Dreyfus Affair: Definition and Much More from Answers.com

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal which divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s. It involved the wrongful conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a promising young artillery officer and a Jew. The political and judicial scandal that followed lasted until Alfred Dreyfus was fully vindicated, after which he actively served in World War I as a lieutenant-colonel and was raised to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in November 1918.

Background

Anti-Semitism was pervasive in France during the 1890s. After the formal inception of the French Third Republic in 1871, in the 1880s nationalist politicians such as Georges Boulanger, Edouard Drumont (founder of the Antisemitic League of France) and Paul Déroulède (founder of Ligue des Patriotes) sought to capitalize on the new fervor for a unified Catholic France. French Jews were described by the author George L. Mosse as a "nation within a nation".^[1]

Nonetheless French Jewish people in the 1890s were in a better situation than Jews in other European states such as Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia ^{[citation needed]}. French Jews held higher positions in both the government and the army.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of both the elite École polytechnique and of École Supérieure de Guerre, was a promising young artillery officer in the French Army. His high exit rankings in both these institutions had placed him on a fast track which had led to a training position on the Army's General Staff in 1894. Dreyfus came from an old and prosperous Jewish family that had made its fortune in a textile business in Mulhouse, Alsace when that province was still a part of France. After the French defeat in 1871 and the annexation of Alsace by Germany, the entire Dreyfus family chose to remain French and moved to France.

Arrest and accusations

Abruptly in October 1894, Dreyfus was arrested and charged with passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was convicted of treason by a military tribunal in December 1894 and promptly imprisoned on Devil's Island, a prison island off the coast of French Guiana. The conviction was based on a handwritten list (the bordereau) offering access to secret French military information. The list had been retrieved from the waste paper basket of the German military attaché, Major Max von Schwartzkoppen, by Marie-Claude Bastian - codename Auguste - an Alsatian cleaning woman working in the German Embassy in Paris, employed by French military counter-intelligence. The latter was headed at that point in time by a Lt Col Sandherr. The incriminating bordereau was passed on by Lt Col Sandherr to the French War Minister himself, General Auguste Mercier. It clearly implicated an artillery officer because it listed the specifications of a new field artillery weapon, the French Modèle 1890 120 mm Baquet howitzer. Dreyfus was suspected because of his artillery training, his Alsatian origins and his yearly trips to the German town of Mulhouse to visit his ailing father. Furthermore, the writing on the bordereau resembled Dreyfus' own handwriting. Fearing that the right-wing anti-Semitic press would learn of the affair and accuse the Army of covering up for a Jewish officer, the High Command pressed for an early trial and conviction. By the time it realized it had no conclusive evidence against Dreyfus, it was politically impossible to withdraw the prosecution without a scandal bringing down the highest levels of the French Army (Doise 1984). Thus the accusations against Dreyfus, void of any merit (aside from the recovered document in handwriting similar to that of Dreyfus), became a massive cover-up to justify the hasty decision to press charges against him. While there were undoubtedly anti-Semitic undertones to these actions, aggravating the situation was the fact that Dreyfus, while being generally praised by his superiors, was not popular among some of his colleagues because of his aloof personality and comparatively wealthy background.^{[citation needed]}

Judicial errors and obstruction of justice

The subsequent court-martial was notable for numerous errors of procedure. For example, the defense was unaware of a secret dossier which the prosecution provided to the military judges (Bredin,1986). Withholding this dossier from the defense was illegal by French law. The French military historian Jean Doise, a retired high level officer in the French Army's General Staff, has published detailed evidence (Doise, 1984) leading him to accept the conclusion that Dreyfus may have been used as a patsy or scapegoat by French military counter-intelligence (the Bureau de Statistique led by Lt Colonel Sandherr). According to Doise (1984), the intense prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus was initially designed to mislead German espionage into believing that it had stumbled onto highly sensitive artillery information.

