Affaire Dreyfus
Portrait du capitaine Dreyfus
Scandale judiciaire et politique qui divisa l'opinion française entre 1894 et 1906.
1. Une affaire d'espionnage1.1. Le contexte politique
La République modérée (1879-1899) traverse une série de crises. Au lendemain des désastres de 1870-1871, de la crise économique des années 1880 et du krach de l'Union générale (1882), du scandale de Panamá (1889), une vague d'attentats anarchistes – Ravachol (1892), Auguste Vaillant (1893), culminant avec l'assassinat du président Sadi Carnot par Caserio (1894) – accroît le sentiment d'insécurité. En proie aux doutes et à l'humiliation, au désir de revanche et à l'aspiration à l'ordre, le régime républicain s'oriente vers un nationalisme agressif où entre naturellement l'antisémitisme répandu par Drumont depuis qu'il a publié la France juive (1886).
1.2. Le capitaine Alfred Dreyfus
Portrait du capitaine DreyfusPortrait du capitaine Dreyfus
Fils d'un industriel alsacien israélite qui, profitant pleinement de la révolution industrielle, construit sa propre filature de coton et connaît une brillante ascension sociale, Alfred naît à Mulhouse en 1859. Il a onze ans lorsqu'éclate la guerre franco-allemande ; une des conséquences de la défaite de 1871, le rattachement de l'Alsace et de la Lorraine à l'Empire allemand, bouleverse la vie de la famille Dreyfus. Les troupes allemandes pénètrent dans Mulhouse, l'Alsace subit une germanisation forcée. Pour conserver leur nationalité française, les Dreyfus se font domicilier à Carpentras, où vit l'un d'entre eux. En 1873, le jeune Alfred est envoyé avec son frère Mathieu à Paris, où, élève doué et studieux, il devient bachelier (1876), intègre Polytechnique dont il sort en 1880. Passionné par l'armée, il entre avec le grade de capitaine à l'état-major général. En 1894, il achève une période de deux ans de stage à la Section de statistiques (nom officiel du Service de renseignements).
1.3. L'accusation
L'affaire Dreyfus, la dictée
L'affaire Dreyfus, la dictée
L'affaire Dreyfus, la dictéeLe traître. Dégradation d’Alfred Dreyfus
Le 27 septembre 1894, la Section de statistiques découvre dans la corbeille à papier de l'attaché militaire allemand à Paris un bordereau anonyme annonçant un envoi de documents concernant la défense nationale. Sous prétexte que le bordereau porte quelque ressemblance d'écriture avec la sienne, Alfred Dreyfus est accusé d'avoir livré des documents à l'Allemagne ; il proteste en vain de son innocence. Le général Auguste Mercier, ministre de la Guerre, fait constituer par le commandant Hubert Henry, un dossier sur le capitaine Dreyfus essentiellement composé de faux, qui est communiqué aux juges à l'insu de la défense.
Dreyfus à l'île du DiableDreyfus à l'île du Diable
Le 22 décembre, Alfred Dreyfus est reconnu coupable de haute trahison par le premier conseil de guerre du gouvernement militaire de Paris, qui le condamne à la dégradation et à la déportation dans île du Diable au large de la Guyane.
1.4. La découverte du coupable et l'impossible révision du procès
Convaincu de l'innocence de son frère, Mathieu Dreyfus décide, avec l'appui du journaliste Bernard Lazare, qui dès novembre a dénoncé dans La Justice le développement de la campagne antisémite, de prouver l'inanité des accusations portées contre Alfred. En mars 1896, le nouveau chef du Service des renseignements, le lieutenant-colonel Picquart acquiert la conviction que le vrai coupable est un certain Esterházy, ce qui lui vaut d'être éloigné alors dans le Sud tunisien. Le vice-président du Sénat,
Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, décide de reprendre le flambeau mais ne peut obtenir du gouvernement la révision du procès. Le ministre de la Guerre affirme que l'ex-capitaine Dreyfus a été « justement et légalement condamné » ; le président du Conseil, Jules Méline, déclare quant à lui qu'« il n'y a pas d'affaire Dreyfus » (4 décembre 1897). Esterházy, accusé sur plainte de Mathieu Dreyfus, est acquitté le 11 janvier 1898 par le conseil de guerre, rendant ainsi impossible toute révision du procès.
