Dreyfus affair

The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided France during the 1890s and early 1900s. It involved the wrongful conviction of Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason and a subsequent political and judicial scandal.

Conviction and pardon

File:Dreyfus3.jpg

Captain Alfred Dreyfus in military uniform.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of the elite "Ecole Polytechnique", was one of the most promising young artillery officers in the French Army. He had clearly been placed on a "fast track" as a junior member of the Army's General Staff. He 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 incuding Alfred Dreyfus moved to France. During 1894,in a very abrupt manner, Alfred Dreyfus was charged with passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and in December 1894 he was convicted of treason and later imprisoned on Devil's Island. The conviction was based on a hand written document (the "bordereau"), offering secret miltary information, which was found in the waste paper basket of the German military attaché, Major Max von Schwartzkoppen. The "bordereau" initially appeared to the French military authorities to implicate an artillery officer because it prominently listed a very recent ( Mle 1890) French artillery piece, the 120mm Baquet, and its novel hydro-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. Also 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 military command pushed 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 major scandal that would have brought down the French government and, above all, the highest levels of the French Army{{Doise,1984). The subsequent court martial was notable for numerous errors of procedure. Most notably, the defense was unaware of a secret dossier which the prosecution provided to the military judges. The withholding of this dossier made Dreyfus' trial illegal under French law. As to the initial "why" of the Dreyfus Case, a professional French military historian, Jean Doise, provides highly detailed evidence that Alfred Dreyfus was made the innocent victim, the fall-person, of a manipulation by French military counter-intelligence. The purpose of the manipulation was to 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" which had been found in the waste paper basket of the German military Attache, Von Schwartzkoppen, by a French cleaning lady working for French counter-intelligence was a fabrication designed and delivered by a French infantry officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The latter either hoped to extract money from the German Attache 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, although later publicly exposed by Colonel Picquart as the author of the "bordereau", was acquitted by French Justice and let go to retire in England with a pension. He had, furthermore, worked in counter-intelligence during the earlier part of his career. All these recent conclusions further reinforce the sordid, in fact criminal character of the machinations which eventually destroyed the career and hence the life of an innocent man and of his family.

L'Aurore's front page on 13 January 1898 features Emile Zola's open letter to the French President Félix Faure regarding the Dreyfus Affair.

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. 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 Legion of Honour. 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 front-line duties in 1917. He served his nation with distinction beyond his natural retirement age.

Scandal and aftermath

This drawing of a French family dinner by caricaturist Caran d'Ache depicts the divisions of French society during the Dreyfus Affair. At the top, somebody says "above all, let us not discuss the Dreyfus Affair!". At the bottom, the whole family is fighting, and the caption says "they have discussed it".

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. The 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.

Zola was in fact a latecomer (who nevertheless brought world-wide attention and publicity to Dreyfus' unjust treatment). The real credit for exposing the flaws behind Dreyfus' conviction, though, belongs to four others: Dreyfus' brother Mathieu, who fought a lonely campaign for several years; Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare; Colonel Picquart, a whistle-blower in the intelligence service; 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.

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.

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.

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).

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
Gerard Demaison "A Well Kept Secret: The Military History of the Dreyfus Case" (book review in english posted on the web, of Jean Doise's " Un secret bien garde.Hstoire militaire del'Affaire Dreyfus ")
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,ISBN 2-02-02100-9 .

External links

Template:Fr icon 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 IMDb
JewishEncyclopedia.com - Andre Cremieu-Foa
Temporal and Eternal by Charles Péguy, translated by Alexander Dru