On the other hand, it is not a novel conclusion (Lewis, 1994) that the torn up bordereau found discarded in the waste paper basket of Attaché von Schwartzkoppen was, in fact, a fabrication which had been hand written and delivered by a French-born infantry officer of Hungarian descent, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. At the top of the list on the "borderau" was a promise to deliver to the German Military Attache information concerning a new French howitzer (the 120 mm Baquet) as well as the specifications of its novel hydraulic recoil mechanism. Esterhazy had either hoped to extract money from the German Attaché or had, as proposed by Jean Doise (1984), planted a deception into German hands to throw them off the Canon de 75mm modele 1897 field gun project. It is also well documented by the military archival records that the new French 75 prototype was in secret progress at that very same time. Jean Doise's explanation fits with the fact that, in spite of being exposed in 1896 by Lt Col Picquart (Sandherr's successor as head of military counter-intelligence) as the author of the "bordereau", Esterhazy was acquitted by French military Justice in January 1898 and let go to retire in England with a pension. Furthermore, and as documented by the French archival records, Walsin-Esterhazy had once been working full-time as a lieutenant on the staff of military counter-intelligence (the very same Bureau de Statistique once led by Lt Colonel Sandherr). This episode took place during the early part of Esterhazy's career, before the Dreyfus Affair. In other words and in clear terms, there is verifiable archival evidence that Major Esterhazy was a past member of French military counter-intelligence and had known Sandherr for many years (General Andre Bach, 2004). General Bach is now retired and was previously in charge of the "Service Historique de l'Armee", the French Army's central historical archives at Fort de Vincennes near Paris.

These recent exposures by French military historians further underline the sordid, in fact criminal, character of the machinations devised by Lt Colonel Sandherr and his small group (notably Major Hubert Joseph Henry and Captain Lauth) at the Bureau de Statistique. Because they operated as a distinct and separate bureaucracy from the regular military intelligence section (the 2eme bureau) at the French War Ministry, Sandherr's small counter-intelligence group (the so-called "Bureau de Statistique") drifted into illegality and obstruction of justice (General Andre Bach, 2004). This happened because Lt Colonel Sandherr had been encouraged, over the years, to report directly and secretly to the office of the politically appointed War Minister himself (General Auguste Mercier). This cascade of internal communication failures, lies, and dissimulations eventually destroyed the career and hence the life of an innocent man, Alfred Dreyfus, and of his family. It is well documented (Bach, 2004) that General Auguste Mercier was the responsible party in initiating this chain of events, and later in pressing for the cover-up of this miscarriage of justice. Whether he had been inspired at the very beginning by General Deloye, who directed French Artillery, is a plausible but unprovable speculation (Doise, 1984).

Alfred Dreyfus was put on trial in 1894 and was accused of espionage, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison on Devil's Island. He was publicly cashiered: his rank marks and buttons were ripped off his uniform and his sabre was broken. In June 1899 the case was reopened, following the uncovering of exonerating evidence and of the fact that Dreyfus had been denied due process during the initial court-martial. France's Court of Cassation quashed his conviction and ordered a new court-martial. Despite the new evidence presented at his new military trial, Dreyfus was reconvicted in September and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was subsequently pardoned by President Émile Loubet and freed, but would not be formally exonerated until 12 July 1906, when the Court of Cassation annulled his second conviction.

He was thereafter readmitted to the army and made a knight in the Légion d’Honneur. Dreyfus was recalled to active duty and served behind the lines of the Western Front during World War I as a Lieutenant-Colonel of Artillery though he did perform some frontline duties in 1917. He served his nation with distinction beyond his natural retirement age.

Scandal and aftermath

The Dreyfus affair became one of the gravest crises to rock the French Third Republic. "The Affair" deeply divided the country into Dreyfusards (supporters of Dreyfus) and anti-Dreyfusards. Generally speaking, royalists, conservatives and the Catholic Church (the "right wing") were anti-Dreyfusards, while Dreyfusards were socialists, republicans and anticlericalists, though there were exceptions ^{[citation needed]}.

The Dreyfus affair could not have developed as it did in a country wholly antisemitic, nor in a country devoid of antisemitism. Dreyfus's Jewish background was well-known, yet he had been admitted to the most-selective military schools in the country and had been assigned to a sensitive position; this would have been unheard of in some other European countries, where discriminatory practices were well-established at the time. In the armies of the French Republic in 1894, there were over 250 career officers professing the Jewish faith (Birnbaum, 1998), including many colonels and at least one general officer, General Samuel Naquet-Laroque (1843-1921), who occupied a high position in the state armament industries. That same period also saw the rise of Lt Colonel Mardochee-Georges Valabregue (1854-1934), an artilleryman from the École polytechnique and an observant Jew from an old French family (as Alfred Dreyfus), who became the Commander in Chief of the École supérieure de guerre in 1905. He became a divisional commander and a full general during WW 1. As a matter of record there were three other French career officers at the time of the affair who also bore the name Dreyfus but were unrelated to Alfred Dreyfus: Captain Sylvain Dreyfus, Major Émile Dreyfus and Captain Paul Dreyfus (Birnbaum, 1998). Two among those three French officers professing the Jewish faith were also, like Alfred Dreyfus, alumni of the elite École polytechnique.

