This year represents a watershed in the history of France's Belle Epoque — the period of unprecedented economic growth and extraordinary cultural foment that nation enjoyed between the centennial of the French Revolution in 1889 (an occasion commemorated by, among other things, the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower) and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 — for two seemingly unrelated reasons.
First, it marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Swann's Way," the first installment of "In Search of Lost Time" (1913-1927), Marcel Proust's vast novel chronicling the lives of privileged Parisians at the fin de siecle.
Second, the French Ministry of Defense has for the first time made public the entire contents of the infamous secret dossier that the French army used against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artilleryman, in a bogus treason case it brought against him in December 1894, sentencing him to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. (The posting is the work of Pierre Gervais, Pauline Peretz and Pierre Stutin, historians who have a new book about the file, "Le Dossier Secret de l'Affaire Dreyfus.")