Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France

The wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army captain in France in the late 19th century exposed antisemitism and virulent nationalism – but also, as Mike Rapport reveals, sparked a flood of ‘fake news’ that presaged the worst of the modern media landscape

Published: November 24, 2025 at 9:00 AM

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In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bottle of rum, and killed himself.

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This desperate act was a pivotal moment in one of the best-known causes celebres in modern history: the Dreyfus Affair. The story of Henry’s suicide, following his arrest for forging a document in the controversial case, was co-opted by the nationalist rightwing media as part of a tidal wave of coverage that threatened to destabilise French democracy and public trust in the Republic.

The background is well known today. In September 1894, Henry, a counter-espionage officer, had uncovered evidence of a mole within French military intelligence. A cleaner working in the German embassy (and in Henry’s pay) had found a memorandum, since dubbed the ‘bordereau’, written by an officer in the French General Staff revealing military secrets. The handwriting was identified as that of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain then working in the War Ministry, who was arrested, court-martialled, publicly degraded and hauled off to solitary confinement on the notoriously harsh penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana.

But the army had the wrong man.

Contradictions and irregularities in the case soon began to appear. In August 1896, the new head of military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, was examining more papers stolen from the German embassy. The handwriting on one was identical to that in the bordereau used to convict Dreyfus – but the signature was that of Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissipated, debt-ridden, disreputable officer who had been selling secrets to the Germans for two years. Dreyfus, Picquart realised, was innocent.

An engraving shows a man lying dead on the floor, while a police officer kneels over him. Another police officer stands by his head, and two more officers are entering the room in the background

An engraving depicts the discovery of the suicide of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry following his arrest for forging a letter incriminating Dreyfus. Some thought his crime justifiable (Image by Bridgeman Images)

Ignoring the errors

Even after this discovery, Dreyfus remained incarcerated for years longer because government officials, the army and large segments of public opinion refused to accept that a terrible error had been made. In part this was a result of the desire to maintain national security by authorities who were keen to avoid demoralising the army just as France secured a military alliance with the Russian empire, and amid heightened tensions with Germany following its annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region from France in 1871. But it was also due to the fact that Dreyfus was from Alsace, and Jewish – at a time when a virulent strain of antisemitism based on ‘scientific’ racism had emerged, and as antisemites of different political persuasions associated Jews with either socialism or capitalism.

These motives also played on a deeper division that had riven French society since 1789. There were those who, like Dreyfus himself, embraced the principles of the Revolution and its legacy as embodied in the Third Republic, founded in 1870. These included secularism, parliamentary democracy, civil equality and a world view exulting in science and human reason. Adherents of this strong current within French political culture generally became ‘Dreyfusards’ who supported the officer’s innocence. Their opponents saw 1789 as a fatal breach with France’s true historical destiny: Catholic, hierarchical and monarchical. More recently, this traditional conservatism had been joined by a new form of rightwing ideology promising social reform but which was also nationalist, authoritarian, antisemitic. Many of those with such views became ‘anti-Dreyfusard’, opposed to revisiting the case.

These flames were stoked by a virulently partisan newspaper press that played a pivotal role in the battle for public opinion. Print media had experienced a boom stimulated by more rapid communications, the introduction of photographs into newspapers, an expansion in advertising, and new forms of printing technology that made periodicals quicker and cheaper to produce and more widely available.

At that time, France had a particularly vibrant press. Free, compulsory and universal primary education for boys and girls from the early 1880s encouraged literacy, and a press law enacted in 1881 lifted almost all restrictions on what could be published, although this was rolled back in 1893 and 1894 after a spate of anarchist bombings. Journalists and publishers could be sued for slander, but cases were rarely successful. Between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the number of periodical titles mushroomed by 250 per cent. These publications included broadsheets and tabloid newspapers representing the whole range of political opinions from the radical left to the extreme right.

Yet within this vibrant ecosystem of print lurked a danger that remains familiar in our age of social media, online news and artificial intelligence. It was all too easy to spread what we now call ‘fake news’ – misinformation (falsehoods spread unintentionally), disinformation (fabrications aimed at manipulating readers politically and socially) and malinformation (deception based on some truth, but twisted in such a way as to deceive).

A black and white photograph of a man wearing military uniform, including a hat with "74" written on the front. He has a large, heavy moustache

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the officer who really wrote the treasonous memorandum attributed to Dreyfus. He was acquitted by a tribunal in 1898 (Image by Getty Images)

Fake news

During the Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper press was infused with ‘fake news’. Not for the last time, the episode exposed the friction between free speech on the one hand and, on the other hand, the challenges that arise when people of bad faith abuse that freedom, spreading falsehoods to manipulate public opinion, demonise certain groups of people, or undermine faith in the rule of law and democratic government.

