The Dreyfus trial is undoubtedly one of the most important events not only in the history of the Jewish people but in the history of France and it continues to resonate in our own day. Dr. Alon Klibanov, whose fascinating lecture on Joan of Arc can be found on the website, returns with another fascinating lecture and proves to us that there are two explanations for why the French tried to convict Dreyfus: the first explanation is shocking, while the second explanation is even more shocking.
You can find both explanations, along with an extensive overview of the affair, with reference to the relatively new film “An Officer and a Spy,” in the video below:
Also, for the benefit of those who prefer to read, in the following chapters you will find a summary of the main points of the lecture.
The historical background of the Dreyfus affair
The Dreyfus Affair did not arise out of thin air and is the result of two historical events, most of which occurred during the 19th century. The first is the integration of Jews into French society and the second is the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. If these two events had not occurred, the Dreyfus Trial would never have taken place.
French Jews become citizens with equal rights
French Jews, who had been expelled during the 14th century, began to return slowly and unofficially during the reign of Louis XIV, who allowed Jewish bankers and merchants from Portugal to settle in Paris. However, until the French Revolution, Jews in France were a negligible minority, cut off from French society and lacking rights. All this changed with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which made Jews, for the first time, equal citizens.
During the 19th century, the Jewish community in France flourished and its members were very successful in the financial field (for example, the Freire brothers and the Commondo family built the railways in France and the neighborhood near Parc Monceau in Paris). The great success that the Jewish community in France enjoyed and its growth following several waves of immigration created a strong anti-Semitic backlash. One of the most famous anti-Semites of the second half of the 19th century was Édouard Drumont (1844-1917), who published the book “Jewish France” in 1886 in which he spoke, among other things, of the Jews as a degenerate, greedy race. Drumont’s own book was very successful and gained him a foothold in many places, including the French army, and as you will see, this would have a very great influence later on.
The loss to Prussia in 1870 shocks France
In 1870, war broke out between Prussia and France. The result of this war was the complete collapse of the French army, the capture of Napoleon III in the town of Sedan, and the fall of Paris in January 1871, after a siege of several months.
The Third Republic, which arose on the ruins of the Second Empire, was forced to sign a peace treaty with Prussia in which it committed to hand over the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The Prussians were not satisfied with this but also decided to proclaim the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles in order to increase the humiliation of France.
The immense humiliation caused the French to want one thing and one thing only: revenge and the return of the provinces they had lost. This was expressed in the strengthening of the right and the extreme right, to the point that in the late 80s there was even a real fear of a military coup by General Boulanger. The desire for revenge also led some French people to enlist in the army in order to be part of the victory that everyone believed would come. One of these people was Alfred Dreyfus.
Alfred Dreyfus' career up to the "affair"
Alfred Dreyfus was born in 1859 to a wealthy Jewish family who lived in Alsace and owned textile factories. In 1871, following the transfer of Alsace to the German Empire, the family decided to leave this region and move to France. Fortunately for the family, they had a branch of the business in Switzerland, which enabled the family to circumvent the German ban on transferring money from Alsace directly to France.
Dreyfus, who was an excellent student, decided to pursue a military career in order to help France avenge Germany for the humiliation of 1870. This was a brave act on his part, as most officers in the French army were right-wing and devout Catholics, many of whom held anti-Semitic views. Despite all this, Dreyfus managed to graduate from the École Polytechnique, the higher engineering school in Paris, and after a two-year officer course, he was commissioned as an officer in an artillery regiment in 1880.
In 1893, Dreyfus accepted a position on the General Staff of the French Army, becoming the first Jew to serve in such a prestigious unit. He became known as an intelligent and diligent officer but also as an “outsider,” who did not develop friendly relations with his colleagues.
His military service went smoothly until one day in October 1894, he was arrested for espionage and treason.
The Dreyfus trial began…
The explosion of the affair: the Bordeaux and the search for a scapegoat
It all begins with a completely routine and everyday act in the world of espionage – rummaging through a trash can. In September 1894, a cleaner at the German embassy in Paris named Marie Bastian (who was actually a double agent for the French intelligence department, known as the “Ministry of Statistics,” because there’s nothing like a boring name to hide juicy secret activity), found a torn document. The document, which came to be known as “Le Bordereau” (an unsigned cover letter), had been collected and retrieved from the trash can of the German military attaché in Paris, Maximilian von Schwarzkopf.
The Bordeaux contained a list of five top-secret French military documents that had been passed to Germany. Among the documents were artillery deployment plans, information about military forces in Madagascar, and most importantly – details about France’s innovative 120mm gun system. Panic was at its peak in the French military leadership. There’s a spy among us! A mole (or крот, as my Russian-speaking colleagues would probably say), and we need to catch him quickly before the Germans know everything about what’s left of our military honor.
