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{{Short description|French army officer (1847–1923)}}
'''Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy''' ([[December 16]], [[1847]]–[[May 21]], [[1923]]) was a [[France|French]] [[traitor]], who served as a [[spy]] for [[Germany]]. Esterhazy was the perpetrator of the crime of which [[Alfred Dreyfus]] had been wrongly accused and convicted. See [[Dreyfus affair]].
{{Refimprove|date=February 2013}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=January 2020}}
{{Infobox military person
| name = Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
| image = Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy en uniforme du 74e d'infanterie.png
| image_size = 230px
| caption = Esterhazy, {{Circa|1893-1898}}
| birth_date = {{Birth date|df=yes|1847|12|16}}
| death_date = {{Death date and age|df=yes|1923|05|21|1847|12|16}}
| birth_name = Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
| birth_place = Paris, France
| death_place = [[Harpenden]], England, UK
| allegiance = {{flagicon|French Third Republic}} [[French Third Republic|France]] <br>{{flagicon|German Empire}} [[German Empire|Germany]]
| branch = [[French Army]]
| serviceyears = 1870–1898
| rank = [[Ranks in the French Army#Commandant|Major]]
| commands =
| unit = [[French Foreign Legion]]<br />74th Line Infantry Regiment
| battles = [[Franco-Prussian War]]
| laterwork =
}}


'''Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy''' (16 December 1847&nbsp;– 21 May 1923) was an officer in the French Army from 1870 to 1898. He gained notoriety as a spy for the [[German Empire]] and the actual perpetrator of the act of [[treason]] of which [[Captain (land)|Captain]] [[Alfred Dreyfus]] was [[Dreyfus affair|wrongfully accused and convicted]] in 1894.<ref name=EB1911>{{cite EB1911 |wstitle=Dreyfus, Alfred |volume=8 |page=579}}</ref>
Born in [[Paris]], Esterhazy belonged to an [[Esterhazy|illustrious Hungarian family]], a branch of which had established itself in France at the end of the [[17th century]], and the head of which had organized there a [[regiment]] of ''[[hussars]]''. His great-grandmother had an illegitimate son, who was brought up under the name of Walsin, but who, after she had acknowledged him during the Revolution, took the name of Esterhazy and settled as a merchant at [[Nimes]]. Two of the sons of this man followed a military career with distinction, and both became generals of division during the [[Crimean war]]. One of these two (Ferdinand) was the father of Major Esterhazy. Left an orphan at an early age, after some schooling at the [[Lycée Bonaparte]] in Paris, Ferdinand Esterhazy disappeared in 1865. In 1869 he was found engaged in the Roman legion, in the service of the [[pope]]; in 1870, in the foreign legion, which his uncle's influence enabled him to enter with the rank of ensign; he then assumed the title of count, to which it is claimed he was not entitled. At this time came the war with Germany. There being a dearth of officers after the catastrophe of [[Battle of Sedan|Sedan]], Esterhazy was able to pass muster as a French lieutenant, then as a captain, and went through the campaigns of the [[Loire]] and of the [[Jura mountains|Jura]]. Though set back after peace was declared, he still remained in the army. In 1876 he was employed to translate [[German language|German]] at the Intelligence Office; then, under various pretexts, at the War Office. He never appeared in his regiment at [[Beauvais]], and for about five years led a life of dissipation in [[Paris]], as a result of which his small fortune was soon squandered. In 1881 he was attached to the expedition sent to [[Tunis]], and did nothing whatever to distinguish himself in it; employed later in the Intelligence Department, then in the native affairs of the [[Regent|regency]], on his own authority he inserted in the official records a citation of his "exploits in war," the falseness of which was recognized later. Returning to France in 1885, he remained in [[garrison]] at [[Marseille]] for a long time. Having come to the end of his resources, he married in 1886; but he soon spent his wife's [[dowry]], and in 1888 she was forced to demand a separation. In 1892, through the influence of General [[Saussier]], Esterhazy succeeded in getting a nomination as garrison-major in the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the line at [[Rouen]]. Being thus in the neighborhood of Paris, he plunged afresh into a life of speculation and excess, which soon completed his ruin.


After evidence against Esterhazy was discovered and made public, he was eventually subjected to a closed military trial in 1898, only to be officially found not guilty. Esterhazy retired from the military with the rank of major in 1898—presumably under pressure—and fled by way of Brussels to the United Kingdom, where he lived in the town of [[Harpenden]] in [[Hertfordshire]] until his death in 1923.<ref>“ESTERHAZY, Ferdinand” in Register of Deaths for the St Albans Registration District, volume 3a (1923), p. 7143</ref>{{Dreyfus affair}}
==His career==
His inheritance squandered, Esterhazy had tried to retrieve his fortune in gambling-houses and on the stock-exchange; hard pressed by his creditors, he had recourse to the most desperate measures. Having seconded [[Crémieu-Foa]] in his duel with [[Edouard Drumont|Drumont]] in 1892, he pretended that this chivalrous role had made his family, as well as his chiefs, quarrel with him; he produced false letters to support his words, threatened to kill both himself and his children, and thus obtained, through the medium of [[Zadoc Kahn]], chief [[rabbi]] of France, assistance from the [[Mayer Amschel Rothschild family|Rothschild]]s (June, 1894); this did not prevent him from being on the best of terms with the editors of the [[anti-Semitism|anti-Semitic]] newspaper ''La Libre Parole,'' even to the extent of supplying them with information.


