The Dreyfus Affair

Paris, September 1894. A cleaning contact inside the German embassy lifted a torn, unsigned memo from the wastebasket of military attache Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. The paper listed French military secrets, specific enough to alarm the General Staff: a new 120mm cannon, an artillery firing manual, formation changes. Jean Sandherr, head of the Statistical Section, was certain the leak came from inside the General Staff itself. Suspicion settled on artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus, one of the few officers with the right access. Handwriting experts examining the bordereau against Dreyfus's own hand disagreed among themselves, but General Auguste Mercier, the Minister of War, pushed the case forward anyway, and anti-Jewish prejudice tipped it further. Dreyfus was arrested on 15 October 1894. His court-martial ran four days, from 19 to 22 December, entirely behind closed doors. Secret documents, later shown to be forged, were handed to the judges but never shown to Dreyfus's own defense lawyer, Edgar Demange, who was barred from the military dossier altogether. On 22 December the judges convicted him of treason. The sentence was perpetual deportation to a fortified enclosure, and he was stripped of his rank on the spot. Dreyfus had no idea what evidence had actually convicted him. Neither did his lawyer.