The Dreyfus Affair: An Overview
Compared to Russia, Germany, and Poland, France was a fairly safe place for European Jewry for most of the 19th century. The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity drawn up in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 extended to the Jews in 1791 when they were emancipated. Through the Napoleonic period, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, anti-Semitism existed in France, but not on an organized scale. This was to change dramatically in the Third Republic period. Despite the fact that “France’s democratic institutions-universal suffrage for men, many political parties reflecting every shade of political opinion, and a free press” (Derfler 7) were the most liberal in the world at the time, France was to become a very confrontational place on the political stage.
On the right wing existed the nationalist monarchists, who wished for a return to a monarchical system with clerical influence from the Jesuits. These ultra-nationalists despised anything not purely French and Catholic, and arose rapidly under the wing of Edouard Drumont, a “highly educated man, a gifted writer, and a dreaded journalist” (Herzog 25). Drumont’s disciples, who consisted of a majority of the French army and the weight of the Catholic Church, held the momentum for most of the Affair. On the left wing the radicals and in some cases, Socialists, fiercely opposed Catholic intervention in French law and education, and worked for a separation between church and state. The leftists would achieve their ascendancy under Georges Clemenceau, when the Dreyfus Affair was winding down.
Drumont was a virulent anti-Semite, funded copiously by the Jesuits. In 1889, he founded the “‘Ligue nationale anti-Semitique de France’, together with the Marquis de Mores and Jacques de Biez” (Herzog 30). Working with reckless abandon, Drumont established a Parisian newspaper, La Libre Parole, in April 1892. In league with the Jesuit mouthpiece La Croix, La Libre Parole turned French sentiment against the Jews dramatically and drove French opinion of the Jews to be even worse than that of their archnemesis, the Germans. Drumont’s articles, written in boiling rage much of the time, touched on the French-Catholic connection and insisted that “Catholicism was essential to French identity, and Jews and Protestants were thus unassimilable interlopers (Hoffman 55). The air of French-Catholic jingoism created by Drumont in the early 1890’s set the fuse of the bomb; the Dreyfus Affair would be the spark that set the bomb off.
Alfred Dreyfus was born in 1859 into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Alsace. Dreyfus was inclined to the tricolor as a boy and was determined to become a French soldier from the moment he saw the Prussians overrun his home at the tender age of eleven. The war forced the Dreyfus family to move to Paris, and “his resentment of the Germans influenced his military career” (Derfler 77). Dreyfus was an esteemed student and joined the French army as a second lieutenant. By the age of thirty-four he was a captain and the youngest officer on the French General Staff (ibid). A French super-patriot, Dreyfus dreamed of becoming a general, but he had to overcome the barriers of religion, a perceived arrogance, and a lack of charisma and humor. (Later on it is interesting to note that throughout Dreyfus’ Five Years of My Life, he does not use the words Jew, Jewish, or Judaism once in any form or phrase. Everything to Dreyfus is for the glory of France).
When Dreyfus was appointed to the General Staff in 1890, his superior officers were not too fond of him. Most of the General Staff was “critical of his wealth, his conceit, and his religion” (Derfler 78), including Major Georges Picquart, Major Armand du Paty de Clam, Lieutenant Colonel Hubert Joseph Henry, and Colonel Sandherr. So when the French Statistical Section, led by Colonel Sandherr, received notice of the bordereau, a letter containing French technological military advancements and strategy, a scan of writing samples was taken to determine the culprit. The bordereau, written to the German military attachÃ?© in Paris, Colonel Max von Schwartzkoppen, was considered to be a traitorous act because it gave the Germans valuable military secrets. By process of elimination, all the General Staff officers were convinced that Captain Dreyfus wrote the letter to von Schwartzkoppen. Dreyfus’ background in artillery, handwriting fairly similar to that of the bordereau, plus his Jewish religion and Alsatian background (many Alsatians sympathized with the Germans) convinced General Auguste Mercier to arrest Dreyfus on October 15, 1894 (Derfler xvii, 1).
