A forged letter split France for twelve bitter years
The Dreyfus affair convulsed France's Third Republic from 1894 to 1906 after Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason. Counter-espionage chief Georges Picquart found the real culprit in 1896, yet institutions doubled down until a second trial and pardon reordered public life.
In December 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old artillery captain from Alsace with Jewish roots, was found guilty of passing military secrets to the German Embassy and shipped to Devil's Island off French Guiana, where he endured five brutal years. Two years later Georges Picquart, running counter-espionage, identified the true traitor as Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Senior officers buried the discovery, a military court cleared Esterhazy after just two days, and new charges against Dreyfus were built on forgeries. Emile Zola's open letter J'Accuse in L'Aurore then rallied public support and forced the case open again.
A retrial in 1899 produced a second guilty verdict and a ten-year term, but Dreyfus was pardoned and freed, and in 1906 he was cleared entirely. Restored to the army as a major, he served throughout the First World War, retired as a lieutenant colonel and died in 1935. Along the way France split between Dreyfusards, among them Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Henri Poincare and Georges Clemenceau, and opponents led by Edouard Drumont of La Libre Parole.
The setting explains the fury. The Third Republic was only 24 years old and reeling from the Boulanger near-coup of 1889 and the Panama scandals, while the loss of Alsace and Moselle to Germany in 1870 still fed a hunger for revenge. An arms race and the Franco-Russian Alliance of August 1892 made espionage a live fear, and a tiny counterintelligence unit called the Statistics Section, created in 1871, watched the German Embassy on Rue de Lille. The German attache Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was conducting an affair with his Italian counterpart Alessandro Panizzardi, and their letters, real and forged, later justified sealing the whole dossier.
Antisemitism had surged since Drumont's book Jewish France sold 150,000 copies in 1886. About 80,000 Jews lived in metropolitan France in 1895, half of them in Paris, with 45,000 more in Algeria. Jewish officers challenged hostile editors to duels, and poster series such as Victor Lenepveu's Musee des Horreurs caricatured Dreyfus's defenders. The case remains a byword for miscarriage of justice and antisemitism.
Source: Dreyfus affair