Here begins one of the most amateurish and biased “scapegoat” investigations in history. The army opened an investigation, and instead of looking for facts, it looked for a person who fit the desired profile of the “ideal traitor.” The conclusion was that the spy must be an artillery officer who had undergone training at the General Staff (because only then would he have access to the specified documents). But who? An investigating officer was quick to point to Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Why Dreyfus? Because he fitted perfectly into the fears and prejudices of the conservative Catholic officer corps. First of all, he was a native of Alsace (the French were convinced that every Alsatian hid a Pickhauve helmet under his bed and spoke German in his sleep). Second, he was an intellectual, cold, distant, and friendless (a true “outsider”). But the main reason, the “bonus” that closed the case for them, was the fact that he was Jewish. In the anti-Semitic environment of France at the time, a Jew walking around the corridors of the General Staff was perceived as a foreign and unreliable factor.
When the handwriting on the bordeaux was compared to Dreyfus’s, the police’s first handwriting experts were hesitant. Some said there was no match. But the army couldn’t let a minor detail like facts ruin a good theory. They brought in Alphonse Bertillon, a senior criminologist but a self-styled handwriting expert, who invented a delusional theory called “autoforgerie.” Bertillon claimed that Dreyfus had fabricated a handwriting that resembled his brother Mathieu’s handwriting a bit, and his own a bit, all out of “megalomania and the intention to confuse investigators.” It sounded far-fetched (and it did), but from the system’s perspective, it was conclusive scientific proof.
The first trial, the secret case, and the public humiliation ceremony
On October 15, 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was arrested. The military trial began in December of that year and was held behind closed doors for reasons of “state security.” Despite the ridiculous evidence, the defense, led by lawyer Edgar Demange, managed to dismantle the prosecution’s case. It seemed that Dreyfus was about to be acquitted.
But General Auguste Mercier, the French Minister of War, was not going to allow an acquittal. He knew that acquitting Dreyfus would portray the General Staff as a bunch of hysterical bureaucrats and would ruin his political career. So Mercier and the head of intelligence, Colonel Sandherr, did the unthinkable: they stitched together a “secret file” containing forged and baseless documents and handed it to the military judges in the courtroom, without Dreyfus or his lawyer knowing about it. It was a gross violation of every legal norm, but it did the job: on December 22, 1894, Dreyfus was convicted of treason. The sentence: life imprisonment and exile to Devil’s Island, somewhere in French Guiana.
But before the deportation to the island, the ritual that perhaps best expresses the destruction of Jewish integration took place. On January 5, 1895, in the snowy courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, Dreyfus was led to the public humiliation ceremony (La Dégradation). In front of 4,000 soldiers and an excited Parisian crowd shouting “Death to the Jew! Death to the traitor!”, a huge sergeant major approached him, tore off the buttons, ranks, and ribbons from his uniform jacket. Then, he broke Dreyfus’s sword on his knee and threw it to the ground.
Dreyfus, upright but pale as chalk, did not break. He shouted in a clear voice: “Soldiers, you are harming an innocent man! I swear to you that I am innocent! Long live France! Long live the army!” From there he was dragged to a civilian prison, on his way to the torture of Devil’s Island.
Hell on Earth: Devil's Island
If you thought French Guiana was a tropical destination for a belly-and-back vacation, think again. Devil's Island (Île du Diable) was a tiny, hot, disease-ridden rocky outcrop that belonged to a notorious penal colony. Dreyfus was sent there and was the only prisoner on the island, completely isolated from the rest of the colony's inmates. His conditions were modern torture: in unbearable heat and suffocating humidity, he was confined to a tiny stone hut.
The guards were ordered never to speak to him (they signed a pledge that if they spoke, they themselves would stand trial). The French were so paranoid that Dreyfus would try to escape (there were unfounded Parisian rumors of “Jewish rescue expeditions” from ghost ships in the ocean) that they built a high double wooden palisade around his cabin so that he could not even see the sea. At night, he was chained to his iron bed with an iron device known as “La double boucle,” which immobilized his legs so that he could not turn around. Despite this, he maintained his sanity by writing desperate and heartbreaking letters to his wife, Lucie, in which he repeated over and over: “I am innocent, seek the truth.”
Plot twist: Colonel Picard uncovers the real culprit
While Dreyfus languished in the Caribbean, his brother Mathieu Dreyfus was restless. Mathieu was a wealthy industrialist, and he poured every franc he had (and at the time he had a lot) into trying to find evidence that would prove his brother’s innocence. The family tried to use private investigators and politicians, but the French public was overwhelmingly convinced that the traitor had been properly tried, and the family simply encountered a “bond of silence.”
