The Dreyfus Affair became a metaphor for antisemitism and, in one of the most unlikely and ironic sequence of events in Jewish history, Dreyfus (1859-1935), a wholly assimilated Jew, played a critical, if unintended, role in the rebirth of the State of Israel.
After French Intelligence had intercepted the “Bordereau,” a secret military document sent to the German military attaché (1894), Eduard Drumont, founder of the antisemitic daily La Libre Parole, published a report accusing Dreyfus, the only Jewish member of the French General Staff, of spying for Germany. Major Joseph Henry forged documents implicating Dreyfus and, after a secret trial, Dreyfus was convicted of treason (December 21, 1894) and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. He was paraded through the streets of Paris to mob jeers of “Death to the Jews” and was stripped of his sword in a humiliating public ceremony. Intelligence later seized a letter written by Major Ferdinand Esterhazy which clearly established that Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, was the German agent, but the French government quashed this evidence and Esterhazy was acquitted.
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On January 13, 1898, Emile Zola (1840-1902), perhaps most famous 19th century French author, published the most legendary open letter in history, his famous J’Accuse!, in which he accused the government and the military with conspiracy and malicious libel against Dreyfus. (Zola escaped to England after being convicted of libel for writing J’Accuse!) Antisemitic riots broke out throughout France and the Dreyfus Affair became a major public issue. In 1898, the case was reopened and Henry’s forgeries were detected; nevertheless, Dreyfus was again found guilty (September 9, 1899) and was sentenced to five years in prison. This second miscarriage of justice evoked international condemnation and, finally, Dreyfus was pardoned by President Emile Lubet (1906).
The Dreyfus Affair made a powerful impact on the outlook of world Jewry. In particular, Herzl’s confidence in liberalism, badly shaken when he personally witnessed Dreyfus’s disgrace, led him to the Zionist Idea. Jews everywhere realized that if such hatred of Jews could occur in France, the so-called “homeland of liberty,” against a wholly assimilated Jew, then Jews couldn’t be safe anywhere and assimilation was no defense against antisemitism.
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Drumont postcards.
The principal propagator of antisemitism in France under the Third Republic, Eduard Drumont (1844-1917) was the founder and editor of the sensationalist newspaper, La Libre Parole (1892), which became the authoritative voice of antisemitism and anti-Dreyfus France. Even prior to the notorious Dreyfus Affair, Drumont used La Libre Parole to mount an unrelenting attack on the presence of “traitorous Jewish officers” in the French army. When the army purposely leaked the news of Dreyfus’s arrest to Drumont, he pounced on the opportunity to prove his central tenet of Jewish perfidy, and he used his newspaper, which regularly reached over 500,000 readers, to portray Dreyfus as the symbol of Jewish treachery and disloyalty. Accordingly, on November 2, 1894, he ran a front-page story about the arrest of Dreyfus who, he alleged, had confessed passing state secrets to the Germans. The day following Dreyfus’s first conviction, the headline in La Libre Parole proclaimed, “Out of France, Jews! France for the French!”
Dumont postcard. In the background is the page of Le Libre Parole, proclaiming “The Traitor (i.e., Dreyfus) is Condemned.”
Drumont financed La Libre Parole from the proceeds of the publication of his magnum opus, La France Juive (“Jewish France,”1886), which provided his readers with a unified synthesis of antisemitic history. A Voltairean who later became a devout Catholic, he was uniquely able to draw on both Church tradition and the secular Enlightenment in expounding on the “Jewish plot” to dominate France; in promoting the blood libel and the Jewish poisoning of wells; in justifying the Spanish Inquisition as Christianity’s right to protect itself against Jewish treason; and in characterizing the French Emancipation of 1791 as a grievous error and arguing for the exclusion of Jews from society. La France Juive became one of the greatest commercial successes of the 19th century, selling over 100,000 copies in its first year, an almost unimaginable triumph at the time and evidencing his keen understanding of the tenor of the time. Drumont attracted many supporters, and he was one of the primary sources of antisemitic ideas that would later be embraced by Nazism.
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In this classically antisemitic May 22, 1897 correspondence, Drumont writes from Paris:
Drumont’s arrogant May 22, 1897 correspondence.
