Dreyfus affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. The scandal began in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent, was wrongfully convicted of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent overseas to the penal colony on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent the following five years imprisoned in very harsh conditions.
In 1896, evidence came to light—primarily through the investigations of Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage—that identified the real culprit as a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. High-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, and a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army laid additional charges against Dreyfus, based on forged documents. Subsequently, writer Émile Zola's open letter "J'Accuse...!" in the newspaper L'Aurore stoked a growing movement of political support for Dreyfus, putting pressure on the government to reopen the case.
In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus, the "Dreyfusards" such as Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Charles Péguy, Henri Poincaré, Georges Méliès, and Georges Clemenceau; and those who condemned him, the "anti-Dreyfusards" such as Édouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The new trial resulted in another conviction and a 10-year sentence, but Dreyfus was pardoned and released. In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated. After being reinstated as a major in the French Army, he served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He died in 1935.
The Dreyfus affair came to symbolise modern injustice in the Francophone world; it remains one of the most notable examples of a miscarriage of justice and of antisemitism. The affair divided France into pro-republican, anticlerical Dreyfusards and pro-army, mostly Catholic anti-Dreyfusards, embittering French politics and encouraging radicalisation. The press played a crucial role in exposing information and in shaping and expressing public opinion on both sides of the conflict.
Contexts
Political
In 1894, the Third Republic was twenty-four years old. Although the 16 May Crisis in 1877 had crippled the political influence of both the Bourbon and Orléanist royalists, its ministries continued to be short-lived as the country lurched from crisis to crisis: three years immediately preceding the Dreyfus affair were the near-coup of Georges Boulanger in 1889, the Panama scandals in 1892, and the anarchist threat. The elections of 1893 were focused on the "social question" and resulted in a Republican victory against the conservative right, and the reinforcement of the Radicals and Socialists.The opposition of the Radicals and Socialists resulted in a centrist government with policies oriented towards economic protectionism, a certain indifference to social issues, a willingness to break international isolation, the Russian alliance, and the development of the colonial empire. These centrist policies resulted in cabinet instability, with some Republican members of the government sometimes aligning with the radicals and some Orléanists aligning with the Legitimists in five successive governments from 1893 to 1896. This instability coincided with an equally unstable presidency: President Sadi Carnot was assassinated on 24 June 1894; his moderate successor Jean Casimir-Perier resigned several months later on 15 January 1895 and was replaced by Félix Faure.
Following the failure of the radical government of Léon Bourgeois in 1896, the president appointed Jules Méline as prime minister. His government faced the opposition of the left and of some Republicans and made sure to keep the support of the right. He sought to appease religious, social, and economic tensions and conducted a fairly conservative policy. He succeeded in improving stability, and it was under this stable government that the Dreyfus affair occurred.
Military
The Dreyfus affair occurred in the context of German annexation of Alsace and Moselle, an event that fed the most extreme nationalism. The traumatic defeat of France in 1870 seemed far away, but a vengeful spirit remained.The military required considerable resources to prepare for the next conflict, and it was in this spirit that the Franco-Russian Alliance of 27 August 1892 was signed, although some opponents thought it "against nature". The army had recovered from the defeat, but many of its officers were aristocrats and monarchists. Cult of the flag and contempt for the parliamentary republic prevailed in the army. The Republic celebrated its army; the army ignored the Republic.
Over the previous ten years, the army had undergone a significant shift resulting from its twofold aim to democratize and modernize. The graduates of the École Polytechnique now competed effectively with officers from the main career path of Saint-Cyr, which caused strife, bitterness, and jealousy among junior officers expecting promotions. The period was also marked by an arms race that primarily affected artillery. There were improvements in heavy artillery, but also, and especially, development of the ultra-secret 75mm gun.
The operation of military counterintelligence, alias the "Statistics Section", should be noted. Spying as a tool for secret war was a novelty as an organised activity by governments in the late 19th century. The Statistics Section was created in 1871 but consisted of only a handful of officers and civilians. Its head in 1894 was Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Sandherr, a graduate of Saint-Cyr, an Alsatian from Mulhouse, and a convinced antisemite. Its military mission was clear: to retrieve information about potential enemies of France and to feed them false information. The Statistics Section was supported by the "Secret Affairs" of the Quai d'Orsay at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was headed by a young diplomat, Maurice Paléologue.