The centerpiece of the first Dreyfus court-martial, which took place from December 19-22, 1894, was the bordereau and if Dreyfus wrote the infamous document to Schwartzkoppen. The General Staff officers, including du Paty de Clam and Henry, testified that the bordereau “could only have been written by a French artilleryman among the officers being rotated through the various General Staff sections for training purposes” (Hoffman 3). They testified that their conclusions pointed to Captain Dreyfus as the culprit. A series of handwriting experts were summoned to court to testify comparing Dreyfus’ handwriting with that of the bordereau. Dreyfus mentions in his Five Years of my Life:
“Two of them gave evidence in my favour, two against me, though at the same time pointing out numerous dissimilarities between the writing of the Bordereau and mine. I attached no importance to Bertillon’s evidence, for it seemed to me to be the ravings of a madman (Dreyfus and Mortimer 21-22).
Unfortunately for Dreyfus, the court listened to Bertillon, who was known to be notoriously anti-Semitic, more intently than the other experts because the General Staff brought him in as their handwriting expert. The President of the French Republic at the time, Casimir-Perier, considered Bertillon to be “completely insaneâÂ?¦a lunatic escaped from an asylum” (Derfler 68). This testimony, along with Colonel Henry’s deposition, was enough to convict Drefyus of treason on December 22, 1894.
Dreyfus was totally devastated by the judge’s ruling, and initially could not bear what was to be in store for him. He was to be publicly humiliated on January 5, 1895, a Saturday, in Paris’ city square and then be deported to Devil’s Island. In Dreyfus’ account, he was “suffering martyrdom and made a supreme effort to rally his strength” (Dreyfus and Mortimer 42). When the charges were read against him in the city square, Dreyfus screamed out:
“Soldiers, an innocent man is degraded. Soldiers, an innocent man is dishonoured! Vive la France! Vive l’armee!” (Dreyfus and Mortimer 43).
The public humiliation Dreyfus endured included the destruction of his epaulets, his rank, and the breaking of his ceremonial officer’s sword. Dreyfus was marched and paraded around the square, where mobs of people spat and cursed at him in effigy. It was the cries of “Death to the Jews” that disconcerted Dreyfus and a fairly young journalist from Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl, more than anything else which happened before.
Herzl had covered the trial in Paris and despite being unsure of Dreyfus’ guilt, was mortified at the deluded mob which pilloried Dreyfus that morning. The scenes in Paris were a catalyst for Herzl to pursue an independent Jewish state outside of European confines. He reasoned that if France, the most civilized nation in the world in his eyes, would persecute a noble patriot to the tricolor like Dreyfus, who is to say what other nations “who have not reached the level of France a hundred years ago” would do. (Cain 14). The Parisian mobs imbued Herzl with the idea that it was impossible for Jews to assimilate successfully into European society and that “anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society, which assimilation did not solve” (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise 2).
Interestingly enough, the Dreyfus Affair’s mobs was not the prospect Herzl feared the most. Herzl barely writes about the Affair in his voluminous diaries, leaving only a few sentences to Dreyfus. He is more terrified of people like Dr. Karl Lueger, a xenophobic anti-Semite who became the mayor of Vienna at the time, and most aggrieved with a German social scientist, Dr. Eugen Duehring, an intellectual who promoted racial anti-Semitism and a conflict between Aryans and Jews (Avineri 9). Herzl concluded that if Lueger could win an election in a major European cosmopolitan center like Vienna, and Duehring’s ideology could gain acceptance in Germany and Austria-Hungary, someone would eventually act on these ideas and take over these countries using Duehring’s ideology as a front. Herzl would unfortunately be proven correct.
The controversy over the Dreyfus affair on France became much more politicized after Dreyfus was deported to Devil’s Island in April, 1895. Initially, the anti-Dreyfusards, a faction which believed in Dreyfus’ guilt and included Drumont and much of the French army and clergy, held sway. Opposed only by Mathieu Dreyfus, the brother of the convicted captain, and Bernard-Lazare, a Jewish literary critic, the anti-Dreyfusards dominated public discourse about the Affair from the conviction of Dreyfus until March 1896. At that point Lieutenant Colonel Picquart (promoted to replace Colonel Sandherr, who was paralyzed) started an investigation of his own which ignited the Affair to even more flammable heights.
