The Dreyfus Affair falls under the category of “the cover-up is worse than the crime,” even in the 19th-century French Army, which Robert Harris has masterfully captured in An Officer and A Spy. The story is told in first-person narrative by French Army officer Colonel Georges Picquart, a soldier who put duty and integrity ahead of convenience and his personal reputation, while serving as chief of military counter-intelligence for the French War Ministry.
Alfred Dreyfus was a French Army Captain, a Jew, serving as an artillery officer who fell victim to a military judicial conspiracy accusing him of being a German spy.
In pre-WWI France, there existed a culture of antisemitism that contributed to the push to convict an innocent man and ignore the evidence against the actual French officer who was a spy. Dreyfus was convicted at court-martial, formally degraded, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Ultimately, Dreyfus is pardoned and restored to Army service, thanks in large part to Colonel Picquart, who relentlessly pursued the truth. Justice is served after a regrettable delay, which is another way of saying that justice delayed is justice denied.
The Dreyfus Affair occurred during the French Third Republic (1870-1940), a period following the Franco-Prussian War and ending with WWI. Germany was rightly viewed as an aggressor nation with superior military strength. The thought of any French officer giving military information to the Germans was repugnant to the Army and the French government. This fact, together with open discrimination of Jews, contributed to hysteria surrounding the arrest and trial of a French officer accused of spying for Germany.
Harris has created a well-researched account of a sad time in French military history and added just enough character development for the reader to care about the people involved. I very much enjoyed reading this book. A final thought about the book title: I believe the officer and spy refers to Colonel Picquart, not Alford Dreyfus, who was an officer but never a spy.