On October 15, 1894, Alfred Dreyfus' life would change forever. The French Artillery captain would be accused of sending military secrets to the Germans. But was he really the culprit?
In this episode, we'll be examining the Dreyfus affair, a story that involves the military, the press, anti-semitism, and the most famous miscarriage of justice in French history.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the third and final part of our French mini-series.
[00:00:27] In case you missed them, in part one we learned about Joan of Arc, the young lady who claimed she had received a message from God to save France, and, well, according to some people, that’s exactly what she did.
[00:00:41] In part two we jumped forward a few hundred years to learn about Le Petit Caporal, the little Corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:00:50] And in today’s episode we will learn about The Dreyfus Affair. It’s a story that involves the military, the press, suicide, murder, treason, anti-Semitism, “Devil’s Island” prison, and the most famous miscarriage of justice in French history.
[00:01:10] It’s an amazing story, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:15] On the 21st of February 1895, a 35-year-old Frenchman boarded a ship. It would take him across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. The journey was long and arduous, most unpleasant.
[00:01:32] He finally arrived at his destination, a small island off the coast of South America.
[00:01:39] This was no 19th century tourism pioneer, no daring French explorer.
[00:01:46] And this was no ordinary island.
[00:01:50] It was nicknamed “Devil’s Island”, and it was used only for the most dangerous, the worst, political prisoners.
[00:02:00] The man would call this island home for four and a half years, and these years were hellish indeed. He lived in a 16 metre square stone hut, often chained up, tormented by his guards, mosquitoes, torrential rain and the scorching heat of the sun.
[00:02:23] On this island, he was completely cut off from the outside world, he had no idea what was going on in his home country of France.
[00:02:33] What was going on, in fact, was the biggest political scandal in French history, a scandal that had divided the country in two, caused one of its most famous authors to flee, and had exposed deep tensions in the country.
[00:02:51] Although the man had no idea of its very existence, the scandal was all about him.
[00:02:59] The scandal was L’Affaire Dreyfus, the Dreyfus Affair, and the man imprisoned on the island was, of course, Alfred Dreyfus, or as we’d say in English, Alfred Dreyfus.
[00:03:13] Now, before we go into the details of how Dreyfus ended up on Devil’s Island in the first place, it’s worth spending a few moments reflecting on some French history leading up to this period.
[00:03:26] There was the revolution in 1789, subsequent serious reforms of the French state, and intermittent wars with other European powers running throughout the 19th century.
[00:03:38] Most importantly for our story, the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war had resulted in a major defeat for France, the loss of French territories including Alsace, and the unification of Germany, which was what the whole war had been fought to try to stop.
[00:04:00] Given that much of the 19th century had been marred by war, it seemed inevitable that fighting would break out again, so there was something of an arms race between France and Germany, with both nations building up their military, investing in military technology and, importantly, trying to figure out what the other’s next move would be.
[00:04:26] On a social level, as has unfortunately been the case throughout much of history, Jewish people all across Europe had experienced persecution in various forms.
[00:04:38] In Eastern Europe this often took the form of pogroms, violent protests where Jews were attacked, murdered, forced out of towns and cities in state-sanctioned anti-Semitism.
[00:04:52] In France, on the other hand, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Jews had been granted the same rights as every other French citizen.
[00:05:03] Finally, Jewish people were legally treated the same as everyone else, but this didn’t mean that they were actually treated the same. There was a resurgence of anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish feeling in France.
[00:05:18] There was even something called the Anti Semitic League that was formed in 1889 by a journalist named Eduard Drummond, a man who had published a popular anti-Semitic manifesto called “Jewish France” a few years beforehand.
[00:05:35] So, the point to remember is that you have a politically and militarily tense situation between France and Germany combined with Jewish people theoretically having the same rights as everyone else in France, but in reality battling some heavily entrenched anti-Semitism in French society.
[00:05:57] So, as to the affair itself, what happened?
[00:06:01] Well, it all started in September 1894 after a cleaner went to empty the bins at the German Embassy in Paris.
[00:06:10] The cleaner found a note.
[00:06:13] Although it had been torn into six pieces, its contents were clearly legible.
[00:06:20] It was addressed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the Germany military attaché to France.
[00:06:28] It was unsigned, anonymous, but it was clearly from a French officer who was passing French military secrets to Schwartzkoppen, and thereby the German state.
[00:06:42] A spy had been caught red handed!
[00:06:47] In fact, this discovery was no coincidence. The cleaner wasn’t just a cleaner; she was the wife of a French soldier, and had been enlisted specifically to try to dig up secrets on Schwartzkoppen, to root through his belongings to try to identify his French contacts.
[00:07:07] See, Schwartzkoppen had long been known to the French, they knew he was trying to dig up French military secrets and they suspected he had a source in the French military. He was a spy, essentially, but not a particularly good one. In fact, he had quite an interesting private life and plenty of secrets of his own.
[00:07:31] He had had an affair with the wife of the Counsellor at the Dutch Embassy in Paris as well as an affair with the male Italian military attaché, both of which were relatively well known.
[00:07:43] Anyway, all of this plus the fact that he tore up this deeply incriminating letter and simply left it in his rubbish bin suggests that he wasn’t particularly good at covering his tracks, at keeping secrets.
[00:07:59] When the cleaner found this note she immediately took it to her handlers, and it made its way up to the French Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier.
[00:08:11] To state the obvious, whoever wrote the note was in serious trouble. They had committed the worst crime a French soldier could: treason, and what’s more, against its greatest enemy and rival, Germany.
[00:08:30] The culprit needed to be found, not only to stop the flow of valuable information but to make an example of, to show what happens to someone when they betray their country.
[00:08:43] The problem was that the only evidence against the traitor was the unsigned note.
[00:08:50] An investigation was launched, and it focussed on two areas: firstly, motive, so, who would want to do this, what kind of person might be inclined to pass information to the Germans.
[00:09:06] And secondly, the note itself. If the investigators could find someone with the same handwriting as in the note, they would have found their guilty man.
[00:09:18] It didn’t take the investigators much time.
[00:09:22] On October 15th, 1894, a 35-year-old artillery officer called Alfred Dreyfus was summoned to speak with his superiors.
[00:09:33] He was told that they knew he was a spy, it was him who had written the letter.
[00:09:39] They told him to confess his guilt and sign a written confession.
[00:09:45] He refused. It wasn’t me, he said, you have the wrong man.
[00:09:51] His interrogators wouldn’t listen; they seemed keener on getting him to confess than uncovering any kind of evidence that it was indeed Dreyfus who had written the letter.
[00:10:02] One of the officers even placed a pistol on the desk in front of the prisoner, indicating to him that he should commit suicide, he should kill himself as the only way out of this situation.
[00:10:17] But Dreyfus maintained his innocence, he didn’t sign a confession, and he didn’t pick up the gun and put a bullet in his brain.
[00:10:27] It turned out that the evidence that they had against him was flimsy at best, or really it was completely non-existent.
[00:10:37] He had been identified as someone who probably would be a spy, first because he was from Alsace, he was from the area of eastern France that had been won by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war.
[00:10:51] This was the main reason that he was suspected of being the guilty party, but he was also rich and Jewish, an easy target in a country where anti-Semitism was widespread and Jewish people were often considered untrustworthy, part of some wider Jewish conspiracy and not loyal to France.
