Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy

Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the French officer who actually sold military secrets to Germany, and for whose treason Alfred Dreyfus was convicted. He was born in Paris, the son of a general, and claimed descent from the Hungarian Esterházy family on thin evidence. His career was undistinguished and his finances were a disaster. He gambled, kept mistresses, ran through his wife's dowry, and in 1894 began passing documents to the German military attaché Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen for money. The torn-up covering note that betrayed the leak, the bordereau, was recovered from an embassy wastepaper basket. Dreyfus was arrested on the strength of a superficial resemblance in handwriting and because he was the only Jewish officer on the General Staff. In 1896 Colonel Georges Picquart, the new head of counter-intelligence, matched the bordereau to Esterhazy's hand and reported it. The army transferred Picquart to Tunisia and tried Esterhazy in closed session in January 1898, acquitting him in minutes. That verdict provoked Émile Zola's open letter J'accuse two days later, and turned a miscarriage of justice into a national crisis over the army, the republic and antisemitism. Esterhazy fled to England later that year, admitted to a newspaper that he had written the bordereau while claiming he had done so on orders, and lived quietly in Hertfordshire under an assumed name until his death in 1923. Dreyfus was fully exonerated in 1906. He was paid by a French newspaper for the confession and gave several contradictory versions of it afterwards. Picquart, who had risked his career to expose him, was himself imprisoned for a year before being vindicated, and later became minister of war. The affair's institutional legacy was the separation of church and state in France in 1905.

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