World War I

World War I is the future historical horizon against which the book places the Dreyfus affair. The affair’s 1890s setting is linked to the French defeat of 1870 and Germany’s occupation of Alsace and Lorraine, a shock to Europe’s balance of power that the author identifies as a precursor to both World War I and World War II. The war itself is not narrated here; its significance lies in how the memory of the earlier conflict governs the people and institutions confronting the affair.

The 1870 defeat as historical prelude

The author situates the Dreyfus affair only twenty-five years after Germany defeated France in 1870 and occupied Alsace and Lorraine. That interval makes the case more than a dispute within the army: it unfolds within a Europe still marked by the consequences of war and by a changed balance of power. The book connects that earlier shock to the conflicts that would later become World War I and World War II, presenting them as part of a longer historical aftermath rather than as events depicted in the main narrative.

Picquart’s personal memory of war

For Georges Picquart, the prelude is also an experience remembered from childhood. He was sixteen when German shelling struck Strasbourg. He witnessed the city’s art gallery and library burn, saw neighbourhoods destroyed, helped dig strangers from rubble, and knelt beside dying friends. After nine weeks, the garrison surrendered. Residents then had to choose between remaining under German rule or leaving for France; Picquart’s family moved to Paris, destitute and stripped of its faith in the security of civilized life.

That experience redirected Picquart’s prospects. He reflects that before the humiliation of 1870 he might have become a music professor or a surgeon, but afterwards a career outside the army seemed frivolous. The Ministry of War paid for his education, and he came to regard the army as a father whose approval he worked hard to earn. His military identity—and the loyalty that later complicates his response to the Dreyfus case—therefore begins in the same national defeat that foreshadows the later European war.

The military generation and the fear of Germany

The book shows that the defeat remained active in the thinking of senior officers. Charles-Arthur Gonse, Auguste Mercier, and Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre belong to a generation scarred as young officers by the rout of 1870. Their outlook is shaped by the conviction that France is materially outmatched: the book gives their pessimistic formula as three Germans for every two Frenchmen and three francs spent on German armaments for every two France can afford. Picquart despises their defeatism, but their arithmetic helps explain why they regard renewed conflict as an ever-present danger.

This fear enters the immediate politics of the affair when Gonse warns that France is in no condition to fight Germany and could be placed at risk if the Germans used the case as a pretext for attack. The possibility of war thus becomes an argument within the military response to the scandal, not simply a distant historical consequence. The old defeat supplies both a real anxiety about national vulnerability and a rationale for treating the case as a matter of security.

The affair recast through the possibility of war

At Alfred Dreyfus’s court-martial, the prosecution asks for a private hearing because the evidence is said to involve matters of national defence. The demand brings the security argument into direct conflict with the defence’s insistence on equal treatment and an open proceeding. In this way, the book connects the fear of Germany to a concrete restriction on scrutiny: the imagined danger of war helps justify withholding evidence from public examination.

Later, during the Rennes proceedings, Mercier revives the threat of war to defend his earlier conduct. He claims that the country had come close to war with Germany and describes waiting with President Casimir-Perier at the Élysée Palace while preparations for mobilization were contemplated. Casimir-Perier challenges Mercier’s account in court, making the invocation of military danger itself part of the contested testimony. The episode shows how the memory of 1870 and the prospect of another war can be used to defend secrecy, while the book leaves the truth of Mercier’s dramatic claim under dispute.