There are those who
say that honor, loyalty, and duty to one’s country are the most
important virtues. But what if such patriotism is sustained by the
practice of deceit, dishonesty, and the persecution of innocent
people? Are the virtues of truth and justice superior? Does an
individual have the right to disagree with their nation to uphold
these higher standards? The Dreyfus Affair put French society to the
this test at the end of the 19th century.
During the 1870
war between France and Germany, a young Jewish boy named Alfred
Dreyfus lived in the French territory of Alsace-Lorraine. He watched
as the German army invaded his town and slaughtered the French
soldiers defending it. The Germans took control and eventually
annexed Alsace. The family of Alfred Dreyfus fled to Paris and
declared themselves French citizens. Young Alfred grew up dreaming
about joining the French military so that one day he could avenge the
injustice of the German occupation. His life’s ambition was to
faithfully serve and protect his country.
One evening in
1894, a French cleaning woman went to work, cleaning the office of a
German military attache named Alexander von Schwarzkoppen stationed
in Paris. Part of her routine was to empty the contents of a
wastepaper basket into a bag and take it to the Section of
Statistics, a French military intelligence bureau. Day after day,
officials would sort through von Schwarzkoppen’s garbage, looking
for evidence of what the spy, posing as a German diplomat, knew about
their affairs. Most of what they found were ashes, some were crumpled
up letters or documents, still others were papers torn into tiny
pieces which they proceeded to piece together. Many of those papers
were correspondences with an Italian spy named Alessandro Panizzardi.
Apparently the two spooks were having a love affair. Or were those
references to buggery really coded messages? No one knows for sure
but what is well known is that one of those torn-up papers had
hand-written, secret artillery information and logistics that only an
insider, say a commanding officer, would be aware of. Somebody in the
French military was a spy and a traitor too. The letter subsequently
became known as the Letter D document because it was signed at the
bottom with no name, only the letter D.
Alfred Dreyfus
graduated from the French military academy with distinction. He was a
serious student with a quick mind and unfailing attitude of loyalty.
He did not excel in all his subjects but he did well in most of them.
He was quiet and aloof, characteristics that would cause some other
students to think of him as arrogant. After graduation he was sworn
in as a low-ranking captain of an artillery squadron. Dreyfus’s
last name started with the letter D; the
Letter
D document was signed with the letter D. Therefore,
according to the Station of Statistics, the incriminating document
was written by Alfred Dreyfus who was also Jewish. The military
officials quickly
decided that he must be tried and convicted of espionage and treason.
Due
to French tradition, the military at that time was deeply
conservative and loyal to the Catholic church. Jews and Protestants
were regarded as foreigners, in other words, enemies who could not be
trusted. In the 1890s, France as a whole saw a wave of anti-Jewish
sentiment and the commanding officers of the army felt a deep
attachment to this social trend.
The
original document was first received by the officer Commandant Henry
who passed it on to his superior Commandant Mercier. The
anti-Semite met with other high-ranking officers who agreed
to link the letter to Alfred Dreyfus. On his day off, Commandant du
Paty de Clam summoned Dreyfus to an office and dictated a letter to
him,
saying that a hand injury prevented him from writing it himself. He
also directed Dreyfus to sign the letter as D. That
document was then taken to Henry.
Meanwhile,
the cleaning lady delivered more garbage collected from von
Schwarzkoppen’s office and this time another letter with the same
information as the Letter D was found, written in handwriting that
was clearly not the same as
that on the original document. The
intelligence agents deduced it was written by the German military
attache and addressed to P
which most likely stood for Panizzardi. The espionage triangle had
been fully revealed.
