2019, was accused of belonging to the criminal Venezuelan gang MS-13. A court, noting the flimsy evidence — the charges were based on an unreliable informant and Abrego Garcia’s Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie associated with MS-13 — granted him a “withholding of removal order” preventing his deportation to El Salvador, which he fled in fear for his life at the age of 16.
Nevertheless, Abrego Garcia, married to an American citizen, was arrested by ICE agents in Maryland while he was driving home from his job as a sheet metal apprentice. He was bundled off to a Texas prison with hundreds of other men also accused, without evidence being presented, of belonging to MS-13. They were then loaded onto two planes which took off for El Salvador. Ignoring a federal judge’s order to turn around, the planes landed in San Salvador. The prisoners were trucked to an infamous maximum-security prison, CECOT, where they were filmed, shackled and shaven, being frog-marched into large cages. While the length of their sentence is undetermined, the prison’s reputation is that only the dead leave.
Clearly, there are more than a few significant differences between the Dreyfus and Kilmar affairs. The biographies of the two protagonists vary dramatically, as do the circumstances of the arrests and contents of the accusations. But these differences become superficial when we reflect on the deeper causes behind the affairs.
In both instances, an obvious, outrageous wrong was committed by national governments relying not merely on flimsy evidence and flat-out lies, but also blindly driven by passions that alchemized other human beings into sub-human others. Both affairs also share shocking rituals of humiliation that debased men who were falsely charged, deprived them of adequate defenses, and sentenced them to life imprisonment in brutal conditions far from their homes. Finally, just as in the French affair the wrong was eventually righted, so too, one hopes, will it be righted in the American affair.
But there is another and equally disturbing parallel. As Ruth Harris underscored, the Dreyfusards, though they prided themselves on their rational and objective powers, were subject to the same “fears, animosities, and inflexibilties” as were the anti-Dreyfusards. This inevitably led to excess; once they assumed power, they committed the same injustices their opponents had previously committed. In the end, the Dreyfusards were no less absolutist in their conviction then were their opponents. When those who believe in the reality of facts and the rule of law correct the current injustices, they must try to also recall the restraint of humility.
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