Dreyfus affair
Summary

At the end of 1894, French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and a Jew of Alsatian origin, was accused of handing secret documents to the Imperial German military. After a closed trial, he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was deported to Devil's Island in French Guiana. At that time, the opinion of the French political class was unanimously unfavourable towards Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus family, particularly his older brother Mathieu, remained convinced of his innocence and worked with journalist Bernard Lazare to prove it. In March 1896, Colonel Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage, found evidence that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The General Staff refused to reconsider its judgment and instead transferred Picquart to a position in North Africa.

In July 1897, Dreyfus's family contacted the President of the Senate Auguste Scheurer-Kestner to draw attention to the weakness of the evidence against Dreyfus. Scheurer-Kestner reported three months later that he was convinced Dreyfus was innocent, and persuaded Georges Clemenceau, a newspaper reporter and former member of the Chamber of Deputies, of the same. In the same month, Mathieu complained about Esterhazy to the Ministry of War. In January 1898 two events raised the case to national prominence: Esterhazy was acquitted of treason charges (subsequently shaving his moustache and fleeing France), and Émile Zola published his J'accuse...!, a Dreyfusard declaration that rallied many intellectuals to Dreyfus's cause. France became increasingly divided over the case, and the issue continued to be hotly debated until the end of the century. Antisemitic riots erupted in more than twenty French cities, and riots in Algiers resulted in several deaths.

Despite covert attempts by the army to quash the case, the initial conviction was annulled by the Supreme Court after a thorough investigation. A new court-martial was held at Rennes in 1899. Dreyfus was convicted again and sentenced to ten years of hard labour, though the sentence was commuted due to extenuating circumstances. Dreyfus accepted the presidential pardon granted by President Émile Loubet. In 1906 his innocence was officially established by an irrevocable judgement of the Supreme Court. Dreyfus was reinstated in the army with the rank of Major and participated in the First World War. He died in 1935.

The implications of this case were numerous and affected all aspects of French public life. It was regarded as a vindication of the Third Republic (and became a founding myth), but it led to a renewal of nationalism in the military. It slowed the reform of French Catholicism and republican integration of Catholics.

The affair engendered numerous antisemitic demonstrations, which in turn affected sentiment within the Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe. At the same time, Jews in the Russian Empire were under pressure of pogroms in response to political instability within the Pale. These factors persuaded Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, that the Jews must leave Europe and establish their own state.
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