The Dreyfus case sparked a truly explosive public controversy after Walsin Esterhazy was finally tried – and acquitted with unseemly haste – by a military court in January 1898. On 13 January, novelist Émile Zola published J’Accuse…!, an open letter to the president of the Republic, in L’Aurore newspaper. He accused the government and army of committing a gross injustice and of conspiring to cover up the truth. He specifically highlighted and decried the antisemitism, militarism and authoritarianism behind the falsehoods:

“It is a crime to lead public opinion astray,” Zola wrote, “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 antisemitism… It is a crime to play on patriotism to further the aims of hatred.”

A yellow newspaper page with the headline "J'accuse!" written across the top

Émile Zola’s open letter to the president of the Republic, accusing the army and government of a cover-up in the Dreyfus Affair, exposed deep rifts in French society (Image by Getty Images)

Following Zola’s outburst, the Dreyfus Affair erupted into a full-scale public storm. Except on rare occasions, newspapers tended to reinforce the beliefs of their readership rather than challenge them with facts. Giving readers what they wanted to hear was partly driven by economics: the conservative Le Figaro, for example, had stopped publishing Zola’s articles towards the end of 1897 after he openly embraced the Dreyfusard cause, which hurt sales of the newspaper. Yet much of the fake news had an even more insidious purpose. Anti-Dreyfusard papers fuelled nationalist prejudices by targeting Jews; claimed to be defending the ‘honour’ of the army; and railed against the ‘unpatriotic’ manoeuvres of the Dreyfusards – all as a means of galvanising support for the assorted authoritarians, monarchists, nationalists and antisemites who loathed the Republic.

It was not that the Dreyfusards were innocent of spreading fake news. Although much of what Zola wrote in J’Accuse…! turned out to be accurate, he did not get everything right, as he himself appeared to admit when he finished by saying that he would willingly submit to prosecution for defamation under the 1881 Press Law. Zola did, in fact, face prosecution in 1898, avoiding imprisonment only by slipping away in June to England and living there in exile for a year.

Even some leftwing Dreyfusard newspapers tended to casually use the antisemitic trope of the Jew as capitalist to explain popular hostility against Jews. Anti-Dreyfusard publications saw Jews, socialists and leftwing republicans as a ‘Syndicate of Treason’ (as the vitriolic journalist Henri Rochefort put it). However, the Dreyfusard press was prone to sharing conspiracy theories of its own, seeing its opponents as part of an interwoven plot involving the Catholic church and the nationalists, aiming to destroy the Republic and the inheritance of 1789. Yet the anti-Dreyfusard press had most of the running: of the 55 dailies published at the time, only eight came out as Dreyfusard from February 1898, almost all of them with relatively low circulation numbers. The media was dominated by anti-Dreyfusard titles, which had an almost open field in which to bombard readers with a swirl of half-truths and outright lies, stoking prejudices and stirring up fears.

Forgiveable forgery

One of the most egregious moments came in the wake of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry’s death. After his colleague, Picquart, had exposed Esterhazy as the real traitor in 1896, Henry had tried to bolster the case against Dreyfus by forging a letter that ‘proved’ his guilt, introducing it into the dossier of evidence. The ruse was successful until, as the pressure mounted over the course of 1898, the government investigated and discovered that forgery, leading to Henry’s arrest and suicide.

For anti-Dreyfusard journalists, Henry’s crime was forgiveable: it was ‘patriotic’ because it served a higher cause – the security of the nation. Dreyfus was guilty anyway, they claimed; and even if he were innocent, those who sought to clear his name were traitors working for Germany.

The virulently nationalist La Patrie accused Zola of doing untold harm to the army: “And since that day, the damage has surged in like a torrent, roared like a tempest. Who has not recognised in this tactic the workings of Bismarckian [ie German] politics?”

The idea that Henry was a martyr to the cause of patriotism gained traction when the explicitly and graphically antisemitic La Libre Parole opened a subscription for the Lieutenant-Colonel’s widow, Berthe, which received no fewer than 25,000 donations. The newspaper published the many antisemitic and anti-republican messages sent along with the money. La Libre Parole means ‘Free Speech’, making it a case study for how prejudice and anti-democratic forces cloak themselves in the very freedoms that they seek to destroy or to deny to others.

The Dreyfus case was – rightly or wrongly – seen as connected with both national security and the country’s future, so both sides entrenched themselves deeply within their positions. The more that the problems with Dreyfus’s conviction trickled out, the more the anti-Dreyfusards reinvigorated strategies that rested less on facts than on what is today called ‘gaslighting’ and on deflection, both of which involved stoking prejudices and demeaning opponents.

Gaslighting, by which the perpetrator seeks to cast doubt on the truth, was deployed by Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, who in June 1898 assured his readers that Dreyfusards were merely “a clutch of cosmopolitans who always talk of pieces of paper and documents but never prove anything” – the term ‘cosmopolitan’ being a dog-whistle term denoting unpatriotic or Jewish people.

