1899 Rennes military trial

The 1899 Rennes military trial put Alfred Dreyfus before a military court for a second time, after his original conviction had been challenged by evidence pointing to another officer and by questions about forged documents. Its public opening gave Dreyfus an opportunity to answer the charge, but the secret hearings that followed again placed crucial evidence beyond public scrutiny and excluded Georges Picquart from much of the proceeding. The guilty verdict renewed the injustice the trial was meant to resolve; its eventual reversal came only after years of further review.

Background and the disputed evidence

The Rennes proceedings took place amid a conflict over whether the case could be reconsidered without exposing the army’s handling of its evidence. Earlier, Charles-Arthur Gonse had told Georges Picquart to investigate Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy if he wished, but not to bring the bordereau into that investigation. During a later inquiry, Picquart challenged the exclusion of the central issue: Esterhazy’s handwriting, he argued, matched the bordereau, and the government’s own expert conceded the match. Picquart also raised the use of falsified material in the secret dossier that had helped convict Dreyfus. The inquiry declared those matters outside its scope.

After the Minister of War publicly cited three secret documents, Picquart drafted an open letter to Prime Minister Henri Brisson. He stated that the two documents dated 1894 could not be applied to Dreyfus and that the 1896 document showed every sign of being a forgery. He further argued that the minister and others had been misled about the documents’ relevance and authenticity. This dispute over what evidence could be examined formed part of the background to Rennes: the new trial would hear Dreyfus’s denial in public, then close its doors to allow the judges access to secret files.

The public opening

As the court assembled, Georges Picquart sat behind Mathieu Dreyfus; Lucie Dreyfus acknowledged him with a strained smile. Fernand Labori, dressed in his advocate’s robes, courteously let the older Edgar Demange precede him. Colonel Jouaust presided. When Alfred Dreyfus entered under escort, the courtroom reacted to his changed appearance: he was described as an old, small man, stiff in his movements, wearing a loose tunic and trousers that hung around his shrunken frame. He climbed the steps to the platform with difficulty, saluted the judges, and was told to stand.

Jouaust read the accusation of high treason, identifying the documents specified in the bordereau, and gave Dreyfus the document to examine. Trembling and visibly struggling to keep his composure, Dreyfus again declared himself innocent, invoking the honour of his name and his children. The court then went through the bordereau item by item. Dreyfus answered in technical terms: he denied knowing about the hydraulic brake of the 120-millimetre cannon, obtaining information about troop cover, requesting plans for an invasion of Madagascar, serving in the department where artillery formations were changed, or possessing a firing manual he was said to have borrowed. He also denied saying that France would be better off under German rule.

The opening session revisited an earlier, more public performance of the accusation. In 1895, at the École Militaire, Alfred Dreyfus had been brought onto the parade ground under escort, formally degraded, and marched past the troops while repeatedly asserting his innocence. At Rennes, his renewed denial was delivered in a courtroom rather than before a military parade, but the charge still demanded that he defend both his loyalty and his honour before an institution that had already condemned him.

Closed hearings and Picquart’s evidence

At eleven, Jouaust ended the public session and announced that the next four days would be held in camera so the judges could be shown the secret files. The public, the press, and Picquart were excluded. Dreyfus was escorted out without looking toward Picquart, while journalists hurried to telegraph their accounts of the Prisoner of Devil’s Island. The arrangement repeated a central feature of the earlier case: evidence said to concern national defence would be considered privately, while the accused’s access to it and the public’s ability to assess it remained limited.

The testimony also brought the conditions of Dreyfus’s confinement into court. When asked to comment on the reported torments of his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, he said he was there to defend his honour and that of his children, and would say nothing about what he had suffered. Picquart read this restraint not simply as coldness, but partly as Dreyfus’s determination not to present himself as a victim.

On Thursday, Picquart was called to testify. He stood at the witness platform barely two metres from Dreyfus, close enough to shake his hand but unable to speak to him directly. He swore to tell the complete truth. His presence made the dispute over the case’s central facts immediate: the officer who had identified Esterhazy as the likely author of the bordereau now testified in a trial where the secret files remained inaccessible to him during the closed sessions.

Verdict and aftermath

After the judges had deliberated for an hour and a half, the courtroom waited for word. The verdict was guilty by five votes to two, with the sentence reduced to ten years’ imprisonment. The reduction did not undo the conviction or restore Dreyfus’s honour. Just over a week later, Mathieu Dreyfus visited Picquart, who objected that accepting a pardon would amount to an admission of guilt. Mathieu answered that Alfred intended to issue a statement upon release declaring that freedom without honour meant nothing and that he would continue seeking reversal of the judicial error.

The Rennes judgment was ultimately quashed by the Supreme Court of Appeal, which fully exonerated Alfred Dreyfus on 12 July 1906. The following day, the Chamber of Deputies voted to restore him to the army as a major and award him the cross of the Legion of Honour; the motion passed 432 to 32. A separate motion restored Picquart to the rank he might have attained had he not been dishonourably discharged in 1898, passing 449 to 26. Picquart then returned to the parade ground of the École Militaire for Dreyfus’s medal ceremony, this time in the uniform of a brigadier general. The second public appearance there marked a reversal of the degradation that had once made the army’s verdict visible to the troops, though the years between the two ceremonies could not be restored.