What Was the Dreyfus Affair?

Learn more about the Dreyfus Affair, an important episode of French legal history that took place during the time that Oscar Wilde lived in Paris.

Feb 22, 2016

BY Dylan Hayley Leavitt

Appraisal: 1899 Oscar Wilde Poem

Transcript

APPRAISER: I really appreciate you bringing in this wonderful manuscript poem by Oscar Wilde today. Why don't you tell us what you know about its history?

GUEST: I worked for a woman when I was in college taking care of show dogs that she had. She approached me one day and she said, "I know you're an English major, you'd like this," and she handed it to me.

APPRAISER: Do you know much about where she would have acquired it? Was it a relative or something?

GUEST: Her father-in-law was the man referred to here as "for Christian." He was a newspaper reporter at one time in the late part of the 1800s and covered the Dreyfus trial in Paris, and that's where I believe he met Wilde.

APPRAISER: So it's inscribed on the bottom here "for Christian." As we understand, it was Christian Gauss who received the poem.

GUEST: That's right.

APPRAISER: And he became a fairly important professor and dean of the college at Princeton, wildly renowned person. But as you say, he was in Paris apparently in 1899 for the Dreyfus trial and wrote articles for The Nation, and by repute, had met Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde, one of the most important Irish poets of the late 19th century, playwright, wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Importance of Being Earnest, and persecuted for his homosexual lifestyle. At first, it appeared that it might have been an unpublished poem because the title here, "Ideal Love: A Sonnet," is not a title that's recorded in the literature as a poem by Wilde. But I discovered the text of the poem is actually quite a well-known and very famous poem by Wilde called "The New Remorse," which he wrote in 1891 for his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. It's a very powerful, evocative love poem in essence, but it's layered with elements of guilt and remorse. So the first line, "The sin was mine, I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave." A concealment of the homoerotic love affair he was having with Douglas. Now, this is incredibly important because eventually, he sued for libel-- Douglas's father-- and in turn was accused of gross indecency, and eventually put to trial, convicted, and he went to jail for two years of hard labor that really broke his spirit. After being released from jail, he went to Europe, reunited with Douglas, but he eventually ended up in Paris destitute, and we know very little about his time when he was in Paris. And this is essentially his last year alive. He died in 1900 at the L'Hotel in Paris basically penniless. So the fact that this was written in 1899 to Mr. Gauss at a place called La Varenne... We're not sure where that may be-- there is a hotel La Varenne. The most important thing though, I think, is that he's taken this poem he wrote for his first lover that was layered with remorse and guilt, and has renamed it, "Ideal Love: A Sonnet." It's almost as if he's reinterpreted his own words. Now, after having gone through the trial and prison, and actually at this point been separated from his lover with a new kind of positive look on the words that he had written some ten years before. So it's a fascinating piece of history. Have you ever had it researched for value or any other purpose?

GUEST: I shopped it around years ago and someone said they thought it could be worth $6,000, $5,000.

APPRAISER: Well, he did do a number of commemorative pieces for people of major poems, so they do come on the marketplace. In fact, what was purported to be the first draft of this very poem has recently sold at auction. I think this example is beautiful, I think it's in wonderful shape, and given its historic importance near the end of his life, I would put an auction estimate conservatively of $10,000 to $15,000 today.

GUEST: Great, great.

At the 2015 ROADSHOW event in Charleston, South Carolina, the owner of an Oscar Wilde manuscript shared that he acquired the piece from a friend whose ancestor, Christian Gauss, had been a reporter for The Nation in the late 1890s, covering the Dreyfus Affair in Paris. During his time there, Gauss met Wilde, who after having been persecuted for his homosexual lifestyle and sent to jail for two years, was living out his final days in Paris. Wilde gifted the manuscript to Gauss, inscribing it “For Christian” and giving it the title, “Ideal Love: A Sonnet,” which differed from the published title, “The New Remorse.” According to Books & Manuscripts appraiser Martin Gammon, the handwritten piece would fetch an auction estimate of $10,000 to $15,000.

Oscar Wilde Photo — Oscar Wilde, one of the most important Irish writers of the late 19th century, is known for penning “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” He was persecuted for his homosexual lifestyle and went to jail for two years. He lived out the end of his life in Paris. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

During the time that Wilde and Gauss were in Paris, the Dreyfus Affair, or “L’affaire Dreyfus,” was the talk of Europe. In 1894, following the Franco-Prussian War, French Army captain Alfred Dreyfus of Alsace was framed for being a German spy by his comrade Ferdinand Esterhazy, the true criminal. Dreyfus was subsequently convicted of treason and sentenced to solitary confinement for life on Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of South America. Dreyfus maintained his innocence throughout his imprisonment, and the whole of France was strongly divided as to whether to believe him. Numerous trials conflated issues of fairness, justice, anti-Semitism, and French pride.

The trials drew the attention of international press, political cartoonists, and cultural leaders like the author Émile Zola. Zola had his famous piece “J’accuse…!” published in January 1898 on the front cover of French newspaper L’Aurore, in which he outlines the guilt of the actual spy, Esterhazy, and the shortcomings of the French justice system and military. Zola was in turn arrested for criminal libel following the publishing of the piece, but his effort did contribute to Dreyfus’s eventual pardon in 1899. Esterhazy fled the country to evade prosecution. The French Army ultimately declared Dreyfus's innocence in 1995.

With its many complex questions of fairness, equality, and accountability, the Dreyfus Affair is a saga that still resonates today. Its intrigues have been the subject of voluminous scholarly exploration, and ROADSHOW has collected several resources for further reading about this important episode of French history.

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Captain Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. After being convicted, he was stripped of his military status and called a traitor. The Dreyfus Affair was heavily covered by international press and political cartoonists. This illustration, "The Traitor: The Degradation of Alfred Dreyfus," originally appeared on the cover of Le Petit Journal in early 1895. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Dylan Hayley Leavitt

Dylan Hayley Leavitt was ANTIQUES ROADSHOW's digital associate producer from 2012 to 2017.