==Biography==
For an officer who had come from the ranks Esterhazy's military advancement had been unusually rapid: lieutenant in 1874, captain in 1880, decorated in 1882, major in 1892, his reports were generally excellent. Nevertheless, he considered himself wronged. In his letters he continually launched into recrimination and abuse against his chiefs; he went still further, bespattering with mud the whole French army, and even France herself, for which he predicted and hoped that new disasters were in store. Such a man, a regular ''landsknecht'' of yore, without a single spark of patriotism, was destined to become the prey of treason. Fate decreed that he should sink to the degradation of a paid spy; he sank. In Tunis he was judged to have become too intimate with the German military ''[[attaché]]''; in 1892 he was the object of an accusation made to the head of the staff, General [[Brault]]; in 1893 he entered [[Schwarzkoppen]]'s service.
{{Moresources|section|date=April 2022}}
===Ancestry===
Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was born in Paris, France,<ref>{{cite book |last=Singer |first=Isidore |title=The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 4 |year=1912 |publisher=Funk and Wagnalls |location=New York, London |page=671 |isbn=978-1-23-218889-6}}</ref> the son of General Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy (1807–1857), who later distinguished himself as division commander in the [[Crimean War]].
His paternal grandfather, Jean Marie Auguste Walsin-Esterhazy, born in 1767 at [[Valleraugue]], was the illegitimate son of Countess Marie Anne Esterhazy de Galántha (1741–1823), by her affair with Jean André César de Ginestous (1725–1810), governor of [[Le Vigan, Gard|Le Vigan (Gard)]].<ref name=mb>Maurice Baumont,
Aux sources de l'affaire: l'Affaire Dreyfus d'après les archives (1959), p. 137</ref>


Jean Marie was adopted by Dr Walsin, a French doctor in the service of the [[Esterházy]] princely family. Growing up under the name of Jean Marie Auguste Walsin, he became a business man and landowner in [[Nîmes]], and added the name of [[Esterházy]], apparently without the agreement of the family, after being acknowledged by his mother about 1797.<ref name=mb/><ref>{{cite web|url=https://gw.geneanet.org/elsa2002?lang=fr&n=walsin+esterhazy&oc=0&p=jean+marie+auguste|title=Généalogie de Jean Marie Auguste WALSIN-ESTERHAZY|website=Geneanet}}</ref> This branch of the Esterházys had settled in France at the end of the 17th century and provided military officers to France, namely in its [[hussar]] regiments.
According to later disclosures he received from the German ''attaché'' a monthly pension of 2,000 marks ($480). He furnished him in the first place with some interesting information about the [[artillery]]; he pretended that he got his information from Major Henry, who had been his comrade in the Intelligence Office in 1876. But Henry, limited to a very special branch of the service, was hardly in a position to furnish details on technical questions; Esterhazy must have had other informants, who were not necessarily his accomplices: for example, his intimate friend [[Maurice Weil]], district orderly officer to General Saussier, and a distinguished military writer and a regular news-hunter. The information furnished by Esterhazy soon became of so little importance that [[Panizzardi]] (to whom Schwarzkoppen communicated it without divulging the name of his informant) began to doubt his qualifications as an officer; to convince the ''attaché'' it was necessary for Esterhazy to show himself one day in uniform, galloping behind a well-known general! The garrison-major, being entrusted with the duties of [[mobilization]], is always well informed in regard to the details of this subject; but as far as the artillery is concerned (the improvements in which department especially interested the German officials), the difficulties which Esterhazy experienced in getting information were very apparent in the text of the ''bordereau'', and in the attempt which he made (in August 1894) to borrow the ''manuel de tir'' from Lieutenant Bernheim (of [[Le Mans]]), whose acquaintance he had made by chance.


===Early life and military career===
After [[Colonel Picquart]]'s exposure of his authorship of the ''bordereau'',the document that had been used to incriminate Alfred Dreyfus, Esterhazy fled to the relative safety of Great Britain in September 1898 and died there in 1923. However this did not happen until Esterhazy had been forced to undergo a trial by French Military Justice ( January 10-11,1898), where he was unexpectedly acquitted.
Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was left an orphan in September 1857, aged only nine. After some schooling at the [[Lycée Condorcet|Lycée Bonaparte]] in Paris, he attempted in vain to enter the [[École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr]]. He disappears from public records in 1865; by 1869 he had been enlisted in the [[Legion of Antibes]], a unit of French volunteers in the service of [[Pope Pius IX]].

