Four Years and Seven Months in a Stone Hut

Alfred Dreyfus arrived at the rocky islet known as Île du Diable, off the coast of French Guiana, on 14 April 1895. He had been transported from the prison ship Saint-Nazaire in a steel cage in the hold for the four-week voyage across the Atlantic. He was thirty-five years old. He had been court-martialed for treason in December 1894 on the basis of a single handwritten document — the bordereau — that the French Army’s intelligence section had identified as written in his hand. The court-martial took four days. The verdict was unanimous. He had been publicly degraded in the courtyard of the École Militaire on 5 January 1895, his sword broken across the knee of a sergeant, his epaulettes torn from his shoulders, while a crowd of 20,000 outside the gate shouted À mort le juif. He was the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the French Army at the time of his arrest. The conviction had been wrong. The author of the bordereau was a Hungarian-born French officer named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, who would not be arrested for another three years.

Dreyfus would spend four years and seven months on Devil’s Island. He would survive a system of imprisonment that had been specifically designed by the French penal authorities, on the orders of the Ministry of War, to break him.

The island

The Îles du Salut are a group of three small islands approximately seven miles off the Guianese coast: Île Royale, Île Saint-Joseph, and the smallest of the three, Île du Diable. The group sat at the latitude of approximately 5 degrees north. The climate was hot and humid year-round, with a wet season from December through July that produced approximately 280 inches of annual rainfall. The islands were used by the French penal administration to house the most serious offenders in the bagne (penal-colony) system established under Napoleon III.

Île du Diable was the smallest of the three, a rocky outcropping approximately 1,500 feet long and 600 feet wide. It had a small leper colony established in the 1850s that had been moved to Île Royale by the 1880s. When Dreyfus arrived in 1895 the island was uninhabited. A small stone hut had been built for him on the highest ground, approximately fifty feet square. It had four rooms: an exterior corridor for the guards, a guard sleeping area, the prisoner’s cell, and a kitchen. The prisoner’s cell was approximately 12 feet square. It had a barred window. It had a wooden bed with a straw mattress. It had a small table and a chair.

Dreyfus was the only prisoner. The French government had transferred all other inmates off the island specifically to ensure his isolation. There were five guards in rotation, supervised by a sergeant. The guards were under standing orders not to speak with him for any reason and not to respond to any direct address. They were rotated every two months to prevent the development of personal acquaintance. Dreyfus was also required to write a brief daily statement of his health and movements, which was reviewed by the sergeant and forwarded to Paris.

The first year

The conditions of his confinement in the first year were severe but legally regulated. He could correspond with his wife Lucie at the rate of one letter per week, with all correspondence read and censored by the prison administration before forwarding; he received one letter per week in response, also censored. He was permitted to read books and newspapers that were approved by the censors and forwarded with his correspondence. He had a small garden of approximately ten feet by ten feet outside his hut, in which he was permitted to walk in the morning. He was provided with adequate food (military rations supplemented by occasional fresh vegetables).

He used the cell extensively for reading and writing. He kept a daily diary that he later edited and published as Cinq années de ma vie (1901). The diary records the routine of his days, his physical condition, his medical complaints, his letters to and from his wife, and his ongoing attempt to reconstruct the legal logic of his own case. He had been allowed to bring with him a small collection of books in French, German, English, and Latin. He used them to maintain his concentration. He taught himself English on the island.

The first year of his confinement was difficult but survivable. He lost approximately twenty pounds, developed a chronic fever that recurred for the rest of his life, and acquired a tropical heart condition. He did not break.

The second and third years

By the spring of 1896 the French intelligence section had a new head — Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart — who had been examining the original Dreyfus case files at the order of the new Minister of War. Picquart had identified inconsistencies in the original evidence and, more importantly, had identified a second document (the petit bleu) suggesting that the author of the bordereau was actually Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Picquart had pursued the new investigation through 1896. By November 1896 the Army’s General Staff had become aware of his investigation and had begun to suppress it. Picquart was reassigned to Tunisia in January 1897. The investigation was internally classified.

Dreyfus on Devil’s Island knew none of this. Neither, however, did he know that his brother Mathieu Dreyfus had been working since 1895 to reopen the case. Mathieu had hired the journalist Bernard Lazare to write a pamphlet on the case (Une erreur judiciaire: La vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus, published in November 1896 in Brussels), had contacted the moderate-republican press, and had begun the slow construction of the political coalition that would eventually demand a retrial. The French press in 1896 began to mention the case again. Émile Zola’s J’accuse…! was eighteen months away.

