![]() Yet few officers probing the crime bothered to conduct a real investigation. The real spy was Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy, who’d been selling French military secrets to Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen, the military attaché at Germany’s embassy in Paris. (Quoted in Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century by Ruth Harris. He constantly asks for his wife and children,” recorded the governor of the prison where Dreyfuss was held. “Since his last interrogation, undergone Thursday, he has fainting spells… He always protests his innocence and shrieks that he will become mad before it is recognized. Dreyfus, being accused of betraying the country he loved was horrible, and he soon began to suffer a mental breakdown. Dreyfus later described his treatment as amounting to torture. ![]() Arrested, he was questioned repeatedly and kept in a cell for months. Dreyfus was summoned to military headquarters. ![]() Dreyfus was the spy, including his handwriting which differed markedly from that of the real spy. Though they claimed to have damning evidence against him, there was nothing at all to indicate that Cpt. When a letter was discovered in 1894 that indicated someone in the upper reaches of the French military was selling sensitive secrets to Germany, French officials turned on Cpt. In 1894, Dreyfus was 36 years old and living with his wife and children in Paris. One of the French families that had been forced out of Alsace was that of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, at the time the only senior Jewish officer in the French military. Barely a generation before, France had lost the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 Germany still occupied the Alsace region in the east of France and many French citizens were still living in exile from that region. In 1894, France was facing growing military strength and bellicose language from its newly unified neighbor Germany. Here are five facts about the Dreyfus Affair, and why it’s crucial we continue to remember Captain Dreyfus today. “In the world in which we live, in our country, and in our Republic, they are not over.” “I say to the young: forget nothing of these fights,” French President Emmanuel Macron said when he formally opened the museum on October 26, 2021. His trial ripped apart France, and the issues debated during Dreyfus’ court martial – including the role of Jews in France, antisemitism and the need for a Jewish homeland – continue to reverberate today. Cast of characters, chronology, index, notes.France’s newest museum is dedicated to preserving the memory of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer who was falsely accused of espionage over a century ago. He asks whether each succeeding generation will have its own Zolas, “ready to defend human rights…against abuse wrapped in claims of expediency and reasons of state.” Begley’s riveting details and unremitting passion make this book a worthy successor to J’accuse. They wanted Jews out of the way.”īegley, writing in 2008, was struck by the parallels between the standard operating procedures for the Guantánamo prison camp and the instructions for the administration of Devil’s Island, where Dreyfus suffered solitary confinement under horrible conditions for some four years. …Emancipated Jews had fallen in love with the good news that they could be like other people, ‘other people’ did not want Jews to be like them. The French Jews, he writes, nonetheless had a “tendency to minimize the importance of anti-Semitism, remain passive, and avoid speaking out against outrageous behavior. Then he goes on to draw a straight line from the anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and the French military in the 1890’s down to the present. In the spare language of his novels, Begley builds a devastating case against the conspirators who knowingly perverted the justice system as they made Dreyfus a scapegoat. Louis Begley insists that the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair, beyond the particulars of the historical episode, extend to abuses of power and anti-Jewish behavior at large today. History remembers Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a victim of French anti-Semitism who was convicted of espionage he did not commit, and exonerated thanks to the passionate support of the novelist Emile Zola.
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