What the Dreyfus affair still has to teach us about antisemitism
In 1906, a French army captain was finally cleared of a treason conviction rooted in antisemitism. More than a century later, we’re still not listening.
One hundred and twenty years ago Sunday, Alfred Dreyfus, a French army captain, was exonerated of his wrongful conviction on espionage charges — bringing to an end an explosive and tortuous process marked by antisemitism, deceit, and the complicity of France’s military in aiding one of the first great miscarriages of justice to play out in the modern media age.
Dreyfus was arrested in December 1894 after being accused of passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment on France’s notorious Devil’s Island.
Historians now agree that a major factor in Dreyfus’ conviction was antisemitism. Dreyfus was a Jew from the Alsace region of France at a time when Jewish officers were rare in the army. They were subject to the same kinds of prejudice and discrimination faced in other parts of French society. A case was trumped up against him by the French military establishment, looking for a convenient scapegoat.
Following the trial, a French officer, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, conducted further investigations that indicated that it was not Dreyfus, but another French officer, Maj. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, who was responsible for passing the secrets to the Germans.
But Picquart’s investigation was suppressed by the French army. Esterhazy, who had been court-martialed, was acquitted.
Astonishingly, in 1899, Dreyfus was again court-martialed and found guilty. Though he subsequently received a pardon from the president, he was not fully exonerated by France’s highest civilian appeals court until July 12, 1906.
There were many examples of great drama and heroism during what came to be known as the Dreyfus affair.
In 1898, the French author Émile Zola published an open letter to the French president in support of Dreyfus, headlined “J’accuse.” The power of Zola’s piece and its wide dissemination launched a movement in defense of Dreyfus but also reinforced divides: Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, liberal/secularists vs. conservatives, left vs. right.
That the story spread so widely is even more remarkable considering that the key events in the case took place long before the emergence of electronic media — the widespread use of radios wouldn’t take hold for another 20 years or so after Dreyfus was cleared.
Nevertheless, the Dreyfus affair became a watershed moment in the media’s role in high-profile trials and a yardstick by which subsequent miscarriages of justice were measured.
In the United States, the 1925 Scopes trial became a cause célèbre with a reach that approximated the Dreyfus affair, despite the very different facts surrounding that case.
The execution of George Stinney Jr. — a 14-year-old Black boy who was wrongfully convicted of killing two white girls in South Carolina in 1944 — is one of the many controversial death penalty convictions that have also betrayed the principles of justice.
What distinguishes the Dreyfus affair is not just the case itself, but its aftermath. The exoneration of Dreyfus ultimately became an indictment of a political culture in France that was defined by secrecy, prejudice, institutional corruption, and arrogance.
Sadly, none of that is unfamiliar to us — so what have we learned in the past 120 years?
During the 2008 financial crisis, critics of America’s banking system asked why no one seemed to heed the lessons of the 1929 stock market crash.
What have we learned? A dozen decades after Alfred Dreyfus was finally cleared — and at a time when antisemitic hate crimes continue to rise — that is a crucial question we must continue to ask ourselves.
Paul McElhinney is a writer and journalist living in Wexford, Ireland. He has contributed to many Irish, British, and American journals.