But the ticking bomb was inside the military system itself. In March 1896, a talented young officer, who ironically had been present at the Dreyfus trial as an observer for the War Office – Colonel Georges Picquart – was appointed head of military intelligence. One day, the agent Marie Bastien did her job faithfully again (and brought in garbage). In the German embassy bin was found a “Petit Bleu” – a kind of sealed postcard. This time it was addressed not to Captain Dreyfus, but to a French infantry officer named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.
Who was Esterhazy? Think of the classic period film villain: a bankrupt count, a compulsive gambler, a bad man, a womanizer, and in huge debt (so to speak, suffering from acute liquidity difficulties). To cover his debts, he did what any rotten aristocrat would do – he sold secrets to the Germans.
Picard, a man of rare integrity, began to interrogate the suspect officer. During the interrogation, he compared Esterhazy’s handwriting to that of the famous “Bordeau” on which Dreyfus was convicted. The shock was complete. It was not a 90 percent match, it was exactly the same handwriting. Dreyfus had not forged anything; Esterhazy had written the Bordeau.
As a loyal and patriotic officer, Picard was quick to present the findings to his superiors. He thought the army would be happy to discover the truth, release the wrong man, and catch the real spy. But the response he received was bloodcurdling. General Gonse, the deputy chief of staff, summoned Picard to a secret meeting. “What do you care about that Jew rotting there on Devil’s Island?” Gonse asked. When the shocked Picard replied that he did not intend to take this secret to the grave with him, Gonse replied: “If you keep quiet, no one will know.”
The army, in a desperate attempt to silence Picard, dismissed him from his post and sent him to “inspect military forces” on the Tunisian-Libyan border. The objective was clear: a dangerous war zone, stray bullets, extreme heat… Perhaps the stubborn officer would not return. At the same time, Picard’s former deputy, a corrupt officer named Hubert-Joseph Henry, was making sure to fabricate a new document that would once again convict Dreyfus and exonerate Esterhazy – a document that would later be called “Le Faux Henry.”
But before Picard was sent into the desert, he left an envelope with his lawyer in Paris, with instructions to open it in case he disappeared. The truth began to leak out.
Zola bursts the bubble: “I blame…!”
Picard’s information, along with pressure from independent journalists like Bernard Lazar, eventually reached Mathieu Dreyfus. Mathieu finally understood who had framed his brother, and in an unprecedented move, he published a public call in the press to put Esterhazy on trial. Under the resulting public pressure, the army was forced to open a military trial against Esterhazy. But of course it was a theatrical performance worse than the fringe plays of Montmartre. Esterhazy appeared at the trial with lawyers who had received instructions from the army, the military judges “saw neither saw nor heard,” and within 48 hours, in January 1898, Esterhazy was acquitted to the cheers of the audience.
This acquittal was the straw that broke the camel's back. Two days after the shameful acquittal, on January 13, 1898, the renowned writer Émile Zola committed a heroic act that changed the face of France. On the front page of Georges Clemenceau's newspaper, L'Aurore, Zola published an open and biting letter to the President of the Republic under the unforgettable headline: "I accuse…!" (!…J'Accuse).
In a text that attacks the rotten foundations of the French justice system and army, Zola did not mince words (and did not fear libel suits, because who cares about the attorney general when you are pursuing the truth). He named all the generals and officers who took part in the cover-up. He accused the entire army of criminal conspiracy, of concealing evidence, and of framing an innocent man for anti-Semitic motives.
Zola knew exactly what he was doing: such public slander required the state to prosecute him. And that was his goal – an open and public civil (not military) trial, which would force witnesses to speak and documents to see the light of day. He was indeed prosecuted, convicted (after all, by right-wing French judges), and forced to flee to England from the threat of prison, but he got what he wanted. The case was reopened, and the whole world was exposed to the injustice. France was torn in two.
The Ran Trial, the Pardon, and the Bitter Victory
In 1899, after the discovery of Colonel Henry's forgeries (who confessed to forging evidence and committed suicide in his cell, leaving a rather pathetic note), and after the resignation of ministers and complete chaos in the cabinet, the French Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that the 1894 trial was flawed. It ordered Dreyfus to be returned from Devil's Island and to be retried in Rennes.
The trial in Bern was a circus. Dreyfus was brought there as a broken man: his hair had turned completely white, he had difficulty speaking due to years of isolation, and he could barely stand on his feet. And if you thought that this time justice had been served – you did not know the stubbornness of the French army. In a maddening step of indifference, instead of acquitting him, the Bern panel of judges convicted him again! This time with a sentence of “only” 10 years in prison, and on the absurd charge of “treason with mitigating circumstances” (because it turns out that it is possible to betray one’s homeland, but in a really gentle and considerate way). In addition, during the trial, Dreyfus’ lawyer, Fernand Laborie, was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt.
