Dreyfus Affair

In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer from Alsace, was accused of passing military secrets to Germany on the basis of a single handwritten list, the "bordereau". A secret court-martial convicted him in December 1894. In January 1895 he was publicly stripped of his rank while a crowd shouted "Death to the Jews!", and he was sent to Devil's Island. In 1896 Colonel Georges Picquart identified the real traitor, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, but the army covered up the truth and acquitted Esterhazy.

On 13 January 1898 Émile Zola published "J'accuse...!", splitting France into two camps. A second court-martial at Rennes in 1899 convicted Dreyfus again; he was pardoned, and only in 1906 was he fully cleared and reinstated. Theodor Herzl covered the case as Paris correspondent of Vienna's Neue Freie Presse. He later said the antisemitic hatred he witnessed in the land of the Rights of Man convinced him that assimilation could not protect the Jews.