[00:11:13] Dreyfus, being Alsatian and Jewish, was soon identified as a prime suspect and taken into custody for questioning, or perhaps more accurately, taken into custody and pressured to confess.
[00:11:29] This all happened behind closed doors, it was not known to the public.
[00:11:35] But on October the 29th, two weeks after his arrest, news of Dreyfus’ alleged treachery broke in the French press.
[00:11:46] It broke in a newspaper called La Libre Parole, a newspaper which was owned by Édouard Drumont, the founder of the anti-Semitic league you heard about a few minutes ago.
[00:11:57] La Libre Parole, if you translated it into English, would be something like “Free Speech”, but this newspaper did not give Alfred Dreyfus the freedom to defend himself from the accusations it made against him.
[00:12:12] It reported only the fact that a rich Jewish soldier had been found spying not just against France, but for its archenemy, Germany.
[00:12:24] The article didn’t say anything about the fact that there was essentially no evidence against Dreyfus, firstly because the military kept all of the details about the investigation secret and secondly because the story of a rich Jewish officer colluding with the enemy just sounded right to its readers.
[00:12:46] The fact that Dreyfus was a Jew meant that of course he would do something like this, the evidence would surely show that he was the traitor the paper’s readers believed French jews to be.
[00:12:58] There was one person, however, who simply didn’t believe the accusations, Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred’s brother.
[00:13:07] He knew his brother, he knew this was something he would never do, and he embarked on what would become a five year campaign to clear his brother’s name.
[00:13:19] He rushed to Paris, found a well-known and respected lawyer, and tried to defend his brother against the allegations both in the legal system and in the press.
[00:13:31] Articles continued to come out in the French newspapers about Dreyfus, especially in the anti-Semitic newspapers, which pointed at Dreyfus’s treachery and said, “look, we told you so, we’ve been telling you that Jews were up to no good, and now one has been caught in the act”.
[00:13:51] All the while, military prosecutors were gathering evidence against Dreyfus.
[00:13:57] The problem was… there was none.
[00:14:00] The only piece of actual evidence against the spy was the note.
[00:14:06] The investigators had compared Dreyfus’ handwriting to the handwriting on the note and concluded that they were similar enough to bring him in for questioning. A handwriting expert had been consulted, but he had said that the two handwritings weren’t a match, they weren’t the same.
[00:14:26] A second expert was consulted, but this man wasn’t a handwriting expert, he was just the inventor of something called forensic anthropometry, which is basically the science of human measurements. The man, somewhat bafflingly, suggested that Drefyus had faked his own handwriting, and that he was certainly the culprit.
[00:14:49] Now, these details weren’t revealed until afterwards, the entire investigation was kept secret from the public while it was going on.
[00:14:59] Dreyfus was taken to a military tribunal, a military court, on December 19th, and it was only then that the lawyer his brother had retained got a chance to see the evidence against him.
[00:15:12] The good news was that this evidence was no evidence at all - there was only the note, there was no agreement between handwriting experts about whether this was definitely Dreyfus.
[00:15:24] What’s more, there were plenty of witnesses who would testify as to Dreyfus’ good character - he was a well-respected, clever and talented army officer with no discernible motive to betray his country.
[00:15:39] The bad news, however, was that Dreyfus’ name and reputation had been dragged through the mud in the press for the previous month and a half, and that it would be deeply embarrassing for the French military to admit that they had got the wrong man, and consequently, that the real spy was still walking free.
[00:16:01] Still, the military court needed to come to a decision.
[00:16:05] On the 22nd of December 1894 the verdict was announced.
[00:16:11] Alfred Dreyfus, the 35 year old army officer was found guilty of high treason.
[00:16:19] The sentence?
[00:16:21] Fortunately it wasn’t the death penalty; France had abolished the death penalty for political crimes in 1848, although there were no doubt moments on Devil’s Island where Dreyfus would have preferred to be dead.
[00:16:35] His punishment was to be deported, to be sent to a penal colony for the rest of his life.
[00:16:43] First he needed to be stripped of his military title.
[00:16:48] He was, up until this point, a distinguished army officer, and had enjoyed a successful career.
[00:16:56] But on January 5th, 1895, he was paraded through the streets of Paris where he was confronted by jeering crowds yelling taunts at him - “Death to Judas, death to the Jew”.
[00:17:11] His final destination was the Military School in Paris, where he was publicly stripped of his military uniform - the ultimate embarrassment for a military officer.
[00:17:23] And after a month in solitary confinement, allowed only to see his wife twice a week in the presence of a prison guard, he was packed off on a ship and sent to Devil’s Island.
[00:17:37] As he sat on the boat, convinced of his own innocence, he must have felt a sense of complete helplessness.
[00:17:46] He was public enemy number one. People had been calling for his execution, demanding that an exception be made in the case of this man who had conspired against France.
[00:17:58] Dreyfus knew, of course, that he was innocent, he was no traitor, but thousands of kilometres away from France, chained up on a tropical island with no means of escape, he was powerless to do anything about it.
[00:18:13] Fortunately his brother, Mathieu, did not stop fighting to clear his brother’s name.
[00:18:20] He was helped in the summer of 1895 when a man called Major Picquart took over as the head of staff at the Military Intelligence Service, essentially the French spying organisation.
[00:18:34] In March the following year, so this is 1896, he found a telegram that Schwartzkoppen, the German spy, had intended to send to a French military officer called Major Esterhazy. And shortly afterwards he found a note from Major Esterhazy to Schwartzkoppen, the German.
[00:18:56] When he looked at Esterhazy’s handwriting, it was an exact match for the handwriting on the original note, the note that had caused this entire scandal.
[00:19:07] Major Esterhazy was the spy, not Alfred Dreyfus. The truth had finally been revealed!
[00:19:15] But if you’re thinking that this is the end of the story, and that Dreyfus would be immediately returned from Devil’s Island and given a hero’s welcome by the French state, you will be sorely disappointed.
[00:19:29] Major Picquart went to his superiors, but he was told to shut up, essentially.
[00:19:36] Dreyfus was a rich Jew, why was Picquart making such a fuss about him?
[00:19:41] Why not just let him rot on Devil’s Island, he was told.
[00:19:45] Dreyfus had been found guilty not only in the military court but in the court of public opinion. Going back and saying “oops, we got the wrong guy” would be of huge embarrassment for the military.
[00:20:00] What’s more, the man Picquart accused, Esterhazy, was a close friend of one of the men who had first accused Dreyfus, Major Henry, so he had powerful friends in the army.
[00:20:14] Major Picquart would be a problem for the French military, and as a result he was transferred to North Africa where he would be out of the way.
[00:20:24] But Picquart didn’t stop; he had told Mathieu Dreyfus of his discovery, and it became public knowledge that this man, Esterhazy, stood accused of being the real traitor.
[00:20:38] The country was divided between those who believed that Dreyfus was innocent - the so-called Dreyfusites, and those who thought he was guilty, the anti-Dreyfusites.
[00:20:50] Despite the best attempts of the anti-Dreyfusites in the military, Mathieu Dreyfus lodged a formal complaint against Esterhazy with the French Minister of War, meaning that there was a legal duty to investigate it.
[00:21:05] Although it was clearly him, incredibly, the military found Esterhazy innocent and acquitted him.
[00:21:13] Esterhazy had powerful friends in the military, and it turned out that his treachery had been motivated by financial reasons, as he was a degenerate gambler and heavily in debt.
