Letter to M. Felix Faure, President
of the Republic.
('J'accuse').

Monsieur le President,
Will you allow me, out of my gratitude for the gracious manner in which you once granted me an audience, to express my concern for your well-deserved glory? Will you allow me to tell you that although your star has been in the ascendant hitherto, it is now in danger of being dimmed by the most shameful and indelible of stains? You have emerged unscathed from libellous slurs†, you have won the people's hearts. You are the radiant centre of our apotheosis, for the Russian alliance has been indeed, for France, a patriotic celebration. And now you are about to preside over our World Fair. What a solemn triumph it will be, the crowning touch on our grand century of diligent labour, truth and liberty. But what a blot on your name (I was about to say, on your reign) this abominable Dreyfus Affair is! A court martial, acting on orders, has just dared to acquit such a man as Esterhazy. Truth itself and justice itself have been slapped in the face. And now it is too late, France's cheek has been sullied by that supreme insult, and History will record that it was during your Presidency that such a crime against society was committed. They have dared to do this. Very well, then, I shall dare too. I shall tell the truth, for I pledged that I would tell it, if our judicial system, once the matter was brought before it through the normal channels, did not tell the truth, the whole truth. It is my duty to speak up; I will not be an accessory to the fact. If I were, my nights would be haunted by the spectre of that innocent man so far away, suffering the worst kind of torture as he pays for a crime he did not commit. And it is to you. M. le President, that I will shout out the truth with all the revulsion of a decent man. To your credit, I am convinced that you are unaware of the truth.
And to whom should I denounce the evil machinations of those who are truly guilty if not to you, the First Magistrate in the land?

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First of all, the truth about the trial and the verdict against Dreyfus. One wicked man has led it all, done it all: Lt-Col du Paty de Clam. At the time he was only a Major. He is the entire Dreyfus Affair. Not until a fair inquiry has clearly established his actions and his responsibilities will we understand the Dreyfus Affair. He appears to have an unbelievably fuzzy and complicated mind, haunted by implausible plots and indulging in the methods that litter cheap novels - stolen papers, anonymous letters, rendez-vous in deserted places, mysterious women who flit about at night to peddle damaging proof. It was his idea to dictate the bordereau to Dreyfus; it was his idea to examine it in a room entirely lined with mirrors; it was du Paty de Clam, Major Forzinetti tells us, who went out with a dark lantern intending to slip into the cell where the accused man was sleeping and flash the light on his face all of a sudden so that he would be taken by surprise and blurt out a confession. And there is more to reveal, but it is not up to me to reveal it all; let them look, let them find what there is to be found. I shall simply say that Major du Paty de Clam, in charge of investigating the Dreyfus Affair, in his capacity as a criminal police officer, bears the greatest burden of guilt - in terms of chronological order and rank - in the appalling miscarriage of justice that has been committed. For some time already, the bordereau had been in the possession of Colonel Sandherr, head of the Intelligence Bureau, who has since died of total paralysis. There were leaks, papers disappeared, just as papers continue to disappear today; and efforts were being made to find out who had written the bordereau when a conviction slowly grew up that that person could only be an officer from the General Staff, and an artillery officer at that. This was a glaring double error, which shows how superficially the bordereau had been examined, since a close and rational scrutiny of it proves that it could only have been written by an infantry officer. Accordingly, they searched throughout the premises; they examined handwriting samples as if it were a family matter; a traitor was to be caught by surprise in the offices themselves and expelled from them. Now, the story is partly familiar to us and I do not wish to repeat it all over again; but this is where Major du Paty de Clam comes into it, as soon as the first suspicion falls on Dreyfus. From that momenton, it was du Paty de Clam who invented Dreyfus. The Affair became his affair. He was sure that he could confound the traitor and wring a complete confession from him. Of course, there is the War Minister, General Mercier, whose intelligence seems to be on a mediocre level; and of course there is the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, who appears to have been swayed by his intense clericalism, and there is the Deputy Chief, General Gonse, whose conscience managed to make room for a good many things. But to begin with, there was really only Major du Paty de Clam. He led those men by the nose. He hypnotized them. Yes indeed, he also dabbles in spiritism and occultism; he converses with spirits. The experiments to which he subjected the unfortunate Dreyfus and the whole demented system of torture - the traps he attempted to make him fall into, the foolish investigations, the monstrous fabrications - are beyond belief. Ah! for anyone who knows the true details of the first affair, what a nightmare it is! Major du Paty de