The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

About this book

July 20 1894. The German military attach in Paris receives a visit from a seedy-looking man who claims to be a French army officer in desperate need of money offering to sell them military secrets.Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a rising star in the French artillery command. Reserved yet intelligent and ambitious Dreyfus had everything: a family money and a clear path to a prestigious post on the General Staff. However Dreyfus had enemies as a result of his ambition. Many of them came from the impoverished Catholic aristocracy and disliked Dreyfus because he was rich bourgeois and above all a Jew.On the basis of flimsy evidence Dreyfus was placed under arrest for the crime of high treason. Not long afterward he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life on the legendary lethal Devils Island. The saga of Dreyfuss many trials-he was not exonerated until 1906 twelve years after first being arrested-the fight to free him and the intrigues on bot