Dreyfus Affair
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The "Dreyfus Affair" was a political scandal which divided France during the 1890s and early 1900s. It involved the wrongful conviction for treason of a promising young French artillery officer of Jewish faith, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and the political and judicial scandal that followed until his full rehabilitation . He ended his career as a Lieutenant-Colonel and actively served during World War I.
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[edit] Conviction and pardon
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of both the elite École Polytechnique and of École Supérieure de Guerre, was one of the most promising young artillery officers in the French Army. His high exit rankings in both these institutions had placed him on a "fast track" which had led to his current training position, in 1894, on the Army's General Staff. Captain 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 the children—including Alfred—moved to France.
During 1894, in a very abrupt manner, Alfred Dreyfus was 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 (French Guyana). The conviction was based on a handwritten list (the so-called bordereau) offering future access to secret French military information. This list had been retrieved in the waste paper basket of the German military attaché, Major Max von Schwartzkoppen by an Alsatian cleaning lady in the employ of French intelligence services. The bordereau initially appeared to the French military authorities as implicating an artillery officer because it listed prominently a new French artillery piece, the Modèle 1890 120mm Baquet howitzer, and its novel oleo-pneumatic recoil mechanism. Although Alfred Dreyfus was in the General Staff, his artillery training, his Alsatian origins and his yearly trips to the then German town of Mulhouse in Alsace to visit his ailing father had earmarked him for suspicion. Furthermore, the writing on the bordereau was incorrectly interpreted as resembling Captain Dreyfus' own handwriting. Fearing that the extreme right-wing anti-Semitic press would learn of the affair and accuse the French Army of covering up for a Jewish officer, the French High Command led by General Mercier pressed for an early trial and conviction. By the time they realised that they had very little evidence against Dreyfus (and that what they had was not at all conclusive), it was already politically impossible to withdraw the prosecution without provoking a scandal that would have brought down the French Government and the highest levels of the French Army (Doise 1984). In other words the accusations against Captain Dreyfus, soon recognized to be void of any merit , evolved into a massive coverup to justify the High Command's initial decision to press charges against him.
The subsequent court-martial was notable for numerous errors of procedure. For instance, the defense was unaware of a secret dossier which the prosecution had provided to the military judges. The withholding of this secret dossier would have made Dreyfus' trial illegal in a French civilian court. As to the initial "why" of the Dreyfus Case, a professional French military historian, Jean Doise, provides detailed evidence that Alfred Dreyfus was used as a "patsy" or scapegoat through manipulations by French military counter-intelligence ( the so-called "Bureau de Statistique" led by a Colonel Sandherr ) . The purpose of the manipulations was to help convince Germany that the new French field gun was the imperfect, soon-to-be terminated Baquet project, instead of the revolutionary French 75mm field gun which was developed in great secrecy at the very same time (1892-1896). The torn up bordereau found discarded in the waste paper basket of German military Attache Von Schwartzkoppen was, in fact, a fabrication which had been delivered by a French infantry officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The latter either hoped to extract money from the German Attaché or was, as proposed by Jean Doise, planting a deception in German hands to throw them off the secret 75mm field gun project. The latter explanation fits with the fact that Esterhazy, in spite of being irrefutably exposed as the real author of the bordereau by Colonel Picquart, was acquitted by French military Justice and let go to retire in England with a pension. Furthermore, as also proven by the archival records, Walsin-Esterhazy had been working as a lieutenant on the staff of French military counter-intelligence ( "Bureau de Statistique" ) during the early part of his career. These recent exposures further reinforce the sordid, in fact criminal character of the machinations devised by Colonel Sandherr and his small team ( notably Major Henry and Captain Lauth ) at "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-espionnage group drifted into illegality ( Bach,2004 ). This happened because Colonel Sandherr had been encouraged, over the years, to report directly and secretely to the office of the politically appointed War Minister himself ( General Mercier ). This cascade of failures, lies and dissimulations eventually destroyed the career and hence the life of an innocent man, Alfred Dreyfus, and of his family. If one looks for a principal culprit, it is clearly General Mercier who carried, by far, the heaviest responsibility in this miscarriage of justice.
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 degraded, 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 France's Court of Cassation overturned 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 recommissioned to serve 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.