[00:21:26] Essentially, he wasn’t deemed a threat and his friends in the army thought they could allow him to slip off into the night, never to reveal the actual truth of the matter.
[00:21:38] But anyone who examined the evidence calmly and rationally could see that Esterhazy, the man who had just been declared innocent, was guilty, and the man chained up on Devil’s Island, the man who had been declared guilty in December of 1894, was innocent.
[00:21:58] Bizarrely free, Esterhazy promptly fled to England, never to return to France again.
[00:22:06] Back in France, the fight to clear Dreyfus’ name intensified, and his case was taken on by people much more powerful and notable than Dreyfus' brother, Mathieu. Most famously, on January 13th, 1898, one of France’s most famous writers, Emile Zola, penned an open letter to the French president.
[00:22:31] It was published in a liberal newspaper called l’Aurore, and led with the headline “J’Accuse”, “I’m accusing”, or “I accuse”.
[00:22:42] In it he implored the French president personally to look into the case, which by this time was clearly full of fabrications and lies.
[00:22:53] Perhaps amazingly, Emile Zola found himself now accused of defamation, of damaging the good reputation, not of Esterhazy or of any individual, but of the French government. He had, essentially, called into question the judgement of the French military court, and this was a crime. The author was sentenced to a year in prison and given a heavy fine, and was then forced to escape to England.
[00:23:26] This was perhaps the height of the division of France into Dreyfusites and anti-Dreyfusites with the country deeply divided between those who thought that Dreyfus was innocent and those who thought he was guilty, with anti-Semitic feelings dominating the latter group.
[00:23:45] After all, there simply was no evidence he was guilty, and there was plenty of evidence that another man was.
[00:23:53] While all of this was going on, the man at the centre of the entire affair, Alfred Dreyfus, was withering away on Devil’s Island; his condition was getting worse and worse, he had lost his teeth and his ability to speak, and he had no idea about what was happening back in his home country.
[00:24:14] Back in France he would have been horrified to find out that there were anti-Semitic riots and increasing violence against the country’s Jewish population.
[00:24:24] But slowly slowly, evidence was mounting, evidence that would prove his innocence.
[00:24:32] First, Esterhazy confessed to a British newspaper that he was the spy, and in August 1898 Major Henry, the major who had originally pointed the finger at Dreyfus, admitted that he had forged documents to make Dreyfus seem guilty.
[00:24:50] The next day he took a razor and slit his own throat, Henry killed himself.
[00:24:57] The evidence was now too great to ignore. The case was referred to the Supreme Court, and a retrial ordered.
[00:25:07] Alfred Dreyfus was called back to France to face trial for a second time. He stepped foot on French soil on June 30th, 1899, four and a half years after he had departed, only to find a very different country to the one he had left behind.
[00:25:26] He still wasn’t a free man, though. There was another trial, and incredibly, despite the fact that Esterhazy had admitted he was guilty, and Major Henry admitted he had forged evidence, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason again, and sentenced to another ten years in prison.
[00:25:46] The good news, however, was that the court decided that there were “extenuating circumstances”, unusual factors, and offered to pardon Dreyfus. The bad news was that you can only be pardoned for something you admit you are guilty of, so Dreyfus would have to admit he was guilty in order to go free.
[00:26:09] So, what did he do?
[00:26:12] He admitted his guilt, knowing full well that he was innocent.
[00:26:17] You can hardly blame him. He had been in prison, away from his family, for almost five years, he was already guilty in the eyes of a particular section of the French public, and by admitting this fake guilt he would go free.
[00:26:33] So, this is exactly what he did, on September the 21st 1899, almost exactly five years after the incriminating letter was discovered, Alfred Dreyfus walked free.
[00:26:47] It wouldn’t be until 1906, however, that Dreyfus was officially cleared of all his crimes, and in fact reinstated as an army officer, being promoted to the rank of major, which would have realistically been where he would have got to had he not become the centre of the country’s biggest political scandal.
[00:27:07] He served for a year before retiring, and lived for another three decades until his death at the age of 75 in 1935.
[00:27:17] Now, as to the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair, it was a deeply divisive period in French history, a period where the fate of one man came to symbolise something much greater than the man himself.
[00:27:32] France was theoretically a place where everyone enjoyed the freedom of liberty, equality and brotherhood, but the Dreyfus Affair, as it would come to be known, revealed that these rights were not equally enjoyed, most markedly by the country’s Jewish population.
[00:27:52] And the case continues to divide France, or at least be controversial, to this very day. President Macron has publicly stated that France must not repeat the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair, yet doubts over Dreyfus’ innocence continue to be raised by several prominent figures on the French far right.
[00:28:14] It has been over 100 years since his exoneration, and almost 100 years since his death, but it seems that Alfred Dreyfus will forever be remembered as France’s most famous innocent man.
[00:28:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Dreyfus Affair, and with it comes the end of this French-themed mini-series.
[00:28:41] As a reminder, in part one we talked about Joan of Arc and in part two it was Napoleon.
[00:28:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and of this mini-series in general.
[00:28:54] For the French listeners among you, what do you think the lasting legacy of the Dreyfus Affair in France?
[00:29:00] Who else should we have covered in this mini-series?
[00:29:03] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:29:07] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:29:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:29:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the third and final part of our French mini-series.
[00:00:27] In case you missed them, in part one we learned about Joan of Arc, the young lady who claimed she had received a message from God to save France, and, well, according to some people, that’s exactly what she did.
[00:00:41] In part two we jumped forward a few hundred years to learn about Le Petit Caporal, the little Corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:00:50] And in today’s episode we will learn about The Dreyfus Affair. It’s a story that involves the military, the press, suicide, murder, treason, anti-Semitism, “Devil’s Island” prison, and the most famous miscarriage of justice in French history.
[00:01:10] It’s an amazing story, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:15] On the 21st of February 1895, a 35-year-old Frenchman boarded a ship. It would take him across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. The journey was long and arduous, most unpleasant.
[00:01:32] He finally arrived at his destination, a small island off the coast of South America.
[00:01:39] This was no 19th century tourism pioneer, no daring French explorer.
[00:01:46] And this was no ordinary island.
[00:01:50] It was nicknamed “Devil’s Island”, and it was used only for the most dangerous, the worst, political prisoners.
[00:02:00] The man would call this island home for four and a half years, and these years were hellish indeed. He lived in a 16 metre square stone hut, often chained up, tormented by his guards, mosquitoes, torrential rain and the scorching heat of the sun.
[00:02:23] On this island, he was completely cut off from the outside world, he had no idea what was going on in his home country of France.
[00:02:33] What was going on, in fact, was the biggest political scandal in French history, a scandal that had divided the country in two, caused one of its most famous authors to flee, and had exposed deep tensions in the country.
[00:02:51] Although the man had no idea of its very existence, the scandal was all about him.
[00:02:59] The scandal was L’Affaire Dreyfus, the Dreyfus Affair, and the man imprisoned on the island was, of course, Alfred Dreyfus, or as we’d say in English, Alfred Dreyfus.
[00:03:13] Now, before we go into the details of how Dreyfus ended up on Devil’s Island in the first place, it’s worth spending a few moments reflecting on some French history leading up to this period.
[00:03:26] There was the revolution in 1789, subsequent serious reforms of the French state, and intermittent wars with other European powers running throughout the 19th century.
[00:03:38] Most importantly for our story, the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war had resulted in a major defeat for France, the loss of French territories including Alsace, and the unification of Germany, which was what the whole war had been fought to try to stop.
