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Street—one that the other America, the Main Street of every city in
the country, sees as the quintessential enemy. And, similarly, this
woman was the allegory of all women who are not only battered and
humiliated but also poor and immigrant—their words, silenced too
long, finally expressed through hers.
The sad thing is, that’s not what justice is. Justice doesn’t oppose
symbols, but human beings. Unless we succumb once more to what
Condorcet—one among many of Robespierre’s victims—called the
“sympathetic zeal of the supposed friends of mankind,” and what I
would call the “lynching, in sympathy with minorities, by their
supposed friends.”
3. For in France, again, Robespierrism has always gotten on well with
another -ism, apparently its opposite but in reality its twin, which is
called Barrèsism. What is Barrèsism? It is a worldview that takes its
name from the French nationalist writer, contemporary of the Dreyfus
Affair, Maurice Barrès. And it is particularly and precisely in
reference to Captain Alfred Dreyfus that he uttered the famous
phrase, “That Dreyfus is guilty, I deduce not from the facts
themselves, but from his race.” The Strauss-Kahn affair is obviously
unrelated to the Dreyfus affair. I must state, to be clear, that I don’t
think it has much to do with this worldwide religion and delirium that
is anti-Semitism. But what I do believe is that this is the appearance
of a new variation on Maurice Barrès’s phrase that has become, “That
X—in this case Dominique Strauss-Kahn—is guilty, I deduce not
from his race, but from his class.”
And what I believe is that this utterance, along with the
transformation (compliments of the Terror) of the “individual”
Strauss-Kahn into “the suspect” delivered to the media guillotine, has
been enough to fuel the fatal mechanism and make it run full throttle.
In a letter by Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York
Times, that I received May 20 and that I have no scruples about

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