The Dreyfus Affair (57 page)

Jules Ferry, French Prime Minister in 1881. His government, with six Protestant ministers, abolished Catholic primary schools in France. Catholic magistrates who resigned rather than enforce the law were often replaced by Protestants and Jews.

Édouard Drumont's
La France Juive
(
Jewish France
), which described France's Jews as ‘a ruling caste' and France ‘a conquered nation', sold over a million copies. Drumont's newspaper,
La Libre Parole
, exposed widespread corruption involving Jewish bankers and republican politicians in the Panama Canal Scandal. It campaigned against giving Jews commissions in the French army.

The Rothschild estate at Ferriéres. Jewish bankers and entrepreneurs amassed great fortunes and bought estates previously owned by the Catholic aristocracy. The increase of power and influence of Jews in France was widely resented.

This portrait of Baron James de Rothschild, titled ‘Jews Take over the World', offers a sense of the perceived threat posed by the rise of the Jews. Rothschild was said to be the model for Gunderman in Emile Zola's novel
L'Argent
.

It was widely believed by French Catholics that freemasons worked with Protestants and Jews to undermine Catholicism, France's established religion. Here the Grand Orient masonic lodge celebrates the anniversary of the 1789 revolution.

General Saussier. A rotund bon viveur with a Jewish mistress, the wife of Major Maurice Weil. He was subordinate to the Minister of War, General Mercier, only while Mercier held office. A mutual antipathy meant that what one proposed the other rejected.

Colonel Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen, the German military attaché in Paris. He suborned agents in co-operation with his lover, the Italian military attaché, Alessandro Panizzardi.

General Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre, Chief of the General Staff. Tall, distinguished-looking, refined, cunning and lazy, he was the architect of the French military alliance with Tsarist Russia. He and other senior army officers felt responsible for the security of France.

General Auguste Mercier, Minister of War in 1894. Curt, dry, authoritarian, he was mistrusted by
La Libre Parole
because of his Republican sympathies. He had an English wife and did not go to mass.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The youngest son of a Jewish textile manufacturer in Mulhouse, Dreyfus graduated with high marks from the École Polytechnique and the École de Guerre. He was shy, awkward and spoke in a monotonous voice. Serving as an intern on the General Staff , he was marked down for his awkward bearing which he ascribed to the anti-Semitism of senior officers.

Lucie Dreyfus, née Hadamard, with her husband and two children, Pierre and Jeanne. The youngest daughter of a diamond merchant, she married Alfred Dreyfus at the age of twenty-five. Despite learning of his infidelities in the course of his court-martial, she remained totally loyal to her husband and wanted to follow him to Devil's Island.

Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred's older brother, was as open and easy-going as Alfred was reserved and retiring. He co-ordinated and financed the campaign for a re-trial.