J'Accuse

At the start of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, France was in the midst of the Third Republic, a period that lasted from the end of the reign of Emperor Napoleon III in 1870 to the Fall of France during World War II in 1940. The Third Republic began after the Second French Empire crumbled during the Franco-Prussian War, and France became governed by a provisional-turned-permanent parliamentary government. The Second Empire was led by Napoleon III and emerged after the dissolution of the Second Republic, which was the brief period of French republican government that existed for four years, from 1848 to 1852, after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon III, the nephew of Bonaparte, was elected president under this temporary republic in 1848, but staged a successful coup in 1851 to obtain power as Emperor, like his uncle. After 18 years as Emperor and a series of tactical foreign policy mistakes that led to an alienation from France’s allies—coupled with the ongoing war with Prussia—republican forces were recaptured by the French government, and the Third Republic began. After the volatility of the Franco-Prussian War and the transitions between empire and republic, France settled into a period of relative governmental stability, with regular democratic elections.

Although the Franco-Prussian War was resolved by the 1890s, there was still tension between France and Germany, and this influenced the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a maid working as a French spy in the German Embassy in Paris found a torn up note in the trash which contained military secrets apparently passed from a French military officer to German officials. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the War Ministry, was accused early on, despite only circumstantial evidence. A handwriting expert determined that the handwriting on the note was too different from Dreyfus’s handwriting, and this was presented as an intentional attempt by Dreyfus to hide his own handwriting from identification. This evidence, along with other false testimonies and contrived stories, was specious at best, but Dreyfus was still tried for treason, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in a penal colony. Many at the time considered that his conviction was due to antisemitic bias in French society, the military, the courts, and in the press; antisemitism is now considered to have been the foremost reason for Dreyfus’s wrongful conviction. His family attempted to appeal his conviction, as did other prominent figures, many of whom called out the antisemitism prevalent in French attitudes at the time. The group who supported Dreyfus became known as the Dreyfusards. The anti-Dreyfusards, on the other side, pushed the narrative of Dreyfus’s guilt forward. These groups clashed as the debate over the issue increased through the mid-1890s, leading up to Émile Zola’s 1898 letter J’Accuse…!. This was a major challenge to the authorities, published on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore. Zola himself faced court charges for the composition and publication of this letter, and was found guilty of libel in February 1898, less than a month after the letter’s publication. He appealed this sentence, then fled to England to avoid imprisonment when his appeal seemed unlikely to succeed. Zola returned to France in the summer of 1900 after Dreyfus was pardoned; Zola died in 1902.

Dreyfus was retried and again found guilty in 1899, although this conviction was considered unsafe. To avoid another trial, he was pardoned by the president in 1899, for which Dreyfus was obliged to accept guilt. At the time of his pardon, he had spent four and a half years incarcerated on the Devil’s Island penal colony. Dreyfus was exonerated fully in 1906 by a judicial investigation, at which point he was reinstated to military service. Dreyfus endured years of prison, public shame, and a halted career as punishment for a crime did not commit. The real culprit behind the espionage and treason was found to be Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a French Army major. He had covered up his crime by framing Dreyfus, with assistance from other members of the French Army and War Ministry.