Dreyfus Affair: It Started Out with a Nosy Cleaning Woman

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. The Dreyfus affair began when a bordereau (detailed memorandum, literally a "laundry list") offering to procure French military secrets was recovered from a cleaning basket by a nosy French cleaning woman who worked in the evenings in the office of the French General staff.  The cleaning woman, who used to read the contents of the wastebaskets as a way to pass the time, found the document suspicious and passed it on to her superiors.  Authorship of the bordereau was quickly pinned upon Alfred Dreyfus a young French artillery officer who was in training within the French Army's general staff.  Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, was convicted of treason in November 1894.  Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement.

Two years later, in 1896, evidence came to light identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real culprit. However, high-ranking military officials suppressed this new evidence and Esterhazy was unanimously acquitted after the second day of his trial in military court. Instead of being exonerated, Alfred Dreyfus was further accused by the Army on the basis of false documents fabricated by a French counter-intelligence officer, Hubert-Joseph Henry, seeking to re-confirm Dreyfus's conviction. These fabrications were uncritically accepted by Henry's superiors.

Word of the military court's framing of Alfred Dreyfus and of an attendant cover-up began to spread largely due to J'accuse, a vehement public open letter in a Paris newspaper by writer Émile Zola, in January 1898. The case had to be re-opened and Alfred Dreyfus was brought back from Guiana in 1899 to be tried again. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus (the Dreyfusards), such as Anatole France, Henri Poincaré or Georges Clémenceau, and those who condemned him (the anti-Dreyfusards), such as Edouard Drumont (the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole) and Hubert-Joseph Henry.

Eventually, all the accusations against Alfred Dreyfus were demonstrated to be baseless. Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army in 1906. He later served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.