La Bête républicaine

Christopher Prendergast

  • The Dreyfus Affair: ‘J’Accuse’ and Other Writings by Emile Zola, edited by Alain Pagès, translated by Eleanor Levieux
    Yale, 208 pp, £25.00, June 1996, ISBN 0 300 06689 9
  • Zola: A Life by Frederick Brown
    Farrar, Straus, 888 pp, £37.50, May 1996, ISBN 0 374 29742 8

In September 1894, the Intelligence Bureau of the French Army intercepted a memorandum (the so-called ‘bordereau’) sent to the German military attaché in Paris, informing him that important details concerning French national defence would shortly be communicated to the Germans. The military authorities were baffled as to the source, but suspicion fell on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, at the time serving in a probationary capacity on the General Staff. The ‘bordereau’ was submitted secretly to handwriting experts, the first expressing doubts that it was by Dreyfus, the second (Bertillon, the inventor of anthropometry, a system for identifying criminals on the basis of an inherent ‘criminality’) concluding in connivance with the authorities that it was indeed in Dreyfus’s hand. Arrested, tried, found guilty of treason, publicly stripped of military office and sentenced to both deportation and life imprisonment, Dreyfus was sent to French Guiana and from there to Devil’s Island.

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