The verdict caused an international outcry. World leaders (including Queen Victoria) condemned France, and threats of a boycott of the World's Fair (Expo) scheduled to be held in Paris in 1900 began to pour in. The new president, Émile Loubet, who wanted to put out the fire once and for all, offered Dreyfus a presidential pardon.
For Dreyfus, it was a heartbreaking dilemma. Accepting the pardon meant an implicit admission of guilt and avoiding a full-scale purge in court. But his family, led by his brother Mathieu (and also Clemenceau and Jean Jaurès), understood that he would not survive a decade in a French prison. In September 1899, Dreyfus accepted the pardon and was released to his family.
But he did not stop fighting. The legal battle continued for another seven years, until in 1906, the Supreme Court of France finally ruled that the case against him was a fabrication and a lie. The Bern verdict was overturned without a retrial, and Alfred Dreyfus was completely acquitted. He was reinstated in the army as a major, and received the Légion d'honneur in the very same court where he had been humiliated.
The two explanations for the affair: the ugly truth behind politics
As Dr. Alon Klibanov points out in his fascinating lecture, when we examine the pathological insistence of the French security establishment to leave an innocent man on Devil's Island despite all the evidence screaming the opposite, we find two main explanations. Both, as mentioned, are shocking in their own way.
The first explanation: institutional anti-Semitism (the shocking explanation)
The most accessible and immediate explanation is the deep hatred of the Jews. The French army, composed largely of members of the old aristocracy and founded on the knees of conservative Catholicism, was simply unable to digest the emancipation. Dreyfus, as the first Jew to advance to the general staff, was considered from the outset a threat, a Trojan horse, an agent of foreigners. When it was necessary to find fault with leaked documents, these prejudices were fertile ground for his incrimination.
We see how deeply the poison of Édouard Dromont and his book “Jewish France” (La France Juive) had penetrated. The public atmosphere was saturated with modern anti-Semitism: accusing the Jews of predatory capitalism on the one hand and subversive treachery on the other. In this sense, anti-Semitism was not just a “feeling,” but an effective tool. It was much easier for an officer to accuse a friendless Jew than to deal with the fact that a European nobleman (Esterhazy) was the one who traded the honor of his homeland for a few francs to pay back gambling debts.
The second explanation: the rationale of “the good of the state” (the even more shocking explanation)
The second explanation is perhaps the most chilling lesson to be drawn from the Dreyfus affair. This explanation is not about the Jews (for them, Dreyfus could have been just an unknown officer not connected to the Chief of Staff's inner circle), but about the principle of the Raison d'État (the interest of the state, or the "reason of the state").
The France of 1894 was still licking the wounds of the humiliating defeat of 1870. All the hopes of the French nation, all the dreams of “revanche” (revenge on the Germans and the recovery of the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine), depended entirely on the public’s confidence in its army. The French General Staff was seen as the holy of holies. For the commanding scoundrels, like General Mercier and General Gonzales, the thought that all of France would discover that the army had fabricated evidence, forged a trial, and thrown an innocent man to torture was seen as more devastating than the injustice done to Dreyfus himself.
When Gonzales asked Picard, “What do you care about this Jew?” he was not speaking out of pure anti-Semitism (although it was always in the background), but rather out of the chilling coldness of a political hierarchy. Their equation was simple and cruel: it is better for one person, even if innocent, to rot on Devil’s Island than for the myth of the “perfect army” to collapse, thereby weakening France against Germany. This is the future-fascist concept according to which the state is more important than any universal justice, and civil rights are completely abolished in the face of political and power interests. This is a painful lesson in the way in which state systems are prepared to trample on the little man and murder the truth, all in the name of the “common good.”
The Legacy of the Dreyfus Affair
The trial, designed to be a tragic end for a lone officer, became the central fault line of French and Jewish history. For France, the victory of the Dreyfussards led to the final consolidation of the values of the Republic over the forces of reaction and the army. This led directly to the Secularization Act of 1905 and the reduction of the political power of the army (well, at least until World War II and the Vichy regime, when it became clear that the anti-Dreyfussards had not disappeared, but were merely waiting for an opportunity to take revenge).
For the Jewish people, the result was tectonic. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist who had until then believed deeply in the idea of emancipation and assimilation in Europe, saw Dreyfus' sword broken and the masses calling for Jewish blood in the capital of freedom, equality and fraternity. The realization that Jews would not be safe even under the most enlightened democracy if they did not have their own state – this was the spark that ignited the Zionist idea that led to the establishment of the State of Israel.
Ultimately, Dreyfus was a victim and a symbol, but also a man who triumphed in his own quiet way. He died in 1935 a French war hero, and when his granddaughter was once asked what her grandfather was, she replied simply: “Alfred Dreyfus was not a Dreyfusser, he was simply a Frenchman who wanted his life back.”