The Duke de Guermantes changes sides to support Dreyfus during his spa cure

The Duke de Guermantes changes sides to support Dreyfus during his spa cure, a reversal that exposes the social and personal forces shaping political conviction during the Dreyfus Affair. Initially a vehement anti-Dreyfusard, the Duke returns from his treatment an equally committed supporter of a retrial, having been challenged by three women whose judgment he admires. The change contrasts with his earlier indignation at Swann for taking the Dreyfusard side, and the narrator places it within a wider pattern of opinions and even national alignments changing through human contact.

Background: A political position becomes a social test

The Duke’s response to Swann had made clear that the Dreyfus Affair was no longer, in his eyes, merely a disagreement over the trial. He believed Swann’s support for Dreyfus demonstrated that Jews were secretly united behind members of their own race, and feared that the example of a respected Jewish figure would be taken as proof about Jews generally. The Duke framed this as a public danger, using the maxim “Ab uno disce omnes” to turn one man’s position into an indictment of a whole group.

The narrator also distinguishes the Duke’s response to Swann from his earlier reaction to Saint-Loup’s Dreyfusardism. He had treated his nephew as a young man gone astray, from whom eccentric conduct was to be expected; Swann, by contrast, was an established and intelligent man whose political position seemed to betray a reputation and social place the Duke valued. In the years between those reactions, opposition to Dreyfus had, the narrator observes, become more violent and increasingly social as well as political. This background makes the Duke’s later reversal a change in an entrenched social climate, not just a private adjustment of opinion.

The spa encounter and the reversal

After returning from a ball still wearing his helmet, the Duke anticipated entering formal mourning and decided to bring forward by a week the spa cure he was due to take. Three weeks later, when he returned, friends who had known him as an indifferent observer turned fanatical anti-Dreyfusard were astonished to hear him argue that Dreyfus would be acquitted at a retrial because there was no evidence against him. He also criticized Colonel de Froberville for appearing to lead the French people toward war.

The immediate change began with the Duke’s meeting at the spa with an Italian princess and her two sisters-in-law. Their comments about their reading and a play at the Casino convinced him that they were women of superior intellect, women whose judgment he felt unable to match. He was pleased when the princess invited him to play bridge, but entered her sitting-room ready to speak in his usual anti-Dreyfusard spirit. Instead, the women told him that a retrial was becoming more certain and that an innocent man could not be kept in prison.

At first the Duke responded with bewilderment, as though hearing a familiar household term used to mock someone he had regarded as intelligent. In time, and despite his embarrassment at adopting a new position, he began to concede that the absence of evidence mattered. The women pressed him to move faster, insisting that no intelligent person could ever have believed Dreyfus guilty. When the Duke brought them revelations he thought would be damaging to Dreyfus, they laughed and showed, through subtle argument, why his evidence did not hold. He returned to Paris a committed Dreyfusard.

Influence, argument, and political change

The narrator does not present the women’s intervention as proof that the Duke’s new position was false or merely fashionable: he explicitly allows that they were messengers of truth. The focus is instead on the mechanism of conversion. The Duke’s admiration for the women’s intellect made their judgments consequential to him; their sustained questioning and rebuttals displaced arguments he had previously accepted. His change therefore carries both an intellectual and a social dimension, without reducing either to the other.

The narrator generalizes from this encounter to describe how a person of genuine conviction may be won over by an intelligent couple, or simply by a charming woman, who enters that person’s life. The same process, he suggests, can operate at the scale of nations: countries left hating another race may reverse their attitudes and alliances within six months. The Duke’s turn thus links the intimate influence of a spa acquaintance to the instability of collective political positions.

Significance within the political narrative

The episode reverses the Duke’s earlier judgment of Swann. Swann had seemed to him dangerously disloyal for supporting Dreyfus; the Duke later adopts that position himself after a change in his immediate social world. The contrast reveals the limits of the Duke’s earlier confidence that a man’s political stance could be judged as a stable expression of character or social allegiance.

The scene also makes political conviction part of the changing relations among aristocrats and their companions. The Duke’s status does not insulate his opinions from influence: he is persuaded by people he considers intellectually superior, and his public identity shifts with his conclusion about the case. The reversal matters not only because he changes sides, but because it shows how the Dreyfus Affair’s arguments move through personal networks, social esteem, and the pressure of debate as well as through the accumulating claims of the case.