#Alfred dreyfus quote trial#

#Alfred dreyfus quote trial#

In 1899, he was found guilty in another show trial and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The military was forced to order a new court-martial for Dreyfus. Soon afterward, Esterhazy fled the country. In 1898, Major Hubert Henry, discoverer of the original letter attributed to Dreyfus, admitted that he had forged much of the evidence against Dreyfus and then Henry committed suicide. Meanwhile, out of the scandal a perilous national division was born, in which nationalists and members of the Catholic Church supported the military, while republicans, socialists, and advocates of religious freedom lined up to defend Dreyfus. One month later, Zola was sentenced to jail for libel but managed to escape to England. By the evening, 200,000 copies had been sold. In response, the French novelist Émile Zola published an open letter entitled “J’Accuse” on the front page of the Aurore, which accused the judges of being under the thumb of the military. A court-martial was held in January 1898, and Esterhazy was acquitted within an hour. The army attempted to suppress this information, but a national uproar ensued, and the military had no choice but to put Esterhazy on trial. Interest in the case lapsed until 1896, when evidence was disclosed that implicated French Major Ferdinand Esterhazy as the guilty party. The Dreyfus case demonstrated the anti-Semitism permeating France’s military and, because many praised the ruling, in France in general. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil’s Island Prison in French Guyana four months later. Although he was pardoned days later by the French president, it wasn’t until 1906 that Dreyfus officially was exonerated and reinstated in the army.In December 1894, French officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason by a military court-martial and sentenced to life in prison for his alleged crime of passing military secrets to the Germans.

In 1899, Dreyfus was court-martialed for a second time and found guilty. The Dreyfus affair deeply divided France, not just over the fate of the man at its center but also over a range of issues, including politics, religion and national identity. As a result, Zola was convicted of libel, although he escaped to England and later managed to return to France. After Esterhazy’s acquittal, a French newspaper published an open letter titled “J’Accuse…!” by well-known author Emile Zola in which he defended Dreyfus and accused the military of a major cover-up in the case.

In 1898, he was court-martialed but quickly found not guilty he later fled the country. Nevertheless, word about Esterhazy’s possible guilt began to circulate.

However, when Picquart told his bosses what he’d discovered he was discouraged from continuing his investigation, transferred to North Africa and later imprisoned. In 1896, the new head of the army’s intelligence unit, Georges Picquart, uncovered evidence pointing to another French military officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, as the real traitor. In a public ceremony in Paris following his conviction, Dreyfus had the insignia torn from his uniform and his sword broken and was paraded before a crowd that shouted, “Death to Judas, death to the Jew.” In 1894, after a French spy at the German Embassy in Paris discovered a ripped-up letter in a waste basket with handwriting said to resemble that of Dreyfus, he was court-martialed, found guilty of treason and sentenced to life behind bars on Devil’s Island off of French Guiana. A scandal that rocked France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Dreyfus affair involved a Jewish artillery captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), who was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans.