Alfred Dreyfus

Born in Mulhouse, Alsace in 1859, Dreyfus was the youngest of nine children born to Raphaël and Jeannette Dreyfus (née Libmann). Raphaël Dreyfus was a prosperous, self-made Jewish textile manufacturer who had started as a peddler. Alfred was 10 years old when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in the summer of 1870 and following the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany after the war, he and his family first moved to Basel in Switzerland, where he went to high school and later on to Paris.

The childhood experience of seeing his family uprooted by the war with Germany prompted Dreyfus to decide on a career in the military. Following his 18th birthday in October 1877, he enrolled in the elite École Polytechnique military school in Paris, where he received military training and an education in the sciences. In 1880, he graduated and was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the French army. From 1880 to 1882, he attended the artillery school at Fontainebleau to receive more specialized training as an artillery officer. On graduation he was assigned to the Thirty-first Artillery Regiment, which was in garrison at Le Mans. Dreyfus was subsequently transferred to a mounted artillery battery attached to the First Cavalry Division (Paris), and promoted to lieutenant in 1885. In 1889, he was made adjutant to the director of the Établissement de Bourges, a government arsenal, and promoted to captain.

On 18 April 1891, the 31-year-old Dreyfus married 20-year-old Lucie Eugénie Hadamard (1870–1945). They had two children, Pierre (1891–1946) and Jeanne (1893–1981).[2] Three days after the wedding, Dreyfus learned that he had been admitted to the École Supérieure de Guerre or War College. Two years later, he graduated ninth in his class with honorable mention and was immediately designated as a trainee in the French Army's General Staff headquarters, where he would be the only Jewish officer. His father Raphaël died on 13 December 1893.

At the War College examination in 1892, his friends had expected him to do well. However, one of the members of the panel, General Bonnefond, felt that "Jews were not desired" on the staff, and gave Dreyfus poor marks for cote d'amour (French slang: attraction; translatable as likability). Bonnefond's assessment lowered Dreyfus's overall grade; he did the same to another Jewish candidate, Lieutenant Picard. Learning of this injustice, the two officers lodged a protest with the director of the school, General Lebelin de Dionne, who expressed his regret for what had occurred, but said he was powerless to take any steps in the matter. The protest would later count against Dreyfus. The French army of the period was relatively open to entry and advancement by talent, with an estimated 300 Jewish officers, of whom ten were generals.[3] However, within the Fourth Bureau of the General Staff, General Bonnefond's prejudices appear to have been shared by some of the new trainee's superiors. The personal assessments received by Dreyfus during 1893/94 acknowledged his high intelligence, but were critical of aspects of his personality.[4]

Alfred Dreyfus in his room on Devil's Island in 1898,

stereoscopy sold by F. Hamel, Altona-Hamburg...; collection Fritz Lachmund

Dreyfus painted by Jean Baptiste Guth for Vanity Fair, 1899

Part of a series on the
Dreyfus affair
Investigation and arrest Trial and conviction Georges Picquart's investigations Other investigations J'Accuse…! Resolution
People Alfred Dreyfus Alphonse Bertillon Armand du Paty de Clam Auguste Mercier Émile Zola Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy Georges Picquart Georges-Gabriel de Pellieux Hubert-Joseph Henry Jean Sandherr Lucie Dreyfus Ludovic Trarieux Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen

A torn-up handwritten note, referred to throughout the affair as the bordereau, was found by a French housekeeper in a wastebasket at the German Embassy. The bordereau described a minor French military secret, and had obviously been written by a spy in the French military.

In 1894, this made the French Army's counter-intelligence section, led by Lieutenant Colonel Jean Sandherr, aware that information regarding new artillery parts was being passed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache in Paris, by a highly placed spy most likely on the General Staff. Suspicion quickly fell upon Dreyfus, who was arrested for treason on 15 October 1894. On 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was summarily convicted in a secret court martial, publicly stripped of his army rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. Following French military custom of the time, Dreyfus was formally degraded (cashiered) by having the rank insignia, buttons and braid cut from his uniform and his sword broken, all in the courtyard of the École Militaire before silent ranks of soldiers, while a large crowd of onlookers shouted abuse from behind railings. Dreyfus cried out: "I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the Army. Long live France! Long live the Army!"[5]

In August 1896, the new chief of French military intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, reported to his superiors that he had found evidence to the effect that the real traitor was the Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Picquart was silenced by being transferred to command a tirailleur regiment based in Sousse Tunisia, in November 1896. When reports of an army cover-up and Dreyfus's possible innocence were leaked to the press, a heated debate ensued about anti-Semitism and France's identity as a Catholic nation or a republic founded on equal rights for all citizens. Esterhazy was found not guilty by a secret court martial, before fleeing secretly to England and shaving off his moustache. Rachel Beer, editor of The Observer and the Sunday Times, English newspapers, knew that Esterhazy was in London because The Observer's Paris correspondent had made a connection with him; she interviewed him twice, and he confessed to being the culprit: "I wrote the bordereau". She published the interviews in September 1898,[6] reporting his confession and writing a leader column accusing the French military of antisemitism and calling for a retrial for Dreyfus.[7]

In France there was a passionate campaign by Dreyfus's supporters, including leading artists and intellectuals such as Émile Zola,[8] following which he was given a second trial in 1899, but again declared guilty of treason despite the evidence of his innocence.

