by Marissa Moss
A Brother’s Efforts
From the beginning, Mathieu Dreyfus worked tirelessly to clear his brother’s name. With the help of the lawyer, Demange, he discovered the contents of the secret dossier. Since repeated petitions for retrials were rejected, Mathieu decided to present his case directly to the public. He approached a Jewish journalist, Bernard Lazare, to write a clear argument exposing the travesty of justice. Mathieu had 35,000 copies of the pamphlet, titled “A Judicial Error,” printed in Brussels (to avoid legal action against him for committing libel) and distributed in France.
Lazare wrote about Dreyfus: “He is a soldier, but he is a Jew, and it is as a Jew that he was prosecuted. Because he was a Jew, he was arrested; because he was a Jew, he was tried; because he was a Jew, he was convicted; because he was a Jew, the voice of justice and truth could not be heard in his favor; and the responsibility for the condemnation of that innocent man falls entirely on those who provoked it by their vile exhortations, lies, and slander…They needed their own Jewish traitor to replace the classic Judas, a Jewish traitor they could use every day to cover an entire race with shame…”
In response to this pamphlet, Le Matin printed a facsimile of the original bordereau as proof of Dreyfus’s guilt. Mathieu seized this opportunity to have posters hung all over the city showing his brother’s handwriting next to the bordereau so that anybody could see the two didn’t match. In France and abroad, handwriting experts agreed that Dreyfus hadn’t written the bordereau.
The Dreyfus Affair Begins
Picquart, back in France in 1897, realized that he had been right about Esterházy and that his superiors had known the truth all along. His transfer to North Africa had been a setup, a form of exile. Recognizing how far the military would go to keep their secrets, Picquart added a codicil to his will that an envelope be delivered to the president of the Republic in case of his death. The envelope contained an accusation against the General Staff of perpetrating a vast cover-up, treating the law with contempt, and knowingly punishing an innocent man.
Finally unable to keep quiet any longer, Picquart told a lawyer friend what he knew. That friend told the vice president of the Senate, a powerful and popular senator, who told the President, Félix Faure, and General Jean-Baptiste Billot, who promised an investigation but did nothing. Still, through Picquart, the wall of secrecy and conspiracy that the military had so carefully built was cracked.
The army, warned that the senator knew the identity of the real traitor, tried to protect Esterházy, but Mathieu’s posters with the bordereau caught the eye of a banker, Jacques de Castro, who recognized the handwriting of his sleaziest client, Esterházy. Convinced that his client had to be the real traitor, de Castro gave Mathieu some of Esterházy’s letters from his bank files as proof of a real match.
Mathieu gave this proof to the senator and approached the mainstream press, this time Le Figaro, writing a letter to the Minister of War that spelled out Esterházy’s guilt and demanded justice for Dreyfus. The letter appeared on November 16, 1897, and ignited a fury of interest. The Dreyfus case was now the Dreyfus Affair.
J’Accuse
Émile Zola, the novelist who was so beloved that he’d been inducted into the Legion of Honor in 1892, hadn’t paid much attention to Dreyfus. But after reading Mathieu’s letter, he wrote his own essay for Le Figaro, not focusing on Dreyfus so much as on the senator and his nobility in trying to right a horrible wrong.
A Nation Divided
The renewed interest forced the military to put Esterházy on trial in January 1898. Once again, the judges ruled for a closed session on grounds of national security. The trial lasted two days, the deliberation not even five minutes. Not surprisingly, the military judges voted unanimously to acquit Esterházy. The real traitor left the courtroom to shouts of “Long Live France,” “Long Live the Army,” and “Death to the Jews!” The senator, Picquart, and Mathieu Dreyfus all testified against Esterházy, only to be threatened by the angry hordes outside.
Esterházy went free. The senator, however, lost his re-election for the post of vice president. Even worse, Picquart was arrested and sent to prison. That same day, January 13, 1898, was when Zola’s “J’Accuse” appeared. It became one of the most famous headlines in the history of journalism. With his forceful writing, Zola turned the Dreyfus Affair into an enormous political, military, and social scandal. He held all of France accountable for the grotesque miscarriage of justice, for fanning the ugly flames of anti-Semitism.
In his clear prose, Zola laid out how the General Staff had seized Dreyfus as the culprit because of his Jewishness, and once they’d made the accusation, they couldn’t go back. Dreyfus was sacrificed to the integrity of the army in a devil’s bargain. One innocent man’s torture paid to keep the reputation of the military unstained.
Zola finished the essay with a list of accusations against specific men on the General Staff, naming names even though he knew he risked the charge of libel by doing so. It was a risk he had to take. “I have but one goal: that light be shed, in the name of mankind which has suffered so much and has the right to happiness. My ardent protest is only a cry from my very soul. Let them dare to summon me before a court of law! Let the inquiry be held in broad daylight! I am waiting.”