Mercier
ordered the arrest of Alfred Dreyfus. The stupefied captain was
imprisoned in Cherche-Midi without
any explanation as to what the charges against him were. He learned
about it all on the
day his trial by military tribunal began. The deck was stacked
against him from the start. His attorney had no time to prepare a
defense; he mostly had to improvise and often the judges would not
even allow him to speak. The prosecution admitted Letter D as the
first piece of evidence and then entered the letter that du Paty de
Clam had dictated to Dreyfus so the handwriting on the two papers
could be compared. A handwriting expert from the intelligence agency
named Brillon was bought in. Anyone who held the two documents side
by side could see that they were obviously written by two different
people but the senile old scientist used an elaborate chart that
looked like an astrological diagram to explain the procedures of
handwriting analysis. He baffled the judges with a speech that
sounded like the impenetrable babbling of medieval alchemists and
wound up by saying there is undisputed proof that the writing in
Letter D could only have been written by Dreyfus and no one else.
The
next part of the trial was held in secret council The prosecution met
with the three military judges without the defense being present.
They presented a secret document that the Dreyfus team was not
allowed to see. Alfred Dreyfus’s only line of defense was to
continually reiterate that he had no knowledge of Letter D and had
never written it. The judges quickly declared Dreyfus to be guilty of
treason and sentenced him to life imprisonment in exile.
The next day, Commandant du Paty de Clam visited Dreyfus in his
cell at Cherche-Midi. He told the captain that he could get him a
more lenient sentence if he confessed to his crime. Dreyfus refused.
Du Paty de Clam went into a rage and began shouting at him then
stormed off. The prison warden was there to witness the incident. He
later contacted Alfred Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu.
One morning, Alfred Dreyfus was taken in his full military
uniform to the military parade ground for a ceremony of degradation.
He was marched for display in front of the whole army. An officer
took off Drefus’s hat and threw it on the ground. He tore the
medals and epaulettes from his jacket then commanded him to take it
off. He drew Dreyfus’s sword from its scabbard and broke it over
his knee. The soldiers collectively jeered and booed and Dreyfus was
hauled off to a ship where they locked him in a cell and made a long
journey to the Caribbean.
Alfred
Dreyfus was taken to Devil’s Island, a tiny penal strip of land off
the coast of French Guiana. The equatorial heat was brutally hot.
They imprisoned him in a shack and fed him only bread and water. In
the daytime he was allowed out but he could only walk around the
shack which was surrounded by two walls to prevent his escape. At
night they shackled his wrists and ankles to the bed posts. Dreyfus
was allowed to read and write letters to his wife Lucie but most of
the letters were intercepted by the guards and kept in a file in the
Section of Statistics to be used as further evidence of his guilt.
Dreyfus was not allowed to socialize with the guards. The shackles
were cutting into his flesh and causing infections so he had to tear
his clothes to shreds to make protective padding.
While
Alfred Dreyfus rotted away in his prison shack, the warden of
Cherche-Midi contacted his brother Mathieu and told him about the
encounter he witnessed when du Paty de Clam demanded a confession
from the prisoner. Convinced
of Alfred’s innocence, the jailer decided to speak out. Mathieu
Dreyfus was a successful, upper-middle class bourgeoisie. He
immediately started using his social contacts to meet with
representatives of the media. Most of them were not interested in the
Dreyfus story but there was one, a Jewish anarchist named Bernard
Lazare, who saw the case as a chance to mobilize the public. Lazare
started publishing editorials in his newspaper explaining the facts
of the case
and decrying the injustice of the conviction.
The
general public and a handful of intellectuals took notice and about
the same time, a young colonel
named Picquart
went to work at the Station of Statistics. Not having any immediate
work for him, his superiors kept him occupied by managing incoming
documents. Part of his job was filing papers into the Dreyfus dossier
which they insisted on stuffing with any document, no matter how
trivial, relating to the case of Alfred Dreyfus. One day a letter
came to Picquart’s
desk. An agent intercepted it
in the mail en route to von Schwarzkoppen’s office; the return
address indicated it was being sent from an apartment in Paris. When
Picquart
opened the envelope he was shocked. The handwriting looked familiar.
He went to the Dreyfus dossier and retrieved the incriminating Letter
D. Upon comparing the two letters it was obvious to see that they had
been written by the same hand. This new letter also had intelligence
about the artillery division written in a thinly veiled code.
