e acrimonies of political life. High-strung and emotional, he writhed
under misinterpretation and abuse, and rebelled against the
constitutional powerlessness of his office. He had never really wanted
the Presidency and had accepted it chiefly through the personal
persuasion of his friend the statesman Burdeau, who unfortunately died
soon after his election. The brief Presidency of Casimir-Perier, lasting
less than a year, was destined to see the beginning of the worst trial
the French Republic had yet experienced, the famous Dreyfus case.

The Administration, in which Dupuy remained Prime Minister, began by
repressive measures, laws directed against the anarchists and the trial
_en masse_ of thirty defendants ranging from utopian theorists to actual
criminals. Most of them were acquitted, but the procedure did not
ingratiate the Government with the advanced parties. Toward the end of
1894 the Dreyfus case began to be talked of, an affair which was
destined to develop into a tremendous struggle of the leaders of the
army and the Church to obtain control of the nation.

In September, 1894, an officer named Henry, of the spy service of the
French army, came into possession of a document pieced together from
fragments stolen from a waste-paper basket in the German Embassy. This
document, containing a _bordereau_ or memorandum of information largely
about the French artillery offered to the German military attache,
Schwartzkoppen, was anonymous, but Henry undoubtedly recognized, sooner
or later, the handwriting of a friend, Major Esterhazy, a soldier of
fortune in the French army, of bad reputation and shady character.
Unable to destroy the document, which had been seen by others, Henry
tried to fasten it on somebody else. Indeed, many people believe that
Henry was an accomplice of Esterhazy in German pay. By a strange
coincidence it happened that the handwriting of the _bordereau_ somewhat
resembled that of a brilliant young Jewish officer of the General Staff
named Alfred Dreyfus. He belonged to a wealthy Alsatian family, and from
antecedent probability would not seem to need to play a traitor's part,
but he was intensely unpopular among his fellows because of many
disagreeable traits of character. Moreover, anti-Semitism, formerly
non-existent in France, was now rife. It had been largely fomented by
the anti-Jewish agitator Edouard Drumont, with his book _la France
juive_ (1886) and his newspaper the _Libre Parole_ (1892