This is a strange and convoluted tale, over one hundred years old, yet replete with familiar themes: justice gone awry; deceit and corruption permeating the highest echelons of government; obscure criminal acts precipitating a transformational political crisis.
Saturday, January 5, 1895, the Jewish sabbath, dawns clear, cold, and crisp as an early morning crowd estimated at 20,000 packs the Place Fontenoy and the streets surrounding it near the entrance to Paris's Ecole Militaire. Inside five thousand troops from the city's garrisons and three hundred journalists await the commencement of a macabre ceremony. (Lewis, pp. 56-57)
At precisely 9:00 AM, flanked by four artillery officers and a lieutenant of the Garde Republicaine, his filed sword at "present arms," a uniformed man marches into the courtyard and approaches a mounted general, Paul Darras. (Lewis, p. 57)
He has been in a holding cell for about an hour, and later that evening, while hoisting drinks with reporters at the Moulin Rouge, his escort, Captain Lebrun-Renault, will either misconstrue or deliberately twist their conversation into an admission of guilt. (Lewis, p. 55)
Upon the clerk of the Court Martial reading the verdict, Darras rises in his stirrups and proclaims, "Alfred Dreyfus, you are no longer worth of bearing arms. In the name of the people of France, we degrade you." (Lewis, p. 57)
Seven-foot Sergeant-Major Bouxin steps forward, yanks the epaulettes from Dreyfus's shoulders, wrenches all the buttons from his tunic and the gold braid from his sleeves, rips the red stripes from his trousers, and, drawing Dreyfus's sword from his scabbard and planting its tip in the mud, snaps it with a thrust of his boot. (Harris, pp. 10-11)
Obliged to parade before the restless assemblage, his clothes in rags, the disgraced pariah confounds them all by exclaiming, "You have no right to insult me . . . On the heads of my wife and children, I swear I am innocent . . . Long Live France! Long Live the Army!" (Bredin, p. 5; Lewis, p. 58)
The troops, the press, the frenzied mob erupt with jeers of scorn: "Coward. Judas. Death to the traitor. Death to the Jew." (Bredin, p. 5; Lewis, p. 58)
The sobering truth is that once Alfred Dreyfus was targeted for selling information to German diplomats, his religious ethnicity became a flashpoint for the anti-Republican, militaristic, and anti-Semitic strata which were both embedded in late nineteenth-century French society and symptomatic of the general malaise which afflicted it.
Although presumptive dictator Georges Boulanger had been discredited and exiled in 1891, his ability to rally a critical mass of nostalgic Royalists, distrustful Catholics, xenophobic generals, and disaffected populists -- all those who detested the parliamentary system -- signified that bourgeois liberalism was hardly secure. (Bredin, pp. 32-33)
While Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Amid Solicitudes, published in February 1882, may have invited Catholics to accept the Republic, bishops remained hostile, priests promoted the rehabilitation of the monarchy, and ecclesiastics aggressively opposed state-sponsored secular education. (Bredin, p. 35)
On the extreme left, anarchist bombers aroused an occasional panic, answering the call to action delivered by the martyr Ravachol at the Court of Assizes: "Society is rotting. In factories, mines, and fields, there are human beings working without hope of acquiring a thousandth part of their labor." (Bredin, p. 36)
In August 1892 at Carmaux, three thousand marched off their jobs to affirm their right to the free exercise of public functions. By 1893, six hundred thirty-four strikes would implicate 170,000 workers, and the established order could no longer ignore the peril. Although Parliament did make concessions -- implementing optional arbitration to resolve differences with management, limiting the workday for women and children to eleven hours -- the labor movement and the Socialist Party had been launched. (Bredin, pp. 36-37)
Humiliated by the Germans in 1870, the French Army had committed itself to a vigorous revitalization -- revising and streamlining antiquated regulations; establishing the Ecole Superieure de Guerre, where the critical study of modern warfare would be the focus; developing a comprehensive plan of mobilization, concentration, requisition, and transportation; adopting improved tools, caissons, boats, rifles, powder, and cannon; and organizing a powerful defensive network on its northern and eastern frontiers. (Bredin, pp. 14-15)
