Bronze-level articleDreyfus affair

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Alfred Dreyfus
Some dare call it

Conspiracy

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Secrets revealed!
The revealers

The Dreyfus affair was a huge controversy in turn-of-the-20th-century France. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was accused of providing defense secrets to the German Army. Remember that Germany had defeated and humiliated France in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War[wp]; hatred of Germany and the burning desire to regain the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine[wp] permeated France. To put this in perspective for today's readers, imagine if an officer (for added resonance maybe make him Chinese, since people expect China to take over the world these days) in the U.S. military was accused of providing intelligence to al-Qaeda.

[edit] Le affaire

In 1894, French military intelligence discovered that someone was passing confidential military information to the German Army. At the time, Dreyfus was serving as a trainee in the French General Staff, and he quickly came under suspicion, being both Alsatian and Jewish, and fluent in German. Dreyfus was convicted of treason in a closed trial and sentenced to life imprisonment. Initially, most of France believed in his guilt. However, he and his relatives maintained that he was innocent, and the more people looked into the case, the more it fell apart. In 1896 the head of French counter-espionage stumbled upon some evidence that the real culprit was another soldier, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Esterhazy was eventually tried and acquitted, but today pretty much all historians agree he was the real culprit. At this same time, more French "intellectuals" were coming around to the idea that Dreyfus had been framed. Indeed, "intellectual" was first used as a noun during the affair, originally as an insult by those who believed Dreyfus was guilty. Those convinced of Dreyfus's innocence included famous author Émile Zola[wp] and Georges Clemenceau[wp], former member of parliament (and future prime minister). Their protestations in newspapers and journals aroused the public and ignited the national controversy.

The affair bitterly divided French society. Those who thought Dreyfus was innocent were known as "Dreyfusards"; those who thought he was guilty were "anti-Dreyfusards". These categories built upon existing divisions in French society; conservatives, traditionalists, and monarchists tended to be anti-Dreyfusards, while republicans, liberals, progressives, and socialists tended to the opposite. Dreyfus being Jewish, there was unsurprisingly a lot of underlying anti-Semitism; Dreyfus's supposed actions were held by many anti-Dreyfusards to prove that Jews had loyalties that superseded national borders and they could never truly be loyal citizens of France. Anti-Semitic riots occurred in some cities.

After a lot of intrigue, Dreyfus was retried in 1899 and convicted again, albeit with "extenuating circumstances". Dreyfus was then pardoned by the President, motivated by the desire to just get the affair over with and move on (the legislature had recently passed an amnesty law for people involved in the affair). Of course, this didn't convince anti-Dreyfusards. The Supreme Court spent years reviewing the case, and eventually, in 1906, formally overturned Dreyfus's conviction and reinstated him into the Army.

[edit] Legacy

The affair galvanized the French left; it fed the growth of republican sentiment among them as well as the development of better-organized political parties and groups like the Human Rights League[wp]. Unfortunately, it also galvanised the French right in supporting the army over and against the republic, while giving plenty of fuel to anti-Semitism in French society, which would later be evident in the collaboration with Nazis in occupied and Vichy France. L'Action française[wp], a far-right political party, was founded as an anti-Dreyfusard movement, and would go on to, with other far-right parties, undermine the Third Republic and support fascism and the Vichy regime. Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, was convinced by the affair to adopt Zionism and abandon previous support of Jewish integration, deciding that it showed Jews would never truly be welcome in Europe.

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