But this hardly means that truth will always march on - a sobering thought when our present so closely resembles France’s past. This effort failed because, as Zola promised, truth marched on. Loathing him more than the Jewish man whose life he helped to save, the army sought to banish Picquart from their midst. The cost of Picquart’s heroism was the intense hatred of the institution to which he had devoted his life. No less important, his courage to insist upon this principle, regardless of the cost, allowed him to act upon it. Picquart’s fidelity to republican principle - indeed, to the reality principle - determined his behavior. If so, it is a heroism that should be commonplace, yet most often is uncommon.
In his recent book on the Dreyfus Affair, the lawyer and novelist Louis Begley praises Picquart as a hero. In short order, Dreyfus was retried, pardoned and exonerated, as was his unlikely advocate, Picquart. With the publication, shortly after, of Emile Zola’s “J’Accuse…!” the military’s conspiracy and government’s complicity were brutally exposed. His commanders rewarded Picquart by charging him with forging evidence - a richly ironic accusation as the army had done the same to fatten their case against Dreyfus - and tossed him into prison. Returning to France, he testified on Dreyfus’s behalf. When Gonse asked why he cared if “this Jew remains on Devil’s Island,” Picquart blurted: “Because he is innocent!” Ordered by his commander to forget what he had found, Picquart replied: “I will not carry this secret with me to the grave.” Though suddenly reassigned to a desert outpost in Tunisia, Picquart persisted. Though the general shared Picquart’s contempt for Jewish people, he did not share his respect for reality. Instead, he reported his finding to his superior officer, General Charles-Athur Gonse, in the expectation that the investigation would be reopened. Yet upon discovering new evidence that incriminated Esterhazy, Picquart did not retreat to his old prejudices. He was also an unrepentant anti-Semite who, like his fellow officers, believed that Dreyfus was a traitor. Unlike Dreyfus, he was Catholic and conservative. Like Dreyfus, he hailed from Alsace and excelled at engineering and military school. In effect, alternative versions of reality faced off against one another.Įnter Picquart, the man picking through the German trash. For the first camp, objective truths based on incontrovertible evidence proved Dreyfus’s innocence for the second camp, subjective truths based on the indelible otherness of Jewish people proved Dreyfus’s guilt. On the other side, however, were the anti-Dreyfusards who privileged the irrational and insisted that France’s identity was rooted in la terre et les morts - the soil that countless generations had cultivated and in which countless ancestors were buried. One side were the Dreyfusards who privileged reason and believed France’s identity was defined by the abstract principles of equality and liberty. Named after Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly accused of treason, the affair opened wide a fault line running through France. Picquart’s response to his startling discovery helped to transform a judicial matter into the existential crisis we know as the Dreyfus Affair. Suddenly, this day was not like any other. The handwriting was identical, yet the military authorities pinned the crime of treason not on Esterhazy, but a different French officer who had since been serving a sentence of life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Digging up a recent memo written by Esterhazy, the stunned director compared its handwriting to a letter sent to the attaché two years earlier that contained vital secrets. We are not, warned the attaché, getting our money’s worth in military information. In France that morning 125 years ago, the director discovered a crumpled telegram from Max von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché, to a French officer named Esterhazy.
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