The Man on Devil’s Island Ruth Harris (Allen Lane, £30) The torturous scandal that rocked France over the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s pitted the bigoted military establishment against left-wing intellectuals. Dreyfus had been accused of passing military secrets to the Germans and was sentenced to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, the penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.
The noted author Emile Zola defended him with a forthright attack on the military system (J’Accuse) that had convicted a Jewish officer innocent of the treason charges laid against him. Harris explores with deep compassion the events that tore apart the cultured fabric of French society cleaved by a travesty of justice. This is a rare book, beautifully written.
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