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If you find the time, would you care to talk a bit about the Dreyfus Affair? I'm quite curious about how it's interpreted in modern France.
Maybe I should. It's our ur-culture war after all, and there was a movie released recently about it that I thought was a fair treatment.
Please do! I only know about it on a surface level, from some Wikipedia reading and a bit of Zola. But it seems to strike directly at what you were saying, about only caring about culture. I'm not French, but to my surprise, my understanding of French ideals matches your description very closely. But I only have an outside view, and of course no society ever completely lives up to its ideals. And so I'm wondering what it looks like from the inside, today, and how it fits into the national myths of France. What lessons do French children learn from it? What do intelligent adults make of it?
My (American) historical education barely touched on it, and the more I learn about it, the more I think that omission may have been a huge mistake. Even on a purely practical level, it seems like Americans ought to learn about how other republics dealt with that sort of thing. Especially now that our own republic is starting to look unstable.
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