Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer, spent 12 years from 1894 to 1906, in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. Amidst the dramatic and shifting revelations of what would come to be known throughout the world as the Dreyfus Affair, four influential authors re-assessed their moral convictions on the civic questions posed by this abuse. Here, Gould explores the Dreyfur Affair as well as secularism and tolerance in the work of Emile Zola, Maurice Barres, Bernard Lazare, and Marcel Proust.