[00:04:00] Given that much of the 19th century had been marred by war, it seemed inevitable that fighting would break out again, so there was something of an arms race between France and Germany, with both nations building up their military, investing in military technology and, importantly, trying to figure out what the other’s next move would be.
[00:04:26] On a social level, as has unfortunately been the case throughout much of history, Jewish people all across Europe had experienced persecution in various forms.
[00:04:38] In Eastern Europe this often took the form of pogroms, violent protests where Jews were attacked, murdered, forced out of towns and cities in state-sanctioned anti-Semitism.
[00:04:52] In France, on the other hand, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Jews had been granted the same rights as every other French citizen.
[00:05:03] Finally, Jewish people were legally treated the same as everyone else, but this didn’t mean that they were actually treated the same. There was a resurgence of anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish feeling in France.
[00:05:18] There was even something called the Anti Semitic League that was formed in 1889 by a journalist named Eduard Drummond, a man who had published a popular anti-Semitic manifesto called “Jewish France” a few years beforehand.
[00:05:35] So, the point to remember is that you have a politically and militarily tense situation between France and Germany combined with Jewish people theoretically having the same rights as everyone else in France, but in reality battling some heavily entrenched anti-Semitism in French society.
[00:05:57] So, as to the affair itself, what happened?
[00:06:01] Well, it all started in September 1894 after a cleaner went to empty the bins at the German Embassy in Paris.
[00:06:10] The cleaner found a note.
[00:06:13] Although it had been torn into six pieces, its contents were clearly legible.
[00:06:20] It was addressed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the Germany military attaché to France.
[00:06:28] It was unsigned, anonymous, but it was clearly from a French officer who was passing French military secrets to Schwartzkoppen, and thereby the German state.
[00:06:42] A spy had been caught red handed!
[00:06:47] In fact, this discovery was no coincidence. The cleaner wasn’t just a cleaner; she was the wife of a French soldier, and had been enlisted specifically to try to dig up secrets on Schwartzkoppen, to root through his belongings to try to identify his French contacts.
[00:07:07] See, Schwartzkoppen had long been known to the French, they knew he was trying to dig up French military secrets and they suspected he had a source in the French military. He was a spy, essentially, but not a particularly good one. In fact, he had quite an interesting private life and plenty of secrets of his own.
[00:07:31] He had had an affair with the wife of the Counsellor at the Dutch Embassy in Paris as well as an affair with the male Italian military attaché, both of which were relatively well known.
[00:07:43] Anyway, all of this plus the fact that he tore up this deeply incriminating letter and simply left it in his rubbish bin suggests that he wasn’t particularly good at covering his tracks, at keeping secrets.
[00:07:59] When the cleaner found this note she immediately took it to her handlers, and it made its way up to the French Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier.
[00:08:11] To state the obvious, whoever wrote the note was in serious trouble. They had committed the worst crime a French soldier could: treason, and what’s more, against its greatest enemy and rival, Germany.
[00:08:30] The culprit needed to be found, not only to stop the flow of valuable information but to make an example of, to show what happens to someone when they betray their country.
[00:08:43] The problem was that the only evidence against the traitor was the unsigned note.
[00:08:50] An investigation was launched, and it focussed on two areas: firstly, motive, so, who would want to do this, what kind of person might be inclined to pass information to the Germans.
[00:09:06] And secondly, the note itself. If the investigators could find someone with the same handwriting as in the note, they would have found their guilty man.
[00:09:18] It didn’t take the investigators much time.
[00:09:22] On October 15th, 1894, a 35-year-old artillery officer called Alfred Dreyfus was summoned to speak with his superiors.
[00:09:33] He was told that they knew he was a spy, it was him who had written the letter.
[00:09:39] They told him to confess his guilt and sign a written confession.
[00:09:45] He refused. It wasn’t me, he said, you have the wrong man.
[00:09:51] His interrogators wouldn’t listen; they seemed keener on getting him to confess than uncovering any kind of evidence that it was indeed Dreyfus who had written the letter.
[00:10:02] One of the officers even placed a pistol on the desk in front of the prisoner, indicating to him that he should commit suicide, he should kill himself as the only way out of this situation.
[00:10:17] But Dreyfus maintained his innocence, he didn’t sign a confession, and he didn’t pick up the gun and put a bullet in his brain.
[00:10:27] It turned out that the evidence that they had against him was flimsy at best, or really it was completely non-existent.
[00:10:37] He had been identified as someone who probably would be a spy, first because he was from Alsace, he was from the area of eastern France that had been won by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war.
[00:10:51] This was the main reason that he was suspected of being the guilty party, but he was also rich and Jewish, an easy target in a country where anti-Semitism was widespread and Jewish people were often considered untrustworthy, part of some wider Jewish conspiracy and not loyal to France.
[00:11:13] Dreyfus, being Alsatian and Jewish, was soon identified as a prime suspect and taken into custody for questioning, or perhaps more accurately, taken into custody and pressured to confess.
[00:11:29] This all happened behind closed doors, it was not known to the public.
[00:11:35] But on October the 29th, two weeks after his arrest, news of Dreyfus’ alleged treachery broke in the French press.
[00:11:46] It broke in a newspaper called La Libre Parole, a newspaper which was owned by Édouard Drumont, the founder of the anti-Semitic league you heard about a few minutes ago.
[00:11:57] La Libre Parole, if you translated it into English, would be something like “Free Speech”, but this newspaper did not give Alfred Dreyfus the freedom to defend himself from the accusations it made against him.
[00:12:12] It reported only the fact that a rich Jewish soldier had been found spying not just against France, but for its archenemy, Germany.
[00:12:24] The article didn’t say anything about the fact that there was essentially no evidence against Dreyfus, firstly because the military kept all of the details about the investigation secret and secondly because the story of a rich Jewish officer colluding with the enemy just sounded right to its readers.
[00:12:46] The fact that Dreyfus was a Jew meant that of course he would do something like this, the evidence would surely show that he was the traitor the paper’s readers believed French jews to be.
[00:12:58] There was one person, however, who simply didn’t believe the accusations, Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred’s brother.
[00:13:07] He knew his brother, he knew this was something he would never do, and he embarked on what would become a five year campaign to clear his brother’s name.
[00:13:19] He rushed to Paris, found a well-known and respected lawyer, and tried to defend his brother against the allegations both in the legal system and in the press.
[00:13:31] Articles continued to come out in the French newspapers about Dreyfus, especially in the anti-Semitic newspapers, which pointed at Dreyfus’s treachery and said, “look, we told you so, we’ve been telling you that Jews were up to no good, and now one has been caught in the act”.
[00:13:51] All the while, military prosecutors were gathering evidence against Dreyfus.
[00:13:57] The problem was… there was none.
[00:14:00] The only piece of actual evidence against the spy was the note.
[00:14:06] The investigators had compared Dreyfus’ handwriting to the handwriting on the note and concluded that they were similar enough to bring him in for questioning. A handwriting expert had been consulted, but he had said that the two handwritings weren’t a match, they weren’t the same.
[00:14:26] A second expert was consulted, but this man wasn’t a handwriting expert, he was just the inventor of something called forensic anthropometry, which is basically the science of human measurements. The man, somewhat bafflingly, suggested that Drefyus had faked his own handwriting, and that he was certainly the culprit.
[00:14:49] Now, these details weren’t revealed until afterwards, the entire investigation was kept secret from the public while it was going on.