He didn’t have to wait long. As soon as the article appeared, his apartment was pelted with stones and excrement. He received death threats, and ugly crowds jeered him when he appeared in public. The official response was as he expected. Three weeks later, his trial for libel was held in the Palais de Justice. Taking longer than either Dreyfus’s or Esterházy’s trials—ten days—the process involved everyone named in “J’Accuse.” The crowds packing the courtroom and spilling outside were bigger and rowdier than those for the two military tribunals.
Unfortunately for Zola, there was no question of justice for him, any more than for Dreyfus. The judges refused to allow any defense that mentioned Dreyfus or actual facts from the Affair, basically making it impossible for Zola to defend himself. The military witnesses, however, were allowed to testify without naming evidence to prove that Zola’s accusations weren’t true. In other words, it was the military’s word against Zola’s enforced silence.
There was one witness who gave evidence corroborating Zola’s facts, Picquart, who was allowed out of prison to appear in court. To refute his testimony, General Georges-Gabriel de Pellieux quoted from the secret dossier, the one forged by Henry and the only proof explicitly naming Dreyfus. When Zola’s lawyer demanded the file be put into evidence for review, the military refused, claiming issues of national security. With that, the trial was quickly adjourned and the judges decided against Zola and the managing director of the newspaper. The once-lauded laureate was sentenced to the maximum penalty—a huge fine of 3,000 francs and one year in prison.
Zola demanded a retrial but was found guilty again. Rather than go to prison, he fled to London, where he met Oscar Wilde, just out of jail himself. But the fire that “J’Accuse” had started grew, creating a new Dreyfusard movement and galvanizing public awareness to fight for human rights.
The new Minister of War, Jacques Godefroy Cavaignac, reopened the files, including the secret dossier, and assuming the documents were legitimate, he publicized the contents. Then, too late, he ordered a careful examination of the papers, only to learn that the incriminating pages has been forged by Henry. Henry admitted his guilt and killed himself in his jail cell, providing the Dreyfusards with even more ammunition.
You would think that when a man kills himself over guilt for his crime, the crime he committed would be obvious. But rather than becoming a scapegoat for the army, Henry became a public hero. He was considered someone who had sacrificed himself for his country, and people donated an enormous sum for his widow (130,000 francs) and for a statue to be erected in his honor (still standing in Paris). These donations were often signed with hatred for the Jews. One was
“from a future medical student, already sharpening his scalpels to dissect the Maccabee Dreyfus, shot by a dozen bullets from a firing squad.” Another was “from a teacher who is sure to tell his students that Jews and their friends are the vampires of France.” A third suggested: “finding not enough Jews to massacre, I propose cutting them in two, in order to get twice as many.”
Despite the ugly spoutings of anti-Semitism, Henry’s suicide created a dramatic change in public opinion. Before his death, only 2 percent of French newspapers were for Dreyfus. Afterward, 40 percent supported him. The Dreyfus Affair divided France, divided families, and severed friendships, as happened with Degas.
With such a strong swell of opinion for Dreyfus’s innocence, the government was forced by late 1898 to open yet another judicial process, this time a civilian tribunal. In May 1899, the court concluded that the infamous bordereau was indeed written by Esterházy (who had long since fled to England like his critic, Zola). The judges annulled the 1894 verdict and sent for Dreyfus to answer to a new court-martial.
The response from army supporters was vicious. They accused the justices of being bribed by the imaginary Jewish cabal. The ugly language fostered more turmoil in the streets. Riots broke out and the government collapsed as the prime minister was voted out of office for his failure to deal with the Dreyfus Affair and the military. What Degas had feared came to pass—the military lost stature and the government lost status, both because of Dreyfus. Or actually because of how those two institutions handled the gross injustice they themselves had caused.
The Second Dreyfus Trial
In the summer of 1898, Dreyfus returned from Devil’s Island for his new court-martial. Not yet forty, he had aged horribly from malaria and malnutrition. His teeth had rotted out; he’d lost so much weight he looked like a skeleton; and his once black hair had turned white. Because he’d barely spoken to anyone in years, he could only manage a hoarse whisper. Worried that his appearance would make him look sympathetic, the army had a special padded uniform made to disguise how gaunt he was.
This court-martial was very different from the first. Because of assassination threats, Dreyfus was guarded by two hundred mounted police. More than three hundred journalists from all over the world were present. The new invention of the movie camera recorded some of the testimony, leading to one of the first documentaries ever made, L’Affaire Dreyfus. (The film was promptly banned by the French government—no film was allowed to made about the Dreyfus Affair in France until 1959.) The courtroom was crammed with as many as a thousand spectators. This trial was a major public event for the entire world and lasted four weeks.
Picquart was freed from prison after nearly a year. Zola returned from England. Both wanted to attend the trial of the century.