Clam arrests Dreyfus and has him placed in solitary confinement. He rushes to the home of Madame Dreyfus and terrifies her, saying that if she speaks up, her husband is lost. Meanwhile the unfortunate man is tearing out his hair, clamouring his innocence. And that is how the investigation proceeded, as in some fifteenth-century chronicle, shrouded in mystery and a wealth of the wildest expedients, and all on the basis of a single, childish accusation, that idiotic bordereau, which was not only a very ordinary kind of treason but also the most impudent kind of swindle, since almost all of the so-called secrets that had supposedly been turned over to the enemy were of no value. I dwell on this point because this is the egg from which the real crime - the dreadful denial of justice which has laid France low - was later to hatch. I would like to make it perfectly clear how the miscarriage of justice came about, how it is the product of Major du Paty de Clam's machinations, how General Mercier and Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse came to be taken in by it and gradually became responsible for this error and how it is that later they felt they had a duty to impose it as the sacred truth, a truth that will not admit of even the slightest discussion. At the beginning, all they contributed was negligence and lack of intelligence. The worst we can say is that they gave in to the religious passions of the circles they move in and the prejudices wrought by esprit de corps. They let stupidity have its way. But now, here is Dreyfus summoned before the court martial. The most utter secrecy is demanded. They could not have imposed stricter silence and been more rigorous and mysterious if a traitor had actually opened our borders to the enemy and led the German Emperor straight to Notre Dame.The entire nation is flabbergasted. Terrible deeds are whispered about, monstrous betrayals that scandalize History itself, and of course the nation bows to these rumours. No punishment can be too severe; the nation will applaud the traitor's public humiliation; the nation is adamant: the guilty man shall remain on the remote rock where infamy has placed him and he shall be devoured by remorse. But then, those unspeakable accusations, those dangerous accusations that might inflame all of Europe and had to be so carefully concealed behind the closed doors of a secret session - are they true?   No, they are not! There is nothing behind all that but the extravagant, demented flights of fancy of Major du Paty de Clam. It's all a smokescreen with just one purpose: to conceal a cheap novel of the most outlandish sort. And to be convinced of this, one need only examine the formal indictment that was read before the court martial.   How hollow that indictment is! Is it possible a man has been found guilty on the strength of it? Such iniquity is staggering. I challenge decent people to read it: their hearts will leap with indignation and rebellion when they think of the disproportionate price Dreyfus is paying so far away on Devil's Island. So Dreyfus speaks several languages, does he? This is a crime. Not one compromising paper was found in his home? A crime. He occasionally pays a visit to the region he hails from? A crime. He is a hard-working man, eager to know everything? A crime. He does not get flustered? A crime. He does get flustered? A crime. And how naively it is worded! How baseless its claims are! They told us he was indicted on fourteen different counts but in the end there is actually only one: that famous bordereau; and we even find out that the experts did not all agree, that one of them, M. Gobert, was subjected to some military pressure because he dared to come to a different conclusion from the one they wanted him to reach. We were also told that twenty-three officers had come and testified against Dreyfus. We still do not know how they were questioned, but what is certain is that not all of their testimony was negative. Besides, all of them, you will notice, came, from the offices of the War Department. This trial is a family conclave; they all belong. We must not forget that. It is the General Staff who wanted this trial; it is they who judged Dreyfus; and they have just judged him for the second time.
So all that was left was the bordereau, on which the experts had not agreed. They say that in the council chambers, the judges were naturally leaning towards acquittal. And if that is the case then you can understand why, on the General Staff, they are so desperately insistent today on proclaiming, in order to justify the judgement that there was a damning but secret document; they cannot reveal it but it makes everything legitimate and we must bow before it, as before an invisible and unknowable God! I deny the existence of any such document, I deny it with all my strength! Some ridiculous piece of paper, possibly; perhaps the one that talks about easy women and mentions a man named D. . . who is becoming too demanding; no doubt some husband or other who feels they're not paying him enough for the use of his wife. But a document that concerns the national defence, a document that would cause war to be declared immediately if ever it was produced? No! No! It's a lie! And what makes the whole business all the more odious and cynical is that they are lying with impunity and there is no way to convict them. They turn France inside out, they shelter behind the legitimate uproar they have caused, they seal mouths by making hearts quake and perverting minds. I know of no greater crime against society.
