The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jewish artillery officer, was court-martialed and convicted of passing military secrets to Germany based on a misattributed handwritten document. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. In 1896, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart identified Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the actual author, but military officials suppressed the evidence. Writer Emile Zola's 1898 open letter "J'accuse" forced public reckoning. Dreyfus was retried in 1899, pardoned, and fully exonerated by a civilian court in 1906.