Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. In today's episode in Politics on Trial, I'm talking about an event which isn't just a trial. There isn't a single

trial that's at the focus of it. It's a scandal. It became known as an affair, the Dreyfus affair.

It was a political drama. It was a social drama. It was a national psychological drama.

It was something like a national nervous breakdown. But at the heart of it, the things

that make sense of it are a series of completely extraordinary legal proceedings. And that's

what I want to talk about. So with Parnell, I was talking about two trials. With Oscar Wilde, there were three. With Dreyfus,

it's almost impossible to say how many key legal events, discrete legal events took place.

There were multiple courts martial, satisfying to be able to say the plural of court

marshal. Courts marshal, there was at least one very significant libel case, libel proceedings.

There was at least one very significant treason trial during the Dreyfus affair. A number of officers

thought it was time for a coup d'etat,

and they attempted to install a general.

As head of state and to effectively abolish Republican government, they were stopped,

they were arrested, they were put on trial, and they were, of course, acquitted in the atmosphere,

the febrile atmosphere of the time.

There were military investigations,

parliamentary investigations, commissions and inquiries, all of them dressed up as legal proceedings.

I'm going to focus in particular on four, so we've gone from two to three to four, four here,

three courts martial and one libel case.

At the heart of it, the celebrated libel case that was brought against the novelist and writer

Emil Zola for his famous notorious attack on the French military establishment, Jacquesus.

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