1898 What history calls ‘the Dreyfus affair’ began in 1894 when it was discovered that French military secrets about artillery dispositions were being passed to the Germans. Since the Franco-Prussian war, relations between the countries had been tense. Suspicion fell on a French officer of Jewish origin, Alfred Dreyfus. He was arrested on 15 October 1894, stripped of his captain’s rank (the epaulets ritually torn from his uniform) and sentenced by court martial, in camera, to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island.
Two years later the real culprit was identified, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. To save military embarrassment, it was covered up and Dreyfus left to rot in French Guiana. The story leaked out. To the allegations of rank injustice were added those of institutional anti- Semitism. Dreyfus’s case became a ‘cause’. It was raised to white heat by the acquittal, after inquiry, of Esterhazy.
This it was that provoked, on 13 January 1898, Emile Zola’s 4,000- word open letter, addressed to the president of France, in the newspaper L’Aurore, headlined ‘J’accuse!’. Two hundred thousand copies of the newspaper were sold that day. ‘La verité est en marche et rien ne l’arrêtera’ (‘truth is on the march and nothing can stop it’), proclaimed the novelist-turned-campaigner.
The authorities had every intention of stopping it. A fortnight later Zola was put on trial for criminal libel (the libel was to have alleged that Esterhazy’s tribunal was knowingly complicit in corruption). Zola’s trial dragged on for two weeks, with ugly mobs – some shouting anti-Semitic slogans – outside.
Zola was convicted and sentenced to the maximum punishment allowed by law, a year’s imprisonment. He fled to England, where there was considerable sympathy for Dreyfus, living there for a year. In September 1899, Dreyfus was finally pardoned. Zola returned, but was financially ruined and exhausted. He died in 1902, in mysterious circumstances (he was asphyxiated by a defective chimney – anti-Dreyfusards were suspected by many).
Full military reparation did not come for Dreyfus until 1906, when, at a full-dress parade, he was promoted to major and returned to service in the artillery. He attended the ceremony to install Zola’s ashes in the Panthéon in 1908, at which he was wounded by a gunshot from a journalist and would-be assassin, Louis Gregori.