![]() ![]() ![]() This « two-year war » ended in the triumph of the Republic over its opponents, nationalists and anti-Semites, at the price of appeasement: Dreyfus’s second trial and conviction at Rennes, his pardon and rehabilitation. Scheurer-Kestner’s conviction that Dreyfus’s was innocent, the denunciation of the true culprit, Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (1847-1923), by Alfred Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu Dreyfus (1857-1930), the first articles by Zola, including his famous open letter to President of the Republic Félix Faure, « J’accuse ! » published by Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) on 13 January 1898 in the daily newspaper L’Aurore, launched a movement that profoundly divided the French nation, split between two opposing and irreconcilable conceptions of France. Convinced of his innocence and shocked by a procedure and trial in which the law had been blatantly disregarded, Captain Dreyfus's few supporters were joined daily by new converts to his cause: several young writers, the senators Arthur Ranc (1831-1908) and Ludovic Trarieux (1840-1904), the member of parliament Joseph Reinach (1856-1921), the new head of counter-espionage, Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart (1854-1914), who discovered the name of the real traitor, the vice-president of the Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner (1833-1899), the writer Émile Zola (1840-1902) to name but a few. In 1896, following a failed attempt to reopen the case by Dreyfus’s family and a young journalist, Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), the affair made history at the end of the following year. Saving the honour of the army and the foundering career of the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier (1833-1921), and deep-rooted anti-Semitism, amplified by a virulent press relentlessly exploiting the affair, made Dreyfus the perfect culprit. Dreyfus was tried behind closed doors and sentenced instead of the true culprit, whom the high command had made no attempt to identify. Stripped of his rank, he was deported to Devil's Island, the penal colony in French Guiana. Late in 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a young army officer at the Ministry of War, was arrested and sentenced for life for high treason for having allegedly communicated military secrets to the Germans. ![]()
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