The Dreyfus Affair

On This Day in History: December 22, 1894

Alfred Dreyfus was Jewish, making it a lot easier for people to railroad him into getting a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. A French artillery officer, his 1894 conviction for treason was a public spectacle that had crowds chanting “Death to the Jew!”

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 22, 1894--

How did an innocent man’s life take such a turn? There was a French spy at the German embassy in Paris, and in a garbage can in the embassy he found a ripped-up letter with handwriting that resembled that of Dreyfus. Captain Dreyfus was accused of passing secrets to the enemy and was court-martialed; there was a closed trial. On December 22, 1894, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. After the conviction, there was a public ceremony where his insignia was ripped from his uniform and his sword was broken in half. That’s where the chants for his death happened.

Dreyfus was deported across the Atlantic Ocean to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of northeast South America. His family believed Alfred had been wrongly convicted and worked to see him freed. Fifteen months after the conviction Colonel Georges Picquart, who was French head of counterespionage, discovered that the real traitor was not Dreyfus, but Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. When Picquart brought this information to his superiors, they said shut the fuck up and reassigned him to Africa.

But the family would not give up. They worked with journalists including Émile Zola to “J’Accuse . . . !” government officials and expose the evidence against Alfred as paltry and reveal this Esterhazy fuckstick as the real traitor. With the accusations of Esterhazy made public, he had a closed trial in 1898 but he was found not guilty. People were pissed, and Esterhazy quickly retired and fled to the U.K., where he remained the rest of his traitorous fucking life.

But what about poor Alfred? His ordeal was now very public, and the country was divided. Antisemitic riots broke out. Eventually, there was a thorough investigation and the Supreme Court quashed Dreyfus’s conviction. But it wasn’t over. The wank socks in the French military didn’t want to admit they had the wrong guy and put him on trial and convicted him again. This time he was sentenced to ten years’ hard labor, but the sentence was commuted due to the extenuating circumstances, and a few days later the French president pardoned Dreyfus. Seven years later, in 1906, Dreyfus was officially exonerated, reinstated in the army, and promoted to the rank of major. He fought in World War I when it broke out eight years later.

The rampant antisemitism the Dreyfus Affair engendered was a catalyst for Zionism, convincing many Jewish people they needed their own state away from Europe where they could protect themselves from those seeking to kill them solely for being Jewish.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. They make great gifts and ‘tis the season n’ shit.

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