[00:14:59] Dreyfus was taken to a military tribunal, a military court, on December 19th, and it was only then that the lawyer his brother had retained got a chance to see the evidence against him.
[00:15:12] The good news was that this evidence was no evidence at all - there was only the note, there was no agreement between handwriting experts about whether this was definitely Dreyfus.
[00:15:24] What’s more, there were plenty of witnesses who would testify as to Dreyfus’ good character - he was a well-respected, clever and talented army officer with no discernible motive to betray his country.
[00:15:39] The bad news, however, was that Dreyfus’ name and reputation had been dragged through the mud in the press for the previous month and a half, and that it would be deeply embarrassing for the French military to admit that they had got the wrong man, and consequently, that the real spy was still walking free.
[00:16:01] Still, the military court needed to come to a decision.
[00:16:05] On the 22nd of December 1894 the verdict was announced.
[00:16:11] Alfred Dreyfus, the 35 year old army officer was found guilty of high treason.
[00:16:19] The sentence?
[00:16:21] Fortunately it wasn’t the death penalty; France had abolished the death penalty for political crimes in 1848, although there were no doubt moments on Devil’s Island where Dreyfus would have preferred to be dead.
[00:16:35] His punishment was to be deported, to be sent to a penal colony for the rest of his life.
[00:16:43] First he needed to be stripped of his military title.
[00:16:48] He was, up until this point, a distinguished army officer, and had enjoyed a successful career.
[00:16:56] But on January 5th, 1895, he was paraded through the streets of Paris where he was confronted by jeering crowds yelling taunts at him - “Death to Judas, death to the Jew”.
[00:17:11] His final destination was the Military School in Paris, where he was publicly stripped of his military uniform - the ultimate embarrassment for a military officer.
[00:17:23] And after a month in solitary confinement, allowed only to see his wife twice a week in the presence of a prison guard, he was packed off on a ship and sent to Devil’s Island.
[00:17:37] As he sat on the boat, convinced of his own innocence, he must have felt a sense of complete helplessness.
[00:17:46] He was public enemy number one. People had been calling for his execution, demanding that an exception be made in the case of this man who had conspired against France.
[00:17:58] Dreyfus knew, of course, that he was innocent, he was no traitor, but thousands of kilometres away from France, chained up on a tropical island with no means of escape, he was powerless to do anything about it.
[00:18:13] Fortunately his brother, Mathieu, did not stop fighting to clear his brother’s name.
[00:18:20] He was helped in the summer of 1895 when a man called Major Picquart took over as the head of staff at the Military Intelligence Service, essentially the French spying organisation.
[00:18:34] In March the following year, so this is 1896, he found a telegram that Schwartzkoppen, the German spy, had intended to send to a French military officer called Major Esterhazy. And shortly afterwards he found a note from Major Esterhazy to Schwartzkoppen, the German.
[00:18:56] When he looked at Esterhazy’s handwriting, it was an exact match for the handwriting on the original note, the note that had caused this entire scandal.
[00:19:07] Major Esterhazy was the spy, not Alfred Dreyfus. The truth had finally been revealed!
[00:19:15] But if you’re thinking that this is the end of the story, and that Dreyfus would be immediately returned from Devil’s Island and given a hero’s welcome by the French state, you will be sorely disappointed.
[00:19:29] Major Picquart went to his superiors, but he was told to shut up, essentially.
[00:19:36] Dreyfus was a rich Jew, why was Picquart making such a fuss about him?
[00:19:41] Why not just let him rot on Devil’s Island, he was told.
[00:19:45] Dreyfus had been found guilty not only in the military court but in the court of public opinion. Going back and saying “oops, we got the wrong guy” would be of huge embarrassment for the military.
[00:20:00] What’s more, the man Picquart accused, Esterhazy, was a close friend of one of the men who had first accused Dreyfus, Major Henry, so he had powerful friends in the army.
[00:20:14] Major Picquart would be a problem for the French military, and as a result he was transferred to North Africa where he would be out of the way.
[00:20:24] But Picquart didn’t stop; he had told Mathieu Dreyfus of his discovery, and it became public knowledge that this man, Esterhazy, stood accused of being the real traitor.
[00:20:38] The country was divided between those who believed that Dreyfus was innocent - the so-called Dreyfusites, and those who thought he was guilty, the anti-Dreyfusites.
[00:20:50] Despite the best attempts of the anti-Dreyfusites in the military, Mathieu Dreyfus lodged a formal complaint against Esterhazy with the French Minister of War, meaning that there was a legal duty to investigate it.
[00:21:05] Although it was clearly him, incredibly, the military found Esterhazy innocent and acquitted him.
[00:21:13] Esterhazy had powerful friends in the military, and it turned out that his treachery had been motivated by financial reasons, as he was a degenerate gambler and heavily in debt.
[00:21:26] Essentially, he wasn’t deemed a threat and his friends in the army thought they could allow him to slip off into the night, never to reveal the actual truth of the matter.
[00:21:38] But anyone who examined the evidence calmly and rationally could see that Esterhazy, the man who had just been declared innocent, was guilty, and the man chained up on Devil’s Island, the man who had been declared guilty in December of 1894, was innocent.
[00:21:58] Bizarrely free, Esterhazy promptly fled to England, never to return to France again.
[00:22:06] Back in France, the fight to clear Dreyfus’ name intensified, and his case was taken on by people much more powerful and notable than Dreyfus' brother, Mathieu. Most famously, on January 13th, 1898, one of France’s most famous writers, Emile Zola, penned an open letter to the French president.
[00:22:31] It was published in a liberal newspaper called l’Aurore, and led with the headline “J’Accuse”, “I’m accusing”, or “I accuse”.
[00:22:42] In it he implored the French president personally to look into the case, which by this time was clearly full of fabrications and lies.
[00:22:53] Perhaps amazingly, Emile Zola found himself now accused of defamation, of damaging the good reputation, not of Esterhazy or of any individual, but of the French government. He had, essentially, called into question the judgement of the French military court, and this was a crime. The author was sentenced to a year in prison and given a heavy fine, and was then forced to escape to England.
[00:23:26] This was perhaps the height of the division of France into Dreyfusites and anti-Dreyfusites with the country deeply divided between those who thought that Dreyfus was innocent and those who thought he was guilty, with anti-Semitic feelings dominating the latter group.
[00:23:45] After all, there simply was no evidence he was guilty, and there was plenty of evidence that another man was.
[00:23:53] While all of this was going on, the man at the centre of the entire affair, Alfred Dreyfus, was withering away on Devil’s Island; his condition was getting worse and worse, he had lost his teeth and his ability to speak, and he had no idea about what was happening back in his home country.
[00:24:14] Back in France he would have been horrified to find out that there were anti-Semitic riots and increasing violence against the country’s Jewish population.
[00:24:24] But slowly slowly, evidence was mounting, evidence that would prove his innocence.
[00:24:32] First, Esterhazy confessed to a British newspaper that he was the spy, and in August 1898 Major Henry, the major who had originally pointed the finger at Dreyfus, admitted that he had forged documents to make Dreyfus seem guilty.
[00:24:50] The next day he took a razor and slit his own throat, Henry killed himself.
[00:24:57] The evidence was now too great to ignore. The case was referred to the Supreme Court, and a retrial ordered.
[00:25:07] Alfred Dreyfus was called back to France to face trial for a second time. He stepped foot on French soil on June 30th, 1899, four and a half years after he had departed, only to find a very different country to the one he had left behind.