Picquart
took the two papers to Commandant Henry. They were able to trace the
letters to another artillery captain named Esterhazy. He was a former
Hungarian-Prussian count with a long drooping mustache. His family
had emigrated to France when he was young. Esterhazy was known to be
a schemer, a blackmailer, a compulsive gambler, and a squanderer of
his family’s money. He
dishonored the family’s name by constantly borrowing money without
paying it back. Never
secretive about his whoring and heavy drinking, his family disowned
him and stripped him of his aristocratic title, making him nothing
but a commoner, no longer a count, for the rest of his life. Aside
from commanding an army squadron, he spent most of his time scamming
money from everyone he met, even
his brother.
Picquart
circulated the documents throughout the Section of Statistics. If the
evidence was not damning enough, it got worse because the story got
leaked to the press. Leftist newspapers seized the issue and brought
it even further into the public’s attention. An
inquiry was launched and it was agreed that Esterhazy should be tried
before a military tribunal.
Workers at the Station of Statistics started to become aware that
Esterhazy, the distinctive looking ethnic Hungarian commandant,
sometimes quietly showed up for meetings in Henry’s office with the
door tightly shut. Some even said they had spotted Henry and
Esterhazy having brief social encounters in public.
Esterhazy’s
trial was short.
The prosecution made the most of his sloppy demeanor and
irresponsible behavior. They even entered as evidence a letter he had
sent to a mistress in which he clearly stated his hatred of France.
In defense, Esterhazy admitted to writing that letter but insisted
that Alfred Dreyfus had forged Esterhazy’s handwriting for
Letter D in an effort to hide
his identity. Henry, Mercier, du Paty de Clam and others all
testified to the sneakiness and cleverness of the Jews who
had no loyalty to any nation. Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew so that proved
he could pull off this outrageous stunt. The judges deliberated for
only three minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty for
Esterhazy.
The officers at the Station of Statistics were worried that
Picquart had learned too much. He was a young, loyal, and earnest
colonel but they feared he would unwittingly stir up too much
trouble. They got him out of the way by assigning him to command
colonial troops in Algeria.
The
leftist media went into a rage. The famous French novelist
Emile Zola published an editorial called “J’Accuse” in a paper;
he heavy-handedly listed all the reasons why Alfred Dreyfus should be
given a civil trial. A team of right wing lawyers charged Zola with
treason. Their case was taken to civil court with Zola as a
defendant. The prosecution
rehashed the same old tropes about Alfred Dreyfus they used in the
first military tribunal and the jury found Esterhazy innocent. Zola
was found guilty for making false accusations against him and
sentenced to prison. His sentence was later suspended.
A clique of military officers were in the strange position of
having persecuted the innocent Alfred Dreyfus, a loyal and patriotic
man, by sheltering and defending a known con-artist and spy who was
obviously guilty of treason. Of course, Dreyfus was Jewish and
Esterhazy was not. The officers were conservative Catholics and
anti-Semites so ridding the army of Jews took precedence over honesty
or truth.
Esterhazy felt Paris was too hot to handle. He quit the army,
shaved his mustache, bought new clothes, and exiled himself to
Belgium where he continued losing other people’s money so he could
have fun.
The French right wing reacted to the verdict with violent
jubilance. Mobs of young people took to the streets armed with clubs
and bricks. Jewish businesses were vandalized, looted, and burned to
the ground. Several people were attacked and killed as a wave of
anti-Jewish hate spread throughout the country. A sect of Catholic
clergymen called The Assumptionists grew in popularity, especially
within the ranks of military officers. Aside from being anti-Semitic,
the reactionary Assumptionists also called for an end to
parliamentary democracy, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. They
believed in reinstating the French monarchy and returning to a
feudalist economy, free from religious and ethnic diversity.
Xenophobic and racist, they took it on faith that anybody who was not
French or Catholic was part of a conspiracy to destroy the French
nation. With the Assumptionists, the seeds of 20th century
fascism were sown.
