Dreyfus, however, officially remained a traitor in a French court of law and pointedly remarked upon his release: "The government of the Republic has given me back my freedom. He had been subjected to a second trial in that year and again declared guilty of treason despite the evidence in favor of his innocence. On 19 September 1899, following a passionate campaign by his supporters, including leading artists and intellectuals like Émile Zola, Dreyfus was pardoned by President Émile Loubet in 1899 and released from prison. Esterhazy was found not guilty by a secret court martial, before fleeing France. When reports of an army cover-up and Dreyfus’s possible innocence were leaked to the press, a heated debate ensued about anti-Semitism, and France’s identity as a Catholic nation and a republic founded on equal rights for all citizens. Picquart was silenced by being transferred to the southern desert of Tunisia in November 1896. In August 1896, the new chief of French military intelligence, Lt Colonel Picquart, reported to his superiors that he had found evidence to the effect that the real traitor was a Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. On 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was summarily convicted in a secret court martial, publicly stripped of his army rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Suspicion quickly fell upon Dreyfus who was arrested for treason on 15 October 1894. Colonel Sandherr, became aware that new artillery information was being passed to the Germans by a highly placed spy most likely to be in the General Staff. In 1894, the French Army’s counter-intelligence section, led by Lt. Known today as the Dreyfus Affair, the incident eventually ended with Dreyfus’s complete exoneration. Alfred Dreyfus ( 9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history.
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