What would you like me to write in the album? One date: May 22, 1897… when this album will be studied in a few years, public opinion will undoubtedly change as the result of the work of my colleagues and myself. They will know then, too late I am afraid, that we acted out of affection for our country. We tried to protect our forefathers’ faith, in the land of our forefathers, the purity of the racial line of our forefathers against the Semites [i.e., the Jews] – the invaders and greedy money-chasing people who sought only to harm an innocent and too confident nation that accepted as brothers its merciless enemies.
Drumont’s downfall began when he made the Rothschilds and their banking family a frequent target of his antisemitic diatribes. He was sued by a vice president of the Chamber of Deputies, who had libelously alleged that the VP had taken a bribe from Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild to enact particular legislation favored by Rothschild; unable to provide any evidence to support his allegations, Drumont was incarcerated for three months, fined, and ordered to publish a retraction. Thereafter, his fortunes declined, and he died in obscurity and penury.
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Esterhazy postcards.
Ferdinand Esterhazy (1847-1923), a French traitor who served as a spy for Germany, was the perpetrator of the crime for which Dreyfus had been wrongly accused and convicted. Born in Paris, he was orphaned at an early age after some schooling at the Lycée Bonaparte. After unaccountably disappearing from public notice (1865), he was later found engaged in the Roman legion in the service of the Pope (1869) and, upon entering the French Foreign Legion as an ensign (1870), he began calling himself “Count Esterhazy.” There being a dearth of officers after the French catastrophe in the Sudan, Esterhazy’s military advancement was unusually rapid: lieutenant (1874); captain (1880); decorated officer (1882) – as a member of the Intelligence Department, he inserted in the official records a citation of his grand “exploits in war,” which were later discovered to be false – and major (1892). After the war with Germany, he was employed as a German translator at the Intelligence Office.
Back in Paris, an irresponsible Esterhazy squandered his small fortune and was desperate after having failed to retrieve his fortune in gambling houses and on the stock exchange. In 1892, when the Libre Parole published a series of articles regarding the “preponderance of the Jewish element” in the French army, Captain Crémieu-Foa, a Jewish officer in the French cavalry, challenged Drumont, to a duel and inflicted a slight wound upon him. Esterhazy, who had served as Crémieu-Foa’s second in the duel, pretended that this “chivalrous” role had earned him the enmity of his family and supporters and thus obtained – through, ironically, Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France – financial assistance from the Rothschilds. Nonetheless, he continued as an ardent supporter of the editors of La Libre Parole.
Notwithstanding a successful military career, he nevertheless considered himself wronged, and he spoke against the entire French army, and even against France herself, for which he predicted and hoped for new disasters. Such a man, lacking even the slightest spark of patriotism, was destined to become the prey of treason and, indeed, he became a paid German spy. Initially, pretending that he received information from Major Henry (who had been his comrade in the French military counter-intelligence section), Esterhazy furnished some interesting information about the artillery, but his information was such that he must have had other informants (who were not necessarily his accomplices.)
Nonetheless, Esterhazy’s information soon became of little importance to the Germans, and the difficulties he endured in getting information were very apparent from the very text of the Bordereau, which was used to incriminate Dreyfus. After Esterhazy was exposed by Colonel Picquart as the true author of the Bordereau, he was forced to undergo a trial behind closed doors by French Military Justice (January 10-11, 1898), where he was unexpectedly acquitted. He fled to the relative safety of Great Britain (September 1898), where he remained for the rest of his life.
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In this July 2, 1898 correspondence, Esterhazy, in deep financial straits, writes:
My dear Emmanuel,
In the middle of the painful ordeals I have been enduring for almost nine months and in which, I think, I have plumbed the depths of human cowardice, I have not forgotten your friendship from the first day and the debt I owe to you.
You probably know about the separation with my wife, which caused me great pain and great troubles. My wife [ ] with her houses, and the court ruling returned her property and its management back to her, but I am waiting and, yes, I beg you, very confidentially, because I have hidden it from everyone, I am waiting for the end of the Zola trials on the 18th of this month in Versailles… I will reimburse you… You can count on it…
Esterhazy was a compulsive gambler, habitual liar, and a crook who women found entrancing. He liked to pick them up in first-class compartments in trains, and it was on a fateful passage from Le Havre to Paris that he met and won Marguerite Pays, the paramour who helped him forge documents in the Dreyfus Affair. Esterhazy’s wife – whom he described as a “spendthrift” and “ninny” – divorced him in 1899. She had stood bravely by him, but he repaid her with neglect, abuse, and flagrant unfaithfulness. Matters reached a crisis when Esterhazy sought to introduce his young daughter to Marguerite, a gratuitous insult which stung Madame to the point where she decided to air her grievances in court, which led to the odious airing in Paris of their notorious domestic relations, as the divorce action brought as much ignominy upon the Commandant as the Dreyfus Affair itself.
