Some of them had gone through emotional traumas and professional humiliations because they had had the courage to identify themselves with him. They had, after all, worked hard and devotedly, on his behalf. Those who supported Dreyfus expected him to behave in a certain way. Many of the Dreyfusards could not understand this, or did not wish to understand this. Whether one was the Prime Minister or Rothschild, one wanted the Dreyfus affair to end, and to go away. Both felt that they stood to lose by further controversy and confrontation. Undoubtedly the Dreyfus family came under pressure to accept the pardon, and the pressure was apparently exercised by two groups of people. It is revealing that some of those who had fought so hard for him were not so concerned about his health. But Dreyfus was a sick man, and there were serious doubts whether or not he could stand further strain. They wanted to go on, from trial to trial, from appeal to appeal, until the essential falseness of the army's case against him would be plain for everyone to see and the army would be discredited. There were those among his supporters who never forgave him for that. The first is the fact that having again been found guilty at his second court-martial, Dreyfus accepted a Presidential pardon rather than continue the fight. One is therefore led to consider other explanations. But there is no reason why one should not pay greater attention to the feelings of the family that loved him dearly rather than to the reactions of those who only knew him slightly or who only knew him in the very particular circumstances of his trials. It is, of course, difficult to know exactly what a man was like. This revelation however has done little to save him from being badly thought of by those who passionately believed, and believe, in his innocence. But it has been shown, from the New York World of 1927, that in fact Dreyfus did join the appeal against their execution. Thus we were told, apparently on good authority, that Dreyfus refused to intervene on behalf of the condemned anarchists Saccho and Vanzetti, whose case had frequently been compared to Dreyfus'. Sometimes when longstanding anecdotes are investigated they are found to be false. Thus it is said that when Dreyfus learned that some unknown man had been arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, and it was pointed out that no one knew what was the evidence against him, then it was Dreyfus, of all people, who said 'There's never smoke without fire'. There are many anecdotes which cannot be verified. And Clemenceau, who had published Zola's famous article J'Accuse which was the turning-point of the affaire, was dismissive about Dreyfus the man, saying that he looked like a pencil salesman. One of Dreyfus' most ardent supporters said, 'we were prepared to die for Dreyfus. He would have been among the army officers saying that there should never be a re-trial and that one must not question military authority. Thus it has been said that had Dreyfus not been involved in the controversy, he would never have been a Dreyfusard. Some of the things said about Dreyfus have been repeated so many times that they have been accepted as established truths. Dreyfus is invariably given as the best example of this. It is often said that the hero of a cause célèbre is never a real hero, and rarely an attractive or likeable man. They also involved hi friends and supporters. But his misfortune did not end with the agonies of exile on Devil's Island. Everyone knows too that the simple fact that he was Jewish was in itself enough to convince many, both in 1894 and now, that he must have been guilty. Everyone knows that he was unjustly condemned for treason. To say that Alfred Dreyfus was unfortunate would be the unacceptable phrase of understatement. He died as he would have wished to live, peacefully, like a respectable bourgeois citizen. He died surrounded by his family (his doctor, Pierre-Paul Levy, was his son-in-law) in his comfortable dwelling place in the 17th arrondissement. Alfred Dreyfus died in Paris on the evening of July 12th, 1935, aged seventy-four.
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