France, History Of, The Dreyfus affair

The 1890s also saw the Third Republic's greatest political and moral crisis - the Dreyfus affair. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a career army officer of Jewish origin, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans. He was tried and convicted by a court-martial and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island off the South American coast. Efforts by the Dreyfus