Opinion was thus still healthy; few Frenchmen imagined what a prodigious about face the spirit of public without teachers or chiefs was exposed to, or whose teachers and chiefs lacked principles, influence and activity. At the first lightning bolt of the Dreyfus Affair the old acquired knowledge of tradition and custom, all our remnants of patriotic affection, of chauvinist pride seemed to fall like rubble, torn apart, razed, carted away. We could get ourselves back in hand, but the first minute had put all in question.

Paris gazed at itself. The Jєωιѕн salons were its master. The newspapers it opened were Jєωιѕн newspapers. We though that Jєωry only had a hold on money. Money had delivered everything over to it: an important sector of the university, an equivalent sector of the judicial administration, a lesser but still appreciable sector of the army, of the highest reaches of the army. At the General Staff, at the intelligence service, the Jєωs had their man, Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, quickly unmasked but so well placed that he was able to do all.

[...]

I don’t want to go into the debate on innocence or guilt. My first and last opinion on this was that if by chance Dreyfus was innocent he should be named Maréchal of France, but we should execute a dozen of his principal defenders for the triple harm they caused France, peace, and reason...