510Chapter 26
the late 1890s, Dreyfusards organized to free him. An
anti-Dreyfusard coalition of monarchists, Catholics, na-
tionalists, militarists, and anti-Semites defended the
army and its verdict. French anti-Semitism remained a
nasty element throughout the Dreyfus affair, but the
battle came to focus on the issues of justice and individ-
ual rights balanced against the interests of the state.
The fight continued until a second court-martial
reconvicted Dreyfus in 1899, and an outraged
president of the republic pardoned him.
The immediate importance of the Dreyfus affair
was that it led to electoral victories for the republicans,
radicals, and socialists who defended Dreyfus. This
made the left-wing majority feel strong enough to re-
turn to its reform agenda. In 1905 they separated
church and state, ending both state financial support
for, and state regulation of, the churches. In 1906
Clemenceau became premier for the first time (at age
sixty-five) and created the first Ministry of Labor,
which he entrusted to a socialist. In 1907 feminists won
one of their foremost goals, a married women’s prop-
erty act known as the Schmahl Law for the woman who
had campaigned for it. The radicals also laid the basis
of the French welfare system. Earlier governments had
established state aid for neglected children (1889) and
a medical assistance program (1893). Republicans now
provided state support for hygienic housing (1902),
needy children (1904), the aged and the infirm
(1905–06), retirement pensions (1910), and large
families (1913).
Such reforms still left a large democratic agenda on
the eve of World War I. Despite feminist electoral vio-
lence by Hubertine Auclert and Madeleine Pelletier in
1908 (see illustration 26.3) and the peaceful demonstra-
tions of hundreds of thousands of suffragists, women’sIllustration 26.2
The Dreyfus Affair.The 1894 court-martial of Captain Al-
fred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the French General Staff, led to
the most passionate human rights debate of the nineteenth cen-
tury in 1898–99, when the innocence of Captain Dreyfus was
discovered but the army refused to reconsider its verdict. The de-
bate between the defenders of Dreyfus and the defenders of the
army awakened some of the most vehement anti-Semitism of the
century. Here Dreyfus is stripped of his rank and watches his
sword being broken before being sent to Devil’s Island.
Illustration 26.3
Hubertine Auclert.Auclert founded the women’s suffrage
movement in France in the 1880s. Her most famous demonstra-
tion—depicted here in an error-filled contemporary sketch—was
to invade a polling place on election day in 1908, smash a ballot
box to the ground, and trample on men’s votes. The woman with
upraised arm at left is Auclert.