Why was dreyfus accused

Then black comedy was piled on stupidity. The accusation was first kept secret, but as soon as it was made public the secrecy itself became an occasion for assault: the Army was protecting a traitor Jew.

He was responding to the waves of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe who had arrived in France during the previous twenty or so years, bringing with them, he argued, values and a faith alien to Christian France. This had happened under the demoralizing pressure of modern art and culture, which was, of course, Jewish culture: the culture of bankers and speculators and atheists and decadent artists.

It seemed perfectly natural—a heartbreaking irony, in retrospect—to suspect that Jews would sell out France to their spiritual home in Germany. The more eagerly a Jew attempted to escape from Judaism, the more Jewish he revealed himself to be—a snaky shape-shifter with no allegiances to anything except clan. This coalition of hatred of immigrants and Catholic reaction did not put Dreyfus in a cage. But it helped keep him there. Overnight the most despised man in the country he worshipped, he was torn from his wife and children and sent to rot on a tiny, desolate island in the Atlantic, in a prison altered to prevent him from ever seeing the ocean that surrounded him.

It must also be said, with Begley, that his treatment was by modern American standards benevolent. Convicted of the worst crime imaginable, selling out France to the Germans, he was still given almost all the books he wanted to read from and all the paper he needed to write on, and he used both.

The image is far from the truth; awkward and uncharismatic he may have been, but Dreyfus was what we now call deep, a serious and cultivated soul. In captivity, shackled to his bed at night, he saved his sanity by reading: he read Tolstoy, Nietzsche, the French classics, and made intelligent notes on them.

More than anything, he read Shakespeare. He worked his way through all the great tragedies—eventually and laboriously teaching himself to read them in the original—and found in those stories a sense of life and a language adequate to his own condition. He was, as far as he knew, utterly alone and friendless. Mathieu worked brilliantly and tirelessly for his martyred brother.

Pretty much everyone in authority had an uneasy sense that Dreyfus had been railroaded, and many who had no particular liking for Jews still felt that anti-Semitism was something worse than false; they thought it was vulgar. Mathieu displayed a kind of genius in seeing that the case for justice was more persuasive than the case for vengeance—that it was necessary to take the position that an injustice had been done by error, rather than that an evil had been done on purpose.

For beneath the affair was a great historical transformation. Though a useful tool of empire, the army was hardly revered as an institution. It would not do to question its integrity, to suppose that the army was a human institution made up of good men and bad, and more inclined than most, through the habit of blind obedience and the nature of its mission, to do the wrong thing unless closely watched.

Many on the anti-Dreyfusard side were prepared to admit, sotto voce, that the case against Dreyfus was not very strong. The same forces of reform that had opened the Army to Dreyfus and raised it to a national sacre were now conspiring to keep him locked up. There were nearly as many reversals as advances. A lieutenant colonel, Georges Picquart, was put in charge of the Statistique, and soon realized, thanks to an intercepted telegram, that Esterhazy was the real culprit.

When he announced this in a report, he was promptly cashiered and transferred to the fringes of empire by panicked superiors, and then imprisoned on trumped-up charges of revealing other secrets. Picquart is one of the truly admirable figures in the story—anti-Semitic by inclination and background, he was a friend of Mahler, and, above all, a dutiful officer, who had followed the facts, despite the consequences.

It was then, too, around , that the affair became the Affaire, the preoccupation of all educated France. It suddenly took in not just the Army and the Jews but the central question of modern French history: nation or republic? These arguments split the upper and the educated classes—dividing even the Impressionists, the anti-Dreyfusards Degas and Renoir drawing daggers with Pissarro and Monet.

They insisted that they were asking France to be faithful to its own declared rules. Esterhazy, in a typically reckless though well-calculated move, demanded a court-martial, which, held in secret, ended, predictably, with his acquittal. The trial and imprisonment of Dreyfus, as well as the public demonstrations of antisemitism in France, spurred Theodor Herzl to write The Jewish State in and convene the first World Zionist Congress in Alfred Dreyfus was born in Mulhouse, Alsace, on October 9, He was the youngest of nine children of Raphael and Jeannette Dreyfus.

Raphael Dreyfus was a prosperous textile manufacturer who moved his family to Paris in after the Franco-Prussian war when Alsace was annexed to the German Empire. Alfred Dreyfus graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique military school in Paris in After receiving specialized artillery training, he was promoted to Lieutenant in the French military in He was promoted to Captain in , later becoming the only Jew serving in the French Army's General Staff headquarters in This was an act of treason.

At the time, there was some evidence that made it unlikely Dreyfus was the author of the traitorous memorandum. Nonetheless, on the basis of handwriting analysis and out of anti-Jewish prejudice against Dreyfus, he was arrested on October 15, , and court-martialed. Dreyfus had no hope of a fair trial. The ministry of war placed a file of secret and in some cases forged documents before the tribunal that Dreyfus' attorney was not allowed to see.

Further, unverified and false testimonies against Dreyfus were presented at the secret trial. The court quickly found Dreyfus guilty of treason. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. At a public ceremony on January 5, , Dreyfus was dishonorably discharged and demoted.

As according with tradition his stripes were torn and his sword was broken, Dreyfus maintained his innocence, crying out: "Soldiers, they are degrading an innocent man! Long live France!

Long live the army! Dreyfus was exiled to a penal colony on Devil's Island, part of an archipelago off the coast of French Guiana in South America. With Dreyfus languishing in captivity, his family continued to challenge the verdict and claim that he was innocent. Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, who had become the new head of French Intelligence Services, was never convinced of Dreyfus' guilt.

In March , new evidence surfaced implicating a French major, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, as the German agent who had written the bordereau. Despite Picquart's efforts to investigate Esterhazy, his superiors resisted efforts to have the case reopened and eventually had Piquart reassigned to Tunisia. Nonetheless, the proof that Dreyfus was in fact innocent reached the French senate, where Senator Auguste-Scheurer-Kestner declared Dreyfus' innocence and accused Esterhazy of being the traitor.

Meanwhile, on January 13, , the Socialist newspaper L'Aurore published an open letter from the novelist Emile Zola to the president of the republic, Felix Faure. Novelist Zola was found guilty of criminal libel in slandering the army and had to flee to England to avoid imprisonment. He was convicted by a military court for supposedly selling French military secrets to the Germans.

The physical evidence consisted of a slip of paper discovered in a German military trashcan on which was written a promise, in French, to deliver a valuable French artillery manual to the Germans. Handwriting experts could not definitively link the note to Dreyfus, but the captain was vulnerable on other accounts. Dreyfus was rich and Jewish. He was also from Alsace, the border area of France that was ceded to Germany as a result of the Franco-Prussian war in After the area was returned to Germany, the Dreyfus family moved to Paris.

The press ran stories questioning his loyalty: Was he, above all, French? Colonel Henry, a French military intelligence agent, testified that he had additional information definitively implicating Dreyfus, but that this information involved classified military secrets and thus could not be revealed. In March of , French intelligence discovered another piece of paper—in the same German office—which promised new deliveries of French military secrets.

The handwriting was identical to that found on the piece of paper used in the Dreyfus case. This time, handwriting experts traced the writing to another officer, Walter Esterhazy, a notorious gambler. The new information was leaked, however, to the government.