Chapter 1.3
THE DREYFUS CASEO
N 26 September 1894 Mme Bastian, an elderly charwoman
at the German Embassy in Paris, had delivered as usual the
contents of the German military attache's waste-paper basket to
Major Henry, the second-in-command of the counter-espionage
bureau of the French War Office euphemistically known as the
Statistical Section. Usually her carrier-bag contained nothing
more exciting than Colonel Schwartzkoppen's love-letters from
Mme de Weede
'
; but this time Henry found a note, thereafter
known as the bordereau, giving a list of five secret documents
which the anonymous writer was willing to sell to the Germans.
Some were about guns, some were about mobilisation: the
Statistical Section decided, reasonably enough, that only a staff-
officer who had recently served in the artillery could have had
access to all the documents in question. Among four or five
possible suspects was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose handwriting
happened to resemble that of the bordereau; and besides, the man
was a Jew. Dreyfus was arrested on Ii October, tried by court-
martial on 19 December, sentenced to public degradation and life-
imprisonment on the 22nd, and shipped to Devil's Island on 21
February I 89i. He remained there in solitary confinement, hoping
and despairing, for more than four years.
The case roused only temporary interest, and with the excep-
tion of Dreyfus'S wife and brother none of his later supporters
was inclined to quarrel with the verdict. The Jews, shocked and
ashamed that one of their number should be a traitor, kept scrupu-
lously quiet. The socialists, led by J aures, were at that time
inclined to anti-Semitism on the assumption that all Jews were
capitalists. They therefore attacked the Government, with the
support of the opposition radical Clemenceau, for favouritism in
1 She was the wife of the counsellor at the Dutch Embassy in Paris, and
occasionally wrote letters to Schwartzkoppen's dictation when he did not
wish lbe handwriting to be recognisable. The most important of lbese was
lbe petit Meu.