Belief Perseverance

PICQUART REOPENS THE CASE

Meet Colonel Georges Picquart: by all appearances, a conventional man, not the sort you'd expect to rock the boat.

Picquart was born in 1854 in Strasbourg, France, to a family of government officers and soldiers, and rose to a position of prominence in the French army at a young age. Like most of his countrymen, he was patriotic. Like most of his countrymen, he was Catholic. And—again, like most of his countrymen—Picquart was anti-Semitic. Not aggressively so, mind you. He was a refined man and considered propaganda against Jews, such as the tirades being printed in France's nationalistic newspapers, to be in bad taste. But anti-Semitism was in the air he breathed, and he grew up with a reflexively disdainful attitude toward Jewish people.

Therefore, Picquart had no difficulty believing it when, in 1894, he was told that the only Jewish member of the French general staff had turned out to be a spy. When Dreyfus professed his innocence during his trial, Picquart observed him closely and concluded that it was an act. And during the "degradation," as Dreyfus's insignia was stripped away, it was Picquart who cracked an anti-Semitic joke ("He's a Jew, remember. He's probably calculating the value of that gold braid").

Shortly after Dreyfus was shipped off to Devil's Island, Colonel Picquart was promoted and put in charge of the counterespionage department that had led the investigation of Dreyfus. He was tasked with accumulating additional evidence against Dreyfus, in case the conviction was questioned. Picquart began searching, but failed to find anything.

However, a more urgent matter soon took precedence—there was another spy! More torn-up letters to the Germans had been discovered. This time, the culprit seemed to be a French officer named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Esterhazy had a drinking problem and a gambling problem and was deeply in debt, thus giving him ample motive to sell information to Germany.

But as Picquart studied Esterhazy's letters, he started to notice something. The precise, slanted handwriting was uncannily familiar . . . It reminded him of the original memo attributed to Dreyfus. Was he imagining things? Picquart retrieved the original memo and set it next to Esterhazy's. His heart jumped into his throat. The handwriting was identical.

Picquart showed Esterhazy's letters to the army's in-house handwriting analyst, the one who had testified that Dreyfus's handwriting was a match for the original memo. "Yes, these letters match the memo," the analyst agreed.

"And what if I told you these letters were written quite recently?" Picquart asked. The analyst shrugged. In that case, he said, the Jews must have trained the new spy to imitate Dreyfus's handwriting. Picquart did not find this argument plausible. Increasingly, with dread, he began to face the inevitable conclusion that they had convicted an innocent man.

He had one last hope: the sealed file of evidence used in Dreyfus's trial. His fellow officers had assured him that he need only consult it to be convinced of Dreyfus's guilt. So Picquart retrieved it and scoured its contents. But he was disappointed once again. As far as he could tell, the file he had been led to believe was so damning contained no hard evidence, only speculation.

Picquart was indignant at his fellow officers' rationalizations and their disinterest in the question of whether they had condemned an innocent man to rot in prison. He pressed on with his investigation, even as the resistance he met from the army grew into outright enmity. His superiors sent him off on a dangerous mission in hopes that he would never come back. When that ploy failed, they had him arrested on charges of leaking sensitive information.

But after ten years, a stint in jail, and multiple additional trials, Picquart succeeded. Dreyfus was cleared and reinstated in the army.

Dreyfus lived for another thirty years after his reinstatement. His family remembers him as being stoic about the whole ordeal, although his health was never the same after his years on Devil's Island. The real spy, Esterhazy, fled the country and died in poverty. And Picquart continued to be harassed by the enemies he had made in the army, but in 1906 was appointed minister of war by the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, who had admired Picquart's work during what came to be known as the "Dreyfus affair."

Whenever anyone asked Picquart why he'd done it—why he had worked so tirelessly to uncover the truth that exonerated Dreyfus, risking his own career and his freedom in the process—his response was simple, and always the same: "Because it was my duty."