![]() But this moment, which finds a strong echo in the current resurgence of nationalism, is left undeveloped. what’s left of the country!” he pleads with Picquart. I realise that I no longer recognise France. “When I see so many foreigners around me, I notice the degeneration of moral and artistic values. Sandherr, is shown bedridden with syphilis, whining about how outsiders have invaded the motherland. In an early scene, Picquart’s predecessor, Lt. The xenophobia among the powerful is evident and unabating. It becomes clear that the army really targeted Dreyfus for the crime of, in today’s parlance, “breathing while Jewish”. Except for Picquart, no one wants to track down the real criminal, which is mind-blowing and not particularly convincing. In addition, the army’s top brass are antisemitic across the board, and none of them appears to harbour any doubt whatsoever about the cover-ups and forgeries that sent Dreyfus to prison. But the facile jumping from one point to the next here cannot be exciting to the viewer because it all feels totally contrived. It is to be expected that a screenplay based on real events will simplify life’s messiness for the viewer. Whatever avenue he pursues is always the right one and leads him on a straight path to crucial evidence that proves his intuition correct. Under Polanski’s direction, evidence simply falls into Picquart’s hands on countless occasions. And it isn’t long before the officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, is revealed to be the real culprit in the affair that convicted Dreyfus. That night’s pick-up produces incriminating snippets of paper that quickly lead him to suspect a French officer of being a spy for the Germans. When he learns that one of his officers regularly receives intelligence from the German Embassy passed on by the cleaning lady, he decides to do the pick-up himself, despite having no intelligence-gathering experience whatsoever. Full of purpose and moral clarity, Picquart seeks to shake up the dusty bureaucracy immediately. This section had been responsible for collecting (rather, creating) the damning evidence that established Dreyfus’s guilt during the trial. ![]() One of his former teachers at the War College, Georges Picquart, gets a promotion to lead the “Statistical Section”, which is really the counter-espionage service. His sentence was lifelong solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, offshore from French Guiana, where even the guards were not allowed to speak to him. Handwritten notes were produced as evidence, and he was found guilty. Then came the accusations that he had shared state secrets with the German Empire. Towards the end of the 19th century, he registered at the prestigious War College, where he was an outstanding student. Born and raised in France, he had joined the military as a young man. It amounts to a public humiliation ceremony. On 5 January 1895, he is stripped of his rank in front of his fellow soldiers. We meet Dreyfus on the worst day of his life. Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy recounts the fallout of Dreyfus’s trial and, ultimately, his quasi-exoneration. The story of Hilsner, a native Czech in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sadly remains untold on the big screen. In both cases, a man’s alleged culpability was supported by a passionate wave of antisemites frothing at the mouth for a conviction rather than actual facts. While history offers countless counterexamples, the two most notorious trials involving innocent Jews took place within just five years of each other: Leopold Hilsner (1899/1900), accused and convicted of two murders, and Alfred Dreyfus (1894), twice convicted of treason. That is a simplification of history that would border on baloney if it wasn’t so tragically uninformed. Non-Jews often prefer to think of antisemitism as something that began and immediately peaked under the Nazis. If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.Roman Polanski’s simplistic portrayal of the historic Dreyfus trial makes An Officer and a Spy a rather lifeless affair. ![]() (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) On this day 126 years ago, Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life in prison - The Jerusalem Post
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