Dreyfus Stripped of Rank: Sent to Devil's Island

Alfred Dreyfus was a French Army captain, an Alsatian Jew in an institution riddled with antisemitism, and completely innocent of the charge that destroyed his life. On January 5, 1895, he stood in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire in Paris while an officer ripped the epaulettes from his uniform, tore the braid from his sleeves, and broke his sword in half. A crowd outside the iron fence screamed "Death to the traitor" and "Death to the Jew." Dreyfus shouted back: "I am innocent." The charge was espionage. A cleaning woman employed as a spy had retrieved a torn-up memo from a wastebasket in the German military attache''s office. The memo, known as the bordereau, listed French military secrets being offered to Germany. Army intelligence needed a suspect, and Dreyfus fit the profile they wanted: a Jewish officer with access to the general staff. Handwriting experts were divided, but the military tribunal convicted him in a closed trial using secret evidence that was never shown to the defense. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil''s Island, a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. Within two years, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart discovered that the real author of the bordereau was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a heavily indebted officer with known German contacts. When Picquart reported his findings, the army transferred him to Tunisia and forged additional documents to strengthen the case against Dreyfus. Esterhazy was tried by court-martial in January 1898 and acquitted in two minutes. The cover-up ignited France''s worst political crisis since the Revolution. Emile Zola published "J''Accuse," an open letter accusing the army of obstruction and antisemitism, in the newspaper L''Aurore. France split into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards along lines of class, religion, and politics. The affair took twelve years to fully resolve. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and fully exonerated in 1906. The scandal accelerated the separation of church and state in France and convinced Theodor Herzl that European Jews would never be safe, fueling the Zionist movement.