Urban: History shows us being a divided country is nothing new

We think that we are a divided society, and we are. But that is nothing unique, not in our history or in world history. We even know that when we stop and think.

The Civil War was long called a conflict between brothers—something that since the time of Cain and Able was known as the worst of all possible conflicts. That was a terrible war, one we can hardly imagine. In our effort to soothe some of those injured feelings, we allowed both sides to put up commemorative statues, statues that we are now tearing down.

The animosity lasted so long that Southerners could not say “Yankee” without putting “damned” in front of it. Northerners assumed that this was just another way of holding a grudge, because they knew that a Yankee was someone living in Vermont or Massachusetts, and most had never even met anyone from there.

In any case, by 1900 the generation remembering the war was dying out, and Yankee eyes were turned to France, where an ancient feud between political factions had just reappeared.

One of the most famous political cartoons consisted of two panels. In the first, a respectable French family was sitting down to a formal dinner. In the second, there is shouting, food being thrown; and underneath a question: “What happened?” The answer was that someone had mentioned the word Dreyfus.

In 1894 the French political world was stunned to learn that an officer on the general staff had been a German spy. Worse, the presumed spy was from Alsace, Alfred Dreyfus, and could speak German. Also, he was a Jew.

This was a critical moment in the history of the Third Republic. The political situation was dire, the German army was larger, becoming better armed and the German emperor—now Wilhelm II—had replaced the cautious Otto von Bismarck and was talking wildly about war, the struggle of nations and Germany’s need for markets and colonies.

As the tensions grew, each nation had armed for war and talked proudly about the coming victory. Of course, each tried to find out what the other planned. Meanwhile, those French who could still think clearly knew that they would inevitably lose any war with Germany.

The thought that a spy had sold France’s information about its newest artillery piece to Germany horrified the army’s high command. Dreyfus was held in secret confinement, then found guilty on a forged document and sent to the tropical hellhole of Devil’s Island, where he was the only prisoner. There was no chance he could escape and little chance that he would live long.

Not long before France’s politicians and generals had sought new allies who could offset Germany’s numerical and technical superiority. Britain had committed itself to a strict neutrality, and Austria was essentially tied to Germany if it wanted to expand into the Balkans, where Turkish power was clearly on the retreat.

The only obstacle to Austrian expansion was Russia, which claimed a priority on the right to protect fellow Slavs, fellow “True Believers” in the Orthodox faith. This meant that there was an opportunity for the French to make an alliance with the Russian tsar.

Before this, such an alliance was unthinkable—France was a republic, Russia a despotism; France was technically secular, but the army and important men were Catholic, while Russians considered the pope to be the anti-Christ. But Russia feared Germany, too, and the tsar hated Jews.

When the Russian Baltic fleet sailed into the Mediterranean, the French invited it to visit Marseilles. There they wined and dined the Russian sailors (and probably did more) with such success that the Russians invited the French fleet to make a visit to St Petersburg. Soon there was an alliance.

Although the French General Staff eventually realized that they had accused the wrong man, they stuck to their story. As rumors of conspiracies abounded, French society was soon even more divided, and the mutual hatred of the parties would last for decades. It was not just parties, but even of families. Catholics and secularists hated one another, and everyone blamed the Jews.

Thanks to a passionate novelist, Emile Zola, Dreyfus was given a new trial. Found guilty again, the public was even more outraged. At last, a Hungarian exile was uncovered as the spy. Dreyfus was released and resumed his service in the army. By the end of the Great War, so many Frenchmen had died that nobody wanted to mention the name Dreyfus again.

Must we also wait for a great war to unite us again? Surely, there is a better way.

William Urban is a retired Lee L. Morgan professor of history and international studies at Monmouth College.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Urban: History shows us being a divided country is nothing new