![]() Dreyfus agreed not to appeal and was released, a pardon was then issued. In September, a second trial was finally held, resulting in global indignation when the military court found Dreyfus guilty with extenuating circumstances and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Esterhazy fled to London, where he admitted his guilt. In 1898, it was discovered that much of the evidence against Dreyfus had been forged by Colonel Henry of army intelligence, and by August of 1899, Henry confessed under interrogation to his forgeries and was placed under arrest. In November 1897, with supporting evidence, Mathieu Dreyfus formally accused Major Ferdinand Esterhazy of the treason for which his brother had been convicted. The case eventually led to anti-Semitic riots throughout France, and the factions in the Dreyfus Affair remained in place for decades afterwards. Author Émile Zola exposed the affair to the general public in the newspaper, L'Aurore, in a famous open letter to the President, entitled "J'accuse!" (I Accuse!) in January 1898, and was then incarcerated for criticizing the government. In broad terms, on the anti-Dreyfus side were royalists, anti-Semites, militarists, and Roman Catholics those defending Dreyfus were republicans, socialists, and anti-clerics. The Dreyfus issue polarized factions within French society. The French military, however, tried to suppress the information and failed. In 1896, new evidenced surfaced that exonerated Captain Dreyfus. After a court martial on January 1895, he was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Devil's Island penal colony in the Caribbean. As a Jew, Dreyfus was a convenient scapegoat for the elitist officer corps, and little effort was made prove the case. In 1894, he was accused of selling military secrets to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, Imperial German military attaché at the German Embassy in Paris. He was then designated as a trainee at army headquarters. In 1891, he was admitted to the Superior War College and graduated ninth in his class. Promoted to Lieutenant in 1885, four year later he made Captain and was appointed as adjutant to the director of the pyrotechnical school in Bourges. In 1877 he entered the École Polytechnique, after which he entered the military. Born in Mulhouse, Alsace, France, the youngest of seven children of a Jewish textile manufacturer.
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