These, M. le President, are the facts that explain how a miscarriage of justice has come to be committed. And the evidence as to Dreyfus's character, his financial situation, his lack of motives, the fact that he has never ceased to clamour his innocence - all these demonstrate that he has been a victim of Major du Paty de Clam's overheated imagination, and of the clericalism that prevails in the military circles in which he moves, and of the hysterical hunt for 'dirty Jews' that disgraces our times.

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Now we come to the Esterhazy affair. Three years have passed. Many people's consciences are still profoundly uneasy; worried, they look further, and ultimately they become convinced that Dreyfus is innocent.
I will not retrace the story of M. Scheurer-Kestner's doubts and then of the certainty he came to feel. But while he was conducting his investigation, very serious events were taking place within the General Staff itself. Colonel Sandherr had died and Lt-Col Picquart had succeeded him at the head of the Intelligence Bureau. And it is in that capacity and in the exercise of his functions that Picquart one day held in his hands a special delivery letter addressed to Major Esterhazy by an agent of a foreign power. It was Picquart's strictest duty to launch an investigation. It is clear that he never acted otherwise than with the consent of his superior officers. So he outlined his suspicions to his hierarchical superiors - General Gonse, then General de Boisdeffre, then General Billot, who had succeeded General Mercier as Minister of War. The famous Picquart file that has been talked about so much was never anything more nor less than the Billot file, by which I mean the file that a subaltern prepared for his Minister, the file that they must still have in the War Ministry. The inquiry lasted from May to September 1896, and two things must be stated in no uncertain terms: General Gonse was convinced that Esterhazy was guilty, and neither General de Boisdeffre nor General Billot questioned the fact that the bordereau was in Esterhazy's handwriting. Lt-Col Picquart's investigation had led to that indubitable conclusion. But feeling ran very high, for if Esterhazy was found guilty, then inevitably the Dreyfus verdict would have to be revised, and that was what the General Staff was determined to avoid at all costs.
At that point there must have been an instant of the most intense psychological anguish. Note that General Billot was not compromised in any way; he had just come on stage; it was within his power to reveal the truth. But he dared not do it - terrified of public opinion, no doubt, and certainly afraid as well of handing over the entire General Staff, including General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse, not to mention the subalterns. Then there was but one minute of struggle between his conscience and what he thought was in the best interests of the army. Once that minute was over, it was already too late. He had made his choice; he was compromised. And ever since then his share of responsibility has grown and grown; he has taken the others' crime upon himself; he is as guilty as the others; he is guiltier than the others, for he had the power to see that justice was done and he did nothing. Understand that if you can! For a year now, General Billot, General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this appalling knowledge to themselves! And people like that sleep soundly! And they have wives and children, and love them dearly!
Lt-Col Picquart had done his duty as a decent man. In the name of justice, he insisted to his superior officers. He even begged them; he told them how impolitic their dithering was, what a terrible storm was building up, how it was going to burst once the truth became known. Later on, M. Scheurer-Kestner used the same words to General Billot; out of patriotism, he implored him to get a grip on the Affair instead of letting it go from bad to worse until it became a public disaster. But no, the crime had been committed and the General Staff could no longer confess to it. And Lt-Col Picquart was sent away on mission; they sent him farther and farther away, all the way to Tunisia where one day they even tried to do his bravery the honour of assigning him to a mission that would assuredly have got him slaughtered, in the same region where the Marquis de Mores had been killed. Mind you, Picquart was not in disgrace; General Gonse had a friendly exchange of letters with him. Only, there are some secrets it is not wise to have discovered.