In September 1896, the prison administration in Paris received intelligence that an escape attempt was being planned. The intelligence was almost certainly false — it was probably planted by the Army’s General Staff to justify further restrictions. The response was immediate and severe. From 6 September 1896 to 20 October 1896 Dreyfus was confined to his cell with the double-bar (double boucle) — a pair of iron shackles fixed to the foot of his bed, with iron half-circles closed around his ankles, so that he could move neither his feet nor his legs while in bed. The shackles were locked at dusk and unlocked at dawn. He could not turn over. He could not move his legs. The wounds from the shackle edges festered in the heat. The application of the double boucle lasted nearly two months. It was the worst single period of his confinement.

The shackles were finally removed on the order of the prison commandant in late October when Dreyfus’s physical condition had deteriorated so substantially that the prison doctor reported he would not survive another week of the regime. By that time his weight had fallen to under 110 pounds. He had developed scurvy. He could no longer walk unsupported. The restrictions were partially relaxed; he was returned to standard close confinement.

He continued to keep the diary.

The fourth year

The political situation in France in 1898 was transformed by Esterhazy’s acquittal at his own court-martial (11 January 1898) — a verdict that the French press read as deliberate cover-up. Émile Zola’s open letter J’accuse…! was published on the front page of L’Aurore on 13 January 1898. Zola was prosecuted, convicted of libel, and fled to England in July 1898. In August 1898 the intelligence officer Colonel Henry, who had forged the most damning piece of evidence against Dreyfus, confessed to the forgery and committed suicide in his cell at Mont-Valérien.

The French government’s position on the Dreyfus case collapsed through the autumn of 1898. The Supreme Court of Appeal accepted a petition for retrial in September 1898 and formally annulled the original 1894 verdict on 3 June 1899. The order to return Dreyfus from Guiana was issued on 5 June 1899. The cruiser Sfax arrived at the Îles du Salut to collect him on 9 June. He boarded the ship that afternoon. He had been on the island for one thousand five hundred and ten days.

He was not told the result of the Supreme Court proceedings. He was not told why he was being returned. He believed, on the voyage home, that he was being brought back for a re-examination of his case but did not know how it would conclude. The Court of Appeal’s decision was not communicated to him until 1 July 1899, in mid-Atlantic.

The Rennes retrial

The retrial at Rennes opened on 7 August 1899 and ran until 9 September. It was the largest media event in nineteenth-century France: the courtroom had a press gallery for one hundred and fifty reporters, including correspondents from London, Berlin, Vienna, and New York. The medical evidence, the handwriting comparison, the testimony of Picquart (returned from Tunisia for the trial), and the testimony of Esterhazy’s mistress all pointed to Esterhazy as the author of the bordereau. The court-martial of seven officers nonetheless voted 5–2 to convict Dreyfus a second time, this time of treason “with extenuating circumstances.” It is unclear what such a verdict was supposed to mean. The sentence was reduced from life on Devil’s Island to ten years’ standard imprisonment.

The retrial conviction was politically untenable. President Émile Loubet — who had taken office in February 1899, after the death of Félix Faure on the night the affair had been entering its final political phase — granted Dreyfus a pardon ten days after the verdict. Dreyfus accepted the pardon on 19 September 1899. His brother Mathieu and his lawyers had advised him to accept; the pardon allowed him to leave prison while leaving the question of his guilt or innocence open for further appeal.

The formal rehabilitation came on 12 July 1906, when the Supreme Court of Appeal, in a definitive judgment, annulled the Rennes verdict as well as the original 1894 verdict without retrial. Dreyfus was restored to the army on 13 July 1906 with the rank of major, awarded the Légion d’honneur on 21 July, and pinned the rosette on his chest in the courtyard of the École Militaire — the courtyard in which he had been publicly degraded eleven years earlier — at a ceremony attended by Picquart, now promoted general.

After

Dreyfus served in the French Army through the First World War, fought at Verdun, and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. He retired in 1919 and lived quietly in Paris until his death from a heart attack on 12 July 1935. He was seventy-five. He was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Lucie Dreyfus, who had married him in 1890 and supported him through every part of the affair, survived him by ten years.

Devil’s Island remained in use as a penal colony until 1953. The hut in which Dreyfus had spent nearly five years still stands. The shackle-bracket on the floor of the cell is still visible, though the shackles themselves have been removed. The island is now an unstaffed UNESCO World Heritage site administered by the French Space Agency, whose Kourou launch facility sits ten miles inland.

The case had transformed the Third Republic, deepened the secularization of the French state (the 1905 separation of church and state was a direct legislative consequence), and produced the modern French definition of l’intellectuel — the public intellectual willing to take a political position in print at the cost of his career. It had not, in the end, been enough to prevent the political dynamics that would produce the Vichy regime’s collaboration in the persecution of French Jews four decades later. Dreyfus’s granddaughter, the journalist Madeleine Lévy, was deported to Auschwitz from Drancy in November 1943 and killed there in January 1944.