Conclusion

The Conclusion describes the post-Dreyfus Affair careers of the four authors covered, discussing Zola’s allegorization of events in his final novel Vérité, Bouhélier’s successful decades-long career as a playwright, and Céard’s final novel Terrains à vendre au bord de la mer. I conclude by taking an updated microhistorical look at one of the central unit-ideas examined in the book, Brunetière’s anti-individualism, in our own time. Through the two very different examples of anti-liberal Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen and antiracist bestselling author Robin DiAngelo, we observe that contemporary figures with radically different ideologies can converge on points such as an opposition to individualism, here identified with the liberal center whose perceived failings both denounce. In the polarized democracies of the early twenty-first century, the Dreyfus Affair continues to be a touchstone. A final demonstration is provided by the 2022 French presidential campaign, in which both Emmanuel Macron and Éric Zemmour returned to the Dreyfus case to burnish their respective centrist and far-right credentials.