The arms race created an acute atmosphere of intrigue from 1890 in French counter-espionage. One of the missions of the section was to spy on the German Embassy at Rue de Lille in Paris to thwart any attempt by the French to transmit important information to the Germans. This was especially critical since several cases of espionage had already been featured in the headlines of newspapers, which were fond of sensationalism. In 1890, the archivist Boutonnet was convicted for selling plans of shells that used melinite.
The German military attaché in Paris in 1894 was Count Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, who developed a policy of infiltration that appears to have been effective. In the 1880s, Schwartzkoppen had begun an affair with an Italian military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Count Alessandro Panizzardi. While neither had anything to do with Dreyfus, their intimate and erotic correspondence, which was obtained by the authorities, lent an air of truth to other documents that were forged by prosecutors to lend retroactive credibility to Dreyfus's conviction as a spy. Some of these forgeries referred to the real affair between the two officers; in one, Alessandro supposedly informed his lover that if "Dreyfus is brought in for questioning", they must both claim that they "never had any dealings with that Jew. ... Clearly, no one can ever know what happened with him."
The letters, real and fake, provided a convenient excuse for placing the entire Dreyfus dossier under seal, given that exposure of the liaison would have 'dishonoured' Germany and Italy's military and compromised diplomatic relations. As homosexuality was, like Judaism, then often perceived as a sign of national degeneration, recent historians have suggested that combining them to inflate the scandal may have shaped the prosecution strategy.
Since early 1894, the Statistics Section had investigated traffic in master plans for Nice and the Meuse conducted by an officer whom the Germans and Italians nicknamed Dubois. This is what led to the origins of the Dreyfus affair.
Social
The social context was marked by the rise of nationalism and antisemitism. The growth of antisemitism, virulent since the publication of Jewish France by Édouard Drumont in 1886, went hand in hand with the rise of clericalism. Tensions were high in all strata of society, fueled by an influential press, which was virtually free to write and disseminate any information even if offensive or defamatory. Legal risks were limited if the target was a private person.Antisemitism did not spare the military, which practised hidden discrimination with the "cote d'amour" system of irrational grading, encountered by Dreyfus in his application to the Bourges School. However, while prejudices of this nature undoubtedly existed within the confines of the General Staff, the French Army as a whole was relatively open to individual talent. At the time of the Dreyfus affair there were an estimated 300 Jewish officers in the army, of whom ten were generals.
The popularity of the duel using sword or small pistol, sometimes causing death, bore witness to the tensions of the period. When a series of press articles in La Libre Parole accused Jewish officers of "betraying their birth", the officers challenged the editors. Captain Crémieu-Foa, a Jewish Alsatian graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique, fought unsuccessfully against Drumont and against M. de Lamase, who was the author of the articles. Captain Mayer, another Jewish officer, was killed by the Marquis de Morès, a friend of Drumont, in another duel.
Hatred of Jews was now public and violent, driven by a firebrand who demonized the Jewish presence in France. Jews in metropolitan France in 1895 numbered about 80,000, who were highly integrated into society; an additional 45,000 Jews lived in Algeria. The launch of La Libre Parole with a circulation estimated at 200,000 copies in 1892, allowed Drumont to expand his audience to a popular readership already enticed by the boulangiste adventure in the past. The antisemitism circulated by La Libre Parole, as well as by L'Éclair, Le Petit Journal, La Patrie, L'Intransigeant and La Croix, drew on antisemitic roots in certain Catholic circles.
Publications remarking on the Dreyfus affair often reinforced antisemitic sentiments, language and imagery. The was a collection of anti-Dreyfus posters illustrated by Victor Lenepveu during the Dreyfus affair. Lenepveu caricatured "prominent Jews, Dreyfus supporters, and Republican statesman". No. 35 Amnistie populaire depicts the corpse of Dreyfus himself as it dangles from a noose. Large noses, money, and Lenepveu's general tendency to illustrate subjects with bodies of animals likely contributed to the dissemination of antisemitism in French popular culture.