Émile Borel combined a life as a scholar with political activism in republican circles, espousing what he called " rational politics ": from Dreyfusism to radicalism, from the Popular Front to the Resistance, and from International Intellectual Cooperation to the European Movement.
The Third Republic was dubbed the "Republic of Professors" because teachers were so numerous among its political figures; these included, for example, the brilliant graduates of the École normale supérieure. The career of Émile Borel, himself an ENS alumnus, made him the consummate example of the "government intellectuals" who played an essential role in the political life of the period. Yet Borel did not turn to politics in his youth. He had nevertheless acquired a "political culture" from his Protestant, republican family background and may also have been influenced by the prevailing atmosphere among ENS students, who tended toward freethought, agnosticism, atheism and virulent anticlericalism. Humanism, reason, science and progress were the cardinal values that Borel invoked throughout his life.
The Dreyfus Affair
In the closing years of the 19 century, republicans fought to secure recognition of Captain Dreyfus's innocence. At the ENS, students and professors stood up for the triumph of justice, the rule of law, reason and truth. In January 1898, a petition gathered thousands of signatures from ENS students, teachers, writers, lawyers and journalists, soon derided as "gangs of intellectuals"; Borel did not sign it. It was not until the "Appeal for Unity", launched on January 23, 1899 by Ernest Lavisse, director of the ENS, that Borel finally took a stand in the name "of legality and public peace"; the signatories seem above all to have wanted to avert the risk of a constitutional crisis, and historians prefer to call them "Dreyfusians" to distinguish them from the Dreyfusards.
Borel was not among the founders of the Dreyfusard Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH). In 1905, he was president of its Saint-Affrique branch but was soundly defeated in the election to the League's central committee; in 1910, he managed to be elected but immediately resigned, citing his recent appointment as director of scientific studies at the ENS.
