Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus Affair (l'affaire Dreyfus) began in 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Convicted by a closed court-martial on the basis of a handwritten bordereau and secret evidence withheld from the defense, he was stripped of rank in a public degradation ceremony and deported to Devil's Island in French Guiana for life.

By 1896, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of military counter-intelligence, identified Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the true author of the bordereau. The army suppressed the finding and transferred Picquart. Esterhazy was tried and acquitted in January 1898. Two days later, the novelist Émile Zola published his open letter "J'Accuse…!" in L'Aurore (13 January 1898), accusing the General Staff and war ministry of judicial error and cover-up. Zola was convicted of criminal libel and fled to England.

The affair split France into dreyfusards (republicans, socialists, anticlericals, intellectuals such as Clemenceau, Jaurès, and Anatole France) and antidreyfusards (much of the army, the Catholic hierarchy, monarchists, and nationalist press including La Libre Parole). It catalyzed the formation of the Ligue des droits de l'homme (1898) and, on the nationalist side, the Action française.

A 1899 retrial at Rennes again found Dreyfus guilty "with extenuating circumstances"; he accepted a presidential pardon from Émile Loubet. Full judicial rehabilitation came on 12 July 1906, when the Cour de cassation annulled the Rennes verdict; Dreyfus was reinstated and decorated with the Legion of Honour. He later served in World War I.

The affair's longer consequences include the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, the weakening of clerical and monarchist forces in the Third Republic, and—through Theodor Herzl's reporting on the 1895 degradation—an impetus for political Zionism articulated in Der Judenstaat (1896).