Link
http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/affaire_Dreyfus/117099
The Dreyfus Affair (French: l'affaire Dreyfus, pronounced [la.fɛʁ dʁɛ.fys]) was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. The affair is often seen as a modern and universal symbol of injustice,[1] and it remains one of the most notable examples of a complex miscarriage of justice. The major role played by the press and public opinion proved influential in the lasting social conflict.
The scandal began in December 1894 with the treason conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian and Jewish descent. Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent nearly five years.
Evidence came to light in 1896—primarily through an investigation instigated by Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage—identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy as the real culprit. After high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquitted Esterházy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army then accused Dreyfus with additional charges based on falsified documents. Word of the military court's framing of Dreyfus and of an attempted cover-up began to spread, chiefly owing to J'accuse!, a vehement open letter published in a Paris newspaper in January 1898 by famed writer Émile Zola. Activists put pressure on the government to reopen the case.
In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus (now called "Dreyfusards"), such as Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Henri Poincaré and Georges Clemenceau, and those who condemned him (the anti-Dreyfusards), such as Édouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The new trial resulted in another conviction and a 10-year sentence, but Dreyfus was given a pardon and set free. Eventually all the accusations against Dreyfus were demonstrated to be baseless. In 1906 Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. He served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He died in 1935.
The affair from 1894 to 1906 divided France deeply and lastingly into two opposing camps: the pro-Army, mostly Catholic "anti-Dreyfusards" and the anticlerical, pro-republican Dreyfusards. It embittered French politics and encouraged radicalization.
Contents
Dreyfus affair board game, 1898, Poster, 65 x 48 cm, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme
At the end of 1894 a French army captain named Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and a Jew of Alsatian origin, was accused of handing secret documents to the Imperial German military. After a closed trial, he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to prison for life. He was deported to Devil's Island. At that time, the opinion of the French political class was unanimously unfavourable towards Dreyfus.
Certain of the injustice of the sentence, the family of the Captain, through his brother Mathieu, worked with the journalist Bernard Lazare to prove his innocence. Meanwhile Colonel Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage, found evidence in March 1896 indicating that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy. The General Staff, however, refused to reconsider its judgment and transferred Picquart to North Africa.
In July 1897 his family contacted the President of the Senate Auguste Scheurer-Kestner to draw attention to the tenuousness of the evidence against Dreyfus. Scheurer-Kestner reported three months later that he was convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus and also persuaded Georges Clemenceau, a former MP and then a newspaper reporter. In the same month, Mathieu Dreyfus complained to the Ministry of War against Walsin-Esterházy. While the circle of Dreyfusards widened, in January 1898 two nearly simultaneous events gave a national dimension to the case: Esterházy was acquitted of treason charges (afterwards shaving his moustache and fleeing France), and Émile Zola published his "J'Accuse ...!," a Dreyfusard declaration that rallied many intellectuals to Dreyfus' cause. France became increasingly divided over the case, and the issue continued to be hotly debated until the end of the century. Antisemitic riots erupted in more than twenty French cities. There were several deaths in Algiers. The Republic was shaken, which prompted a sense that the Dreyfus Affair had to be resolved to restore calm and protect the stability of the nation.
Despite the intrigues of the army to quash the case, the first judgment against Dreyfus was annulled by the Supreme Court after a thorough investigation and a new court-martial was held at Rennes in 1899. Despite increasingly robust evidence to the contrary, Dreyfus was convicted again and sentenced to ten years of hard labour, though the sentence was commuted due to extenuating circumstances. Exhausted by his deportation for four long years, Dreyfus accepted the presidential pardon granted by President Émile Loubet. It was only in 1906 that his innocence was officially recognized through a decision without recourse by the Supreme Court.[2] Rehabilitated, Dreyfus was reinstated in the army with the rank of Major and participated in the First World War. He died in 1935.