Relishing revenge and glory, manifesting traditional virtues -- obedience, hierarchy, and respect for authority -- starkly contradictory to the liberty, equality, and fraternity espoused by the Republic, this re-imagined Army, particularly its officer corps, emerged as a magnet for young men from the aristocracy and the conservative and Catholic bourgeoise. (Bredin, pp. 17-18)
Isolated by its culture and mission, the Army envisioned itself as the protector of French pride and religion, the preserver of male devotion, daring, and bravery, the incarnation of the concept of nationhood, and, quite possibly, the arbiter of the rule of law. (Bredin, pp. 18-19)
Although Jews had been emancipated and granted full citizenship in 1791, Christian anti-Judaic prejudices persisted. For numerous Catholics, Jews bore the cross of god-slayers. By 1880 this theological hostility had evolved into a more complex political and moral doctrine by which Jews were maligned not only for their anomalous religious beliefs but also as indolent, greedy moneygrubbers and as racially inferior non-Indo-Europeans. (Bredin, pp. 23-24, 29)
While some of this intolerance can be attributed to a surge in immigration -- between 1870 and 1886, fifty thousand Jews made their way from Alsace-Lorraine to Paris -- its real strength derived from a burgeoning resentment against the perceived evils of capitalism, secularism, industrialism, and liberal democracy and a gnawing hunger to identify a responsible agent. (Bredin, pp. 26-27)
The Jew was the logical scapegoat. He was a wanderer without a homeland, an international without French ancestry or property, a merchant enamored of profit, and the epitome of the decadence, materialism, and corruption of the era. (Bredin, pp. 27-28)
Two of the most articulate, anti-Semitic ideologues were Edouard Drumont, author of La France Juivre, published in 1886, and founder of La Libre Parole in 1892, and Leon Bloy, whose La Salut par les Juifs appeared the same year. (Bredin, pp. 28-30)
To them and others, the Jew was "evil" itself: a dangerous revolutionary, a ruthless capitalist, a devious German, a miser, a usurer, a speculator. He was hypocritical, obsequious, spineless, and cunning. He hated Christians and sought only to despoil them. He could be detected at once by his physiognomy -- his hooked nose and fingers, protruding ears, elongated torso, and square fingernails -- and by an inhuman voice that whined, barked, and screeched. His women were sensual, perverted, and debauched. (Bredin, p. 30)
In May 1892, La Libre Parole, along with La Croix, the self-proclaimed "most anti-Jewish newspaper in France," embarked on a virulent campaign to root out from the Army the large number of potentially treasonous Jewish officers, one of whom was Alfred Dreyfus, whose career was flourishing. (Bredin, p. 29)
He was a native of Alsace, the youngest of thirteen children (seven of whom would survive infancy), born in 1859 to a household prosperous and well-entrenched until its domestic tranquility was shattered twelve years later by the German annexation of the territory, which would force the family to emigrate. Young Alfred was shy, taciturn, and introspective, traits hardly predictable of his future course, yet, passionately loyal to his country and region, despising the foreign invader, and yearning for orderliness and security, he was drawn to the Army. (Bredin, pp. 12-13)
After earning his diploma from the College Chaptal in 1876 -- the last of several Parisian boarding schools he attended -- he applied and was accepted to, surprisingly, the Ecole Polytechnique, France's rigorous military engineering school. With a temperament well-suited to the institution's curriculum and ethos -- unemotional, mechanical, and logical -- he graduated 32nd in his class, and in 1880 entered the Army as a second lieutenant. (Lewis, pp. 7-8)
By 1890 Dreyfus had attained the rank of captain, earned praise for zealousness, spirit, conscientiousness, intelligence, and a thirst for knowledge, garnered a wife -- Lucie Hadamard -- and was emboldened to seek admission to the War College in Paris. His acceptance was a stupendous achievement. "Top graduates were guaranteed assignment to the Army General Staff on which no acknowledged Jew had ever served." (Lewis, pp. 9-11)
