Hubert-Joseph Henry

Hubert-Joseph Henry forged the document that was supposed to settle the Dreyfus case and cut his own throat the day after admitting it. He was a farmer's son from the Marne who enlisted as a private and rose to lieutenant-colonel through the ranks and through the wars in Italy, Algeria and Tonkin - unusual in an officer corps of aristocrats and graduates, and part of why the general staff treated him as a loyal instrument rather than an equal. He worked in the Statistical Section, the army's counter-intelligence office, and was involved from the beginning in the case against Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, testifying at the first court-martial that a source had named Dreyfus as a traitor. When Georges Picquart succeeded to the section and found that the real author of the incriminating memorandum was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, Henry worked to have Picquart removed and posted to Tunisia. In 1896 he manufactured what became known as the faux Henry - a letter assembled from two different pieces of squared paper, purporting to be from the Italian military attache and naming Dreyfus explicitly - which was produced as conclusive proof. It held for two years. In August 1898 a captain examining it under lamplight noticed that the ruling of the paper did not match. Henry was interrogated by the war minister, admitted the forgery, and was arrested and taken to Mont-Valerien, where he was found the next day with his throat cut and a razor beside him. The right-wing press then raised a public subscription for his widow, and the lists of donors, published with their comments, are one of the plainest surviving records of French antisemitism in that decade. Whether he acted on his own initiative or under instruction has never been settled, and the army closed ranks around the question. Zola's J'accuse had been published seven months before the forgery was exposed. Dreyfus was retried, convicted again with extenuating circumstances, pardoned, and finally exonerated in 1906.

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