The writer Émile Zola is often thought to have exposed the affair to the general public in a famously incendiary open letter to President Félix Faure to which the French journalist and politician Georges Clemenceau had affixed the headline "J'accuse!" (I accuse!); it was published January 13, 1898 in the maiden issue of the newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn). It had the effect of a bomb. In the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, it was "one of the great commotions of history." Zola's intent was to force his own prosecution for libel so that the emerging facts of the Dreyfus case could be thoroughly aired. In this he succeeded. He was convicted, appealed, was retried, and, before hearing the result, fled to England on the advice of his counsel and friends, returning to Paris in June 1899 when he heard that Dreyfus's trial was to be reviewed.

Zola's world fame and internationally respected reputation brought international attention to Dreyfus' unjust treatment. Most of the work of exposing the errors in Dreyfus' conviction was done by four people: Dreyfus' brother Mathieu, who fought a lonely campaign for several years; Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare; Lt.Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, a senior infantry officer who had replaced Lt. Colonel Sandherr at the helm of French Military Counter-intelligence; and the vice-president of the Senate, Scheurer-Kestner, who worked resolutely to make the case for revision of Dreyfus's conviction to the French government. Picquart himself, who had demonstrated that the real traitor was Major Esterhazy, was reassigned to a post in the south of Tunisia in December 1896. This was not necessarily an inappropriate assignment, since Picquart had been seconded to Military Counter-intelligence from a North African Tirailleur regiment. The intention, however, was clearly to get him away from Paris.

The affair saw the emergence of the "intellectuals"—academics and others with high intellectual achievements who took positions on grounds of higher principle —such as Zola, the novelists Octave Mirbeau and Anatole France, the mathematicians Henri Poincaré and Jacques Hadamard, and the librarian of the École Normale Supérieure, Lucien Herr. Constantin Mille, a Romanian Socialist writer and émigré in Paris, identified the anti-Dreyfusard camp with a "militarist dictatorship".^[2]

In 1906 the Chamber of Deputies overwhelmingly approved measures to rehabilitate and promote Dreyfus and Picquart in the Army (Picquart became a general and even held the position of Minister of War). Anti-Dreyfusards then denounced the use of the Dreyfus affair for political ends.

The factions in the Dreyfus affair remained in place for decades afterwards. The far right remained a potent force, as did the moderate liberals. The liberal victory played an important role in pushing the far right to the fringes of French politics. It also prompted legislation such as a 1905 law separating church and state. The coalition of partisan anti-Dreyfusards remained together, but turned to other causes. Groups such as Maurras' Action Française, formed during the affair, endured for decades. The right-wing Vichy Regime was composed to some extent of old anti-Dreyfusards and their descendants. The Vichy Regime would later deport Dreyfus' grand-daughter to her death at a Nazi extermination camp.^[3]

In 1985, President François Mitterrand commissioned a statue of Dreyfus by sculptor Louis Mitelberg to be installed at the École Militaire, but the minister of defense refused to display it. Although rehabilitated in the army in 1906, the military didn't formally acknowledge Dreyfus' innocence until 1995 ^{[citation needed]}.

The Dreyfus Affair, anti-Semitism and Zionism

The Jewish-Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl was assigned to report on the trial and its aftermath. Soon afterward, Herzl wrote The Jewish State (1896) and founded the World Zionist Organization, which called for the creation of a Jewish State. For many years it was believed that the anti-Semitism and injustice revealed in France by the conviction of Dreyfus had a radicalizing effect on Herzl, showing him that Jews could never hope for fair treatment in European society, thus orienting him toward creating a Jewish state. Herzl himself promoted this view.

Despite his complete exoneration, Dreyfus's statues and monuments are occasionally vandalised by far-right activists. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that the affair evidenced a recurring theme of anti-Semitism and sought to identify its causes.

