Raymond Rudorff, Belle Epoque

The Dreyfus Period (1): Over View

 

THE STORY of the arrest, trial, imprisonment, re-trial, pardon and final rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus is so well known and has been told so many times that only the outlines of the affair need to be mentioned here. In October 1894, Dreyfus was a staff captain attached to the General Staff intelligence section known as the Deuxieme Bureau, and was arrested on the charge of passing on documents to the German Intelligence in Paris. A document alleged to be in his writing was produced as evidence against him. He was found guilty by a military court, and on January 5, 1895, he was publicly degraded in a humiliating ceremony before being sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island, Cayenne.

A year later, another army officer, Commandant Picquart, had begun to suspect that Dreyfus was innocent and that the evidence against him had been fabricated. A number of prominent personalities expressed their doubts about the case, contradictory "revelations" were published in the press and another officer, Esterhazy, was accused of having forged a document which had incriminated Dreyfus. Esterhazy was court martialled, acquitted and, a few days later, the newspaper L'Aurore published a sensational letter by Zola who accused ministers and high-ranking officers of concealing the truth, thus inaugurating the bitterest phase of the controversy. Esterhazy and a colleague, Colonel Henry, were arrested for forgery. In 1899 Dreyfus was brought back to France, re-tried, found guilty again, there was a fresh uproar, and he was pardoned. Calm returned to France and Parisians were able to celehate the dawn of a new century in a comparatively peaceful atmosphere enlivened by the 1900 Exposition.

The fact that the affair had so greatly divided the nation showed that the main issue was not merely that of the guilt or innocence
of one army  officer whom many believed to have been wrongly condemned. Dreyfus  himself became only  the  pretext  for  the quarrel. The  question of his guilt  was a political  weapon  used by both  sides, and  the  reason  the  affair blew up to such  a huge extent  was because it occurred at a time in France when passions were being stirred  by violent  anti-semitism, militarism and anti­ militarism,  delirious chauvinism, anti-republican plotting and social agitation.  Nothing else could  have explained  the  remark­ able displays of hatred  that  France witnessed;  it was a time when politicians and  journalists fought duels regularly, when  an archbishop of Paris patronised an anti-semitic league of army  officers, when writers and  artists who  had formerly assumed attitudes of detachment from  life and  world-weariness suddenly engaged themselves  in political  argument and  propaganda, when  mobs reappeared  in  the streets  of Paris, and  when  society salons  split into opposing  factions and  raucous ultra-patriots called  for a coup d'etat.