Maintaining a stellar record, Dreyfus was on track for third in his class until a negative evaluation by General Pierrre de Bonnefond, an unabashed anti-Semite, relegated him to ninth. He was appointed to the General Staff in January 1893. (Lewis, p. 19)
Like all trainees, Dreyfus entered a rotation through the Staff's four departments or bureaus. After receiving a superior rating in the Bureau of Organization and Mobilization, he moved on to Communications and Transport, where he encountered two anti-Semites. Chief officer Pierre-Elie Fabre described him as "incomplete . . . pretentious . . . and from the point of character, conscience, and service conduct, failing to fulfill the requirements of being employed by the General Staff." Assistant Bertin-Mourot reprimanded him for being "too aggressive with his intelligence." (Lewis, pp. 22-24)
The atmosphere at his next stop, Intelligence, was more congenial. Not only was he commended for excellence; after a day of special maneuvers, he was singled out by Chief of Staff Raoul de Boisdeffre for his brilliant commentary on the use of defensive artillery. In July 1894, when he assumed his duties in the Bureau of Operations and Training, eventual promotion to a generalship, which would be a rarity for a Jew, seemed not out of reach. (Lewis, pp. 25-26)
Realizing that future military success might hinge on competent intelligence, in 1876 the War Office had created a special Statistical Section to engage in espionage and counter-espionage. Shifty undercover characters drawing payments from a variety of sources were recruited for surveillance, shadowing, and thievery, and to distribute false information. The operation could hardly be deemed professional; there was no central registry or record of paper trails, and it is doubtful if officials knew which documents were bogus and which were genuine. (Chapman, pp. 48-49)
Although the titular head of the Section was Colonel Jean-Conrad Sandherr -- an Alsatian, a fanatic patriot, and an avowed anti-Semite -- the dominant personage, and the one responsible for fabricating reports and reconstructing and interpreting those supplied to him by his rakish network, was Commandant Hubert Joseph-Henry. A broad-shouldered giant with a heavy moustache, Henry was uneducated but cunning, courageous, energetic, ambitious, and infused with a blind respect for discipline and an unreserved admiration for his military superiors. (Bredin, p. 44)
Once or twice a month Henry rendezvoused at one of two nearby churches with "Auguste," actually Madame Marie Bastian, an elderly domestic working at the German Embassy, who would pass him trash bags full of torn or crumpled correspondence, bills, receipts, and miscellaneous documents, a few of which might turn out to be useful after they were pieced together and translated into French. (Bredin, p. 46)
Over time, this system, known as "the ordinary track," produced a revelatory series of letters between Colonel Maximilien von Schwarzkoppen and Major Alessandro Panizzardi, military attaches to their German and Italian embassies. Not only were the two dandies excessively fond of one another (penning such endearments as "dog, darling, bitch, and bugger"), someone was selling them large-scale plans of fortifications. (Bredin, pp. 46, 49-50)
For example, in April 1894, an intercepted letter from Schwarzkoppen to Panizzardi included "twelve master plans of Nice which that scoundrel D. gave me in the hope of restoring relations" -- which only confirmed what Henry had already heard second-hand from a retired attache to Spanish Embassy, Marquis del Val Carlos: that "an officer in one of the War Office departments was handing documents to a foreign power." (Chapman, pp. 52-53)
The identity of the traitor would remain elusive until September 26, when Madame Bastian delivered the celebrated bordereau -- the memorandum to Schwarzkoppen -- which stands at the heart of the Dreyfus Affair. It was unsigned, undated, torn partly across twice, and missing an envelope. Once repaired by Henry, it was easily deciphered:
"Without news indicating that you wish to see me, I am nevertheless sending you some interesting information, Monsieur: (1) A note on the hydraulic recoil of the 120 and the way it has behaved; (2) A note on the covering troops (some modifications will be introduced by the new plans); (3) A note on the modifications in the artillery formations; (4) A note concerning Madagascar; (5) The provisional Firing Manual for Field Artillery.
