Read The Dreyfus Affair for Free Online Page A

Dreyfus at the age of twenty-five. Despite learning of his infidelities in the course of his court-martial, she remained totally loyal to her husband and wanted to follow him to Devil’s Island.

    Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred’s older brother, was as open and easy-going as Alfred was reserved and retiring. He co-ordinated and financed the campaign for a re-trial.

    Colonel Georges Picquart. From a Catholic background, he had a meteoric career in the French army and was appointed Chief of the Statistical Section on the death of Colonel Sandherr. The draft of a letter-telegram filched from Schwarzkoppen’s waste-paper basket led him to realise that Dreyfus was innocent. His discovery was ignored by his superiors who posted him abroad.

    Major Armand du Paty de Clam. An officer on the General Staff, an amateur hand-writing expert, and a cousin of General de Boisdeffre, he was given the task of gathering evidence against Dreyfus. He was convinced of his guilt and hoped to extract a confession.

    Commandant Charles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the man to whom the letter-telegram from Schwarzkoppen was addressed. A degenerate and embittered man, perennially short of money, it was believed on the Right that he had been chosen to replace Dreyfus by the Jewish ‘syndicate’. Picquart was said to be in its pay.

    Commandant Joseph Henry, the son of a farmer who had risen from the ranks to be third in command at the Statistical Section, recruited agents from the Parisian low life and was adept in the dirty tricks department. He revered his superiors and liked to anticipate their unspoken orders.

    Ritual degradation in front of serried ranks of soldiers at the École Militaire was part of the sentence handed down after the judges of his court-martial had unanimously found Dreyfus guilty of betraying military secrets to a foreign power.

    Alfred Dreyfus at the time of his conviction and deportation from France.

    Devil’s Island. When he first arrived in French Guiana, Dreyfus was held in the prison on the Île Royale while a hut and guard house were built on the smallest of the Salvation Islands, Devil’s Island. Until then it had housed convicts with leprosy. He would remain there in solitary confinement for more than four years.

    Comte Albert de Mun. A great orator and liberal Catholic who abhorred anti-Semitism and accepted France’s republican form of government, he believed that the agitation to re-open the case against Dreyfus was the work of ‘a mysterious and hidden power strong enough to be able to cast suspicion at will on those who command our Army’.

    Jules Guérin, founder of the Anti-Semitic League, joined Déroulède in his attempted coup and named his League after a Masonic Lodge to avoid legal restrictions imposed on unauthorised associations.

    Henri Marquis de Rochefort. A Communard who had escaped from the penal settlement in New Caledonia, he had become an extreme nationalist and fanatic anti-Semite, convinced that the judges who re-opened the case against Dreyfus had been bought by the Jewish ‘syndicate’.

    Maurice Barrès. An erudite journalist, essayist and politician, he believed that France was threatened by a coalition of Protestants and Jews whose first loyalties lay with their coreligionists abroad.

    Marcel Proust described himself as ‘the first Dreyfusard’ because he persuaded the writer Anatole France to sign a petition in favour of Dreyfus. Proust’s mother was Jewish: his father, Dr Adrian Proust, when he learned that his two sons had become Dreyfusards, would not speak to them for a week.

    Ã‰mile Zola. One of France’s leading novelists, he exposed the conspiracy against Dreyfus in his polemical article, J’Accuse . It led to anti-Semitic riots throughout France.

    Edgar Demange, the eminent lawyer who was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence and undertook his defence. He was a devout Catholic and married to the daughter