Arrest and Conviction of Alfred Dreyfus
A French artillery captain was arrested for treason in October 1894 on the strength of a handwriting comparison. The document was a bordereau, an unsigned covering note listing military information offered to the German embassy, recovered by a cleaner working for French intelligence from a wastepaper basket. The investigation looked for an artillery officer with access to several departments, which pointed to the general staff trainees, and Alfred Dreyfus was the only Jew among them. The handwriting experts disagreed; one was a police official whose method involved a theory of self-forgery that was incomprehensible then and is now. He was arrested on 15 October and told to write to dictation while an officer sat with a loaded revolver in case he confessed and shot himself. The court martial in December was held in camera, and the judges were shown a secret file that neither Dreyfus nor his counsel ever saw, containing documents that were irrelevant or forged. He was convicted unanimously and sentenced to deportation for life. The degradation in the courtyard of the École Militaire in January 1895 — his sword broken, his braid torn off, a crowd outside shouting — was attended by Theodor Herzl as a correspondent, who began organising political Zionism shortly afterwards. Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island and kept in solitary confinement, at one point in leg irons at night. The affair took twelve years to reverse. The intelligence unit that produced the case was the statistical section, and its own officers forged documents to shore it up when the evidence failed. Its chief killed himself in prison in 1898 when the forgery was found.
- Year: 1894 CE
- Category: Social
