NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HISTORY 17France. Zola was sentenced to jail for libel
but fled to England.
Under renewed scrutiny, the lies and
falsifications surrounding the Dreyfus
case began to unravel. Esterhazy was
dismissed from the army for “habitu-
al misconduct” and promptly fled the
country for England. The minister of
war, Godefroy Cavaignac, who had pre-
viously been convinced of Dreyfus’s
guilt, proclaimed that the letter Henry
produced from the Italian military at-
taché was a forgery. Henry was sent to jail,
where he committed suicide. In January
1899 a proposal to have the Dreyfus case
heard by a Supreme Court of Appeals was
approved.
As the anti-Dreyfusards lost credi-
bility, the right-wing and anti-Semitic
nationalist group Ligue des Patriotes
attemped a failed coup in February 1898.
With France in crisis, the Supreme Court
overturned the 1894 verdict against
Dreyfus in June 1899, and ruled that he
would appear before a new court-martial.
After four years on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus
returned to France in July for the retrial.
Despite the overwhelming evidence
of his innocence, the military court still
found Dreyfus guilty in another show trial
and sentenced him to 10 years in prison,
reduced to five for time served. The ver-
dict triggered an uproar. The weakened
French government, fearing the conse-
quences of another trial, offered Dreyfus
clemency. His health impaired by the
years on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus accepted
the pardon provided that he could con-
tinue his fight to prove his innocence.
Shortly afterward, the government
issued an amnesty on all crimes related
to the case, except for Dreyfus to allow
him to pursue his exoneration, which
he finally received in 1906. He was then
reinstated in the army as a lieutenant-
colonel and made Chevalier of the Le-
gion of Honor in the same courtyard of
the École Militaire where he had beendegraded 11 years earlier. With the start
of World War I, he reenlisted and fought
at the Battle of Verdun, then returned
home to a quiet retirement. He would
die in Paris in 1935 at the age of 75. The
army did not publicly declare his inno-
cence until 1995.
With its explosive combination of
“state collaboration in the miscarriage of
justice [and] the impact of the media on
the public perception of events,”the Drey-
fus affair, wrote the late Yale University
historian Paula Hyman, “raises issues that
still resonate today.” In November 2021
Éric Zemmour, a prominent far-right
political journalist in France, argued that
Dreyfus’s innocence was “not obvious,” a
position criticized by France’s president,
Emmanuel Macron, among many others.
The passion incited by Zemmour’s words
across France shows that the affaire Drey-
fus is far from over.—Ainhoa CamposThe Real
Traitor
FERDINAND Esterhazy, an officer of
Hungarian origin, had begun selling
French army intelligence to Ger-
many in 1892 to pay off gambling
debts. Following Dreyfus’s convic-
tion, Esterhazy’s stockbroker saw
a reproduction of the bordereau in
the newspaper Le Figaro and recog-
nized the handwriting as Esterhazy’s.
Protected at his trial by military anti-
Dreyfusards, Esterhazy escaped
punishment, and went to England,
where he scraped a living as a trans-
lator and writer. He was interviewed
by the journalist Rachel Beer for the
London Observer, in the course of
which he confessed: “I wrote the
bordereau.” The author of several
anti-Semitic tracts, Esterhazy died
in England in 1923 and was buried
under a false name.INTERFOTO/ALAMYESTERHAZY’S TRIAL, DEPICTED IN LE PETIT
JOURNAL, PARIS, IN JANUARY 1898