In Paris, the all-conquering truth was on the march, and we know how the predictable storm eventually burst. M. Mathieu Dreyfus denounced Major Esterhazy as the real author of the bordereau just as M. Scheurer-Kestner was about to place in the hands of the Minister of Justice a request for a revision of the Dreyfus trial. And this is where Major Esterhazy appears. Witnesses state that at first he panicked; he was on the verge of suicide or about to flee. Then suddenly he became boldness itself and grew so violent that all Paris was astonished. The reason is that help had suddenly materialized in the form of an anonymous letter warning him of his enemies' doings; a mysterious lady had even gone to the trouble one night of bringing him a document that had been stolen from the General Staff and was supposed to save him. And I cannot help suspecting Lt-Col du Paty de Clam, for I recognize the type of expedients in which his fertile imagination delights. His achievement - the decision that Dreyfus was guilty - was in danger, and no doubt he wished to defend his achievement. A revision of the verdict? Why, that would put an end to the far-fetched, tragic work of cheap fiction whose abominable last chapter is being written on Devil's Island! He could not allow that to happen. Henceforth, a duel was bound to take place between Lt-Col Picquart and Lt-Col du Paty de Clam. The one shows his face for all to see; the other is masked. Soon we will see them both in the civil courts. Behind it all is the General Staff, still defending itself, refusing to admit to its crime, which becomes more of an abomination with every passing hour.
In a daze, people wondered who Major Esterhazy's protectors could be. Behind the scenes there was Lt-Col du Paty de Clam, first of all; he cobbled it all together, led the whole thing. The means used were so preposterous that they give him away. Then, there are General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse and General Billot himself, who are obliged to get Esterhazy acquitted since they dare not let Dreyfus's innocence be acknowledged lest the War Office collapse as the public heaps scorn on it. It's a prodigious situation and the impressive result is that Lt-Col Picquart, the one decent man involved, the only one who has done his duty, is going to be the victim, the person they will ride rough-shod over and punish. Ah justice! what dreadful despair grips my heart! They are even claiming that Picquart is the forger, that he forged the letter-telegram purposely to cause Esterhazy's downfall. But in heaven's name, why? To what end? State one motive. Is he too paid by the Jews? The funniest thing about the whole story is that in fact he was anti-Semitic. Yes. we are witnessing an infamous sight: men heavily in debt and guilty of evil deeds but whose innocence is being proclaimed while the very honour of a man whose record is spotless is being dragged in the mud! When a society comes to that, it begins to rot away.
This, M. le President, is the Esterhazy affair: a guilty man who had to be proved innocent. For almost two months now, we have been following every single episode of this pitiful business. I am simplifying, for by and large this is only a summary of the story, but one day every one of its turbulent pages will be written in full. So it is that we saw General de Pellieux, first of all, then Major Ravary, conduct a villainous investigation from which the scoundrels emerged transfigured while decent people were besmirched. Then, the court martial was convened.

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Did anyone really hope that one court martial would undo what another court martial had done in the first place?
I am not even talking about the judges, who could have been chosen differently. Since these soldiers have a lofty idea of discipline in their blood, isn't that enough to disqualify them from arriving at an equitable judgement? Discipline means obedience. Once the Minister of War, the supreme commander, has publicly established the authority of the original verdict, and has done so to the acclamations of the nation's representatives, how can you expect a court martial to override his judgement officially? In hierarchical terms, that is impossible. General Billot, in his statement, planted certain ideas in the judges' minds, and they proceeded to judge the case in the same way as they would proceed to go into battle, that is, without stopping to think. The preconceived idea that they brought with them to the judges' bench was of course as follows: 'Dreyfus was sentenced for treason by a court martial, therefore he is guilty; and we, as a court martial, cannot find him innocent. Now, we know that if we recognize Esterhazy's guilt we will be proclaiming Dreyfus's innocence.' And nothing could make them budge from that line.
They reached an iniquitous verdict which will forever weigh heavy on all our future courts martial and forever make their future decisions suspect. There may be room for doubt as to whether the first court martial was intelligent but there is no doubt that the second has been criminal. Its excuse, I repeat, is that the commander in chief had spoken and declared the previous verdict unattackable, holy and superior to mere mortals - and how could his subordinates dare to contradict him? They talk to us about the honour of the army; they want us to love the army, respect the army. Oh yes, indeed, if you mean an army that would rise up at the very first hint of danger, that would defend French soil; that army is the French people themselves, and we have nothing but affection and respect for it. But the army that is involved here is not the dignified army that our need for justice calls out for. What we are faced with here is the sabre, the master that may be imposed on us tomorrow. Should we kiss the hilt of that sabre, that god, with pious devotion? No, we should not!
