A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (36 page)

Charging a military officer with treason has far-reaching consequences. Before arresting Dreyfus, the intelligence officers informed the minister of war and the chief of the general staff. Those officials, in turn, told the French president and the prime minister. After some discussion, they all agreed that Dreyfus was the traitor.

Today the evidence seems flimsy for such a serious accusation, particularly against a man with an excellent military record and no apparent motive. As a child, Dreyfus had dreamed of becoming an officer in the French army; he had worked his entire life to make that dream a reality. Although he was not particularly popular with fellow officers, he earned regular promotions and had the support of his immediate superiors. He was widely considered a man who played by the rules—not someone who took chances or cut corners. Dreyfus was also a wealthy man; his father was an industrialist and his father-in-law a diamond merchant, so it was unlikely that he would have sold military secrets because he needed the
money. In addition, he was a French patriot, one of the many Alsatian Jews who had moved to Paris to avoid losing French citizenship after Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine. Why would such a man betray his country?

In 1894, Dreyfus did not think he was accused of treason because he was a Jew. He believed that the accusation was simply a terrible mistake. After all, at the time, the French army had about 300 Jewish officers, including 10 generals. Also within its ranks were many Protestants and a large number of men who considered themselves freethinkers. But even if antisemitism had not been a factor in Dreyfus’s arrest, it played a powerful role in everything that happened after that arrest.

Dreyfus was taken into custody on the morning of October 15, 1894. At first the government did not even tell him what crime he had been accused of, nor was he allowed to communicate with his wife or anyone else in his family. When his wife was later informed of the charges against him, she was told to remain silent. If the details of the case were known, she was told, they might set off a war with Germany. She informed no one, but someone in the army did.

On November 1, Drumont’s newspaper became the first to publish the story, denouncing Dreyfus as a “Judas,” the disciple who betrayed Jesus to his enemies. The paper also falsely claimed that Dreyfus had confessed to the crime and that the army had absolute proof of his guilt. The reporting in other papers was less sensational, but all assumed that Dreyfus was guilty. In fact, in November 1894, most people in France, including most Jews, were convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt. Why were they so certain? Just before the trial began, General Auguste Mercier, the minister of war and the nation’s highest military officer, announced that Dreyfus was guilty beyond a doubt. No one except Dreyfus’s family and friends had reason to question his word.

Yet by all accounts, the defense presented a strong case at the trial, and many began to think Dreyfus might be acquitted. Then, suddenly, two prominent men stepped forward with dramatic evidence of Dreyfus’s guilt.

One was Hubert Henry, the intelligence officer who had headed the investigation. Toward the end of the trial, when the prosecution recalled him to the stand, he made a startling statement: a highly reliable “secret informant” had confirmed Dreyfus’s guilt. Henry refused to identify the informant or provide information about him. To do so, he claimed, would endanger the informant and might lead to war with Germany. So the prosecutor asked Henry to swear on his honor that Dreyfus was a spy. He immediately raised his arm, looked deliberately at a painting of Jesus on
the wall, and swore that his statement was correct. His “total sincerity” impressed almost everyone in the courtroom.

On the last day of the trial, General Mercier himself offered new evidence. He sent the judges a sealed dossier that pointed to Dreyfus as the spy. The defense attorney was not allowed to see it, even though French law gives a defendant and his attorney the right to examine all evidence. The judges chose to ignore that law, because the general told them that revealing the contents of the file could endanger French intelligence officers.

After reading the file, the seven judges unanimously found Dreyfus guilty of treason. He was sentenced to degradation and then deportation and imprisonment for life on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America.

The French army had a special ceremony for degrading officers who had committed crimes. In the courtyard of the nation’s chief military academy, before approximately 4,000 French soldiers and a large crowd of reporters and invited guests, a senior officer announced, “Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people we degrade you!” Then the officer cut off Dreyfus’s badges, insignia, even the buttons on his jacket, and broke his sword in half. The prisoner was then marched around the courtyard as his fellow soldiers watched in silence. But Dreyfus was not silent. He shouted over and over that they were degrading an innocent man.

A huge crowd had gathered outside the gates of the academy. When they heard Dreyfus shouting, they responded by chanting, “Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jew!” During the trial, neither the prosecutors nor the judges had referred to Dreyfus as a Jew. Yet the mob clearly considered his religion, or perhaps his “race,” relevant. So did the press. One reporter wrote, “I need no one to tell me why Dreyfus committed treason…. That Dreyfus was capable of treason, I conclude from his race.”

As soon as the trial ended, Dreyfus’s family, particularly his brother Mathieu, searched for evidence that would prove Alfred’s innocence. Mathieu was reluctant to work publicly, fearing his efforts might stir antisemitic feelings. But he quickly learned that everything he and his family did was misinterpreted. When he tried to meet with public officials, he was accused of bribery; when he looked for new evidence, he was accused of searching for a “patsy”—another officer who could be blamed for Dreyfus’s treason. At last, in 1896, the family’s luck began to change. Two unconnected events brought the case back into the headlines and turned it into an “affair”—the kind of incident that seizes the public’s imagination and causes widespread excitement and mass demonstrations.

