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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 and ethnicity, 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 at the end of which he was raised to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor.
General condition of French Jews circa 1890
French Jews were in a relatively precarious situation in France during the 1890s. The extent to which anti-Semitic prejudices had pervaded French society during the latter half of the 19th century was astounding. With the formal inception of the French Third Republic in 1871, nationalist politicians like Georges Boulanger and Edouard Drumont in the 1880s sought to capitalize on the new-found fervor for a wholly unified Catholic France. As a result, French Jews were viewed as a "nation within a nation."[1] Most of the anti-Semitic bigotries at the time stemmed from major Catholic factions within French politics. Since 1801, when Napoleon signed his Concordat with Pope Pius VII, the Catholic Church received a degree of official support from the French state. A decree of separation of Church and state would not occur in France until 1905, partly as a repercussion of the Dreyfus affair. Nonetheless, the general condition of French Jews circa 1890 proved to be rather decent when compared to that of Jews in other European states like Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Examples of this decent condition for French Jews include their relative positions in both the government and the army around 1890. Dreyfus himself, a graduate of the elite Ecole Polytechnique, was a career artillery officer, which is a high rank for any military personnel. By comparison, in countries like Germany and Austria-Hungary circa 1890, it was considered unthinkable for a Jew to attain any high career position in either the government or the military.[citation needed] For the most part, German and Austro-Hungarian Jews were erroneously thought of as being in control of the financial and publishing sectors of their respective economies. Antisemitism grew in the wake of these common stereotypes which led to question the patriotism of Jews in Germany and Austria-Hungary . Conviction and pardonImage:Dreyfus3.jpg Captain Alfred Dreyfus in military uniform Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of both the elite École Polytechnique and of École Supérieure de Guerre, was a promising young artillery officer in the French Army. His high exit rankings in both these institutions had placed him on a "fast track" which had led to a 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. In October 1894, in a very abrupt manner, Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and later 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, a prison island in 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 from the waste paper basket of the German military attaché, Major Max von Schwartzkoppen by an Alsatian cleaning lady in the employ of French counter-intelligence. This retrieved list or bordereau was then promptly passed on to the French War Minister, General Auguste Mercier. The bordereau initially appeared to the French military authorities as implicating an artillery officer because it listed prominently the comportment of the novel and unprecedented oleo-pneumatic recoil mechanism of a new field artillery piece: the French Modèle 1890 120mm Baquet howitzer. Although Dreyfus was in the General Staff, his artillery training, his Alsatian origins and his yearly trips to the then German town of Mulhouse to visit his ailing father had earmarked him for suspicion. Furthermore, the writing on the bordereau was incorrectly interpreted as resembling Dreyfus' own handwriting. Fearing that the right-wing anti-Semitic press would learn of the affair and accuse the Army of covering up for a Jewish officer, the High Command led by General Mercier pressed for an early trial and conviction. By the time they realized 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 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 cover-up to justify the hasty decision to press charges against him. While there were undoubtedly anti-Semitic undertones to this miscarriage of justice it would be inaccurate to see it purely in these terms. As noted below there were a significant number of Jewish officers in the French Army during the 1890s which made it a more progressive institution than most other armies of the time. It appears that Captain Dreyfus, while being generally well noted by his superiors, was not personally popular amongst some of his colleagues because of his aloof personality and comparatively wealthy background. 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 dossier was illegal. As to the initial "why" of the case, the renowned French military historian Jean Doise provides detailed evidence that Dreyfus was used as a patsy or scapegoat through manipulations by French military counter-intelligence (the so-called Bureau de Statistique led by Lt 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 listed in the bordereau, instead of the revolutionary French 75mm field gun which was developed in great secrecy at the very same time (1892-1896). In other words, the intense prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus was designed to mislead German espionnage into believing that it had stumbled onto highly sensitive artillery information. The torn up bordereau found discarded in the waste paper basket of Attaché von Schwartzkoppen was, in fact, a fabrication which had been hand written and delivered by a French-born infantry officer of Hungarian descent, 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 exposed by Colonel Picquart as the real author of the bordereau, was acquitted by French military Justice in January 1898 and let go to retire in England with a pension. Furthermore, and as also proved by the archival records, Walsin-Esterhazy had once been working full-time as a lieutenant on the staff of military counter-intelligence (the very same Bureau de Statistique led by Lt Colonel Sandherr). This episode took place during the early part of Esterhazy's career, before the Dreyfus Affair. In other words and in clear terms, there is verifiable evidence that Major Esterhazy was a past member of the Sandherr counter-intelligence network. These recent exposures further underline the sordid, in fact criminal character of the machinations devised by Lt Colonel Sandherr and his small group (notably Major Hubert Joseph Henry and Captain Lauth) at the 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-intelligence group drifted into illegality (Bach, 2004). This happened because Lt Colonel Sandherr had been encouraged, over the years, to report directly and secretly to the office of the politically appointed War Minister himself (General Mercier). This cascade of internal communication failures, lies and dissimulations eventually destroyed the career and hence the life of an innocent man, Alfred Dreyfus, and of his family. It is well documented that General Auguste Mercier was the responsible party in initiating this chain of events, and later in pressing for the cover-up of this miscarriage of justice. Whether he had been inspired at the very beginning by General Deloye, who directed French Artillery, is a plausible but unprovable speculation (Doise, 1984).Image:Degradation alfred dreyfus.jpg Dreyfus cashiered in a public ceremony 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 cashiered: 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 of the fact that Dreyfus had been denied due process during the initial court-martial. France's Court of Cassation quashed 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 recalled to active duty and served 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. Scandal and aftermathImage:J accuse.jpg L'Aurore's front page on 13 January 1898 features Émile Zola's open letter to the French President Félix Faure denouncing the miscarriage of justice Image:Caran-d-ache-dreyfus-supper.jpg This cartoon of a French family dinner by caricaturist Caran d'Ache illustrates the divisions in French society during the Dreyfus affair. In top panel, the host says, "Above all, let us not speak of the Dreyfus affair!". Bottom panel shows the dinner party in disorder: "They have spoken of it". The Dreyfus affair became one of the gravest crises to rock the French Third Republic. "The Affair" deeply divided the country into Dreyfusards (supporters of Dreyfus) and anti-Dreyfusards. Generally speaking, royalists, conservatives and the Catholic Church (the "right wing") were anti-Dreyfusards, while Dreyfusards were socialists, republicans and anticlericalists, though there were exceptions. The Dreyfus affair could not have developed as it did in a country wholly antisemitic, nor in a country devoid of antisemitism. Dreyfus's Jewish background was well-known, yet he had been admitted to the most selective military schools in the country and had been assigned to a sensitive position; this would have been unheard of in some other European countries where discriminatory practices were not uncommon at the time. In the armies of the French Republic in 1894, there were over 250 career officers professing the Jewish faith (Birnbaum, 1998) including many colonels and at least one general officer, General Samuel Naquet-Laroque (1843-1921), who occupied a high position in the state armament industries. That same period also saw the rise of Lt Colonel Mardochee-Georges Valabregue (1854-1934), an artilleryman from Ecole Polytechnique and an observant Jew from an old French family, as Alfred Dreyfus, to being the Commander in Chief of Ecole Superieure de Guerre in 1905. He became a divisional commander and a full general during WW-1. As a matter of record there were three other French career officers at the time of the affair who also bore the name Dreyfus but were unrelated to Alfred Dreyfus : Captain Sylvain Dreyfus, Major Émile Dreyfus and Captain Paul Dreyfus (Birnbaum, 1998). Two among those three French officers professing the Jewish faith were also, like Alfred Dreyfus, alumni of the elite École Polytechnique. 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 journalist and politician Georges Clemenceau affixed the headline "J'accuse!" (I accuse!); it was published January 13, 1898 in the maiden issue of the newspaper L'Aurore (The Dawn). It had the effect of a bomb. In the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, it was "one of the great commotions of history." Zola's intent was to force his own prosecution for libel so that the emerging facts of the Dreyfus case could be thoroughly aired. In this he succeeded. He was convicted, appealed, was retried, and, before hearing the result, fled to England on the advice of his counsel and friends, returning to Paris in June 1899 when he heard that Dreyfus's trial was to be reviewed. Zola's world fame and internationally respected reputation brought international attention to Dreyfus' unjust treatment. Most of the work of exposing the errors in Dreyfus' conviction was done by four people : Dreyfus' brother Mathieu, who fought a lonely campaign for several years; Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare; Lt.Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, a senior infantry officer who had replaced Lt. Colonel Sandherr at the helm of French Military Counter-intelligence; and the vice-president of the Senate, Scheurer-Kestner, who worked resolutely to make the case for revision of Dreyfus's conviction to the French government. Picquart himself, who had demonstrated that the real traitor was Major Esterhazy, was reassigned to a post in the south of Tunisia in December 1896. This was not necessarily an inappropriate assignment, since Picquart had been seconded to Military Counter-intelligence from a North African Tirailleur regiment. The intention, however, was clearly to get him away from Paris. The affair saw the emergence of the "intellectuals", academics and others with high intellectual achievements who took positions on grounds of higher principle, 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. In 1906 the Chamber of Deputies overwhelmingly approved measures to rehabilitate 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 ends. 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 law separating church and state. The coalition of partisan anti-Dreyfusards remained together, but turned to other causes. Groups such as Maurras' Action Française, formed 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. Despite his complete exoneration, Dreyfus's statues and monuments are occasionally vandalised by far-right activists. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that the affair evidenced a recurring theme of anti-Semitism and sought to identify its causes. 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 HerzlThe 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. Centennial commemorationOn 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 Zola and 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 held a memorial of the centennial of the end of the affair, particularly the laws that reintegrated and promoted Dreyfus and Picquart. Films and theatreFilms:
A British-made television film of 1991, "Prisoner of Honor", directed by Ken Russell, focuses on the efforts of Colonel Picquart to have the sentence of Alfred Dreyfus overturned. (Colonel Picquart was played by American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who claims to be a descendant of Alfred Dreyfus). Theatre:
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