Alfred Dreyfus was born in Alsace in 1859. After the Franco–Prussian war of 1870–1, and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by Prussia, his family moved to Paris. Alfred trained at the École Polytechnique, an elite military school in Paris, and on graduation in 1880 he was commissioned as a sub–lieutenant. By 1889 he had risen to the rank of Captain; he married in 1891, and was admitted to the École Supèrieur de Guerre, or War College, shortly afterwards. On graduation he was designated as a trainee in the General Staff headquarters of the French Army, where he would be the only Jewish officer.
In 1894, the French Army's counter–intelligence section became aware that information regarding new artillery parts was being passed to the Germans by a highly placed spy, most likely to be on the General Staff. Suspicion quickly fell upon Dreyfus, who was arrested on 15 October 1894 on suspicion of treason. On 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was summarily convicted in a secret court martial, publicly stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. Following the French military custom of the time, he was formally degraded by having the rank insignia, buttons and braid cut from his uniform and his sword broken, in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire before silent ranks of soldiers, while a large crowd of onlookers shouted abuse from behind railings. Dreyfus cried out: "I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the Army. Vive La France! Vive l'Armée!"
In 1896, new evidence identified a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy as the real culprit. But the new evidence was suppressed by high–ranking military officials, and a military court unanimously acquitted Esterházy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army then charged Dreyfus with additional offences, based on falsified documents.
In January 1898, a Paris newspaper published a vehement open letter from the popular French writer Émile Zola, entitled J'accuse, which exposed the framing of Dreyfus by the military court and an attempted cover–up. The government came under pressure to reopen the case.
In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial. The ensuing political and judicial scandal caused a major rift in French society. Dreyfus's anti–clerical, pro–republican supporters, known as Dreyfusards, included Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Henri Poincaré and Georges Clemenceau; prominent among the the pro–Army, mostly Catholic "anti–Dreyfusards' was Édouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The new trial resulted in another conviction and a 10–year sentence, but in view of the strength of public opinion, Dreyfus was offered a pardon by President Émile Loubet. He accepted the pardon, and was released from prison in 1899; this was a compromise that saved face for the mistakes made by the military. Officially, Dreyfus remained a traitor to France; he pointedly remarked upon his release: "The government of the Republic has given me back my freedom. It is nothing for me without my honour."
Eventually all the accusations against Dreyfus were demonstrated to be baseless. He lived under house arrest for two years, but on 12 July 1906 he was officially exonerated by a military commission. The following day he was readmitted into the army with a promotion to the rank of major ("Chef d'Escadron"). He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour a week later, and subsequently assigned to command an artillery unit at Vincennes. He served throughout World War I, rising eventually to the rank of lieutenant–colonel. He died in 1935.
The story of the Dreyfus Affair was told in a series of eleven documentary films, each one minute long, made while the case was actually going on. A feature–length film was made in Germany in 1930, and this was remade in Britain the following year. Cedric Hardwicke starred as Dreyfus, and George Merritt played Zola. Col. Georges Piquart, the army intelligence chief, was played by Charles Carson. It was Piquart who uncovered the evidence that implicated Ferdinand Esterházy and eventually (thanks to Piquart's persistence) led to Dreyfus's pardon and exoneration.
© Haydn Thompson 2017