Mathieu's unpublished handwritten letters meant that Harris had to recruit French researchers. Harris, a tutor in modern history at New College, Oxford, argues that the Dreyfus family's solidarity was central to bringing the case to the public. And you want to know why I paid no heed? It is because I don't give a damn! I have had enough, I have had enough, I have had enough!" But everything you have said to yourself, I said it to myself quite a long time ago. He wrote: "I thank you for expressing your fears about the stay of Jeanne and the children here with me. The Dreyfusards were afraid that this would taint their cause, but Zola refused to send them away. After Zola was found guilty of libel and fled to Kent, his mistress and illegitimate children joined him. But the new research shows that Zola's disrepute was a major factor in alienating the public. History has presented the Dreyfusards as free-thinking, leftwing defenders of progress, truth and justice, with Zola as their standard bearer, and anti-Dreyfusards as antisemitic rightwing Catholic champions of French tradition and honour. The case sparked a vicious rift in France. The novelist Emile Zola took up Dreyfus's cause, writing history's most famous open letter, J'accuse…! It charged high-ranking officers of conspiring against an innocent man. In one, she wrote: "I shall not be able to live without you." The letters show that she was immensely passionate, almost operatic, in her love for her husband." Lucie was even prepared to abandon their children to join him in exile, her most intimate letters reveal. What people haven't realised is that there was another dimension. She's seen as the prototype of the long-suffering wife and virtuous mother. "She's not been written into the story in an appropriate way. Lucie Dreyfus's correspondence "changes the whole history of the affair", Harris said. The fight to clear his name took 12 years – even though the real spy's identity was unmasked by a senior officer. Shackled to a bed at night and existing on scraps of food, his teeth rotted and he lost the power of speech. The document contained military secrets supplied by an unidentified French army officer.Īfter a court martial, Dreyfus was deported in 1895 to Devil's Island, off the coast of French Guyana, to serve a life sentence in solitary confinement. In 1894 a cleaner at the German embassy in Paris who was working for French intelligence found a torn-up letter in the military attaché's waste-paper bin. Backed by a wealthy author and politician, Joseph Reinach, Mathieu had devoted himself to orchestrating the campaign for his "soulmate".Īn Oxford historian, Ruth Harris, has gained access to many thousands of unpublished letters, and letters not yet published in English, which delve further into Dreyfus and the miscarriage of justice that sparked political turmoil.ĭreyfus was a patriotic French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent who was convicted of spying with forged evidence. Family solidarity, particularly the extent of support from Dreyfus's brother Mathieu, is also revealed in letters that he wrote, which had been previously ignored by scholars because of their barely decipherable handwriting.
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