For the left especially, the growing doubts cast upon Dreyfus' conviction, mainly through the indefatigable efforts of Mathieu Dreyfus to clear his brother's name, offered a golden opportunity to break the center-right's monopoly on political power. Like any capital city, perhaps more than most, it was a place where the ambitious and the simply dishonest clawed for advantage in a political world of remarkable instability. Paris at the turn of the century provided fertile ground for intrigue. What transformed the condemnation of Alfred Dreyfus to Devil's Island into a full-blown affaire was the context in which it took place. While all of this offered a promising beginning, in itself it was little more than a collection of elements for a fairly pedestrian piece of detective fiction. And how could it fail with a cast of characters which included intelligence officers who liked to wear false beards, a covey of politically ambitious generals, a pair of homosexual military attach,es (who addressed each other affectionately as "My Little Bugger" and "My Little Dog"), anti-Semitic loonies, spies, traitors, clairvoyants and mind readers, heavily veiled women passing on secret messages, Emile Zola, Jean Jaur army which appeared on the verge of mutiny, and, at its center, an innocent man falsely convicted? But the Dreyfus Affair was twisted enough to enlist the attentions - and the passions - even of the jaded Parisians. Spying upon political opponents in Belle Epoque France was so commonplace that it never occurred to anyone to complain about it. After all, how could Richard Nixon's departure possibly compare with that, in 1899, of French President F,elix Faure who "died on the job," as the newspapers would say, his hands still clutching the hair of his shrieking and completely naked mistress, Madame Steinhell? In comparison, Watergate looks like a skit straight out of Ted Mack's Amateur Hour. However, even by the high standards of the French Third Republic, that which swirled around Captain Dreyfus at the turn of the century was an absolute corker. Of course, scandal was nothing new to France - on the contrary, the French seemed by the 1890s to have developed a fairly buoyant industry in political corruption. This confrontation between two relatively obscure officers in the bowels of the French War Ministry was slowly and methodically to develop into an affaire which was to transform the face of French politics for roughly the first half of the 20th century. However, to demonstrate that he was not merely a heartless gendarme, du Paty offered the unfortunate Dreyfus a revolver with one bullet in the chamber and suggested that he make an honorable exit. Hardly had Dreyfus written down the words than the major clamped his hand on the captain's shoulder and announced that he was under arrest for the crime of high treason. Dreyfus complied with this apparently bizarre request, only to discover much later that du Paty wished to compare his handwriting with that on a report, obviously written by a traitor, which French intelligence hd rescued from the German military attach,e's wastebasket. Upon arrival, he was greeted by Major du Paty de Clam who asked him to be seated and take a dictation. His destination was the French War Ministry, a brooding building which squats upon the angle formed by Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue Saint-Dominique. ON 15 October 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus kissed his wife and children, stepped out of his house on Paris' Avenue du Trocad,ero and into a nightmare of Kafkaesque somberness.
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