The left wing intelligentsia also saw the Dreyfus trial as a
rallying point. The centrist government of Meline could no longer
hold the country together as the moderate sectors of the population
allied themselves with the progressives who were starting to be
called the Dreyfusards. Several disparate groups took sides with
them. Socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, and
democratic-republicans joined forces with atheists, pacifists,
scientists, and human rights activists although this conglomeration
of special interest groups were often more concerned with
piggybacking on the Dreyfus controversy to further their own agendas.
The Dreyfus Affair had split France straight down the middle with a
wide, uncrossable chasm separating progressives from conservative
reactionaries.
Due to the media’s constant hammering at the Dreyfus case with
its deep analysis of facts and logical arguments, the left wing in
France began to gain the upper hand. Support for the right wing
ideologues began to slip as it became more and more obvious that they
had no evidence to build their case against Dreyfus on; they were an
emotionally charged rabble of hotheaded windbags with nothing but bad
intentions. Commandant Henry knew something had to be done to revive
the anti-Jewish cause. He got hold of another letter written by the
Italian spy Panizzardi and cut off the heading and last lines. These
were pasted to sheet of paper, the center of which he filled with an
amateurish forgery of a confession from Dreyfus that said he was
working with Panizzardi and von Schwarzkoppen as a spy for the sake
of starting a war with Germany. Where Panizzardi had signed the
letter P at the end, Henry altered it to say D instead,
making it look as if Alfred Dreyfus had written the letter. He then
photographed the document and sent it to the press. It was printed in
newspapers all around the country; the forgery was also printed on
flyers and posted in town squares everywhere. The anti-Semites
believed they had the proof they needed, definitively proving that
Alfred Dreyfus was guilty of treason.
Then an unknown person retrieved the forged letter from the
Station of Statistics’ files and brought it to the attention of the
authorities. After careful examination, it was clear that Henry had
created it himself. The letters were written on lined paper and the
lines in the middle were a different color than the lines at the top
and bottom. Comparisons with Dreyfus’s handwriting did not match;
his cursive was written with a smooth flow and Henry’s appeared
jerky and uneven as if he were writing slowly and carefully while
deliberately trying to make it look like the script of someone else.
Henry was summoned to a meeting with his superiors. Henry broke down
crying and admitted to having forged the Dreyfus confession but he
claimed he did it to protect the army from the conspiracy of Jewish
infiltrators that were polluting the French army and trying to take
down the nation from within. The police handcuffed Henry and locked
him in a cell in Cherche-Midi. After writing a letter to his wife, he
slit his throat with a razor. Nobody knows how the blade got into his
cell.
Intelligence agents located Esterhazy in Belgium. He refused to
return to France but agreed to answer written questions through the
mail. Under the threat of legal pressure, he admitted that it was he,
and not Alfred Dreyfus, who wrote the Letter D which was originally
seized. He admitted to spying on behalf of von Schwarzkoppen and
Panizzardi but his excuse was that he was commanded to do so by the
Station of Statistic’s head officer Sandherr with the intention of
feeding them misinformation. The problem with Esterhazy’s story is
that the information he had written in the documents was true and the
part about Sandherr could not be corroborated since the director had
already died. They later learned that von Schwarzkoppen was merely
paying Esterhazy for information because he wanted money to indulge
in his gambling habits.
Socially and politically, the French majority supported the
causes of the leftists, progressivists, and Deryfusards by 1896. The
liberal prime minister Waldeck-Rousseau had been sworn into office.
When the story of Henry’s forgery and suicide, along with the
account of Esterhazy’s treason, got into the papers, the government
began taking the Dreyfus Affair into serious consideration. By 1898,
a court martial proceeding was scheduled. The exile of Alfred Drefus
ended when he was taken off Devil’s Island and transported by
steamboat back to France for the trial. Colonel Picquart, who had
also been imprisoned for making a false accusation against Esterhazy,
was released to join the defense team along with Dreyfus. The two
lawyers representing them were named Demange and Labori.
The court martial was intended to be a retrial of the military
tribunal. This time it was to be tried by a team of seven federal
judges. Most of the original witnesses were too sick or too senile to
testify for the prosecution. Some of them were dead. The retired and
ailing commandant Mercier did most of the speaking, the majority of
which explained how Alfred Dreyfus the Jew was untrustworthy,
chronically dishonest, incapable of loyalty because of his religion,
and incapable of being nothing but a traitor and a false human being.