Centennial commemoration

On July 12 2006, Ex-President Jacques Chirac held an official state ceremony on the Hundred Year Anniversary of Dreyfus' official rehabilitation together with the living relatives of Zola and Dreyfus. The event was held in the cobblestone courtyard of Paris' École Militaire, where Dreyfus had been officially stripped of his officer's rank. Chirac stated that "the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won," and called Dreyfus "an exemplary officer" and a "patriot who passionately loved France." The French National Assembly held a memorial of the centennial of the end of the affair, particularly the laws that reintegrated and promoted Dreyfus and Picquart.

Films and theatre

Films:

• "L'Affaire Dreyfus", Georges Méliès, Stumm, France, 1899
• "Trial of Captain Dreyfus", Stumm, USA, 1899
• "Dreyfus", Richard Oswald, Germany, 1930
• "The Dreyfus Case", F.W. Kraemer, Milton Rosmer, USA, 1931
• "The Life of Emile Zola", USA, 1937
• "I Accuse!", José Ferrer, England, 1958
• "L"Affaire Dreyfus" (released in Germany as "Die Affäre Dreyfus"), Yves Boisset, 1995

A British-made television film of 1991, "Prisoner of Honor", directed by Ken Russell, focuses on the efforts of Colonel Picquart to have the sentence of Alfred Dreyfus overturned. (Colonel Picquart was played by American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who claims to be a descendant of Alfred Dreyfus).

Theatre:

• Seymour Hicks wrote a drama called One of the Best, based on the Dreyfus trial, starring William Terriss. It played at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1895. The idea was suggested to Hicks by W. S. Gilbert.

See also

• Antisemitism
• Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy the true perpetrator of the crime of which Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly accused and convicted.

Notes

1. ^ George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 150.
2. ^ (Romanian) Constantin Antip, "Émile Zola: «Adevărul este în marş»" ("Émile Zola: «Truth Is Marching On»"), in Magazin Istoric
3. ^ http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=31&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.floridaholocaustmuseum.org%2FNewsletter%2FFHM_winter_2005.pdf&ei=AvsFR9nAGIiagQKL_PiqBQ&usg=AFQjCNHYmuivmZiYwC-ZuLXb_6YLV1uoLA&sig2=kZ2zYn_LbZslgeBZhJ5NdA

References

• Adam Kirsch (July 11, 2006), The Most Shameful of Stains, The New York Sun
• Ronald Schechter (July 7, 2006), The Ghosts of Alfred Dreyfus, The Forward
• Stanley Meisler (July 9, 2006), Not just a Jew in a French jail, The Los Angeles Times
• Kim Willsher (June 27, 2006), Calls for Dreyfus to be buried in Panthéon, The Guardian
• Anya Rous The Rising Celebrity and Modern Politics—The Dreyfus Affair
• Jean Doise, 1984, "Un secret bien garde.Histoire militaire de l'Affaire Dreyfus". Editions du Seuil, Paris, ISBN 2-02-021100-9
• General Andre Bach, 2004, "L'Armee de Dreyfus. Une histoire politique de l'armee francaise de Charles X a l'"Affaire". Tallandier,Paris, ISBN 2-84734-039-4
• Pierre Birnbaum,1998,"L'Armee Francaise etait elle antisemite ?", pp 70-82 in Michel Winock: "L'Affaire Dreyfus", Editions du Seuil, Paris, ISBN 2-02-032848-8.

External links

• (English) (French) 1906 : Dreyfus rehabilitated. Site of the French Ministry of Culture
• (French) Site of the National Assembly
• Text of J'accuse! (in French)
• Text of J'accuse! (in English and French)
• Alfred Dreyfus and "The Affair"
• America's Dreyfus Affair by David Martin
• Complete Digital Bibliography on CD-ROM
• Greatest Newspaper Article of all Time (Journalistic retrospective of Zola's "J'accuse!")
• Prisoner of Honor at the Internet Movie Database
• JewishEncyclopedia.com - Andre Cremieu-Foa
• Temporal and Eternal by Charles Péguy, translated by Alexander Dru
• The Life of Emile Zola at the Internet Movie Database

Further reading

• Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (1986)
• Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics (1996), ISBN 0-582-27679-9)
• Guy Chapman, The Dreyfus Trials (1972)
• Nicholas Halasz, Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria (1955)
• Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (1999)
• David Levering Lewis, Prisoners of Honor, the Dreyfus Affair(1994),Henry Holt and Co, ISBN 0-8050-3766-7
• The Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG, The Dreyfus Case a Century On - Ten Lessons for Ireland & Australia http://www.lawsociety.ie/documents/committees/hr/lectures/dreyfusaffair2006.pdf

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