France: 100 years ago, Paris witnessed the culmination of the most infamous judiciary saga in French history, writes Lara Marlowe
Almost 100 years after he was finally cleared of wrongdoing, the words uttered by Captain Alfred Dreyfus on July 12th, 1906, rang out again yesterday in the Grand Chamber of France's Supreme Court.
"Lift your heads and see the world as it is," Guy Canivet, the chief justice of today's Supreme Court, said, quoting Dreyfus. "I am not guilty. Despite all my despair, I never bowed my head, and I will not until my last breath."
The most infamous judiciary saga in French history started in 1893, during a time of tense relations between France and Germany. The cleaning woman at the German embassy in Paris, who was employed by French military intelligence, found documents detailing plans for new French artillery in the German military attaché's waste bin.
The defence ministry found a perfect scapegoat in Capt Dreyfus, an intern at headquarters whose family left Alsace when it was conquered by the Germans in 1870. Had Dreyfus not been Jewish, he would never have been convicted by a military tribunal of spying for Germany. Dreyfus was deported to Devil's Island in French Guyana, where he lived in dreadful conditions, shackled and manacled, until he was brought back to France for a retrial in 1899.
Émile Zola had taken up Dreyfus's defence, writing the whole front page of L'Aurore newspaper under the title "J'Accuse!". Anti-Dreyfusards dismissed writers and journalists who supported the wronged army captain as "intellectuals" - the origin of a much-vaunted 20th century French tradition.
For his vitriolic open letter to the president of France, Zola was convicted of defaming the French army and condemned to one year in prison. The Supreme Court overturned the ruling, but Zola nonetheless spent a year in exile.
The Dreyfus Affair generated at least eight trials, but Zola's three weeks in court most impassioned the country. Bourgeois Parisians attended hearings with picnic hampers, as if they were going to the opera. When Zola was pronounced guilty, the crowd shouted "Death to Jews". "They are cannibals," replied Zola.
Lieut Col Picquard, the new head of French intelligence, had discovered proof that Dreyfus was innocent, and that the man who spied for Germany was in fact an officer of Hungarian descent, Comdt Esterhazy. Picquard was convicted and imprisoned; Esterhazy - who later admitted his guilt from exile in London - was acquitted.
International interest in the Dreyfus case was so intense that the British chief justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, attended Dreyfus's second military trial, in Rennes, reporting back to Queen Victoria. "The military judges were unfamiliar with the law and with criminal procedure," he wrote. "They were steeped in prejudice and acted in function of what they considered to be the honour of the army."
By this time, Dreyfus's innocence was so obvious, and outrage in Britain and the US so great, that the French president Émile Loubet pardoned Dreyfus 10 days after his conviction was upheld. It nonetheless took seven more years for the the Supreme Court to knock down the decisions of the two military courts. Georges Clémenceau commented that military justice was to justice what military music is to music.
A century later, nearly 1,000 people crowded into yesterday's symposium in the Palais de Justice. Vincent Duclert, a historian who is campaigning to have Dreyfus's ashes transferred to the Pantheon, said the July 12th, 1906, decision is relevant today "because it reminds us that a civilised society is based on law, but also on the rights of citizens". The US constitution recognises the rights of citizens vis-à-vis the state, Duclert said. "In France there is a lesser place accorded to the rights of the citizen in public life, in the context of the action of the state." Chief justice Canivet praised his colleagues of 1906 for "resisting political pressure... a virulent press, mob violence, nationalist hysteria and anti-Semitic hatred" in clearing Dreyfus.
The decision by the French Supreme Court re-established the right to a fair trial and banned the use of secret evidence.
Amid the celebration of brave judges and lawyers yesterday, divisions within the court - which forced Canivet's distant predecessor to manipulate proceedings to obtain a just result - were forgotten.
There was no mention of continuing anti-Semitism, which resulted in anti-Jewish laws and the deportation of 76,000 Jews during the second World War.