The implications of this case were numerous and affected all aspects of French public life. In politics, the affair established the triumph of the Third Republic (and became a founding myth);[3] in the renewal of nationalism, in the military. In religion, it slowed the reform of French Catholicism and republican integration of Catholics; and in social, legal, press, diplomatic and cultural life. It was during the affair that the term intellectual was coined. The affair engendered numerous antisemitic demonstrations, which in turn affected emotions within the Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe. These demonstrations affected the international movement of Zionism by persuading one of its founding fathers, Theodor Herzl, that the Jews must leave Europe and establish their own state.
Contexts
Political
In 1894, the Third Republic was twenty-four years old. Although the May 16th Crisis in 1877 had crippled the political influence of both the Bourbon and Orléanist royalists, its ministries continued to be short-lived as the country lurched from crisis to crisis: three immediately preceding the Dreyfus Affair were the near-coup of Georges Boulanger in 1889, the Panama scandal in 1892, and the anarchist threat (reduced by the "villainous laws" of July 1894). The elections of 1893 were focused on the "social question" and resulted in a Republican victory (just under half the seats) against the conservative right and the strength of the Radicals (about 150 seats) and Socialists (about 50 seats).
The opposition of the Radicals and Socialists resulted in a centrist government where political choices were oriented towards economic protectionism, a certain indifference to the social question, a willingness to break international isolation, the Russian alliance, and development of the Empire.
These politics of the centre caused ministerial instability, with certain Republicans from the government sometimes aligning with the radicals and some Orléanists aligning with the Legitimists in five successive governments from 1893 to 1896. This governmental instability was reflected in an unstable presidency: President Sadi Carnot was assassinated on 24 June 1894, then his moderate successor Jean Casimir-Perier resigned on 15 January 1895 and was replaced by Félix Faure.
Following the failure of the radical government of Léon Bourgeois in 1896, the president appointed Jules Meline, who had been a supporter of protectionism under Jules Ferry. His government acknowledged the opposition of the left and some Republicans (including the Progressive Union) and always made certain of the support of the right. He sought to appease tensions in the religious (by slowing the anticlerical struggle), social (by passage of the law on the liability of work accidents), and economic (by maintenance of protectionism) sectors and he conducted a fairly conservative policy. These policies achieved stability, and it was under this stable government that the Dreyfus
Affair actually broke out.[4]
Military background[edit]
General Raoul Le Mouton de Boisdeffre, architect of the military alliance with Russia
The Dreyfus Affair occurred within the context of the annexation of Alsace and Moselle by the Germans, an event that fed the most extreme nationalism. The traumatic defeat in 1870 seemed far away, but a vengeful spirit remained. Many participants in the Dreyfus Affair were also Alsatian.[Note 1]
The military required considerable resources to prepare for the next conflict, and it was in this spirit that the Franco-Russian Alliance, which some saw as "against nature",[Note 2] of 27 August 1892 was signed as the basis of a military convention. The army had recovered from the defeat but many of its officers were former senior aristocrats and were monarchists. The cult of the flag and contempt for the parliamentary republic were two important principles in the army of the time.[5] The Republic celebrated its army regularly; the army ignored the Republic.
Over the previous ten years the army had experienced a significant shift in its twofold aim to democratize and modernize. The graduates of the École polytechnique competed effectively with officers from the royal career path of Saint-Cyr, which caused strife, bitterness, and jealousy among those junior officers who expected promotions of their choice. The period was also marked by an arms race that primarily affected artillery. There were improvements in heavy artillery (guns of 120 mm and 155 mm, Models 1890 Baquet, new hydropneumatic brakes), but also and especially the development of the ultra-secret 75mm gun.[6]
The operation of military counterintelligence, alias the "Statistics Section" (SR), should be noted. Spying as a tool for secret war was a novelty as an organised activity in the late 19th century. The Statistics Section was created in 1871 but consisted of only a handful of officers and civilians. Its head in 1894 was Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Sandherr, a graduate of Saint-Cyr, an Alsatian from Mulhouse, and a convinced anti-Semite. Its military mission was clear: to retrieve information about potential enemies of France and to feed them false information. The Statistics Section was supported by the "Secret Affairs" of the Quai d'Orsay at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was headed by a young diplomat, Maurice Paléologue. The arms race created an acute atmosphere of intrigue in French counter-espionage from 1890. One of the missions of the section was to spy on the German Embassy at Rue de Lille in Paris to thwart any attempt to transmit important information to the Germans. This was especially critical since several cases of espionage had already hit the headlines of newspapers, which were fond of sensationalism. Thus in 1890 the archivist Boutonnet was convicted for selling plans of shells that used melinite.
