The Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus Affair was a key moment for journalism. It established the potential power of journalist to keep tabs on the powerful and is therefore a particular high point in Journalism. Dreyfus was unlucky enough to be at the heart of one of the most controversial court cases ever.

 France in the late 19^th century was devastated by the Franco-Prussian war. This war was carefully constructed by Bismarck, who tempted Napoleon into the war with no allies and no plan. The Ems telegraph was released by Bismarck and humiliated the French so much that they had to go to war. Napoleon was defeated and captured at Sedan in 1871. France prided itself in its military and they were beaten by an “upstart” Prussia. Bismarck played the French very well, he tempted them into a war, crushed them and once the Prussians had won he forced France to pay compensation for the war. As well as compensation, France also had to give up the two regions of Alsace and Lorraine. France surrendered but Paris refused to give in. Prussia, which now became Germany, therefore laid siege to Paris. Roughly 2 million people stayed in Paris, the rich people fled but the majority stayed. The problem was feeding all of the people still in Paris; there are stories of people eating horses, rats and even breaking into the zoo to eat the animals in there. Paris finally relented and to prove that they had won and broken the French, the Germans marched through Paris. France is therefore humiliated and Germany is a rising power.

                Then came a definitive moment in history, the Paris Commune. Parisians admitted defeat, Germans marched then left and the rich people returned to the city. The rich, who were the landlords to the poor, tried to charge their tenants rent for the time they spent under siege. The heavily armed populace of Paris decided that they weren’t taking it. They threw out the government and for the briefest moments it came close to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Lenin called it the festival of the oppressed. The people set up a council to determine how they were going to live, women had a lot of power and set up many of the rules. The political makeup of the commune was mainly radicals, people of the left and socialists. Marx thought it was finally the end of capitalism. The French army surrounded the city and started shelling it, just as the Germans had. People were once again running out of food but at the same time people were planning out what their idea of the perfect society would be. Women of the commune came up with some amazing things such as nurseries, stopping work at night, establishing the right of workers to take over factories and run businesses as well as female suffrage. It had phenomenal potential even though it only lasted a few weeks. The rulers of Europe did not want this to even be an idea in people’s heads and therefore it was ruthlessly destroyed, as if to send a message to workers of the world. When the army took control 20,000 to 30,000 people were executed. Women were paid close attention to and the government claimed that they had been setting fire to rich people’s houses; the real reason was because they were playing a large role in the leadership. The Paris Commune established two things, that what Marx had written about may well be possible, but also that the governments and monarchies of the world were not benign and would crush you if you stepped out of line. France was a wounded animal after the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. They desperately needed a victory to get them over this and return the faith of the people. What they needed was a scapegoat, and as usual with history, the most obvious scapegoat took the form of the Jews.

France was very militaristic and was paranoid about what would happen in Europe. Nations were building up power; spying and espionage began taking a greater role in global politics. France could not trust itself since the Paris Commune and therefore spied on itself. The Dreyfus Affair set the right against the left. The army, the Catholic Church and monarchists were the anti-Dreyfusards and the Republicans, socialists and Jews were the Dreyfusards. Germany and France were deadly enemies, watching each other like hawks. A secret document was found in a waste paper basket in the German embassy. The French thought they had to find who was passing this information onto the Germans. The Army immediately implicated Captain Dreyfus. Dreyfus was intelligent, Jewish and from Alsace. He was framed, court marshalled and found guilty of treason, he was stripped of his military rank and sent to Devils Island in 1894 under the evidence that his handwriting looked slightly similar to the handwriting on the note. They also claimed that they had more evidence but they couldn’t release it, since they claimed it was classified, the defence barrister was also shot before the trial. When evidence was examined it was found that the real culprit was a man called Esterhazy. When the evidence was taken to Esterhazy’s superiors they conceded but said that Dreyfus was a Jew and that his fate was not as important as that of France. Esterhazy was put on trial but found innocent. Emile Zola, a famous French Journalist, was so incensed by this that he wrote an article called “J’accuse”, in this he named the men who wrongly convicted Dreyfus and said exactly what they were guilty of. This was a very brave thing to do since there were so many conspiracies at the time which implicated the Jews into a whole manner of crimes. The sheer amount of public hate for Dreyfus also made it an incredible thing to write. This was a game changer, it caused supporters of Dreyfus to band together under the “J’accuse” banner. The government wasn’t having any of it and they went to convict Zola of libel, who promptly fled to London. There was a huge anti-Jewish feeling at the time and many riots. The government got a man called Henry to forge documents implicating Dreyfus, but the forgeries were laughably bad and Henry later slit his throat in prison. However he was still hailed as a martyr to the right and his heroic forgery. Dreyfus was brought back for a second court martial, there was no evidence against him, lots of evidence that he was innocent yet he was found “guilty with extenuating circumstances” he was granted a pardon and released very quietly many years later.

The Dreyfus Affair had the effect of hardening the far right wing of French politics. Action Francoise came into being. At the time they were viewed as ridiculous but in World War 2 they came into power. They were so extreme that even the Nazi’s had to tell them to back down.