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Though Paris grew and prospered, the national government was perennially unstable. Unsure of how long the Third Republic would last, Parisians believed, in the words of one, that they were “dancing on a volcano.” 39

The execution of President Sadi Carnot’s assassin was soon followed by the most severe internal crisis France faced during the Third Republic. The false accusation of a Jewish military officer for treason, known as the Dreyfus affair, divided the nation into bitterly opposed camps for years. It began in September 1894, when Major Hubert-Joseph Henry of the French intelligence service came into possession of a document that had been taken from a wastebasket at the German embassy. It was a note, afterward referred to as the bordereau, which indicated that someone in the French army apparently had provided the Germans with important information about French military plans. The type of information described in the bordereau implied that the traitorous informant had to be an artillery officer on the general staff of the army.

That brought Captain Alfred Dreyfus under suspicion, on no grounds other than the fact that he fit that general description and that his handwriting was said to have resembled that on the bordereau. More important, Dreyfus was a Jew — a rarity at such an elevated rank — and his colleagues did not like him. France was experiencing an upsurge in anti-Semitism around this time. Despite the fact that there were only about 85,000 Jews in a French population of 39 million, 40 anti-Semites blamed them for many of the country’s problems. The accusation against Dreyfus played directly into this metastasizing intolerance.

Military officials seeking to build a case against Dreyfus had asked Alfred Gobert, the handwriting expert of the Bank of France, to compare the handwriting on the incriminating bordereau with samples of Captain Dreyfus’s writing. Gobert reported that although the two writing samples were “of the same graphic type,” they “presented numerous and important disparities which had to be taken into account.” 41 He concluded that the bordereau had been written by someone other than Dreyfus. This did not satisfy the military, which began to look for a second opinion. Prefect of Police Louis Lépine recommended Alphonse Bertillon, France’s best-known expert on crime. Since he had identified and helped convict the anarchist Ravachol two years earlier, Bertillon’s reputation had only increased. Police forces throughout Europe, the United States, and Latin America were keeping records of criminals and suspects according to Bertillon’s identification system.

Unfortunately, Bertillon had no expertise as a handwriting expert, but at the urging of his chief, he acted as if he did — thus stepping into a morass from which his reputation never recovered. He pronounced his own judgment after a single day of examining the handwriting on the bordereau: “If the hypothesis of a document forged with the utmost care is eliminated, it appears clear to us that it was the same person who wrote the various items submitted and the incriminating document.” 42

In court, during Dreyfus’s initial court-martial, Bertillon’s testimony was far from compelling, for he tended to speak in a convoluted manner, complete with charts and diagrams that seemed dauntingly confusing. Moreover, the defense produced experts who contradicted his conclusion. By now, openly anti-Semitic publications, notably La Parole Libre, edited by the notorious bigot Édouard Drumont, had inflamed the public with their declarations that Dreyfus was a traitor. It was clear that if he were not convicted, the heads of those who accused him would roll. Desperate, Major Henry and others forged documents that added to the weight of “evidence” against the defendant. These were presented secretly to the judges, with the caution that “national security” would be compromised if they became public. Bertillon had no role in the forgery, but because he was the chief prop of