The Dreyfus affair: the facts, the documents, the arguments

It all starts with a piece of paper picked out of a waste basket. On 27 September 1894, at the war ministry on the rue Saint-Dominique, major Henry receives from Madame Bastian, a cleaner at the German embassy employed by French counter-intelligence, an unsigned letter offering military information to the German military attaché Schwartzkoppen. It would be called the bordereau. Suspicion falls on a trainee captain on the general staff, Alfred Dreyfus, Alsatian and Jewish. He is arrested on 15 October.

The court martial sits behind closed doors from 19 to 22 December 1894 and pronounces military degradation and deportation for life. At the start of the deliberation the president receives a sealed packet from the Statistical Section: a secret file, handed over entirely illegally, which the defence would never see. On 5 January 1895, in the courtyard of the École militaire, his stripes are torn off and his sword broken. He would spend 1,517 days on Devil’s Island, in French Guiana, in total isolation and under constant watch.

Meanwhile the army learns. In March 1896 a telegram reaches the Statistical Section: the petit bleu, addressed to Esterhazy by Schwartzkoppen. Its head, lieutenant-colonel Picquart, recognises Esterhazy’s handwriting in the bordereau at the end of August. His superiors, generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse, refuse to hear him and send him on a mission to Tunisia. In October, major Henry manufactures a document to shore up the file. Esterhazy, tried in his turn, is acquitted on 11 January 1898.

Two days later Zola publishes “J’accuse…!” on the front page of L’Aurore, in the form of a letter to president Félix Faure; three hundred thousand copies are snapped up. Tried at the Seine assizes from 7 to 23 February 1898, Zola gets the maximum: a year in prison and 3,000 francs. On 30 August, Henry admits to being the author of the forgery that the war minister Cavaignac had read out in public a month earlier as decisive proof; he kills himself the next day in the Mont-Valérien prison.

That the Rennes trial cleared him. The second court martial, from 7 August to 9 September 1899, finds him guilty again by five votes to two, and sentences him to ten years’ detention with extenuating circumstances: extenuating circumstances for treason. What gets him out ten days later is a pardon from president Loubet: it lifts the sentence, not the conviction. Innocence comes only with the judgment of 12 July 1906, by which the Court of Cassation quashes without remitting the case. The next day he is reinstated as a squadron commander, and on 21 July he receives the Légion d’honneur at the École militaire, where he had been degraded eleven years before.

That Zola won his trial. He had provoked it to force the affair into the open, and he lost it: given the maximum in February 1898, he left France in July and lived in England under false identities until 5 June 1899.

That it all ends in 1906. On 4 June 1908, during the transfer of Zola’s ashes to the Panthéon, Louis Grégori, an antisemitic journalist on Le Gaulois, shoots Dreyfus and wounds him in the arm. The jury acquits him on 11 September 1908.

What Picquart is worth. A solid tradition makes him the hero of the affair: the officer who saw the truth and paid for it. Philippe Oriol disputes the portrait. He points out that more than fourteen months pass without Picquart saying publicly what he knows about Esterhazy: to raise an alarm, he says, you have to speak in public, and those who did were the lawyer Leblois and the senator Scheurer-Kestner. He also documents antisemitic remarks by Picquart as early as 1891, and recalls that, having become war minister in October 1906, he refused to regularise Dreyfus’s situation.

What the degradation did to Herzl. Theodor Herzl, the correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse, was there on 5 January 1895, and it is often read that the scene made a Zionist of him. Ritchie Robertson objects that the affair is mentioned neither in the letters nor in the diary Herzl was keeping at the time: it would have reinforced an anxiety born in the early 1880s, without giving rise to it.

Almost all of it can be read. The shorthand records of the Zola trial and of the Rennes court martial are on Gallica, word for word; “J’accuse…!” is on Wikisource; the Archives nationales hold the Court of Cassation files and even the inventory of the papers seized at Dreyfus’s home in 1894. An affair born of a document is the one that has left the most of them.