Georges Picquart

Colonel Georges Picquart discovered that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent and destroyed his own career reporting it. He was born in Strasbourg, graduated fifth in his year from Saint-Cyr, served in Indochina and Algeria, and was second in his class at the staff academy. He was present at Dreyfus's public degradation in 1895 and, by his own account, shared the ordinary antisemitism of his class and thought the man guilty. Appointed head of the army's counter-intelligence section in 1895, he came across a second document passed to the German embassy in the hand of Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. He compared it with the bordereau that had convicted Dreyfus and found the same handwriting. He reported it up the chain of command and was told the matter was closed and that the two cases could be kept separate. He refused to let it go. The general staff posted him to Tunisia, then to a dangerous frontier post, and when he persisted he was dismissed from the army and imprisoned for almost a year on a charge of leaking secret documents. Colonel Hubert Henry, meanwhile, forged fresh evidence against Dreyfus and confessed before killing himself in 1898. Picquart was vindicated with Dreyfus in 1906, reinstated as a brigadier general, and appointed minister of war by Clemenceau within months. He died in 1914 after falling from a horse. He never became a Dreyfusard in sympathy and said so, insisting that he had acted because an innocent man was in prison and not because he had changed his opinion of Jews. Dreyfus was promoted only to major on rehabilitation, a slight that Picquart, by then his superior, did nothing to correct - the two were never friends.

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