Picquart was initially convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt, as had all the other General Staff officers. When he took over for Sandherr as the head of the Statistical Section he was told by his superiors to fill up the case file on Dreyfus. What he found in his investigation was a letter called the petit-bleu, “a special delivery letter for use within Paris and written on thin blue paper” (Derfler 2) in a wastebasket in the German embassy. Picquart found the torn-up letter, saved by the French spy Madame Bastian, who on the surface was a chambermaid for Colonel von Schwartzkoppen at the German embassy. The details of the petit-bleu were of stunning similarity to the bordereau, as was the handwriting. The problem for Picquart to resolve was that Dreyfus was not the writer of the petit-bleu. The culprit was from within the French ranks, but it was another French officer, Major Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.
Picquart was keen to investigate Esterhazy, but was initially inclined to do it on his own, fearing a scandal. Esterhazy was an “adventurerâÂ?¦always in pecuniary difficulties, a gambler in clubs and on the stock exchange, seeking confidential information on all questions concerning the artillery” (Herzog 185). He was an officer totally unfit for the rank he attained, carousing women all the time, and frittering away his money countless times. When Picquart was informed of Esterhazy’s undisciplined nature, he reopened the Dreyfus file. Esterhazy’s nature combined with the striking handwriting similarities between the bordereau and the petit-bleu made Picquart more convinced than ever of Dreyfus’ innocence and Esterhazy’s guilt. He held the information “for four long months” and despite the fact that he was an avowed anti-Semite, he did not let that prejudice get in the way of his investigation and presented the evidence to his superiors in August 1896.
Initially Picquart was ordered to “treat the two affairs, the Dreyfus Affair and the Esterhazy Affair, completely separately” (Herzog 186). Picquart would not stand down to his superiors, and questioned them to consider the possibility of Dreyfus’ innocence. When General Gonse, one of France’s top officers, told Picquart to cover up the evidence, Picquart famously replied, “I won’t take this secret to my grave!” (Herzog 187). For his trouble Picquart was sent to Algeria in September 1896, and later convicted, jailed, and thrown out of the army for releasing these secret military documents in 1898.
At around the same time, Mathieu Dreyfus and Clemenceau tried to persuade the renowned French novelist Emile Zola into the Dreyfusard, or pro-Dreyfus camp. Zola, the son of Italian immigrants, was initially “struck by the hostility of the crowd” (Derfler 112) at Dreyfus’ humiliation, but still believed Dreyfus to be guilty. Despite not being in the Dreyfusard camp from the start, he was fervently critical of Drumont and his anti-Semitic ravings in La Libre Parole. Zola responded to Drumont in the French daily Le Figaro with the editorial, A Plea for the Jews, in May 1896. The argument starts with two questions: “What are the Jews accused of? What are they reproached with?” (Zola et. al., 2). Zola reasoned that there is no logic behind the mobs of French anti-Semitism. He argued that the French people would be going back to barbarism with their continued behavior against Jews and anyone who is not of Catholic persuasion. He even goes as far to say that the Jews are “a wise and practical race; in their blood they carry a need for lucre, a love for money, a prodigious business sense” (Zola et. al., 3).
Zola was not sold on Dreyfus’ innocence until he actually laid eyes on the evidence. It became public knowledge when Picquart turned over the evidence to his lawyer, Louis Leblois, who subsequently persuaded influential French senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner of Dreyfus’ innocence. Scheurer-Kestner, an Alsatian like Dreyfus and Picquart, became convinced of the evidence pointing to Dreyfus’ innocence and presented it to the French Senate on Bastille Day, 1897. He declared that “he was absolutely convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence and that he would do everything to prove it” (Herzog 190). Scheurer-Kestner presented the evidence to Zola in November of 1897 and won him over. By then the Dreyfusards, led by Mathieu Dreyfus, a convinced Zola, Scheurer-Kestner and the radical politicians, led by Clemenceau and Jean Jaures, coalesced to form a powerful response to the Drumont anti-Dreyfusard faction.
Immediately after the evidence was spread around, Mathieu Dreyfus condemned Esterhazy as a spy, and Zola published Monsieur Scheurer Kestner, the first of many inflammatory letters directed at the army’s handling of the Dreyfus Affair. Sensing his time running out, “Esterhazy decided to bluff” (Derfler 87) by asking for a court-martial to prove his innocence. Esterhazy received a court-martial hearing, and on January 11, 1898, he was acquitted in three minutes by the military tribunal. Zola by this point was so outraged that it brought him to writing the famous letter, J’accuse (“I Accuse”) in Clemenceau’s L’Aurore on January 13, 1898.