As I have already shown, the Dreyfus Affair was the affair of the War Office: an officer from the General Staff denounced by his fellow officers on the General Staff, sentenced under pressure from the Chiefs of the General Staff. And I repeat, he cannot emerge from his trial innocent without all of the General Staff being guilty. Which is why the War Office employed every means imaginable - campaigns in the press, statements and innuendoes, every type of influence - to cover Esterhazy, in order to convict Dreyfus a second time. The republican government should take a broom to that nest of Jesuits (General Billot calls them that himself) and make a clean sweep! Where, oh where is a strong and wisely patriotic ministry that will be bold enough to overhaul the whole system and make a fresh start? I know many people who tremble with alarm at the thought of a possible war, knowing what hands our national defence is in! and what a den of sneaking intrigue, rumour-mongering and back-biting that sacred chapel has become - yet that is where the fate of our country is decided! People take fright at the appalling light that has just been shed on it all by the Dreyfus Affair, that tale of human sacrifice! Yes, an unfortunate, a 'dirty Jew' has been sacrificed. Yes, what an accumulation of madness, stupidity, unbridled imagination, low police tactics, inquisitorial and tyrannical methods this handful of officers have got away with! They have crushed the nation under their boots, stuffing its calls for truth and justice down its throat on the fallacious and sacrilegious pretext that they are acting for the good of the country!
And they have committed other crimes. They have based their action on the foul press and let themselves be defended by all the rogues in Paris - and now the rogues are triumphant and Insolent while law and integrity go down in defeat. It is a crime to have accused individuals of rending France apart when all those individuals ask for is a generous nation at the head of the procession of free, just nations - and all the while the people who committed that crime were hatching an insolent plot to make the entire world swallow a fabrication. It is a crime to lead public opinion astray, to manipulate it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the humble, ordinary people, to whip reactionary and intolerant passions into a frenzy while sheltering behind the odious bastion of anti-Semitism. France, the great and liberal cradle of the rights of man, will die of anti-Semitism if it is not cured of it. It is a crime to play on patriotism to further the aims of hatred. And it is a crime to worship the sabre as a modern god, when all of human science is labouring to hasten the triumph of truth and justice.
Truth and justice - how ardently we have striven for them! And how distressing it is to see them slapped in the face, overlooked, forced to retreat! I can easily imagine the harrowing dismay that must be filling M. Scheurer- Kestner's soul, and one day, no doubt, he will wish that when he was questioned before the Senate he had taken the revolutionary step of revealing everything he knew, ripping away all pretence. He was your true good man, a man who could look back on an honest life. He assumed that truth alone would be enough - could not help but be enough, since it was plain as day to him. What was the point of upsetting everything, since the sun would soon be shining? He was serene and confident, and how cruelly he is being punished for that now! The same is true of Lt-Col Picquart: out of a lofty sense of dignity, he refrained from publishing General Gonse's letters. His scruples do him honour, particularly since while he was being respectful of discipline, his superior officers were busy slinging mud at him, conducting the investigation prior to his trial themselves, in the most outrageous and unbelievable way. There are two victims, two decent, stout-hearted men, who stood back to let God have His way - and all the while the devil was doing his work. And where Lt-Col Picquart is concerned, we have even seen this ignoble thing: a French court first allowed the rapporteur to bring charges against a witness publicly, accuse him publicly of every wrong in the book, and then, when that witness was called to give an account of himself and speak in his own defence, that same court held its session behind closed doors. I say that that is still another crime, and I say that it will arouse the conscience of all mankind. Our military tribunals certainly do have a peculiar idea of justice.
That, M. le President, is the plain truth. It is appalling. It will remain an indelible blot on your term as President. Oh, I know that you are powerless to deal with it, that you are the prisoner of the Constitution and of the people nearest to you. But as a man, your duty is clear, and you will not overlook it, and you will do your duty. Not for one minute do I despair tha truth will triumph. I am confident and I repeat, more vehemently even than before, the truth is on the march and nothing shall stop it. The Affair is only just beginning, because only now have the positions become crystc clear: on the one hand, the guilty parties, who do not want the truth to be revealed; on the other, the defenders of justice, who will give their lives to see that justice is done. I have said it elsewhere and I repeat it here: if the truth is buried underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open along with it. Time will tell; we shall see whether we have not prepared, for some later date, the most resounding disaster.

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But this letter has been a long one, M. le President, and it is time to bring it to a close.