The top image shows a man in a suit with a moustache sitting at a desk and looking to the right. The bottom image shows a bearded man wearing glasses attached to a string, looking directly into the camera

Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès (top) entreated readers to consider national security above the facts of the miscarriage of justice, in contrast with the moral arguments of Dreyfusard Émile Zola (Images by TopFoto and Getty Images)

Image by Getty Images

Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès made a more sophisticated use of gaslighting. Nothing in the Dreyfus Affair was demonstrably true, he argued in Le Journal in February 1898, so “how do you intend… to undertake to solve the problem when you do not have all the data?” he demanded of the Dreyfusards.

Barrès’ purpose was to cast doubt on the significance of the few facts that were, at that point, already public knowledge. He took this further by suggesting that there are some truths that are “foreign to individual reason”, and that national circumstances and interests were the true barometer of what was just and true. “It is necessary to judge things in the relative,” Barrès argued, opening the way for his readership to be secure in their prejudices – because for them the army’s honour and national security were more important than the facts of any miscarriage of justice.

Anti-Dreyfusard newspapers tried in various ways to deflect their readers’ attention away from the question of the convicted man’s innocence and onto other targets. This was a strategy behind the argument that Henry’s forgery was ‘patriotic’: his crime was minor compared to the real danger, which would be the victory of the Dreyfusards, who were no better than traitors. La Patrie proclaimed in September 1898: “Let us leave those cosmopolitans from Frankfurt to howl with joy over the tomb of that modest child of French soil [Henry]… Let us turn away with disgust from the spectacle of the odious triumph of the worst enemies of the army and of the country.” In that one sentence, the newspaper connected the Dreyfusards with treason, with Germany and Jews (‘cosmopolitans’), and with the ignominy of defeat – ‘Frankfurt’ being a reference to the humiliating peace treaty with Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

Demeaning caricatures

At the same time, the anti-Dreyfusard press demeaned their opponents, caricaturing them as effeminate wimps, sexually sterile and highly strung, and contrasted them with the muscular, virile masculinity of the army officers whom they were accused of attacking.

Zola was frequently depicted with simian characteristics: hairy, fat, thick-lipped. Dreyfus and other Jewish figures were ascribed the whole range of antisemitic tropes. La Libre Parole compared the ‘French’ femininity of Henry’s widow, Berthe, with the Jewish Dreyfusard Joseph Reinach, who was “puffy, swarthy, sweaty, stomach bulging”. For some, it did not even matter that Dreyfus was innocent: he was Jewish, so for the nationalists the greater ‘truth’ was that he could never be French. The process of gaslighting and deflection combined to stoke prejudices and popular fears, fogging out the original question of Dreyfus’s innocence.

Yet a denouement was eventually reached. In February 1899, President Félix Faure – who opposed reopening Dreyfus’s case – died of a brain haemorrhage. He was succeeded by a Dreyfusard, Émile Loubet, whose election by parliament prompted an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue antisémitique, who provided the street muscle of the anti-Dreyfusard movement. In June, the appeals court quashed Dreyfus’s conviction and ordered a retrial, which took place in August and September 1899 in Rennes – Paris being deemed too dangerous. Shockingly, the military tribunal again found the captain guilty. President Loubet issued a formal pardon, but Dreyfus was not officially cleared until 1906. He returned to the army, serving with merit in the First World War.

The Dreyfus Affair showed how, when the stakes were high and when divisions ran deep, a torrent of half-truths, lies, deflection, the stoking of fear and prejudices, and appeals to ‘patriotism’ made it difficult for citizens to make informed decisions. It also demonstrated that many citizens were content to have their prejudices reaffirmed rather than critically examined.

This is why Barrès’ argument that the nation had needs that were above reason and truth was so corrosive to democratic politics. The principle that truth, justice and legality could be judged only according to national interests allowed readers to indulge in a kind of relativism that justified falsehoods and injustice in pursuit of a conception of France that excluded groups who were the bogeymen of the nationalist right: Jews, foreigners, Protestants, Freemasons, socialists and others. It also exposed the spiky question that every democracy faces when freedom of expression becomes a means of undermining confidence and trust in its institutions: how to defend itself without infringing the very liberties that are its essence.

Ultimately, the lesson of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in an age of mass media, citizens not only need to be equipped to make the honest effort to assess critically their sources of information and to examine their positions with verifiable evidence: they have to be willing to do so. In December 1898, L’Aurore understood that this was essential to the survival of democracy: “It is for citizens to inform themselves, to think, to use their will; it is for them to reform their morals, to no longer let themselves be taken for fools or as things to be juggled with and to emancipate themselves, not by force, but by ideas.” We need, the newspaper concluded, to “enlighten [our] brains, not slice them open!”

Mike Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow

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This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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