[edit] Scandal and aftermath
The Dreyfus Affair was one of the most important scandals of the French Third Republic, if not the most important. The Affair deeply divided the country into Dreyfusards (those supporting Dreyfus) and anti-Dreyfusards (those against). Generally speaking, royalists, conservatives and the Catholic Church (the "right wing") were antidreyfusards while socialists, republicans and anticlericalists (the "left wing") were dreyfusards, though there were exceptions.
The Dreyfus Affair could not have happened in a country wholly antisemitic, nor in a country devoid of antisemitism. Indeed, Alfred Dreyfus, openly Jewish, had been admitted to the most selective military schools in the country, and had been commissionned into a sensitive position; this was, at the time, unheard of in several other European countries, where policies of discrimination were often in place. In the French Army , at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1894), there were over 250 career officers professing the Jewish faith including many colonels and at least one general officer : General Samuel Naquet-Laroque who occupied a high position in the State armament industries. The Dreyfus Affair then greatly split French society and had important political repercussions; it contributed to the radicalization of opinion against the Catholic Church and the "clerical" party, which resulted in the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State.
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 statesman and journalist Georges Clemenceau appended the eye-catching title "J'accuse...!" (I Accuse!); it was published January 13, 1898 in the newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn). In the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, it was "one of the great commotions of history." Zola was convicted of libel and was forced to flee the country.
Though he brought world-wide attention and publicity to Dreyfus' unjust treatment, Zola was in fact a latecomer. The real credit for exposing the flaws behind Dreyfus' conviction belongs to four people : Dreyfus' brother Mathieu, who fought a lonely campaign for several years ; Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare ; Colonel Picquart, a high level whistle-blower in the French military intelligence services ; and finally the politician Scheurer-Kestner, who brought the injustice to the attention of the French political class. Picquart himself, the new chief of French counter-espionage who discovered the real traitor, Esterhazy, was "reassigned" to Tunisia, North Africa in December 1896 for his continual attempts to expose Major Esterhazy and rehabilitate Dreyfus.
The affair saw the emergence of the "intellectuals": that is, academics and other with high intellectual achievements who take positions on grounds on higher principles 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. The affair finished with the political and judicial defeat of the antidreyfusards, with laws voted overwhelmingly by the Chamber of Deputies in 1906 to reintegrate 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 goals.
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 enactment separating church and state. The coalition of partisan antidreyfusards remained together, but turned to other causes. Groups like Maurras' Action Française that were created 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 the Nazi extermination camps.
It is now universally agreed that Dreyfus was innocent, but his statues and monuments are occasionally vandalised by far-right activists. The Dreyfus Affair was commented upon later by Hannah Arendt in her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" claiming that the Affair evidenced a recurring theme of anti-Semitism as she sought to identify the causes of such a crisis.
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. The army didn't formally acknowledge Dreyfus' innocence until 1995.
[edit] Discussion of Theodor Herzl
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 Zionism. Herzl himself promoted this view.
However, in the past few decades this view has been rejected by historians[citation needed] who have closely examined the chronology of events. They have shown that Herzl, like most contemporary observers, including Jews, initially believed in Dreyfus' guilt. While eventually convinced of Dreyfus' innocence and indeed upset by French anti-Semitism beyond l'Affaire, Herzl seems to have been much more influenced by developments in his home city of Vienna, including the rise to power of the anti-Semitic Mayor Karl Lueger. It was this, rather than the Dreyfus Affair, which provided the chief stimulus for his support for a Jewish homeland, and which did so at a time (1895) when the pro-Dreyfus campaign had not really begun.
[edit] Centennial Commemoration
On July 12, 2006, President Jacques Chirac held an official state ceremony on the Hundred Year Anniversary of Dreyfus' official rehabilitation together with the living relatives of Emile Zola and Alfred 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 holds a memorial of the centennial of the end of the affair, particularly the laws that reintegrated and promoted Dreyfus and Picquart.
[edit] 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
- "Die Affäre Dreyfus", Yves Boisset, 1995
An American television film of 1991, "Prisoner of Honor", focuses on the efforts of a Colonel Picquart to justify the sentence of Alfred Dreyfus. (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.
[edit] Sources
- Adam Kirsch (July 11, 2006), The Most Shameful of Stains, The New York Sun
- Ronald Schechter (July 07, 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 2-02-02100-9 .
- 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
[edit] See also
- Antisemitism
- Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy the true perpetrator of the crime of which Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly accused and convicted.
[edit] External links
- (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
[edit] 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 (1973)
- Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, a Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914 (1962)
