What Was The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to death for treason, largely as a result of anti-semitism. A French spy claimed to find papers in the German embassy which seemed to offer confidential information for sale. Given the secrets mentioned within them, the papers must have been written by a French officer. Suspicion fell on Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer when Edouard Drumont, an anti-semitic journalist, cast the blame on Dreyfus. Evidence was twisted against logic to prove treason. For example, handwriting experts claimed that the fact that the handwriting was so dissimilar from Dreyfus’s normal handwriting showed that he had been intentionally attempting to conceal his guilt. Even when this handwriting turned out to have
Countries such as the United States and England mistakenly believed that France had become more tolerant toward diverse religions among its citizens. In fact, anti-semites often proclaimed that Jews were not French; that Judaism was its own race, and this encouraged discrimination against Jews. Just five years before the Dreyfus Affair, in 1891, 39 deputies sent a proposal to the French parliament in an effort to expel Jews from France, however the proposal was not adopted. One year after this proposal, Edouard Drumont founded La Libre Parole for the primary purpose of verbally persecuting Jews. Drumont originally founded this newspaper during the Panama Canal scandal, in which during the building of the canal, Jewish Frenchmen were among those involved in paying off governments and journalists. Drumont exploited the coincidence that these men happened to be Jewish as evidence that all Jews were corrupt and malicious. In addition, only several years earlier to the founding of his newspaper, Drumont had published what turned out to be one of the top two best-sellers in France between the years 1850 and 1900: La France juive, or Jewish France. This book relied on stereotypes of Jews and asserted that Jews were the agents behind negative historical events. This book especially helped set up the French population for convicting a Jew of treason without evidence to prove his
Trying a different angle of persuasion, Drumont talked about the last name ‘Dreyfus’ being a very Jewish name. In this way, Drumont connected Alfred Dreyfus to Jewish culture. In these incendiary publications, Dreyfus was not seen as an individual but as a scapegoat for society’s problems. The ideal French soldier was muscular, while Drumont stereotyped Jews as bookish and weak. Drumont appealed to a sense of patriotism in the public by saying that Dreyfus did not make an honorable soldier, and by claiming that throughout history Jews had been known to be dishonourable. Émile Zola, a writer supporting Dreyfus, demanded France to start thinking rationally in his Letter to France, saying “Are you really losing your head on the asinine pretext that your army has been insulted and there is a plot to sell you to the enemy?” Unfortunately Zola’s criticism of France was insufficient to counter Drumont’s stereotypes. Drumont even received the backing of the Catholic Church, because Christianity held Jews responsible for killing Jesus Christ. Edouard Drumont appealed to many aspects of French tradition. Drumont used long held stereotypes to appeal to the nationalist fervor among the population of