[00:25:26] He still wasn’t a free man, though. There was another trial, and incredibly, despite the fact that Esterhazy had admitted he was guilty, and Major Henry admitted he had forged evidence, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason again, and sentenced to another ten years in prison.
[00:25:46] The good news, however, was that the court decided that there were “extenuating circumstances”, unusual factors, and offered to pardon Dreyfus. The bad news was that you can only be pardoned for something you admit you are guilty of, so Dreyfus would have to admit he was guilty in order to go free.
[00:26:09] So, what did he do?
[00:26:12] He admitted his guilt, knowing full well that he was innocent.
[00:26:17] You can hardly blame him. He had been in prison, away from his family, for almost five years, he was already guilty in the eyes of a particular section of the French public, and by admitting this fake guilt he would go free.
[00:26:33] So, this is exactly what he did, on September the 21st 1899, almost exactly five years after the incriminating letter was discovered, Alfred Dreyfus walked free.
[00:26:47] It wouldn’t be until 1906, however, that Dreyfus was officially cleared of all his crimes, and in fact reinstated as an army officer, being promoted to the rank of major, which would have realistically been where he would have got to had he not become the centre of the country’s biggest political scandal.
[00:27:07] He served for a year before retiring, and lived for another three decades until his death at the age of 75 in 1935.
[00:27:17] Now, as to the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair, it was a deeply divisive period in French history, a period where the fate of one man came to symbolise something much greater than the man himself.
[00:27:32] France was theoretically a place where everyone enjoyed the freedom of liberty, equality and brotherhood, but the Dreyfus Affair, as it would come to be known, revealed that these rights were not equally enjoyed, most markedly by the country’s Jewish population.
[00:27:52] And the case continues to divide France, or at least be controversial, to this very day. President Macron has publicly stated that France must not repeat the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair, yet doubts over Dreyfus’ innocence continue to be raised by several prominent figures on the French far right.
[00:28:14] It has been over 100 years since his exoneration, and almost 100 years since his death, but it seems that Alfred Dreyfus will forever be remembered as France’s most famous innocent man.
[00:28:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Dreyfus Affair, and with it comes the end of this French-themed mini-series.
[00:28:41] As a reminder, in part one we talked about Joan of Arc and in part two it was Napoleon.
[00:28:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and of this mini-series in general.
[00:28:54] For the French listeners among you, what do you think the lasting legacy of the Dreyfus Affair in France?
[00:29:00] Who else should we have covered in this mini-series?
[00:29:03] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:29:07] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:29:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:29:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the third and final part of our French mini-series.
[00:00:27] In case you missed them, in part one we learned about Joan of Arc, the young lady who claimed she had received a message from God to save France, and, well, according to some people, that’s exactly what she did.
[00:00:41] In part two we jumped forward a few hundred years to learn about Le Petit Caporal, the little Corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:00:50] And in today’s episode we will learn about The Dreyfus Affair. It’s a story that involves the military, the press, suicide, murder, treason, anti-Semitism, “Devil’s Island” prison, and the most famous miscarriage of justice in French history.
[00:01:10] It’s an amazing story, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:15] On the 21st of February 1895, a 35-year-old Frenchman boarded a ship. It would take him across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. The journey was long and arduous, most unpleasant.
[00:01:32] He finally arrived at his destination, a small island off the coast of South America.
[00:01:39] This was no 19th century tourism pioneer, no daring French explorer.
[00:01:46] And this was no ordinary island.
[00:01:50] It was nicknamed “Devil’s Island”, and it was used only for the most dangerous, the worst, political prisoners.
[00:02:00] The man would call this island home for four and a half years, and these years were hellish indeed. He lived in a 16 metre square stone hut, often chained up, tormented by his guards, mosquitoes, torrential rain and the scorching heat of the sun.
[00:02:23] On this island, he was completely cut off from the outside world, he had no idea what was going on in his home country of France.
[00:02:33] What was going on, in fact, was the biggest political scandal in French history, a scandal that had divided the country in two, caused one of its most famous authors to flee, and had exposed deep tensions in the country.
[00:02:51] Although the man had no idea of its very existence, the scandal was all about him.
[00:02:59] The scandal was L’Affaire Dreyfus, the Dreyfus Affair, and the man imprisoned on the island was, of course, Alfred Dreyfus, or as we’d say in English, Alfred Dreyfus.
[00:03:13] Now, before we go into the details of how Dreyfus ended up on Devil’s Island in the first place, it’s worth spending a few moments reflecting on some French history leading up to this period.
[00:03:26] There was the revolution in 1789, subsequent serious reforms of the French state, and intermittent wars with other European powers running throughout the 19th century.
[00:03:38] Most importantly for our story, the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war had resulted in a major defeat for France, the loss of French territories including Alsace, and the unification of Germany, which was what the whole war had been fought to try to stop.
[00:04:00] Given that much of the 19th century had been marred by war, it seemed inevitable that fighting would break out again, so there was something of an arms race between France and Germany, with both nations building up their military, investing in military technology and, importantly, trying to figure out what the other’s next move would be.
[00:04:26] On a social level, as has unfortunately been the case throughout much of history, Jewish people all across Europe had experienced persecution in various forms.
[00:04:38] In Eastern Europe this often took the form of pogroms, violent protests where Jews were attacked, murdered, forced out of towns and cities in state-sanctioned anti-Semitism.
[00:04:52] In France, on the other hand, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Jews had been granted the same rights as every other French citizen.
[00:05:03] Finally, Jewish people were legally treated the same as everyone else, but this didn’t mean that they were actually treated the same. There was a resurgence of anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish feeling in France.
[00:05:18] There was even something called the Anti Semitic League that was formed in 1889 by a journalist named Eduard Drummond, a man who had published a popular anti-Semitic manifesto called “Jewish France” a few years beforehand.
[00:05:35] So, the point to remember is that you have a politically and militarily tense situation between France and Germany combined with Jewish people theoretically having the same rights as everyone else in France, but in reality battling some heavily entrenched anti-Semitism in French society.
[00:05:57] So, as to the affair itself, what happened?
[00:06:01] Well, it all started in September 1894 after a cleaner went to empty the bins at the German Embassy in Paris.
[00:06:10] The cleaner found a note.
[00:06:13] Although it had been torn into six pieces, its contents were clearly legible.
[00:06:20] It was addressed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the Germany military attaché to France.
[00:06:28] It was unsigned, anonymous, but it was clearly from a French officer who was passing French military secrets to Schwartzkoppen, and thereby the German state.
[00:06:42] A spy had been caught red handed!
[00:06:47] In fact, this discovery was no coincidence. The cleaner wasn’t just a cleaner; she was the wife of a French soldier, and had been enlisted specifically to try to dig up secrets on Schwartzkoppen, to root through his belongings to try to identify his French contacts.
[00:07:07] See, Schwartzkoppen had long been known to the French, they knew he was trying to dig up French military secrets and they suspected he had a source in the French military. He was a spy, essentially, but not a particularly good one. In fact, he had quite an interesting private life and plenty of secrets of his own.
[00:07:31] He had had an affair with the wife of the Counsellor at the Dutch Embassy in Paris as well as an affair with the male Italian military attaché, both of which were relatively well known.
[00:07:43] Anyway, all of this plus the fact that he tore up this deeply incriminating letter and simply left it in his rubbish bin suggests that he wasn’t particularly good at covering his tracks, at keeping secrets.