The tribunal in the divorce case assigned temporary custody of the children to their mother and ordered Esterhazy to pay 600 francs a month in alimony for the duration of the lawsuit. Esterhazy’s poverty was so dire that, in a letter to his divorced wife, he wrote that he had had nothing to eat for two days. One of the key charges in the Zola trial was that Zola had defamed Esterhazy by claiming that his court-martial (in which he was fully exonerated of any wrongdoing) was fixed and, as we see from our letter, Esterhazy hoped that the damages he would be awarded in that case would relieve his of his economic duress and permit repayment of the loan he was seeking. In fact, Zola was fined 3,000 francs but, with his appeal pending, he escaped France for England.
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Du Paty de Clam portrait.
When, through the Bordereau, French military intelligence became aware in September 1894 of a spy within the army, Armand du Paty de Clam (1853-1916), a devout antisemitic Catholic loyalist and a major with the French General Staff, became deeply involved in the investigation to identify the traitor, due principally to his alleged “expertise” in handwriting analysis, although he was only – at best – an amateur. A brief three-week investigation identified approximately six suspects, but the pompous and patrician du Paty de Clam decided that the Jew Dreyfus was the criminal.
On October 15, 1894, du Paty de Clam effected an ambush of Dreyfus by summoning him to a meeting also attended by two civilian police detectives and a French military intelligence officer, during which he faked an injury to his writing hand, asked a bewildered Dreyfus to take dictation, and proceeded to dictate the precise words written in the Bordereau. After comparing Dreyfus’s writing through the lens of unadulterated antisemitic animus, he ignored warnings from professional handwriting experts – including a conclusion from Alfred Gobert, a leading expert and graphologist for the Bank of France, that “there were numerous and important disparities that had to be taken into account” – and announced that Dreyfus had written the Bordereau. He charged the Jewish officer with high treason and offered him the “honorable” way out: he gave him a revolver with a single bullet in the chamber. When Dreyfus proclaimed his innocence and refused to take his own life, he was transferred to Major Henry who, according to plan, had been waiting in an adjacent room.
The French General Staff ordered du Paty de Clam to compile the prosecution’s case against Dreyfus, but he failed to uncover any further evidence against him even after ransacking his home and the homes of his relatives, and Dreyfus refused to confess to a crime he had not committed, even after being subjected to brutal interrogation. Relying on his handwriting analysis, du Paty de Clam testified against Dreyfus at a court-martial hearing in late December 1894. When word got out that Dreyfus was about to be acquitted, he provided the infamous “secret dossier” to the tribunal and, in a blatant violation of the French Code of Military Justice, the tribunal accepted it. As it turned out, du Paty de Clam had manufactured a wholly counterfeit version of an important telegram (and misrepresented others) and then, in a prohibited ex parte communication, he represented to the tribunal that “this telegram is the pivot of the Affair.”
German postcard, “The Key Witnesses” “Remembrance of the Zola Process” (Paris 1898). Du Paty de Clam, the leading witness, is depicted on the left (with Mercier to his right and Henry on the far right).
The focus of the miscarriage of justice against Dreyfus has always been upon the fraudulently-obtained Dreyfus handwriting sample, but it may have been du Paty de Clam’s bogus telegram that was outcome determinative in Dreyfus’s conviction by the tribunal. In any event, du Paty de Clam was later promoted to lieutenant-colonel for his “excellent work” in the Dreyfus prosecution and conviction.
When the anti-Dreyfus conspiracy began to come to light, du Paty de Clam took a leading role in attempting to suppress the truth, including meeting with Esterhazy, the real spy, in October 1897; warning him of the emerging allegations against him; and promising protection by the French military authorities. He also participated in sending threatening telegrams to Colonel Georges Picquart, the principal whistleblower who emerged as perhaps the unlikeliest hero in the Dreyfus Affair and proved to be a key figure in unraveling the Affair and proving Dreyfus’s innocence. At a time when Dreyfus had few defenders in the French army, Picquart, an unapologetic antisemite, found evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence and damaged his career by fighting for justice for Dreyfus. In particular, it was Picquart who obtained samples of Esterhazy’s handwriting that later proved to be identical to the writing of the Bordereau that had been attributed to Dreyfus.
