The Dreyfus Affair — Before and After

Abstract

The chain of circumstance that brought about the Separation was less direct than most historians suggest. The decisive events took place during the ministry of Combes; and, despite his own personal hostility to Separation, his conduct of affairs was a major factor. Yet pressure came from many sides — from the Socialists for whom Separation was the threshold to social reform, from anticlericals who wanted it for its own sake, and from Combes’s enemies among the Gauche Radicale and the Union Démocratique who thought that it would prove Combes’s undoing. Diverse thought these factors were, the Dreyfus Affair was a common denominator in the genesis of many of them.