Abstract
On the 15 October 1894, the French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and accused of giving capital secret intelligence to the Germans. He was unanimously declared guilty of treason by the senior Paris court martial the 22 December 1894, and sentenced to deportation for life in the famous prison of Devil's Island, the French penal colony. However, it appeared actually that Dreyfus was innocent, and that the true culprit was the major Esterhazy.
Dreyfus was finally rehabilitated in 1906. Described in this way, this case could be seen as a simple miscarriage of justice. However, Dreyfus affair is actually considered as one of the Third Republic's turning point. According to Mayeur and Reberioux "the Affair bears comparison with the greatest crises that French society has experienced". Indeed the Dreyfus affair triggered a huge reaction in the French society, dividing France between two opposite sides, the pro-Dreyfus and the anti-Dreyfus. They were sharply ideologically opposed, and the victory of one of them would inevitably influence the future path of the Third Republic.
The affair could actually had such a dramatic consequence for the Republic because this one was actually weak when the time came to face the affair. Confidently proclaimed the 4 September 1870 from the balcony of Paris City Hall, the Republic had to face the opposition of a majority of monarchists (the Legitimists and the Orleanists), and mainly owed its survival to their incapacity to unite on the choice of a King. Moreover, the recent context of the fin de siecle France was tensed: the Third Republic had to face the phylloxera crisis which weakened it, economically speaking.