Du Paty de Clam June 2, 1909 correspondence.
In this June 2, 1909 correspondence on his infantry letterhead – notwithstanding the fact that he had been earlier discharged from the military – du Paty de Clam writes regarding a letter he had submitted to Le Siecle, a French newspaper published from 1836-1932.
I would be grateful if you could have a search made to find out if the “Siecle” has published a letter from me in one of the issues after last May 27. Receive, sir, my sincere greetings…
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Mercier portrait.
Auguste Mercier (1833-1921), the French Minister of War, was one of the great villains of the Dreyfus Affair; in his famous J’Accuse, Zola accused him of “having made himself an accomplice in one of the greatest crimes in history, probably because of a weak mind.” Mercier was the first public Dreyfus accuser (November 28, 1894); he arrested Dreyfus and coordinated the anti-Dreyfusards throughout the entire Affair; he masterminded the creation of the sham secret dossier handed furtively to the judges in the first Dreyfus court-martial to influence their decision; and even after he was no longer Minister (as of January 24, 1895), he directed the witnesses for the prosecution at the Rennes trial. He gave virulent and perjured testimony against Dreyfus at every trial in the matter and, though he was only a witness, he sought to act as prosecutor by introducing evidence on his own; he (unsuccessfully) attempted to blackmail Dreyfus’s lawyer, Labori, by alleging that he has a letter from Esterhazy compromising Labori’s daughter; and he remained an implacable foe of Dreyfus, even after the Jewish officer was pardoned.
When the Dreyfus mater first came to Mercier’s attention, he initially felt that all the evidence had been concocted, and he knew that Dreyfus could not have masterminded such a deception. However, he was under significant pressure from the press and the army, which now stood to redeem the honor it lost in the miserable defeat by convicting the spy responsible for it. The day before he was to decide if the evidence against Dreyfus warranted a trial, Mercier re-examined the evidence and, once again, had his doubts; however, the next day, there appeared in one of the leading papers in Paris that Mercier was in the pay of the Jews and therefore would not order the trial. To exonerate himself from that accusation, he threw Dreyfus to the wolves and ordered the trial; declared that the evidence against Dreyfus was beyond doubt and that his guilt was certain; and publicly and vociferously alleged that Dreyfus had committed “treason.”
Dreyfus’s conviction based only upon the secret file set up another problem: Mercier was the one who had approved submission of the file, which meant that the army had approved it; were there to be a second trial where Dreyfus would be acquitted, the army would stand exposed for its perfidy and French pride would be devastated. Indeed, Dreyfus would be tried a second time, and there would be other trials against Dreyfus supporters until as late as 1906; however, in none of these trials was the “secret file” allowed to be seen by the defendants and their attorneys, as the French authorities claimed that the honor of France was at stake.
Testifying in 1904 before the Court of Cassation (French for “the Court of Abrogation,” the highest court of criminal and civil appeals in France with the power to quash decision of the lower courts), Mercier again perjured himself by denying the existence of a document written by a foreign sovereign implicating Dreyfus. However, in 1906, speaking of the secret dossier given to the court martial, public prosecutor Baudoin evoked a “monstrous violation of the inalienable rights of the defense” and emphasized Mercier’s responsibility in preventing the disclosure of the dossier. Nonetheless, Mercier remained the hero of the anti-Dreyfusards and he kept his seat in the Senate until January 1920.
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In this November 2, 1906 correspondence on his Senate letterhead, Mercier writes:
I thank you for your kind words, which gladdened me. I will come to your house today between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. In the event that I do not find you there, I will leave this there tomorrow at the same time, unless you advise otherwise.
As far as the Henry subscription, I think it is appropriate to put Mrs. Henry in possession of what remains of the money as soon as possible. We could therefore, if you agree, convene the Commission “La Libre Parole” on Wednesday afternoon (both the Senate and the House in session) next week at the time that will suit you.
Please accept, Sir, the expression of my most sympathetic feelings.
Henry, the forger of the Bordereau that launched the entire Dreyfus Affair, was found dead in his cell on the morning of August 31, 1898 and, although no razor was found, his death was declared a suicide. Our correspondence refers to Drumont’s La Libre Parole’s sponsor of a public subscription for Henry’s widow, in which the donors were invited to vent all their anger against Jews.
