The Dreyfus Affair and After

Abstract

In December 1894 a French military tribunal found Alfred Dreyfus guilty of high treason. Dreyfus was a Jew and, as was later revealed, had been convicted upon the basis of false evidence. It was not until 1898 that the plight of Dreyfus — condemned to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island — became well known. In that year Emile Zola’s open letter ‘J’Accuse’ and the discovery of the army’s forgeries brought to the nation’s attention what became known as the Dreyfus Affair.¹ With alarming rapidity large sections of French opinion polarised into mutually hostile camps: those for and those against a revision of the original verdict against Dreyfus. Incompatible principles — on the one side the claims of individual justice, on the other those of national interest — were utilised in defence of each position. For Charles Péguy the quarrel was between those who believed in ‘eternal salvation’ and those who believed in ‘temporal salvation’.² Ominously, it appeared that an alliance between the Church, the army and the extreme Right had been forged as a means not only of preventing a revision of the original sentence against Dreyfus but as a means of bringing down the Republic itself.