ANTI-SEMITISM, THE DREYFUS AFFAIR & THE THIRD REPUBLIC
This research paper traces the course of the Dreyfus Affair in the French Third Republic between 1894 and 1906 and examines the cardinal role played by anti-Semitism in its origin and development. Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), son of a wealthy Jewish-Alsatian textile millowner, and a member of the French Army's General Staff, was convicted in 1894 and again in 1899 of treason by military courts. He was originally given a life sentence. He was stripped of his rank and officially degraded. He served nearly five years' imprisonment on Devil's Island before he was pardoned by the President of the Republic in 1899. Even though the evidence against Dreyfus was insufficient to warrant his conviction, it took his family and other defenders (Dreyfusards) 12 years before France's highest civil court annulled his convictions in 1906.
French anti-Semitism played an important role in Dreyfus' original arrest and conviction. It helped prevent disclosure of the illegal methods secretly used by the French Army to fabricate evidence against Dreyfus and to coverup its misdeeds and to delay remedial action by the French government. In a broader sense, the Dreyfus Affair, the struggle for and against revision of the Dreyfus verdicts, shook the foundations of the Third Republic and represented the most divisive and passionate controversy of fin de siecle France. It exposed and accentuated deep schisms in the French body politic and society and fundamental flaws in the Third Republic's ability to govern. Such imperfect justice as was eventually meted out to Dreyfus; and the steps taken to curb the excesses of the Army and other anti-Dreyfusards which the Affair revealed represented a step forward in stabilizing the Third Republic, but they left an unresolved legacy of discord and distrust among the contending factions and interests involved.
Introduction: French Anti-Semitism and The Thi...