Few in France were indifferent to the Dreyfus Affair. A cartoonist highlights the strong emotions that divided the nation by showing a family dinner before and after a discussion of the affair.

Early in 1896, Colonel Georges Picquart became head of French military intelligence. He soon discovered that the Germans were still receiving French military secrets, even though the supposed traitor, Dreyfus, was thousands of miles away. Picquart began to investigate, and his suspicions soon centered on a single man—Walsin Esterhazy, a French officer known as a gambler and scam artist. Picquart quickly became convinced that Esterhazy was guilty.

Picquart was an unlikely champion of justice for a Jew. He was a conservative Catholic from Alsace who worried about being “tricked” by the “devious” Dreyfus family. As a result, he refused to meet with members of the family. He also feared damage to his own career. Yet in the end, his report identified Esterhazy as the spy.

Picquart’s superiors refused to accept it. They did not want to admit that they might have made a mistake. One is said to have asked, “What does it matter to you if this Jew stays on Devil’s Island?” Still others claimed that even if Esterhazy was guilty, his guilt did not mean that Dreyfus was innocent.

To keep Picquart quiet, the army sent him to a post in North Africa. Before he left, he wrote a letter that spelled out his reasons for believing that Esterhazy was guilty; he told his lawyer that if he died while in North Africa, the letter should be given to the president of France. Some historians think that the lawyer leaked the information in the letter to a member of the parliament.

As rumors about Esterhazy began to circulate, a number of people said that “the Jews” had found their “patsy.” They also whispered that Jews had paid Picquart to say Dreyfus was innocent. In the end, Picquart’s superiors decided to stop the rumors by putting Esterhazy on trial; they believed that the case against him was so weak that there was not much risk in doing so. They were right. On January 10, 1898, his court-martial ended with a verdict of “not guilty.” When he left the courtroom, he was greeted with cheers.

On January 13, 1898, just three days after the trial, France’s most famous novelist, Emile Zola, wrote a letter to the president of France. It was published in a newspaper under a huge headline that read
“J’Accuse!”
(“I Accuse!”). Zola accused the government and the army of conspiring to convict Dreyfus. Zola claimed that at the trial, powerful officials had covered up the truth. That day the newspaper sold more than 200,000 copies in Paris alone.

The government responded by suing Zola for libel. He had no proof to support his charges and was quickly found guilty. Nevertheless, his trial heightened interest in the case. Like Picquart, Zola had little interest in defending Jews. Many of his novels contain characters that are little more than crude antisemitic stereotypes. Why did he speak out? Perhaps because, just as Drumont feared a “Jewish conspiracy,” Zola feared a military conspiracy led by “fanatic Catholics.”

Whatever his motives, Zola’s accusations and the government’s response pulled thousands of people into the controversy. Those who disagreed with Zola’s conclusions took to the streets, where they attacked Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes—including the Dreyfus residence. There were anti-Jewish riots in about 70 cities.

The violence in the streets troubled many people on both sides of the issue, and some decided it was time to take a stand. They called for a new trial for Dreyfus in the hope that it would settle the matter once and for all. Charles Chanoine, the new minister of war, reopened the investigation in order to quiet the uproar. The new chief investigator, Louis Cuignet, quickly discovered that Hubert Henry, who had testified so powerfully at Dreyfus’s trial, had forged evidence and lied to the court. Although Cuignet considered Henry a friend, he brought his findings to the minister of war. Zola turned out to be right: there had been a military conspiracy against Dreyfus.

Many saw the Dreyfus Affair as a conspiracy organized by Jews to betray France.

Chanoine made Cuignet’s findings public and ordered Henry’s arrest. Before he could be questioned, Henry committed suicide and promptly became a folk hero. Thousands were convinced that the “Jewish syndicate” had murdered him. Some of Dreyfus’s supporters also thought Henry had been murdered, but they believed it had been ordered by the military general staff because he knew too much.

As the French argued about Henry’s death, Esterhazy fled to England and then confessed that he had written the original memo listing military secrets for sale to the Germans. He claimed that the general staff had ordered him to create the document as part of a secret counter-espionage plan. Once again, however, many insisted that “the Jews” had paid Esterhazy to say this.

In August of 1899, five years after his conviction, Dreyfus was retried and, to the surprise of many, once again convicted. But strangely, the day
after his second conviction, he was pardoned. When a government issues a pardon, it does not say that the person who was convicted of a crime is innocent; it simply forgives the crime and cancels the punishment. The courts did not declare Dreyfus innocent until 1906—12 years after his first conviction. Only then was he reinstated as a captain in the army. He and his son Pierre would later fight in the French army during the First World War.

The Dreyfus Affair, as it came to be known, changed the way many Jews in western Europe saw themselves and others. In 1894, Theodore Herzl, then a reporter for an Austrian newspaper, covered the ceremony in which Dreyfus was degraded. Although Herzl recognized the power of antisemitism long before the Dreyfus Affair, this event strengthened his views. In 1896, he wrote:

The Jewish Question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it. It exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not yet exist, it will be brought by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence soon produces persecution. This is true in every country, and will remain true even in those most highly civilized—France itself is no exception—till the Jewish Question finds a solution on a political basis.
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