The Dreyfus Affair: A Poison in The French Body-politic

Alfred Dreyfus was a Captain in the French Army. He was an efficient officer whose diligence and hard work soon came to the attention of his superiors and he was quickly assigned to the French General Staff. But he was never truly trusted. He had been born and raised in the city of Mulhouse in the region of Alsace which since the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, had been annexed by Germany, and he was as fluent in German as he was in French. Moreover, he was a Jew. The Jews had been fully assimilated into French society since the time of the Revolution, but they were still seen by many to be an alien presence, and anti-Semitism was rife. In 1894, these things combined in a scandal that rocked France to its very foundations and has continued to traumatise the politics of the country ever since.

In September, 1894, a French cleaning woman at the German Embassy, Marie Bastian, who was also employed as a spy by French Counter-Intelligence retrieved a bordereau (a list) from the waste-paper basket of General Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache. It appeared to indicate the willingness of a French artillery officer in the General Staff to sell secrets to the Germans for a price, and it was signed D. Suspicion immediately fell upon the Jew, Dreyfus the German from Alsace. 

In October, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for spying and charged with treason. He had never been popular amongst his colleagues. He was distant, aloof, and didn’t mix. He was also personally wealthy which caused great resentment. There were many only too willing to believe that the arrogant Dreyfus must be guilty, even though the evidence against him was flimsy and circumstantial. Indeed, experts could not even agree that the bordereau had been written in his hand. Even so, in December, 1894, Dreyfus was found guilty by a Military Tribunal, and on 5 January, 1895, after a humiliating public ordeal when he was stripped of his rank, he was transported to serve a life sentence on the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guyana. As far as the French Army was concerned that was that.  Except it wasn’t.

In April, 1896, Lt Colonel Georges Picquart, who was well known to be virulently anti-Semitic, and had just been appointed Head of Army Intelligence, discovered that the bordereau had in fact been written by a French officer of Hungarian descent, Major Ferdinand Wilsan Esterhazy. Picquart was warned not to take his discovery any further, but he refused. He continued to delve further but his investigations were impeded at every opportunity by Major Hubert Henry, a friend of Esterhazy’s, whom it would emerge had forged documents to ensure that Dreyfus was found guilty. Unable to persuade Picquart to cease his investigations, in December, 1894, he was relieved of duty and sent to serve in Tunisia. But it was too late. The fact that new evidence had emerged that might exonerate Dreyfus had already been leaked to the press and it had sparked a national debate.