Dreyfus affair

For twelve years, from 1894 to 1906, France was torn apart by the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain from Alsace who was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to Germany and sent to a penal colony, while the army shielded the real culprit. The long struggle to clear his name divided French society and became a lasting symbol of injustice and antisemitism.

France in the 1890s still smarted from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the loss of Alsace and Moselle to the German Empire. French military intelligence kept the German embassy in Paris under watch, and in September 1894 a housekeeper planted by the French passed on a torn-up, unsigned note found there. Addressed to the German military attaché, Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, this note, later called the bordereau, promised confidential details of French artillery.

Suspicion fell on Dreyfus, aged 35, partly on the basis of disputed handwriting comparisons. He was arrested on 15 October 1894 and tried by a military court behind closed doors. The judges were also shown a secret file that his defence never saw. On 22 December the seven judges unanimously found him guilty. At a public degradation on 5 January 1895 his insignia were torn off and his sword broken, while a crowd outside shouted "Death to the Jew". He insisted on his innocence throughout. From April 1895 he was held in harsh isolation on Devil's Island, off French Guiana.

In 1896 the new head of military intelligence, Georges Picquart, found evidence that the bordereau's true author was another officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. His superiors refused to reopen the case and set about removing Picquart from his post, and documents forged to strengthen the case against Dreyfus were added to the file. When Esterhazy was finally tried in January 1898, a military court acquitted him unanimously after a hearing of two days.

Two days later, on 13 January 1898, the novelist Émile Zola published an open letter to President Félix Faure, "J'Accuse...!", in the newspaper L'Aurore, accusing the army of a cover-up. Zola was prosecuted for libel, sentenced to a year in prison and fled to England. Antisemitic riots broke out across France during 1898.

In August 1898 an officer working for the war minister noticed that the lines on one of the main documents against Dreyfus, later known as the faux Henry, did not match from one part of the page to another. Its forger, Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry, confessed on 30 August and was found dead in his cell the next day, having cut his throat. The government sent the case for review, and on 3 June 1899 the Supreme Court quashed the 1894 verdict.

Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island and retried by a court-martial at Rennes. On 9 September 1899 the judges again found him guilty, by five votes to two, but "with extenuating circumstances", and sentenced him to ten years. To end the crisis, President Émile Loubet pardoned him, and he was freed on 21 September. Accepting a pardon implied guilt, and the fight for full rehabilitation continued.

On 12 July 1906 the Court of Cassation annulled the Rennes verdict outright. Dreyfus was restored to the army as a major and made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He served throughout the First World War, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, and died in 1935.

The affair set Dreyfusards, mostly republican and anticlerical, against anti-Dreyfusards, mostly supporters of the army and the Catholic Church. Among those who rallied to Dreyfus were Georges Clemenceau and the socialist Jean Jaurès; his enemies included Édouard Drumont's antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who reported on the degradation, later said the affair had shaped his turn to Zionism, though some historians think he overstated its influence.

Our 1880 and 1900 maps show France during the years of the Third Republic, with Alsace and Moselle inside the German Empire.