"This last document is extremely difficult to procure and I can only have it at my disposal for a few days. The Minister of War has sent out a fixed number to the corps and the corps are responsible for them. Each officer who has a copy has to send it back after the maneuvers . . . I am off to maneuvers." (Lewis, p. 79)
Within days the bordereau crossed the desk of Minister of War Auguste Mercier. Having recently come under fire for some grievous errors in judgment -- protecting a spy, releasing 60,000 conscripts without informing his president, spurning a weapons inventor, Eugene Turpin, who afterward threatened to sell his talents to Germany -- Mercier was in dire need of a notable triumph to redeem his reputation. (Lewis, pp. 86-87)
After a week of fruitless research by his Statistical Section, Sandherr in desperation transmitted copies of the bordereau to the General Staff's four departments. On October 6, newly appointed Deputy of Communications and Transport, Lieutenant-Colonel Albert d'Aboville, observed to his chief, Colonel Fabre, that only an artillery officer and a staff trainee would be privy to the classified material which had been enumerated. (Lewis, p. 87)
Among the short list of candidates who had passed through their bureau was Alfred Dreyfus, whose prejudicial assessment by Fabre was already a matter of record. After examining a sample of Dreyfus's handwriting, the two were convinced it matched that of the bordereau. They hurried down the hall to Sandherr's office; when shown the damning evidence, he slapped his forehead and exclaimed, "I ought to have thought of it." (Chapman, p. 59)
If Minister of War Mercier now had his spy, he at least understood that a more qualified analysis of the handwriting was imperative. Of the three individuals whose opinions were sought -- Major Armand du Paty de Clam, a frivolous and romantic-minded officer from the Bureau of Operations and Training; Alphonse Bertillon, head of the police department of Judiciary Identity and a notorious anti-Semite; and Albert Gobert, an expert from the Bank of France -- only Du Paty was confident that the samples were identical. (Bredin, p. 65)
Gobert concluded that "the anonymous letter could well be from some other person than the suspect," (Chapman, p. 70) while Bertillon concocted the bizarre theory that the bordereau might be a forgery, even a self-forgery, in which Dreyfus had imitated his own handwriting. (Bredin, p. 73)
Despite these inconsistencies and the advice of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabriel Hanotaux, who feared the diplomatic consequences of a judicial procedure initiated on the basis of a document illegally obtained from an embassy, Mercier would not be deterred. On Saturday, October 13, Dreyfus was summoned by telegram to appear before Chief of Staff Boisdeffre two days hence and in civilian dress, an extraordinary violation of protocol. (Lewis, p. 27)
What transpired was a surrealistic Star Chamber. Du Paty, whose hand was bandaged to demonstrate that he could not write, asked Dreyfus to take down a letter for Boisdeffre's signature. He then recited some verbiage similar to that of the bordereau. After failing twice to provoke the amanuensis into indignation, Du Paty rose, clamped him by the shoulder, and shouted, "Captain Dreyfus, in the name of the law, I arrest you. You are accused of high treason." (Chapman, p. 72)
Now completely rattled, Dreyfus demanded proof. "The evidence is overwhelming," said Du Paty, but he refused to present it. Instead he placed a loaded revolver on the writing table, and announced that if Dreyfus would not confess, he must shoot himself. Dreyfus replied, "I won't do it. I am innocent," which he continued to assert as he was taken away to the Cherche-Midi prison, where he would be held in solitary confinement until his court-martial. (Chapman, pp. 72-73)
For the next two months Dreyfus's accusers scrambled to solidify their case. A search of his apartment turned up nothing of any value. During repeated interrogations, Du Paty harassed and threatened Dreyfus, ordering him to take dictation sitting, reclining, leaning, standing, and wearing a glove, trying to no avail to get him to acknowledge scraps of a photographed mystery document as his own handwriting. (Lewis, p. 33)
Francois Guenee, a civilian investigator employed by the General Staff, reported that Dreyfus was an inveterate gambler and womanizer; the claims were subsequently refuted by a police captain who clarified that Guenee had mistaken his subject for a well-known rogue of the same name. (Chapman, p. 83)
When a comprehensive review of Statistical Section records failed to yield any material of sufficient weight, Sandherr and Henry were stymied. How could they obtain a guilty verdict -- other than resorting to extreme measures?
