The 1890s

The 1890s are the decade in which the Dreyfus Affair grows from a military intelligence matter into a public crisis over evidence, antisemitism, and institutional responsibility. In the novel, the period’s defining movement is the passage of information between agents, files, officers, newspapers, and witnesses: secrecy is meant to contain the affair, but each attempt to manage it widens its reach.

Historical Setting

The Author’s Note places the affair in a France still living with the consequences of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Only twenty-five years separated that defeat and the German occupation of Alsace and Lorraine from the events of the novel; the note describes that earlier rupture as a shock to the European balance of power and a precursor to the First and Second World Wars. Within this unsettled political setting, the Dreyfus Affair came to obsess France and, ultimately, the wider world.

The book presents itself as a novelistic retelling of real history rather than a documentary transcript. Its note says that none of its characters, even minor ones, is wholly fictional and that most events happened in some form, while also acknowledging compression, omitted figures, dramatization, and invented personal details. One stated invention is the secret account attributed to Georges Picquart and its imagined deposit in a Geneva bank vault. The decade is therefore both a historical period and the setting for a deliberately shaped narrative about how the affair was investigated and remembered.

From Intelligence Reports to the Bordereau

The sequence of intelligence reports begins before the accusation against Alfred Dreyfus. In June 1893, the Statistical Section received a note indicating that Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was receiving plans of French fortifications from an unidentified informant. An intercepted note in January 1894 described a further payment of six hundred francs for plans and other military information. These reports established the existence of a source passing material to foreign attachés, but did not identify that source conclusively.

In March 1894, François Guénée, acting for the Statistical Section, met the Spanish military attaché, the marquis de Val Carlos. Val Carlos warned that a French General Staff officer was informing German attachés. When Georges Picquart met him in June, Val Carlos again described an officer who had supplied information to German and Italian attachés, but could not name him. Picquart reported the conversation to Jean Sandherr, after which surveillance was intensified. On 25 September, the Bordereau that would form the basis of the Dreyfus case came into the section’s possession. The chronology places a genuine search for an unidentified source immediately beside the emergence of the document used to accuse Dreyfus, a juxtaposition that later investigation makes consequential.

Public Opinion and the Circulation of Secrecy

The decade’s public climate is shown not only through official files but through the treatment of Dreyfus. During his public degradation, Dreyfus repeatedly protested his innocence as the crowd answered with insults, including antisemitic cries. A Foreign Ministry observer interpreted his endurance as evidence of Jewish character; Sandherr endorsed the prejudice in explicitly hostile terms. The scene exposes how an accusation could be reinforced by assumptions about identity rather than tested solely against evidence.

The secret file also proves unable to remain secret. After L’Éclair published an anonymous article claiming that confidential evidence had established Dreyfus’s guilt, Picquart counted the people who knew of the file: officers, intelligence personnel, judges, the President, his doctor, and Mathieu Dreyfus. The growing list turns secrecy into a practical problem of circulation. Picquart reasons that photography, telegraphy, railways, and newspaper presses make lasting concealment impossible, while suspecting that the leak may instead prompt senior officers to restrict the investigation more aggressively.

From Private Accusation to Public Contest

As the affair moves into public view, the press becomes a channel for competing claims and personal attacks. In an interview reported by Le Matin, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy blamed Picquart for the investigation, accused him of passing secret files through Louis Leblois, and presented his transfer to Tunisia as evidence of disgrace. Picquart, who had never before seen his name in a newspaper, recognizes the reversal: an officer accustomed to working in the shadows has become a public target.

A later gathering brings together Picquart, Mathieu Dreyfus, Georges Clemenceau, Arthur Ranc, Joseph Reinach, and Émile Zola. Their meeting is itself treated as a security risk; Picquart says that every additional minute together increases the chance that the Sûreté will discover it. The episode shows how the affair’s network has expanded beyond official channels, linking the accused man’s family, politicians, journalists, and witnesses.

At Émile Zola’s trial, Georges de Pellieux declares that the defence has brought a passage from a closed proceeding into public view and then invokes alleged proof of Dreyfus’s guilt from November 1896. Picquart recognizes the reference as a letter previously read aloud but withheld from him. Pellieux’s intervention, intended to strengthen the case against the defence, instead gives Picquart an opening to challenge the claim. Across the decade, the movement from intercepted notes to newspaper allegations and public testimony makes the central conflict visible: military authority seeks to control the circulation of evidence, but its disclosures and assertions repeatedly create new grounds for scrutiny.