Republican France 739lowing the annexation of Alsace by Germany in 1871, the Dreyfus family
moved to Paris. In 1894, evidence surfaced—from a wastepaper basket in
the office of a German military attache—that someone in the French army
had been passing secret information to the Germans about French military
operations. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Captain Dreyfus—the
writing on a list of documents that had been prepared to be handed over to
a German contact resembled Dreyfus’s handwriting. Maintaining his inno
cence, Dreyfus refused the arresting officer’s offer of a loaded pistol with
which he could kill himself. A hurriedly convened and secret court-martial
found him guilty of treason. Dreyfus was stripped of his rank and sent to
Devil’s Island off the coast of South America.
However, confidential documents continued to disappear from French
army offices. Two years later, a new chief of army intelligence, Lieutenant
Colonel Georges Picquart, determined to his own satisfaction that the origi
nal list of documents had not been penned by Dreyfus, but by Major Walsin
Esterhazy. Picquart, who was an unlikely hero in this case because he made
no secret of his anti-Semitism, presented his evidence. But high-ranking
officers believed that it was better to have an innocent Jew languishing in
increasing depression on Devil’s Island than to compromise the army’s pub
lic image. The army packed Picquart off to a post in Tunisia, and a military
court acquitted Esterhazy, despite overwhelming evidence of guilt.
{Left) Edouard Drumont’s anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole (The Free