Étienne Bazeries

Étienne Bazeries is the presiding expert of a seven-man code-breaking team in the French Foreign Ministry. His decipherment of a telegram from Panizzardi establishes that the message did not implicate Alfred Dreyfus: it asked whether Dreyfus had dealt with the Italians and proposed an official denial if he had not. Bazeries’s encounter with Georges Picquart exposes not only the correct reading of the telegram but the pressure the General Staff had put on its meaning.

Position and Reputation

Code-breaking belongs neither to the Statistical Section nor to the Ministry of War, but to a seven-man team in the French Foreign Ministry, headed by Bazeries. Newspapers have made him famous for breaking the Great Cipher of Louis XIV and revealing the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. The account presents him as an eccentric prodigy, unkempt, abrupt, and forgetful, and as a difficult person to find or consult.

Picquart visits the Quai d’Orsay twice on the pretext of other business, but Bazeries’s staff cannot tell him where their chief is. At the end of the month Picquart finally finds him in his office, in his shirtsleeves and bent over a desk. A cylindrical enciphering device lies in pieces around him, and he is working on it with a screwdriver. Although Picquart is theoretically his superior officer, Bazeries neither salutes nor stands. His disregard for rank is part of a broader indifference to conventional grooming and decorum; Picquart even remarks on the unwashed atmosphere of the office.

The Panizzardi Telegram

Picquart brings Bazeries the telegram sent by the Italian military attaché Panizzardi to the General Staff in Rome on 2 November 1894. In his notebook, Picquart has placed the coded text copied from the archive beside the solution attributed to Charles-Arthur Gonse: that Dreyfus had been arrested, that the Ministry of War possessed evidence of his dealings with Germany, and that precautions had been taken. When Picquart asks whether this is Bazeries’s solution, Bazeries immediately rejects it. He insists that the transcript is not what the telegram says, and that wishing it to say something else cannot make that reading correct.

Bazeries explains how the General Staff supplied him with a false expectation before the cipher was solved. Panizzardi took the original telegram to the telegraph office on avenue Montaigne at three in the morning; through an arrangement with the telegraph service, it reached Bazeries’s department by ten. At eleven, Colonel Sandherr arrived demanding an urgent decipherment. Bazeries initially told him that this particularly complex cipher had never been broken. Sandherr then offered a supposed shortcut: he claimed he could guarantee that the message contained a particular word, and named “Dreyfus.”

Sandherr had arranged for Dreyfus’s name to be leaked to newspapers as the identity of the man arrested for espionage. He expected whoever employed Dreyfus to panic and contact their superiors. After Panizzardi was followed to the telegraph office in the middle of the night, Sandherr treated the transmission as confirmation that his tactic had worked. But when Bazeries deciphered the message, it contradicted that expectation. The solution read: “If Captain Dreyfus has had no dealings with you it would be appropriate to instruct the ambassador to publish an official denial in order to avoid comments by the press.” The telegram therefore suggested that Panizzardi was unaware of any dealings between Dreyfus and the Italians, rather than confirming the General Staff’s suspicions.

Resistance to a Forced Reading

The original telegram, which Bazeries has fetched from his department’s files, bears Panizzardi’s handwriting. Bazeries shows Picquart the coded text and the decipherment written neatly beneath its numerals, making the contrast between the document and Gonse’s version concrete. His anger is directed at the repeated refusal to accept the solution, not at any remaining difficulty in reading it: he says that the Ministry continued to reject the facts and that Sandherr would not accept the result because it failed to match what he wanted the message to say.

Sandherr escalated the dispute to the highest levels and arranged for an agent to give Panizzardi fresh information on an unrelated matter. This prompted a second cipher message to Rome containing specified technical terms. Bazeries’s team broke that message as well, using it to demonstrate beyond doubt that the original decryption was correct. The entire procedure took nine days. By the time Picquart approaches him, Bazeries regards the matter as settled and resents being asked to reopen it.

Narrative Significance

Bazeries’s role is limited in duration but decisive in evidentiary force. He supplies an independent technical check on the version preserved in the military file, and his account shows how Sandherr’s planted expectation shaped the demand for a solution before the cipher could be read. The episode turns a disputed interpretation into a verifiable contrast: the coded original and its decipherment say one thing, while the General Staff’s account says another. Bazeries’s refusal to bend the result to institutional insistence makes his expertise a point of resistance to the case against Dreyfus.