He presented no evidence other than the original Letter D that
started the whole ordeal. This was again analyzed for the court by
the looney handwriting expert Brillon who repeated the gibberish he
originally said in the first trial. Mercier later came back to defend
Henry’s forgery, saying it was necessary to protect the honor of
the army. Mercier also claimed to have a letter written by Germany’s
King Wilhelm II which clearly says that Alfred Dreyfus was employed
as a spy for their nation; this document was not admitted as evidence
since it supposedly contained classified information. Most likely it
never existed since it has never been found in the intelligence
agency’s archives.
The defense should have had an easy time winning the case. They
had all the evidence on their side but Demange and the envious Labori
were constantly bickering with other about how to proceed. Still,
their lack of coordination should not have damaged any of the hard
evidence they had on their side. Then things got worse for Labori.
One evening as he took a stroll by the Seine, an assassin shot at him
from behind and ran away. The police made no attempt to apprehend the
gunman. Labori fell face down with one bullet lodged in his back next
to his spine. The surgeon decided the risk involved with removing the
bullet was too great, so Labori was left to recover in bed. The
judges ruled against postponing the end of the trial and Demange took
over as the only attorney for the defense. Labori quickly recovered
and returned to the trial, bellicose as ever. His arguments with
Demange continued to wound the morale of the defendants. But by then
he had contacted von Schwarzkoppen and Panizzardi. The two spies who
had fled France when the Dreyfus Affair came to public attention. The
had both sent letters claiming that they had never hired or worked
with Alfred Dreyfus. They had never met him and had never heard of
him until they read about him in the news. When Alfred Dreyfus was
asked by the court to make a statement, he stood up and simply said,
“I am innocent” then sat down again.
The defense’s final statement was given by Demange. He made a
five hour speech that had everyone in the courtroom on the edge of
their seats with tears in their eyes. After Demange’s tour de
force, the jealous and sullen Labori decided to sulk rather than add
anything of his own. The judges went to their chambers to deliberate
and when they returned they announced that Alfred Dreyfus was found
guilty of treason with five judges voting to convict him, two were in
favor of acquittal. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.
The progressivist prime minister Waldeck-Rouseau felt sympathetic
to Alfred Dreyfus and Picquart. He approached the defense team. Under
French law he had the legal authority to pardon criminals with the
consent of parliament. However, there was an unpleasant catch. In
order to be pardoned, they had to admit to being guilty as charged
when originally brought to trial. The pardon would also exonerate the
anti-Jewish military conspirators, making it impossible to bring them
to any future trials regarding the Dreyfus Affair. Picquart was
quick to agree to this but Alfred Dreyfus decided to spend some time
thinking it over. It is true that he would be free to live the rest
of his life with his family but by admitting to a crime he never
committed, his honor would be permanently tarnished. Eventually, he
decided to accept the pardon. Waldeck-Rousseau’s bill passed
through parliament with an overwhelming majority in favor of Dreyfus
and Picquart. To compensate the two men, the government passed a bill
saying that all French newspapers were legally obligated to print an
announcement declaring that Dreyfus and Picquart were innocent of all
charges against them. Technically, they were considered to be guilty
on paper but in the eyes of the media and the general public they
were fully vindicated. The French military had conducted a conspiracy
of lies and deceit to hide their mistakes and preserve their honor
but in the end the unraveling of their water-thin case disgraced them
anyways.
The troops were summoned to the parade ground. Dreyfus and
Picquart were ceremonially reinstated into the French army while in
full uniform, medals, epaulettes and all. In another ceremony, they
were awarded with medals making them members of the French Legion of
Honor. The younger Picquart was given a prominent position as a
lieutenant. The older and frailer Dreyfus was returned to his
position as a captain of a small artillery squadron. After two years
he retired and died soon after.
Reference
Bredin,
Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. George
Braziller, New York: 1983
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