[00:07:59] When the cleaner found this note she immediately took it to her handlers, and it made its way up to the French Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier.
[00:08:11] To state the obvious, whoever wrote the note was in serious trouble. They had committed the worst crime a French soldier could: treason, and what’s more, against its greatest enemy and rival, Germany.
[00:08:30] The culprit needed to be found, not only to stop the flow of valuable information but to make an example of, to show what happens to someone when they betray their country.
[00:08:43] The problem was that the only evidence against the traitor was the unsigned note.
[00:08:50] An investigation was launched, and it focussed on two areas: firstly, motive, so, who would want to do this, what kind of person might be inclined to pass information to the Germans.
[00:09:06] And secondly, the note itself. If the investigators could find someone with the same handwriting as in the note, they would have found their guilty man.
[00:09:18] It didn’t take the investigators much time.
[00:09:22] On October 15th, 1894, a 35-year-old artillery officer called Alfred Dreyfus was summoned to speak with his superiors.
[00:09:33] He was told that they knew he was a spy, it was him who had written the letter.
[00:09:39] They told him to confess his guilt and sign a written confession.
[00:09:45] He refused. It wasn’t me, he said, you have the wrong man.
[00:09:51] His interrogators wouldn’t listen; they seemed keener on getting him to confess than uncovering any kind of evidence that it was indeed Dreyfus who had written the letter.
[00:10:02] One of the officers even placed a pistol on the desk in front of the prisoner, indicating to him that he should commit suicide, he should kill himself as the only way out of this situation.
[00:10:17] But Dreyfus maintained his innocence, he didn’t sign a confession, and he didn’t pick up the gun and put a bullet in his brain.
[00:10:27] It turned out that the evidence that they had against him was flimsy at best, or really it was completely non-existent.
[00:10:37] He had been identified as someone who probably would be a spy, first because he was from Alsace, he was from the area of eastern France that had been won by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian war.
[00:10:51] This was the main reason that he was suspected of being the guilty party, but he was also rich and Jewish, an easy target in a country where anti-Semitism was widespread and Jewish people were often considered untrustworthy, part of some wider Jewish conspiracy and not loyal to France.
[00:11:13] Dreyfus, being Alsatian and Jewish, was soon identified as a prime suspect and taken into custody for questioning, or perhaps more accurately, taken into custody and pressured to confess.
[00:11:29] This all happened behind closed doors, it was not known to the public.
[00:11:35] But on October the 29th, two weeks after his arrest, news of Dreyfus’ alleged treachery broke in the French press.
[00:11:46] It broke in a newspaper called La Libre Parole, a newspaper which was owned by Édouard Drumont, the founder of the anti-Semitic league you heard about a few minutes ago.
[00:11:57] La Libre Parole, if you translated it into English, would be something like “Free Speech”, but this newspaper did not give Alfred Dreyfus the freedom to defend himself from the accusations it made against him.
[00:12:12] It reported only the fact that a rich Jewish soldier had been found spying not just against France, but for its archenemy, Germany.
[00:12:24] The article didn’t say anything about the fact that there was essentially no evidence against Dreyfus, firstly because the military kept all of the details about the investigation secret and secondly because the story of a rich Jewish officer colluding with the enemy just sounded right to its readers.
[00:12:46] The fact that Dreyfus was a Jew meant that of course he would do something like this, the evidence would surely show that he was the traitor the paper’s readers believed French jews to be.
[00:12:58] There was one person, however, who simply didn’t believe the accusations, Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred’s brother.
[00:13:07] He knew his brother, he knew this was something he would never do, and he embarked on what would become a five year campaign to clear his brother’s name.
[00:13:19] He rushed to Paris, found a well-known and respected lawyer, and tried to defend his brother against the allegations both in the legal system and in the press.
[00:13:31] Articles continued to come out in the French newspapers about Dreyfus, especially in the anti-Semitic newspapers, which pointed at Dreyfus’s treachery and said, “look, we told you so, we’ve been telling you that Jews were up to no good, and now one has been caught in the act”.
[00:13:51] All the while, military prosecutors were gathering evidence against Dreyfus.
[00:13:57] The problem was… there was none.
[00:14:00] The only piece of actual evidence against the spy was the note.
[00:14:06] The investigators had compared Dreyfus’ handwriting to the handwriting on the note and concluded that they were similar enough to bring him in for questioning. A handwriting expert had been consulted, but he had said that the two handwritings weren’t a match, they weren’t the same.
[00:14:26] A second expert was consulted, but this man wasn’t a handwriting expert, he was just the inventor of something called forensic anthropometry, which is basically the science of human measurements. The man, somewhat bafflingly, suggested that Drefyus had faked his own handwriting, and that he was certainly the culprit.
[00:14:49] Now, these details weren’t revealed until afterwards, the entire investigation was kept secret from the public while it was going on.
[00:14:59] Dreyfus was taken to a military tribunal, a military court, on December 19th, and it was only then that the lawyer his brother had retained got a chance to see the evidence against him.
[00:15:12] The good news was that this evidence was no evidence at all - there was only the note, there was no agreement between handwriting experts about whether this was definitely Dreyfus.
[00:15:24] What’s more, there were plenty of witnesses who would testify as to Dreyfus’ good character - he was a well-respected, clever and talented army officer with no discernible motive to betray his country.
[00:15:39] The bad news, however, was that Dreyfus’ name and reputation had been dragged through the mud in the press for the previous month and a half, and that it would be deeply embarrassing for the French military to admit that they had got the wrong man, and consequently, that the real spy was still walking free.
[00:16:01] Still, the military court needed to come to a decision.
[00:16:05] On the 22nd of December 1894 the verdict was announced.
[00:16:11] Alfred Dreyfus, the 35 year old army officer was found guilty of high treason.
[00:16:19] The sentence?
[00:16:21] Fortunately it wasn’t the death penalty; France had abolished the death penalty for political crimes in 1848, although there were no doubt moments on Devil’s Island where Dreyfus would have preferred to be dead.
[00:16:35] His punishment was to be deported, to be sent to a penal colony for the rest of his life.
[00:16:43] First he needed to be stripped of his military title.
[00:16:48] He was, up until this point, a distinguished army officer, and had enjoyed a successful career.
[00:16:56] But on January 5th, 1895, he was paraded through the streets of Paris where he was confronted by jeering crowds yelling taunts at him - “Death to Judas, death to the Jew”.
[00:17:11] His final destination was the Military School in Paris, where he was publicly stripped of his military uniform - the ultimate embarrassment for a military officer.
[00:17:23] And after a month in solitary confinement, allowed only to see his wife twice a week in the presence of a prison guard, he was packed off on a ship and sent to Devil’s Island.
[00:17:37] As he sat on the boat, convinced of his own innocence, he must have felt a sense of complete helplessness.
[00:17:46] He was public enemy number one. People had been calling for his execution, demanding that an exception be made in the case of this man who had conspired against France.
[00:17:58] Dreyfus knew, of course, that he was innocent, he was no traitor, but thousands of kilometres away from France, chained up on a tropical island with no means of escape, he was powerless to do anything about it.
[00:18:13] Fortunately his brother, Mathieu, did not stop fighting to clear his brother’s name.
[00:18:20] He was helped in the summer of 1895 when a man called Major Picquart took over as the head of staff at the Military Intelligence Service, essentially the French spying organisation.