But if they expected justice to finally be done, they—and the rest of the world—were disappointed. No military witnesses testified, just the same handwriting expert as before, and the same unproven hearsay evidence was admitted. The crowds were as full of hate and rage as ever.
As Fernand Labori, one of Dreyfus’s lawyers, was leaving the courtroom, he was shot in the back. Despite numerous witnesses and all the mounted police, the attacker ran away in the crowd and was never found. Fortunately the injury proved to be minor, and Labori quickly returned to the trial.
The most compelling testimony came from Dreyfus himself, and reporters from all of Europe’s newspapers wrote about how clearly the evidence proved him to be innocent. Still, the need to preserve the honor of the military compelled the justices to find Dreyfus guilty again by a vote of five to two. Out of a sense of mercy and given how ill the defendant was, however, they offered to reduce the sentence to only ten years in prison.
Zola wrote in the newspaper L’Aurore of the verdict: “there will exist no more detestable monument to human infamy…the ignorance, folly, madness, cruelty, deceit, and crime.” He added that this new trial would cause “tomorrow’s generations to tremble with shame.”
The Fallout
The French press was split in its response, some shamed by how France now looked to the world, others proud of the army and suspicious of the so-called Jewish cabal. The international press was solidly pro-Dreyfus, even in deeply anti-Semitic countries like Russia. In America, Mark Twain skewered France and its farcical claim to have invented the Rights of Man after the French Revolution in admiration of the American Bill of Rights.
Again, riots broke out, and to calm the public and put the disastrous affair to rest once and for all, the French president pardoned Dreyfus on grounds of ill health and national interest in healing wounds.
The pardon only inflamed public sentiment more. Protests broke out in Chicago, Rome, and London, drawing tens of thousands in support of Dreyfus. Germans warned their citizens not to travel to France, a country where all rights were violated. The British advised that France was no longer a civilized nation.
Zola captured the pervasive sense of despair in the face of such blatant injustice: “I am terrified. What I feel is no longer anger, no longer indignation and the craving to avenge it, no longer the need to denounce a crime and demand its punishment in the name of truth and justice. I am terrified, filled with the sacred awe of a man who witnesses the supernatural: rivers flowing backward toward their sources and the earth toppling over under the sun…for our noble and generous France has fallen to the bottom of the abyss…The world is convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, and France looks ignorant, cruel, blinkered, uncivilized.”
Dreyfus was pardoned, though to him liberty was hollow without honor. And in 1900 the National Assembly voted a blanket amnesty to everyone involved in the whole sorry six-year history of the affair. Nobody would ever be held accountable for Dreyfus’s suffering or for the suffering of those who supported him, including Picquart and Zola.
When Zola was found dead in his apartment in September 1902, poisoned by fumes from the fireplace, it was immediately suspected that a “patriot” had blocked the chimney, but nothing was ever proved. Dreyfus and his brother both went to the funeral, along with an armed guard, as crowds heckled both the dead writer and the man he’d proclaimed innocent. Zola was buried in an elaborate tomb in Montmartre, but his remains were later moved to a crypt in the Pantheon so he could be honored along with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, other famous French writers. As Anatole France said of Zola at the funeral, “Fate and courage swept him to the summit, to be, for one moment, the conscience of mankind.”
Justice?
Zola was silenced, yet Dreyfus kept pressing for a new judgment, one that would fully exonerate him of all charges. It took twelve years, but in July 1906, the second verdict was annulled and Dreyfus was declared innocent. He was reinstated in the army, promoted to major, and awarded the cross of the Knight of the Legion of Honor in the same War College courtyard where he had been humiliated.
Even after vacating the original judgment against Dreyfus, the government censored public discussion of the affair. No movie on the subject, including anything on the life of Zola, was allowed to be made or shown in France until 1959, when the law was finally changed. The legal reason given for such harshness was the possibility of riots or injury to the honor of the army.
For the same reason, there was no public statue of Dreyfus in Paris until 1985. Even at that late date, the sculpture commissioned by Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, was considered too controversial for the courtyard of the War College, where it was intended. Almost eighty years after Dreyfus was reinstated, the Army still couldn’t accept an image that would remind them of the injustice they had inflicted. A copy was placed in the courtyard of the newly opened Museum of Jewish Art and History, but the original languished in storage for two decades.
Only in 2006, after giving a speech to pacify the military, did President Jacques Chirac have the statue set at the exit to the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station. By carefully selecting a site th
at wasn’t too prominent, a place far from the War College, the government at that late date was still choosing military honor over the truth.
The Conscience of Mankind
Despite how immensely important the Dreyfus Affair was, its history is barely known. Reading about it today, the military corruption, the need for a scapegoat, the brutal disrespect for human rights doesn’t seem all that distant. This kind of thing could still happen today in this country. Maybe not to a Jew, but maybe to a Muslim this time. And where would we find our Zola?
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