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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 Barrésism. What is Barrésism? It is a worldview that takes its name from the French nationalist writer, contemporary of the Dreyfus Affair, Maurice Barrés. 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 Barrés’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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029939