The Dreyfus Case

The most important partisan trial of modern times is the Dreyfus case. In 1894 the French General Staff discovered that the German military attaché in Paris had come into possession of various secret documents.

The truth, which we now know, is that Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, a major in the French Army, had sold the documents to the Germans. But the General Staff pounced on Dreyfus, who was from Alsace and a Jew, as the spy. Major Herbert Henry ignored evidence implicating his friend Esterhazy, forged documents that he placed in Dreyfus’s file, and leaked “information” to the anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole. Evidence emerged revealing that Esterhazy was the spy, a year and a half after Dreyfus had been arrested, but the army suppressed it and discharged Lt. Colonel Georges Picquart who had uncovered it. When Picquart showed General Charles Gonse his discovery that Dreyfus was innocent, the general replied: “For me truth is what the Minister of War and the Chief of the General Staff tell me is true. If you keep silent, no one need find out anything.”²⁵

That Alfred Dreyfus was finally exonerated fully and restored to his military position was due to the persistence of Picquart; the dogged work by Alfred’s brother, Mathieu; the exposé, J’Accuse!, written by Emile Zola and published by George Clemenceau; and the massive political effort by the Dreyfusards led by Clemenceau. France had not been so divided since the French Revolution a century earlier. As the Gunpowder Plot proved to be a prelude to the 1640 Puritan Revolution, so the Dreyfus Affair offers, as Hannah Arendt characterizes it in her Origins of Totalitarianism, “a fore-gleam of the twentieth century.”²⁶

For arriving at the truth, as the Garnet and the Dreyfus trials demonstrate, a partisan trial is worse than no trial at all.

Such trials become overheated kitchens for innovative partisan chefs. A teaspoon of evidence which may be true will be blended with a barrel of “facts” and assumptions made up for the occasion. The mixture is allowed to rise in the heat of an exaggerated public imagination. After baking in an indictment, it is served up with official decorum at the trial. Bates’s mention of his confession was all Cecil and Coke needed to prove the treason of Jesuits and the “iniquity of Catholics.” In the Dreyfus case the anti-Semite cause had even less than that in the cupboard. After Dreyfus was arrested he was required to provide endless samples of his handwriting. One small piece of writing which could compare with the itemized list of documents written by the spy and given to the German attaché was all they needed to convict Dreyfus. After a week of writing Dreyfus had not demonstrated that his handwriting was the spy’s. The experts identified every scribble from Dreyfus as his, and every bit that was not his was also properly identified. Further, during an exhaustive questioning Dreyfus did not slip up even once. All this lack of evidence might have been conclusive of Dreyfus’s innocence in a trial within the rule of law. But in a partisan trial it became conclusive of his guilt. The prosecutor cited it as proof that Dreyfus was a super-criminal, clever and without a conscience, unable to be undone, as lesser criminals would be, under intense question-ing.²⁷ It showed “how dangerous he must be.”