The Degradation

Part IV: Trial, Deportation, and the Beginning of the Affair

(This is Part IV of the series on the Third Republic, you can read Parts II and III to catch up.)

It doesn’t appear that the French secret service, the “Bureau of Statistics,” deliberately targeted and framed Dreyfus at the outset. But the fact that he was the victim of error and incompetence only adds to the shamefulness of the whole Affair. The officer class was obsessed with the idea of traitors, believing its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war could only have been the result of treason and not their own military failure. In their zeal they missed the real traitor and fabricated an imaginary one.

After the “bordereau” was discovered in 1894 and the handwriting seemed superficially close to the Jewish captain’s, the secret service and the General Staff fixated on that “fact” despite encountering evidence to the contrary. He was found to not have gone on the maneuvers mentioned in the document; it didn’t matter, the Staff found others that he had gone on. “From the fist moment on,” wrote Joseph Reinach, a Dreyfusard politician, “the phenomenon that would dominate the entire affair was in operation. It was no longer carefully verified facts and scrupulously examined matters which formed opinion; it was a sovereign, pre-established, and irresistible belief which distorted facts and realities. “

Despite being convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt, largely on the basis of his Jewishness, the generals realized that that their evidence was scant. They brought in the first of a serious of dubious “experts.” Their man was the preposterous Commandant Mercier du Paty de Clam, a “bizarre and frequently mad individual…a monocle-bearing automaton, with an inflated torso, a chin pointing upward, and the mustache of a cat.” Descended from an ancient noble family, du Paty de Clam, was bored in the bourgeois world of fin de siecle Paris and decided to live instead a “peculiar world of fantasy and intrigue.” One recurrent fantasy was that the nation beset by Jewish spies. He was also an amateur graphologist and quickly returned the opinion to the General staff that the handwriting in the bordereau was indeed Dreyfus’s.

Commandant du Paty de Clam

Dreyfus was invited to a meeting, an ambush really, at the General Staff headquarters. Du Paty dictated the contents of the bordereau to him in order confirm the similarity of the handwriting. When Dreyfus’s hand began to shake, du Paty and the other officers sprang their trap and arrested him. The offered him a pistol to commit suicide and preserve his honor. Dreyfus refused and maintained his innocence. They interrogated Dreyfus relentlessly in the hopes of getting a confession. Dreyfus, who did not even know what he was being charged with, could not have even made a false confession to end his ordeal: He appeared to be on the verge of a nervous collapse.

Unable to secure a confession, the General Staff brought in their second expert, Alphonse Bertillon, head of the Paris Prefecture’s Service of Judiciary Identity. Bertillon, the inventor of the mug shot and “a notorious antisemite,” concocted a theory that seems like the product of psychosis. Since there were both similarities and differences in the handwriting, Bertillon hypothesized that Dreyfus had deliberately engaged in a “self-forgery” so that he could either claim the document was not written by him or that it was a deliberate forgery to frame him. This theory had the convenient ability to confound any path for Dreyfus to maintain his innocence. Bertillon did not stop there: he drew up a convoluted diagram that showed how Dreyfus came up with the stratagem of “self-forgery:” part of a system of defenses of “the habitual spy.” When Bertillon presented his “evidence” to the president of the Republic, the president confided to a friend that he found the expert “Not, bizarre but completely insane…I thought I had an escapee from [the mental asylum] before me.”

Bertillon’s diagram

With all this rather dubious evidence, the case against Dreyfus seemed uncertain. The Captain still refused to confess. Just as the accusation seemed to be falling apart, the press stepped in. Edouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole—”free speech,” the country’s premier antisemitic daily, broke the story and the rest of the press followed. It seems highly likely that the Bureau of Statistics leaked the story to La Libre Parole.

It’s worth mentioning that the real traitor, the aristocratic Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, had close relations with La Libre Parole, acting as a source and anonymous contributor. This manipulative and devious man, who had squandered his family fortune on gambling and women, embarked on a number of schemes to pay his creditors. While associating with antisemites, he would agree to be the Second for Jewish officers involved in duels, in one case against Drumont himself. Since the officer caste was so filled with anti-Jewish prejudice, it was not easy for Jews to find Seconds and thus Esterhazy provided a valuable service. He would then hit up rich Jews for money: they believed they were financially supporting a friend of their people whose straightened circumstances were the result of his brave but unpopular stand. Another of Esterhazy’s schemes was being a spy for the German government: he was the true author of the bordereau.

Even with the force of public opinion mounting against Dreyfus, his conviction did not seem like a sure thing. In his closed military trial, the defense was ably taking apart the absurd indictment against him. The General Staff and the Bureau of Statistics realized they had to act, so they illegally passed a secret file to the judges in the case. This file was later revealed to be not much more than a collection of suggestive scraps without any direct evidence against Dreyfus, but it secured his conviction. He was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment in a penal colony and military degradation.

On January 5, 1895, Dreyfus was publicly cashiered, having his rank and insignia stripped from him and his sword broken by a sergeant major of the Garde Républicaine. Dreyfus attempted to make a show of dignity and shouted out that he was innocent. The press criticized his bearing, calling him “stiff,” an “automaton”; his “passivity” and “docility” were evidence of the Jews’ lack of “moral sensibility,” “patriotism,” “honor” or “pride.” His voice, which cracked under the strain, was deemed “metallic,” hollow” and “unbearable.” In the witnessing crowd, the first cries of “Death to the Jews” could be heard. Dreyfus was bound for Devil’s Island, a desolate rock off the coast of French Guiana. On the way, crowds mobbed his railway car and were even able to beat him.

I have so far focused mostly on politics and society, but it seems worthwhile to reflect for a moment on the man caught up in this ordeal. Hannah Arendt, very unkindly I think, calls Dreyfus “rather stupid,” preferring instead to cast the glorious politicians and intellectuals as the heroes of the affair. Dreyfus does not seem stupid to me so much as possessed of a certain simplicity of nature. He fervently believed in the Republic, in France, in his honor as an officer, and the military. Throughout his ordeal, his faith in those institutions never wavers, even to the point of trusting the General Staff, which was arrayed in conspiracy against him. Dreyfus was a very conventional, bourgeois man, quite unlike the dashing aristocrats who were often his enemies. No identity was as important to him as being a French officer and as husband to his wife and father to his children. He barely mentions his Jewishness in his letters at all. Although he came close to despair, he never gave himself over to cynicism about France or altered his politics, to the extent he had any. One would be hard pressed to find a person who the accusation of treason could wound so deeply. The intellectuals and politicians used the Affair as a screen to project their own ideas about France and produced a welter of grand notions about the nation or universal human rights, but it seems only Dreyfus, the supposed alien, just believed in France with utter clarity and simplicity.

(Next post we will look at the intervention of the intellectuals, Zola’s J’Accuse, and the polarization of France into two warring factions.)