However, due to public opinion, Dreyfus was offered and accepted a pardon by President Émile Loubet in 1899 and released from prison; this was a compromise that saved face for the military's mistake. Had Dreyfus refused the pardon, he would have been returned to Devil's Island, a fate he could no longer emotionally cope with; so officially Dreyfus remained a traitor to France, and pointedly remarked upon his release:

The government of the Republic has given me back my freedom. It is nothing for me without my honor.[2]

For two years, until July 1906, he lived in a state of house-arrest with one of his sisters at Carpentras, and later at Cologny.

On 12 July 1906, Dreyfus was officially exonerated by a military commission. The day after his exoneration, he was readmitted into the army with a promotion to the rank of major (Chef d'Escadron). A week later, he was made Knight of the Legion of Honour,[9] and subsequently assigned to command an artillery unit at Vincennes. On 15 October 1906, he was placed in command of another artillery unit at Saint-Denis.

While attending a ceremony relocating Zola's ashes to the Panthéon on 4 June 1908, Dreyfus was wounded in the arm by a gunshot from a right-wing journalist, Louis Grégori, who was trying to assassinate him. Grégori was acquitted by the Parisian court which accepted his defense that he had not meant to kill Dreyfus, meaning merely to graze him.[10]

In 1937 Dreyfus's son Pierre published his father's memoirs based on his correspondence between 1899 and 1906. The memoirs were titled Souvenirs et Correspondance and translated into English by Betty Morgan.[11]

Dreyfus started corresponding with the marquise Marie-Louise Arconati-Visconti in 1899 and began attending her Thursday (political) salons after his release. They continued their correspondence until her death in 1923.[12]

Dreyfus's grandchildren donated over three thousand documents to the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme (Museum of Jewish Art and History), including personal letters, photographs of the trial, legal documents, writings by Dreyfus during his time in prison, personal family photographs, and his officer stripes that were ripped out as a symbol of treason. The museum created an online platform in 2006 dedicated to the Dreyfus Affair.

• Florence Earle Coates, a Philadelphia poet, wrote four poems about the Dreyfus affair: two entitled "Dreyfus", one published in 1898 and the other in 1899, "Picquart" (1902), and "Le Grand Salut" (1906).
• Jack Dreyfus, founder of the Dreyfus Funds and relative.
• Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, American businessman and distant relative.
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus, American actress and distant relative.
• J'Accuse…!, influential 1898 open letter written by Émile Zola.
• Theodor Herzl, Austrian journalist who began the Zionist movement after seeing the antisemitism present in Dreyfus's trial.
• Gaston Moch, a defense supporter of Dreyfus.
• Charles Péguy, who wrote a defense of Dreyfus.
• George Whyte, an authority on the Dreyfus affair who has authored a large body of literary and stage works on Dreyfus and the Dreyfus affair.
• Julie Dreyfus, French actress and descendant.
• The Dreyfus Affair (film series), an 1899 series of short silent docudramas.
• The Prisoner of the Devil, a novel by Michael Hardwick which features Sherlock Holmes called in to solve the case.
• An Officer and a Spy, a novel written in first person by Robert Harris, in the form of an account of the Dreyfus Affair as if written by Georges Picquart.
• The Life of Emile Zola, a 1937 film starring Joseph Schildkraut as Dreyfus; best actor in a supportive role, Academy Awards.
• I Accuse!, a 1958 film starring José Ferrer as Dreyfus.
• An Officer and a Spy, film by Roman Polanski (2019).

• Lettres d'un innocent (Letters from an innocent man) (1898)
• Les lettres du capitaine Dreyfus à sa femme (Letters from capitaine Dreyfus to his wife) (1899), written at Devil's Island
• Cinq ans de ma vie (5 years of my life) (1901), New edition 2019, Comino. ISBN 978-3-945831-19-9.
• Souvenirs et correspondence, posthumously in 1936
• Michael Burns, Dreyfus: a family affair 1789–1945 (1991), Harpercollins. ISBN 978-0-06-016366-2.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alfred Dreyfus.

• Works by Alfred Dreyfus at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Alfred Dreyfus at Internet Archive
• Works by Alfred Dreyfus at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Dreyfus Rehabilitated
• References to Alfred Dreyfus in European newspapers of the time - The European Library
• "Dreyfus, Alfred" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
• "Dreyfus, Alfred" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
• Alfred Dreyfus Personal Manuscripts and Letters
• Online platform on Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaïsme site
• Newspaper clippings about Alfred Dreyfus in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Actors and scenes in the drama of disgrace, A booklet with nearly one hundred photographs and documents from the arrest and trial of Dreyfus, from the National Library of Israel