Zola traveled completely beyond the normal intellectual discourse in J’accuse, the letter to the French President Felix Faure. In the letter, Zola chronicled the entire sordid chain of events and fiercely attacked the people who tried to hide the crime. Zola believed the actions of the army to be criminal and wicked, and took personal potshots at members of the General Staff to bring a lawsuit upon himself and to turn the tide of the Dreyfus Affair. He calls Major du Paty de Clam “the entire Dreyfus Affair” (Zola et. al., 44) and pins most of the blame on him. Zola attacks other generals without any remorse or fear of reprisal. He calls out “the War Minister, General Mercier, whose intelligence seems to be on a mediocre levelâÂ?¦the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, who appears to have been swayed by his intense clericalism” (ibid). When Zola comes upon the subject of Esterhazy, he defends the honor of Picquart, who some anti-Dreyfusards actually claimed to be the forger of the bordereau because he was “paid by the Jews” (Zola et. al., 49). Zola points out the irony in the anti-Dreyfusard argument; Picquart is fiercely anti-Semitic. Of the Esterhazy court-martial, Zola believes two wrongs do not make a right. Even if Esterhazy were convicted, it does not do Dreyfus any good if he is still chained up on Devil’s Island.
The most famous lines in J’accuse, and the writing that gets him convicted for libel, is the last section, where he starts virtually every paragraph with the words “I accuse”. Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam was a “diabolical agent of a miscarriage of justice” (Zola, et. al., 52). Mercier was weak minded, de Boisdeffre was clerically influenced, and Pellieux and Ravary (two other General Staff officers) “led a villainous inquiry, by which I mean a most monstrously one-sided inquiry” (ibid). Zola blatantly put himself on the line to get put in jail, and he even mentions the law he violates in the letter.
Zola was immediately brought to trial, but he let the horse out of the barn. At the Zola trial a suspected forgery attributed to Colonel Henry was “paraphrasedâÂ?¦although the document itself was not produced” (Hoffman 20). The faux Henry was a letter that was originally written by the Italian military attachÃ?© Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen containing much of the information in the bordereau and Dreyfus’ apparent confession. Colonel Henry added on to the letter:
“I read that a Deputy is going to raise questions concerning Dreyfus. If anyone in Rome asks for new explanations, I am going to say that I never had any ties to this Jew” (Derfler 152).
The faux Henry was presented to the French Chamber of Deputies by Godefroy Cavaignac, a staunch anti-Dreyfusard. On July 7, 1898 he “explained at length why these pieces should be judged authentic and conclusive” (Hoffman 22). The Chamber voted almost unanimously to place the faux Henry on all of the town halls in France. Zola in response fled to England, fearing for his life.
Despite the initial defeat, the remainder of the Dreyfusards carried on and accused the French government of a cover up and a miscarriage of justice. Cavaignac was horrified to discover that the documents posted in every town in France were forgeries and were parts of two genuine documents (Hoffman 23). Fearing embarrassment and the end of his political career, Cavaignac demanded to interrogate Henry on August 30, 1898. Henry admitted to the forgeries and was jailed. He slit his own throat shortly thereafter in his cell to prevent himself from facing any more personal humiliation. General de Boisdeffre resigned, and the disgraced Esterhazy fled for England. However, the League of Patriots, a violently anti-Semitic French group, was formed by Paul Deroulede in September 1898 to continue the fight on the highest of political levels.
The Henry suicide was the pivotal point when the Dreyfusards turned the tables. The socialists, led by Jaures, came completely into the Dreyfusard camp; they initially announced their neutrality on the issue in 1894. A group called the Revisionists sprang up in the Chamber of Deputies. Led by Clemenceau, the Radical leader and Jaures, the Chamber of Deputies ruled on February 10, 1899 to “require the combined divisions of the High Court to review the Dreyfus case” (Derfler xx). Two weeks later, on February 23, Deroulede’s League of Patriots attempted to overthrow the French government. In June 1899, the French High Court threw out the earlier Dreyfus court-martial and ordered a re-trial at Rennes. France was on the verge of civil war and it took the organization of the Waldeck-Rousseau national unity government to quell the unrest in July 1899. At this time Schwarzkoppen wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II:
“The streets of Paris resemble an army camp. Everywhere are strong police detachments, strengthened with infantry and cavalryâÂ?¦Ten regiments of cavalry and several battalions of infantry arrived in Paris” (Herzog 237).
