Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus

(NYTBR) ... The real question for the opposing camps was not whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent, but whether France itself was to be modern or traditional, cosmopolitan or nationalist, Catholic or secular, a republic or a monarchy. The struggle, as Frederick Brown puts it in “For the Soul of France,” his briskly paced and highly readable book, was between “champions and foes of the Enlightenment.” Continued

Photo: "Eiffel Tower machinery with man beside wheel that raises elevator(?), during Paris Exposition," c1889 (Library of Congress).