In recommending a court-martial, military magistrate Major Bexon d'Ormescheville chose to ignore Dreyfus's affidavit in which he cited incompatibilities in the script of the bordereau and incongruities in the text itself, including incorrect artillery terminology and the impossibility of his "going off to maneuvers" which the General Staff had canceled. (Lewis, p. 43)
Acceding to Minister of War Mercier's expressed desire for a closed session -- ostensibly for security reasons, but perhaps also because of the flimsiness of the evidence -- the seven-judge panel so ordered it upon a request by prosecutor Commander Andre Brisset. (Chapman, pp. 91-92)
Dreyfus's attorney, Edgar Demange, was one of France's most distinguished, and he struggled mightily to justify his billing. Bertillon's bewildering explications prompted such objections as "If the handwriting was disguised, how could he be certain who was the author?" and "Indeed, since he was not really a graphologist, how could Bertillon be certain of anything?" And Du Paty was unconvincing when he spoke of Dreyfus's trembling as he wrote from dictation. (Lewis, pp. 49-50)
But when Demange challenged Major Henry to name the anonymous informant (it was del Val Carlos) who had warned of a traitor in the War Office ("who is sitting right there," he had shouted), Henry's stony response ("There are some secrets in an officer's head which his cap does well to ignore.") and his swearing to Dreyfus's guilt while pointing to a picture of Christ were hugely effective. (Bredin, p. 94)
On the final day of the trial, Demange argued for three hours that Dreyfus could not possibly have written the bordereau and that he had no motive for committing treason. If Dreyfus's own testimony was a "colorless, vacant, indolent" monotone, its lucidity and precision exposed the feebleness of the indictment. (Bredin, pp. 95, 93)
Shortly after the judges retired to deliberate, "a remarkable event occurred. Major Du Paty arrived with a small packet of papers. In the handwriting of the Minister of War himself, the packet bore the broadly scrawled message 'For the Officers of the Court Martial' " Could those persons be faulted for assuming they had been tendered some vital proof of treason, for believing they would be flouting the Minister of War if they found Dreyfus innocent? (Lewis, pp. 51-52)
What they did not know was that "the production of documents not shown to the defense was irregular and illegal in civil and military law." (Chapman, p. 95)
The so-called Secret Dossier contained, first, a biographical commentary authored by either Sandherr or Mercier revealing a history of suspicious behavior by the defendant, including a charge that Dreyfus had sold details of new explosive developed by Turpin and notes on troop mobilization to the Germans. (Lewis, p. 98)
Attached were five other incriminating documents: (1) The "scoundrel D" letter from Schwarzkoppen to Panizzardi; (2) A letter about securing information from un ami, written by Panizzardi; (3) A collection of fragments, "whose unintelligibility gave them an aura of malign significance"; (4) A summary of the warnings of del Val Carlos to the Statistical Section; and (5) The decoded text of a telegram sent from Panizzardi to his Italian Chief of Staff, which Henry had amended from "If Captain Dreyfus has never been in contact with you, it would be convenient to have the ambassador publish an official denial . . ." to "Dreyfus arrested, precautions taken, our emissary warned. It would be convenient to have the ambassador publish an official denial . . ." (Lewis, pp. 98, 93)
The verdict was now assured: guilty by unanimous consensus. After it was announced, Du Paty reclaimed the dossier and returned it to Mercier, who burned the commentary and ordered Sandherr to scatter the other pieces throughout the archives. But Sandherr disobeyed; he appended a copy of the original investigative report compiled by Du Paty, sealed the file, and locked it in his office safe. (Lewis, pp. 98-99)
The death penalty for political crimes had been abolished by Article Five of the Constitution of 1848. Dreyfus was therefore sentenced to forfeiture of his rank, public degradation, and deportation for life to a remote fortification. (Chapman, p. 96)