The Third Republic was on very shaky ground and clearly defined political factions were at loggerheads, making vicious attacks on one another. In this case, the “France of 1898 (1899) resembled in more than one particular the Germany of 1932” (Herzog 234-5).
Strangely enough, the one person who knew of none of this was Captain Dreyfus himself. Deported to Devil’s Island in the Caribbean, the letters he received from his wife once a month (and occasionally from his brother) are his only permitted inbound communication and are censored by the French government so he does not know of the affairs and attempt an escape. These letters, Dreyfus admits, are the only thing that keeps him alive and sane.
Dreyfus is locked in a stone and corrugated steel hut for over four years. From September of 1896 to his release in 1899, he rarely if ever saw the light of day, as he was locked in his hut for twenty-four hours a day. The draconian punishment dealt out to Dreyfus included drinking contaminated water, scarce food, and bright lights shining on him at night to prevent him from sleeping at all.
Finally, on June 8, 1899, Dreyfus is released from his hut. He describes his joy as “boundless, unutterable. At last, I was escaping from the rack to which I had been bound for five years, suffering martyrdom for the sake of my dear ones, for my children” (Dreyfus, Mortimer 326). The next day, Dreyfus sailed back to France for his second court-martial in Rennes. Three months later, in September, Dreyfus is convicted again, but with extenuating circumstances. He is offered a pardon by the French government and initially balked at it. After persuasion from his brother Mathieu, Alfred Dreyfus accepts the pardon on September 19, 1899.
The momentum at this point was firmly with the Dreyfusards. The right-wing was quashed in France, and the anti-Semitic leaders were either arrested or brought into disrepute. In 1902, French President Emile Combes started the campaign to separate church and state in France. That proposal became law in 1905. One year earlier, religious orders were banned from teaching outside their clerical boundaries. The French High Court also began a review of the second Dreyfus court-martial case in 1904. By July 12, 1906, the Court annulled the second court-martial without the need for a retrial. Dreyfus and Picquart were reinstated into the army, and both were awarded the French Legion of Honor (Derfler xxi). Dreyfus retired, but returned to active duty in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I. He retired permanently as a full Colonel after the Allied victory.
Dreyfus, Picquart, and Zola all died heroes, but anti-Semitism remained alive in France. It would rear its ugly head again in World War II with the Vichy regime deporting the Jews of France to the death camps and after the war with Prime Ministers Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac and their ineffectiveness in curbing Muslim anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus Affair does not officially close until 1995, sixty years after Alfred Dreyfus’ death, when Chirac and the French army finally absolved Dreyfus and declared him innocent of all charges.
Works Cited
Avineri, Shlomo. “Herzl’s Road to Zionism: Full of Twists and Bumps.” American Jewish Yearbook 1998, pg. 9.
http://www.hagshama.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1273&subject=70
Cain, Fabrice. “Dreyfusgate.” Trans. Dr. Ruth Morris. The Department for Jewish Zionist Education 1994, pg. 14. http://www.jafi.org.il/education/antisemitism/Dreyfus/dreyfus14.html
Derfler, Leslie. The Dreyfus Affair. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002. ppg. xvii, xx-xxi, 1-2, 7, 68, 77-8, 87, 112, 152.
Dreyfus, Alfred. Five Years of My Life. Trans. James Mortimer. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. ppg. 21-22, 42-43, 326.
Herzog, Wilhelm. From Dreyfus to Petain. Trans. Walter Sorell. New York: CreativeAge Press and Stratford Press Inc., 1947. ppg. 25, 30, 185-7, 190, 234-5, 237.
Hoffman, Robert L. More than a Trial: The Struggle Over Captain Dreyfus. New York: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1980. ppg. 3, 20, 22-23, 55.
Zola, Emile. The Dreyfus Affair: “J’accuse” and Other Writings. Ed. Alain Pages. Trans. Eleanor Levieux. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ppg. 2-3, 44,49, 52.
“Theodor (Binyamin Ze’ev) Herzl”. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2005, pg. 2. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Herzl.html
