Then came Boulanger in 1886. General Boulanger became Minister of War. He steadily gained support winning elections in the provinces and in January 1889 a Parisian election with a big majority. He had the love of the people and big military power, but on a crucial night of his coup d’etat, he was attracted by his mistress with whom he spent the night instead of working on his plans. He had lost his chance, and the government started arresting his supporters. Boulanger eventually went into exile and actually committed suicide on the grave of his mistress.
A worse and more serious crisis occurred between 1869 and 1900. The Dreyfus Affair. It involved the wrongful conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a promising young artillery officer and a Jew. The political and judicial scandal that followed lasted until Alfred Dreyfus was fully vindicated.
Abruptly in October 1894, Dreyfus was arrested and charged with passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was convicted of treason by a military tribunal in December 1894 and promptly imprisoned on Devil's Island, a prison island off the coast of French Guiana. The conviction was based on a handwritten list (the bordereau) offering access to secret French military information. The list had been retrieved from the waste paper basket of the German military attaché, Schwartzkoppen, by a cleaning woman employed by French military counter-intelligence. Dreyfus was suspected because of his Alsatian origins. Furthermore, the writing on the bordereau resembled Dreyfus' own handwriting. Fearing that the right-wing anti-Semitic press would learn of the affair and accuse the Army of covering up for a Jewish officer, the High Command pressed for an early trial and conviction. By the time it realized it had no conclusive evidence against Dreyfus, it was politically impossible to withdraw the prosecution without a scandal bringing down the highest levels of the French Army.
The subsequent trial was notable for numerous errors of procedure. For example, the defense was unaware of a secret dossier which the prosecution provided to the military judges. Withholding this dossier from the defense was illegal by French law. Then, it was discovered that an Esterhazy had written the bordereau, but he was acquitted by French military Justice in January 1898 and let go to retire in England with a pension. This cascade of internal communication failures, lies and dissimulations eventually destroyed the career and hence the life of an innocent man, Alfred Dreyfus, and of his family. It is well documented that General Auguste Mercier was the responsible in initiating this chain of events, and later in pressing for the cover-up of this miscarriage of justice.
Alfred Dreyfus was put on trial in 1894 and was accused of espionage, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison on Devil's Island.
The Dreyfus affair became one of the gravest crises to rock the French Third Republic. "The Affair" deeply divided the country into Dreyfusards (supporters of Dreyfus) and anti-Dreyfusards. Generally speaking, royalists, conservatives and the Catholic Church (the "right wing") were anti-Dreyfusards, while Dreyfusards were socialists, republicans and anticlericalists. The Dreyfus affair could not have developed as it did in a country wholly antisemitic, nor in a country devoid of antisemitism.
The writer Emile Zola is often thought to have exposed the affair to the general public in a famously incendiary open letter to the President to which the French journalist affixed the headline "J'accuse!" (I accuse!); it was published in the newspaper L’Aurore (The Dawn). It had the effect of a bomb. Zola's intent was to force his own prosecution for libel so that the emerging facts of the Dreyfus case could be thoroughly publicised. In this he succeeded. He was convicted, appealed, was retried, and, before hearing the result, fled to England on the advice of his counsel and friends, returning to Paris when he heard that Dreyfus's trial was to be reviewed.
In June 1899 the case was reopened, following the uncovering of exonerating evidence by Colonel Picquart. Despite the new evidence presented at his new military trial, Dreyfus was reconvicted in September and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was subsequently pardoned by the President and freed, but would not be formally exonerated until 12 July 1906, when the Court annulled his second conviction.
Before this, there was the Panama Scandal. The Panama Scandal was a corruption affair in France in 1893, linked to the building of the Panama Canal. This building of the canal was to be a very prestigious affair that had a lot of publicizing. A million francs were lost when the government took bribes not to tell the public that the Panama Canal Company was in huge financial trouble. This deeply affected the French morale and further damaged the reputation of the politicians.
