Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, was the true spy. There, he faced incredibly harsh treatment: guards were under orders never to speak to him, he received spoiled rations that made him sick, and he was manacled to his bed each night.Įvidence soon emerged that Maj. Insisting on LiesĬourt-martialed, Dreyfus was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana in South America. He then perjured himself in court saying that he’d been told by a secret source that Dreyfus was indeed guilty. Realizing that the army’s case against Dreyfus was weak, one of his men, Major Hubert Henry – who’d found the original letter and realized it had been written by a spy – fabricated damning evidence in handwriting that was similar to Dreyfus’. General Auguste Mercier, France’s Minister for War, insisted that Dreyfus be convicted, no matter what the evidence. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1987). One of the most advanced newspapers in France at the time, the Catholic journal La Croix, “reached a huge audience during the Dreyfus era, and mixed lurid antisemitism with other themes of interest… According to La Croix the Jews had virtually taken over the Republic… Every incident was linked to the purported conspiracy of Jews to subvert Christianity and French society” (quoted in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth & Justice, edited by Norman L. Dreyfus’ trial was conducted against a backdrop of extreme antisemitism, with mobs of people and French newspapers openly calling for “death to Jews” and spreading vile antisemitic slurs. Yet few officers probing the crime bothered to conduct a real investigation. The real spy was Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy, who’d been selling French military secrets to Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen, the military attaché at Germany’s embassy in Paris. (Quoted in Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century by Ruth Harris. He constantly asks for his wife and children,” recorded the governor of the prison where Dreyfuss was held. “Since his last interrogation, undergone Thursday, he has fainting spells… He always protests his innocence and shrieks that he will become mad before it is recognized. Dreyfus, being accused of betraying the country he loved was horrible, and he soon began to suffer a mental breakdown. Dreyfus later described his treatment as amounting to torture. Arrested, he was questioned repeatedly and kept in a cell for months. Dreyfus was summoned to military headquarters. Dreyfus was the spy, including his handwriting which differed markedly from that of the real spy. Though they claimed to have damning evidence against him, there was nothing at all to indicate that Cpt. When a letter was discovered in 1894 that indicated someone in the upper reaches of the French military was selling sensitive secrets to Germany, French officials turned on Cpt. In 1894, Dreyfus was 36 years old and living with his wife and children in Paris. One of the French families that had been forced out of Alsace was that of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, at the time the only senior Jewish officer in the French military. Barely a generation before, France had lost the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 Germany still occupied the Alsace region in the east of France and many French citizens were still living in exile from that region. In 1894, France was facing growing military strength and bellicose language from its newly unified neighbor Germany. Here are five facts about the Dreyfus Affair, and why it’s crucial we continue to remember Captain Dreyfus today. “In the world in which we live, in our country, and in our Republic, they are not over.” “I say to the young: forget nothing of these fights,” French President Emmanuel Macron said when he formally opened the museum on October 26, 2021. His trial ripped apart France, and the issues debated during Dreyfus’ court martial – including the role of Jews in France, antisemitism and the need for a Jewish homeland – continue to reverberate today. France’s newest museum is dedicated to preserving the memory of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer who was falsely accused of espionage over a century ago.
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