structural:summarization, structural:expansion
Henry unmasked, the case is rekindled

The acquittal of Esterhazy, the convictions of Émile Zola and of Georges Picquart, and the continued presence of an innocent man in prison had a considerable national and international effect. France was exposed as an arbitrary state, which contradicted its founding republican principles. Antisemitism made considerable progress and riots were common throughout the year 1898. However politicians were still in denial about the affair. In April and May 1898, they were mostly concerned with elections, in which Jaurès lost his seat of Carmaux. The majority was moderate, though a parliamentary group in the House was antisemitic. Nevertheless the cause of the Dreyfusards was restarted.

Godefroy Cavaignac, the new minister of war and a fierce supporter of anti-revisionism, definitely wanted to prove the guilt of Dreyfus and from there "wring the neck" of Esterhazy, whom he considered "a pathological liar and blackmailer". He was absolutely convinced of Dreyfus's guilt, a conviction reinforced by the legend of the confession (after meeting the main witness, Captain Lebrun-Renault). Cavaignac had the honesty of a doctrinaire intransigent, but absolutely did not know the depths of the affair—the General Staff had kept him in the dark. He was surprised to learn that all the documents on which the prosecution was based had not been expertly appraised and that Boisdeffre had "absolute confidence" in Henry. Cavaignac decided to investigate—in his office, with his assistants—and retrieved the secret file, which now contained 365 items.

On 4 April, the newspaper Le Siècle published Lettre d'un Diplomate, the first of four documents, that were of critical importance in exposing Esterhazy's guilt, and enabled the Dreyfusard cause to regain the initiative it had lost with Zola's conviction. The secret information had been provided by Zola, who had received it from Oscar Wilde; Wilde had gained it from best friend Carlos Blacker, who was an intimate friend of Alessandro Panizzardi.

On 7 July 1898, during a questioning in the National Assembly Cavaignac reported three items "overwhelming among a thousand", two of which had no connection with the case. The other was the "faux Henry". Cavaignac's speech was effective: the députés (deputies) gave him an ovation and voted to display copies of the three documents in the 36,000 communes of France. The anti-Dreyfusards had triumphed, but Cavaignac implicitly recognized that the Dreyfus's defence had not had access to all the evidence. The application for annulment made by Lucie Dreyfus became admissible. The next day, Picquart declared in Le Temps to the council president, "I am in a position to establish before a court of competent jurisdiction that the two documents bearing the date of 1894 could not be attributed to Dreyfus and that the one that bears the date of 1896 had all the characteristics of a fake", which earned him eleven months in prison.

On the evening of 13 August 1898, Louis Cuignet, who was attached to the cabinet of Cavaignac, was working by the light of a lamp and observed that the colour of the lines on the "faux Henry" paper header and footer did not correspond with the central part of the document. Cavaignac was still trying to find logical reasons for the guilt and conviction of Dreyfus but was not silent on this discovery. A board of inquiry was formed to investigate Esterhazy, before which he panicked and confessed his secret reports to Major du Paty de Clam. Collusion between the General Staff and the traitor was revealed. On 30 August 1898 Cavaignac resigned himself to demanding explanations from Colonel Henry in the presence of Boisdeffre and Gonse. After an hour of questioning by the minister himself, Henry broke down and made a full confession. He was placed under arrest at the Mont-Valérien fortress, where he killed himself the next day by cutting his own throat with a razor. The request for review filed by Lucie Dreyfus could not be rejected. Yet Cavaignac said "less than ever!", but the president of the council, Henri Brisson, forced him to resign. Despite his apparently entirely involuntary role in the revision of the 1894 trial Cavaignac remained convinced that Dreyfus was guilty and made a statement disparaging and offensive to Dreyfus at the Rennes trial.

The anti-revisionists did not consider themselves beaten. On 6 September 1898 Charles Maurras published a eulogy of Henry in La Gazette de France in which he called him a "heroic servant of the great interests of the State". La Libre Parole, Drumont's antisemitic newspaper, spread the notion of "patriotic fake" (" faux patriotique "). In December the same newspaper launched a subscription, in favour of his widow, to erect a monument to Henry. Each gift was accompanied by pithy, often abusive, remarks on Dreyfus, the Dreyfusards, and the Jews. Some 14,000 subscribers, including 53 deputies, sent 131,000 francs. On 3 September 1898, Brisson, the president of the council, urged Mathieu Dreyfus to file an application for review of the military court of 1894. The government transferred the case to the Supreme Court for its opinion on the past four years of proceedings.

France was thoroughly divided into two, but several things remain clear: the Jewish community had little involvement, intellectuals were not all Dreyfusards, the Protestants were divided, and Marxists refused to support Dreyfus. The split transcended religion and social background, as shown in a cartoon by Caran d'Ache, “A Family Dinner”: before, "Above all, never talk about it!"; after, "They talked about it".