*Includes pictures
*Includes a bibliography for further reading
"By my forty years of work, by the authority that this toil may have given me, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. By all I have now, by the name I have made for myself, by my works which have helped for the expansion of French literature, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. May all that melt away, may my works perish if Dreyfus be not innocent! He is innocent. All seems against me - the two Chambers, the civil authority, the military authority, the most widely-circulated journals, the public opinion which they have poisoned. And I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. But I am quite calm; I shall conquer. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. I may be condemned here. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor." - Émile Zola
Sometime in 1889, a woman named Madame Marie Bastian was recruited as an agent of the secretive "Statistical Section," an espionage and counter-intelligence agency attached to the military intelligence office of the French General Staff. Mme. Bastian, a cleaner employed by the German Embassy in Paris, and thanks to her Romany origins, she was somewhat acquainted with Germany and marginally conversant in the German language. She enjoyed complete and unrestricted access to the private residences of many important German diplomats and functionaries, and as she gathered up the torn-up documents in the various waste paper baskets, she routinely passed them on to a handler attached to the Statistical Section. Most of what was delivered was of little interest or importance, but on some occasions, documents taped back together and translated proved to be of significant value.
In September 1890, among a pile of torn-up documents delivered by Mme. Bastian was found a note handwritten in French which, when pieced together, proved to be a list of French military secrets handed over to the Germans by an unknown French officer of the General Staff. This discovery, which proved the existence of a traitor in the department, triggered a ferment in the corridors of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, and the hunt was on for the culprit.
By a process of elimination, officers of the military intelligence were able to narrow down a list of probable traitors, among whom was a young Jewish staff officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was immediately earmarked as the chief suspect. Dreyfus' handwriting was compared to that on the bordereau, and although the various handwriting experts who conducted the comparison failed to reach a common consensus, it was nonetheless judged that Dreyfus was indeed the culprit. In December 1894, Dreyfus was court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to a term of life in prison. On January 5, 1895, in a formal parade, Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his rank, his sword was broken over the knee of a sergeant, and he was shipped overseas to the penal colony of Devil's Island on the coast of French Guiana.
These are the essential facts of the "Dreyfus Affair," as it came to be known, an episode that in many respects defined French anti-Semitism in the late 19th century. A case was built with the central objective of protecting the integrity of French military establishment, and in the process, the relatively muted anti-Semitism in France (at least compared to other European nations) was transformed into an era of virulent and violent Jew-hatred that characterized and sullied the final decade of the 19th century in France. Even today, as many of the affair's nuances and facets have faded from memory, its political importance and anti-Semitic elements continue to be well-known and quite relevant today.
The Dreyfus Affair: The History and Legacy of France's Most Notorious Antisemitic Political Scandal examines the chain of events that produced one of the most notorious episodes in modern French history.