Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus (born October 9, 1859, Mulhouse, France—died July 12, 1935, Paris) was a French army officer whose trial for treason began a 12-year controversy, known as the Dreyfus Affair, that deeply marked the political and social history of the French Third Republic.

Trial and conviction

Dreyfus was the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer. In 1882 he entered the École Polytechnique and decided on a military career. By 1889 he had risen to the rank of captain. Dreyfus was assigned to the War Ministry when, in 1894, he was accused of selling military secrets to the German military attaché. He was arrested on October 15, and on December 22 he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He entered the infamous penal colony of Devils Island, off the coast of French Guiana, on April 13, 1895.

The legal proceedings, which were based on specious evidence, were highly irregular. Although he denied his guilt and although his family consistently supported his plea of innocence, public opinion and the French press as a whole, led by its virulently antisemitic faction, welcomed the verdict and the sentence. In particular, the newspaper La Libre Parole, edited by Édouard Drumont, used Dreyfus to symbolize the supposed disloyalty of French Jews.

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But doubts began to grow. Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart found evidence that Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was engaged in espionage and that it was Esterhazy’s handwriting found on the letter that had incriminated Dreyfus. When Picquart was removed from his post, it was believed that his discovery was too inconvenient for his superiors. The pro-Dreyfus side slowly gained adherents (among them, journalists Joseph Reinach and Georges Clemenceau—the future World War I premier—and a senator, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner).

“J’Accuse”

The affair was made absurdly complicated by the activities of Esterhazy in inventing evidence and spreading rumors, and of Major Hubert Joseph Henry, discoverer of the original letter attributed to Dreyfus, in forging new documents and suppressing others. When Esterhazy was brought before a court martial, he was acquitted, and Picquart was arrested. This precipitated an event that was to crystallize the whole movement for revision of Dreyfus’s trial. On January 13, 1898, the novelist Émile Zola wrote an open letter published on the front page of Aurore, Clemenceau’s paper, under the headline “J’Accuse.” By the evening of that day, 200,000 copies had been sold. Zola accused the army of covering up its mistaken conviction of Dreyfus and of acquitting Esterhazy on the orders of the Ministry of War.

By the time of the Zola letter, the Dreyfus case had attracted widespread public attention and had split France into two opposing camps. The issues were regarded as far exceeding the personal matter of the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus. The anti-Dreyfusards (those against reopening the case), nationalist and authoritarian, viewed the controversy as an attempt by the nation’s enemies to discredit the army and saw it as a case of national security against international socialism and Jewry, of France against Germany. The Dreyfusards (those seeking the exoneration of Captain Dreyfus) saw the issue as the principle of the freedom of the individual subordinated to that of national security and as republican civilian authority pitted against a military authority that acted independently of the state.

Amid uproar in the parliament, the government was pressed by the nationalists to bring Zola to justice, while antisemitic riots broke out in the provinces. A petition demanding revision of the Dreyfus trial was signed by some 3,000 persons, including Anatole France, Marcel Proust, and a host of other intellectuals. The trial of Zola began on February 7; he was found guilty of libel and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs.

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Retrial and acquittal

From 1898 to 1899 the Dreyfusard cause gained in strength. Major Henry committed suicide at the end of August 1898, after confessing his forgeries. Esterhazy, in panic, fled to Belgium and London. The confession of Henry opened a new phase in the affair, for it ensured that the appeal of the Dreyfus family for a retrial would now be irresistible.

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A new ministry, led by René Waldeck-Rousseau, took office in June 1899 and resolved to bring the affair to an end at last. Dreyfus, brought back from Devils Island for retrial, appeared before a new court martial in Rennes (August 7–September 9, 1899). It found him guilty, but the president of the republic, in order to resolve the issue, pardoned him. Dreyfus accepted the act of clemency but reserved the right to do all in his power to establish his innocence.

In 1904 a retrial was granted and in July 1906 a civilian court of appeals (the Cour d’Appel) cleared Dreyfus and reversed all previous convictions. The parliament passed a bill reinstating Dreyfus. On July 22 he was formally reinstated and decorated with the Legion of Honour. After further short service in the army, in which he attained the rank of major, he retired to the reserves. He was recalled to active service during World War I and, as a lieutenant colonel, commanded an ammunition column. After the war he retired into obscurity. The army did not publicly declare his innocence until 1995.

Legacy

The Dreyfus case—or l’Affaire, as it came to be called—was an important landmark in the history of the Third Republic and of modern France. From the turmoil of which it was the center emerged a sharper alignment of political and social forces, leading to such drastic anticlerical measures as the separation of church and state in 1905 and to a cleavage between right-wing nationalists and left-wing antimilitarists that haunted French life until 1914 and even later. On each side were mobilized France’s most eminent literary men, and the violent controversy destroyed the cohesion of French life for more than a generation after. A conjunction of mistaken loyalties, repeated stupidities, base forgeries, and excited extremisms inflamed the situation into a national crisis. At best, it evoked a passionate repudiation of antisemitism, which did France honor; at worst, it revealed and intensified a chronic internal division that was to be a major source of national weakness.