[00:18:34] In March the following year, so this is 1896, he found a telegram that Schwartzkoppen, the German spy, had intended to send to a French military officer called Major Esterhazy. And shortly afterwards he found a note from Major Esterhazy to Schwartzkoppen, the German.
[00:18:56] When he looked at Esterhazy’s handwriting, it was an exact match for the handwriting on the original note, the note that had caused this entire scandal.
[00:19:07] Major Esterhazy was the spy, not Alfred Dreyfus. The truth had finally been revealed!
[00:19:15] But if you’re thinking that this is the end of the story, and that Dreyfus would be immediately returned from Devil’s Island and given a hero’s welcome by the French state, you will be sorely disappointed.
[00:19:29] Major Picquart went to his superiors, but he was told to shut up, essentially.
[00:19:36] Dreyfus was a rich Jew, why was Picquart making such a fuss about him?
[00:19:41] Why not just let him rot on Devil’s Island, he was told.
[00:19:45] Dreyfus had been found guilty not only in the military court but in the court of public opinion. Going back and saying “oops, we got the wrong guy” would be of huge embarrassment for the military.
[00:20:00] What’s more, the man Picquart accused, Esterhazy, was a close friend of one of the men who had first accused Dreyfus, Major Henry, so he had powerful friends in the army.
[00:20:14] Major Picquart would be a problem for the French military, and as a result he was transferred to North Africa where he would be out of the way.
[00:20:24] But Picquart didn’t stop; he had told Mathieu Dreyfus of his discovery, and it became public knowledge that this man, Esterhazy, stood accused of being the real traitor.
[00:20:38] The country was divided between those who believed that Dreyfus was innocent - the so-called Dreyfusites, and those who thought he was guilty, the anti-Dreyfusites.
[00:20:50] Despite the best attempts of the anti-Dreyfusites in the military, Mathieu Dreyfus lodged a formal complaint against Esterhazy with the French Minister of War, meaning that there was a legal duty to investigate it.
[00:21:05] Although it was clearly him, incredibly, the military found Esterhazy innocent and acquitted him.
[00:21:13] Esterhazy had powerful friends in the military, and it turned out that his treachery had been motivated by financial reasons, as he was a degenerate gambler and heavily in debt.
[00:21:26] Essentially, he wasn’t deemed a threat and his friends in the army thought they could allow him to slip off into the night, never to reveal the actual truth of the matter.
[00:21:38] But anyone who examined the evidence calmly and rationally could see that Esterhazy, the man who had just been declared innocent, was guilty, and the man chained up on Devil’s Island, the man who had been declared guilty in December of 1894, was innocent.
[00:21:58] Bizarrely free, Esterhazy promptly fled to England, never to return to France again.
[00:22:06] Back in France, the fight to clear Dreyfus’ name intensified, and his case was taken on by people much more powerful and notable than Dreyfus' brother, Mathieu. Most famously, on January 13th, 1898, one of France’s most famous writers, Emile Zola, penned an open letter to the French president.
[00:22:31] It was published in a liberal newspaper called l’Aurore, and led with the headline “J’Accuse”, “I’m accusing”, or “I accuse”.
[00:22:42] In it he implored the French president personally to look into the case, which by this time was clearly full of fabrications and lies.
[00:22:53] Perhaps amazingly, Emile Zola found himself now accused of defamation, of damaging the good reputation, not of Esterhazy or of any individual, but of the French government. He had, essentially, called into question the judgement of the French military court, and this was a crime. The author was sentenced to a year in prison and given a heavy fine, and was then forced to escape to England.
[00:23:26] This was perhaps the height of the division of France into Dreyfusites and anti-Dreyfusites with the country deeply divided between those who thought that Dreyfus was innocent and those who thought he was guilty, with anti-Semitic feelings dominating the latter group.
[00:23:45] After all, there simply was no evidence he was guilty, and there was plenty of evidence that another man was.
[00:23:53] While all of this was going on, the man at the centre of the entire affair, Alfred Dreyfus, was withering away on Devil’s Island; his condition was getting worse and worse, he had lost his teeth and his ability to speak, and he had no idea about what was happening back in his home country.
[00:24:14] Back in France he would have been horrified to find out that there were anti-Semitic riots and increasing violence against the country’s Jewish population.
[00:24:24] But slowly slowly, evidence was mounting, evidence that would prove his innocence.
[00:24:32] First, Esterhazy confessed to a British newspaper that he was the spy, and in August 1898 Major Henry, the major who had originally pointed the finger at Dreyfus, admitted that he had forged documents to make Dreyfus seem guilty.
[00:24:50] The next day he took a razor and slit his own throat, Henry killed himself.
[00:24:57] The evidence was now too great to ignore. The case was referred to the Supreme Court, and a retrial ordered.
[00:25:07] Alfred Dreyfus was called back to France to face trial for a second time. He stepped foot on French soil on June 30th, 1899, four and a half years after he had departed, only to find a very different country to the one he had left behind.
[00:25:26] He still wasn’t a free man, though. There was another trial, and incredibly, despite the fact that Esterhazy had admitted he was guilty, and Major Henry admitted he had forged evidence, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason again, and sentenced to another ten years in prison.
[00:25:46] The good news, however, was that the court decided that there were “extenuating circumstances”, unusual factors, and offered to pardon Dreyfus. The bad news was that you can only be pardoned for something you admit you are guilty of, so Dreyfus would have to admit he was guilty in order to go free.
[00:26:09] So, what did he do?
[00:26:12] He admitted his guilt, knowing full well that he was innocent.
[00:26:17] You can hardly blame him. He had been in prison, away from his family, for almost five years, he was already guilty in the eyes of a particular section of the French public, and by admitting this fake guilt he would go free.
[00:26:33] So, this is exactly what he did, on September the 21st 1899, almost exactly five years after the incriminating letter was discovered, Alfred Dreyfus walked free.
[00:26:47] It wouldn’t be until 1906, however, that Dreyfus was officially cleared of all his crimes, and in fact reinstated as an army officer, being promoted to the rank of major, which would have realistically been where he would have got to had he not become the centre of the country’s biggest political scandal.
[00:27:07] He served for a year before retiring, and lived for another three decades until his death at the age of 75 in 1935.
[00:27:17] Now, as to the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair, it was a deeply divisive period in French history, a period where the fate of one man came to symbolise something much greater than the man himself.
[00:27:32] France was theoretically a place where everyone enjoyed the freedom of liberty, equality and brotherhood, but the Dreyfus Affair, as it would come to be known, revealed that these rights were not equally enjoyed, most markedly by the country’s Jewish population.
[00:27:52] And the case continues to divide France, or at least be controversial, to this very day. President Macron has publicly stated that France must not repeat the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair, yet doubts over Dreyfus’ innocence continue to be raised by several prominent figures on the French far right.
[00:28:14] It has been over 100 years since his exoneration, and almost 100 years since his death, but it seems that Alfred Dreyfus will forever be remembered as France’s most famous innocent man.
[00:28:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Dreyfus Affair, and with it comes the end of this French-themed mini-series.
[00:28:41] As a reminder, in part one we talked about Joan of Arc and in part two it was Napoleon.
[00:28:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and of this mini-series in general.
[00:28:54] For the French listeners among you, what do you think the lasting legacy of the Dreyfus Affair in France?
[00:29:00] Who else should we have covered in this mini-series?
[00:29:03] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:29:07] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:29:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:29:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