The German military attaché in Paris in 1894 was Count Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, who developed a policy of infiltration which appears to have been effective. In the 1880s Schwartzkoppen had begun an affair with an Italian military attache, Lieutenant Colonel Count Alessandro Panizzardi.[7] While neither had anything to do with Dreyfus, their intimate and erotic correspondence (e.g. "Don’t exhaust yourself with too much buggery."),[8] which was obtained by the authorities, lent an air of truth to other documents that were forged by prosecutors to lend retroactive credibility to Dreyfus's conviction as a spy. Some of these forgeries even referenced the real affair between the two officers; in one, Alessandro supposedly informed his lover that if "Dreyfus is brought in for questioning," they must both claim that they "never had any dealings with that Jew. … Clearly, no one can ever know what happened with him."[9] The letters, real and fake, provided a convenient excuse for placing the entire Dreyfus dossier under seal, given that exposure of the liaison would have 'dishonoured' Germany and Italy's military and compromised diplomatic relations. As homosexuality was, like Judaism, then often perceived as a sign of national degeneration, recent historians have suggested that combining them to inflate the scandal may have shaped the prosecution strategy.[10][11]
Since early 1894, the Statistics Section had investigated traffic in master plans for Nice and the Meuse conducted by an officer whom the Germans and Italians nicknamed Dubois.[Note 3] This is what led to the origins of the Dreyfus Affair.
Social
The social context was marked by the rise of nationalism and of antisemitism.
The growth of antisemitism, virulent since the publication of Jewish France by Édouard Drumont in 1886 (150,000 copies in the first year), went hand in hand with the rise of clericalism. Tensions were high in all strata of society, fueled by an influential press, who were virtually free to write and disseminate any information even if offensive or defamatory. Legal risks were limited if the target was a private person.
Antisemitism did not spare the military, which practiced hidden discrimination with the famous "cote d'amour" system of irrational grading, encountered by Dreyfus in his application to the Bourges School.[12] However, while prejudices of this nature undoubtedly existed within the confines of the General Staff, the French Army as a whole was relatively open to individual talent. At the time of the
Dreyfus Affair there were an estimated 300 Jewish officers in the army (about 3 per cent of the total), of whom ten were generals.[13]
The popularity of the duel using sword or small pistol, sometimes causing death, bore witness to the tensions of the period. When a series of press articles in La Libre Parole[14] accused some brilliant Jewish officers of "betraying their birth", the officers challenged the editors. Captain Crémieu-Foa, a Jewish Alsatian graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique, fought unsuccessfully against Drumont[Note 4][15] and against M. de Lamase, who was the author of the articles. Captain Mayer, another Jewish officer, was killed by the Marquis de Mores, a friend of Drumont, in another duel, which triggered considerable emotion far beyond Jewish circles.
Hatred of Jews was now public and violent, driven by a firebrand (Drumont) who demonized the Jewish presence in France. Jews in metropolitan France in 1895 numbered about 80,000 (40,000 in Paris alone), who were highly integrated into society; an additional 45,000 Jews lived in Algeria. The launch of La Libre Parole with a circulation estimated at 200,000 copies in 1892,[16] allowed Drumont to expand his audience to a popular readership already enticed by the boulangiste adventure in the past. The antisemitism circulated by La Libre Parole, as well as by L’Éclair, Le Petit Journal, La Patrie, L'Intransigeant and La Croix, drew on antisemitic roots in certain Catholic circles.[17]
Link
Link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
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