At this point the complications which had been foreseen by Foreign Minister Hanotaux materialized. (Chapman, p. 100) With the French press incensed over the Dreyfus-German connection, the German ambassador, Georg von Munster, delivered a cable from his chancellor demanding that the French government exonerate "the embassies and legations of Paris" of espionage. (Lewis, p. 99) After intense negotiations, the two governments agreed on the following communique: ". . . since certain newspapers persist in calling into question the foreign embassies of Paris, we are authorized, lest public opinion be led astray . . . to declare that the allegations concerning them are unfounded." (Bredin, pp. 109, 82)
The Dreyfus drama unleashed the anti-Semitic press, which seized upon it as the perfect vehicle to further its inflammatory agenda: hatred of the Jew; hatred of Germany; love of the homeland and the Army, which embodied it; and fear of treason. "The betrayal of the Jewish captain demonstrated the treachery of all Jews . . . He came into the Army with the intention of betrayal . . . As a German and a Jew, he detests the French . . . the Jews are vampires leading France into slavery . . . In every nasty affair, there are always Jews." These and other calumnies spewed forth from the pages of La Libre Parole, La Croix, and their ilk. (Bredin, pp. 78-79)
But they might have relented in their cries for Dreyfus's execution had they been aware of the fate that awaited him as he steamed across the Atlantic.
Devil's Island, a former leper colony thirty miles off the coast of French Guiana, was a desolate lump of rock four hundred yards wide and two miles long, baked by stupefying heat six months a year, drenched by malarial-breeding downpours the other six. Dreyfus was confined to a four-yard-square hut illuminated day and night and fronted by a booth from which a guard watched his every minute. (Chapman, p. 111)
"The chief warder had received instructions to shoot the prisoner down at the slightest movement to escape. He was permitted to exercise only on a narrow path two hundred yards in length. He was not allowed to communicate with the jailers." (Chapman, p. 111)
His food was scarcely adequate -- a serving of bread, occasionally a piece of raw meat, lard, dry vegetables -- and he had to prepare it himself, constructing a grill and pot from scraps of rusted sheet metal. (Bredin, pp. 130-131) As a result of poor nutrition, "his hair thinned, his teeth loosened, and his skin shriveled to little more than yellow membrane stretched over weakened bone." (Lewis, p. 108)
He suffered from headaches, colic, fever, and chronic insomnia. "Inside the clammy hut insects materialized as if by spontaneous combustion. During the day the hut was a miasma of smoke from the primitive stove, of decomposing insect carcasses, and of human excrescence. During the night the endless drubbing on the roof, the dampness, and the bugs made sleep impossible." (Lewis, p. 112)
In September 1896, by order of the Minister of Colonies, Dreyfus was chained indoors twenty-four hours a day -- and double-shackled at night -- not as a punishment, but as a security measure following an announcement by an English newspaper that he had escaped. (Bredin, p. 133)
Throughout his ordeal, in his journal and in correspondence to his wife Lucie, Dreyfus repeatedly emphasized his honor, his innocence, his loyalty, and his faith in justice and reason. On October 5, 1895, he addressed the president of the Republic: "Accused and convicted on the basis of my script of the most infamous crime a soldier can commit, I declare again that I did not write the letter attributed to me, that I have never betrayed my honor." (Bredin, pp. 127-128)
He asked his diary: "How can it be said that in our century and in a country like France, imbued with ideas of truth and justice, something as fundamentally unjust as this can happen?" He believed that the authorities must already suspect a terrible mistake had been made and were on the trail of the real spy. (Lewis, p. 109)
But of the powerful forces arrayed against him and determined to bury this affair in the footnotes of history, could anyone ferret out to truth, and, if he did, would he be courageous and honest enough to speak up?
REFERENCES
Bredin, Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: George Braziler, Inc., 1986.
Chapman, Guy. The Dreyfus Case: A Reassessment. New York: Reynal & Company, 1956.
Harris, Robert. An Officer and A Spy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Lewis, David L. Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973.