===Franco-Prussian War===
In June 1870, his uncle's influence enabled Esterhazy to be commissioned into the [[French Foreign Legion]]. It was an irregular appointment as he had neither been promoted from the ranks after service as a non-commissioned officer, nor graduated from a military academy.<ref>{{cite book |first=W. |last=Serman |title=Les Origines des officers français. 1848–1870|language=fr |location=Paris |publisher=Publications de la Sorbonne |year=1979 |isbn=2-85944-015-1 }}</ref> However, the start of the [[Franco-Prussian War]] in July precluded any action being taken against him. He then assumed the title of count, to which he was not entitled.<ref>As descendant of a bastard of a daughter of Esterhazy, he was not entitled to a title which does not pass (1) to bastards (2) to daughters.</ref>

There being a dearth of officers after the catastrophe of [[Battle of Sedan|Sedan]], Esterhazy was able to pass muster as a lieutenant and then as a captain. He served as an infantry officer in the campaigns of the [[Loire]] and of the [[Jura Mountains]]. After peace was declared, he remained in the army.

===Post-war career===
{{Unreferenced section|date=August 2011}}
Between 1880 and 1882 Esterhazy was employed to translate German at the French military counter-intelligence section, where he became acquainted with [[Hubert-Joseph Henry|Major Henry]] and [[Jean Sandherr|Lieutenant Colonel Sandherr]], both to become major figures in the [[Dreyfus affair]]. He was then employed at the French War Ministry. He never appeared in his regiment at [[Beauvais]], and for about five years led a life of dissipation in Paris, as a result of which his small fortune was soon squandered.

In 1882 Esterhazy was attached to the expedition sent to [[Tunis]]. While there he was employed in the Intelligence Department, then in the Native Affairs Department of the [[Regent|regency]]. On his own initiative he inserted a citation within official records mention of his "exploits in war", which was later recognised as being falsely concocted.

Returning to France in 1885, Esterhazy remained in [[garrison]] at [[Marseille]] for a long time. Having come to the end of his financial resources, he married in 1886, but he soon spent his wife's [[dowry]]. In 1888 she demanded a separation.

In 1892, through the influence of General Félix Gustave Saussier, Esterhazy succeeded in getting a nomination as garrison-major in the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the line at [[Rouen]]. Being thus in the neighborhood of Paris, he resumed a life of speculation and excess. His inheritance squandered, Esterhazy had tried to retrieve his fortune in gambling-houses and on the stock-exchange; hard pressed by his creditors, he had recourse to extreme measures.

Having seconded André Crémieu-Foa in his duel with [[Édouard Drumont]] in 1892, Esterhazy claimed that this action had made his family, as well as his military seniors, quarrel with him. He produced false letters to support this allegation and threatened to kill both himself and his children. Through the medium of [[Zadoc Kahn]], chief [[rabbi]] of France, Esterhazy obtained assistance from the [[Rothschild family]] (June 1894). At the same time, he was on good terms with the editors of the [[antisemitism|antisemitic]] newspaper ''[[La Libre Parole]]'', which he supplied with information.

For an officer whose original commission had been irregular, Esterhazy's military advancement had been unusually rapid: lieutenant in 1874, captain in 1880, decorated in 1882, major in 1892. The reports on him were generally excellent. Nevertheless, he considered himself wronged. In his letters he continually launched into recrimination and abuse against his chiefs. He made negative written comments on the [[French Army]], and even France herself, for which he predicted and hoped that new disasters were in store.

===Dreyfus affair===
{{main|Dreyfus affair}}
[[File:Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy Vanity Fair 26 May 1898.jpg|thumb|Esterhazy as caricatured by [[Jean Baptiste Guth]] in ''[[Vanity Fair (British magazine)|Vanity Fair]]'', May 1898]]The Dreyfus affair was triggered in September 1894 when an office cleaner at the German embassy in Paris, who was also an agent of French military intelligence, passed on to her French contacts a handwritten memorandum (widely known as the ''bordereau''), evidently written by an unnamed French officer, offering the German Embassy various confidential military documents.

Captain [[Alfred Dreyfus]] was picked by the army as the alleged traitor in October 1894. Among those who might have had access to some of the documents, suspicion seems to have fallen on Dreyfus mainly because he was a Jew. The official evidence against him depended overwhelmingly on the contention that his handwriting matched that on the ''bordereau''. Convicted, he was [[Cashiering|cashiered]] (formally stripped of his military rank in a public ceremony of degradation), and then shipped to the penal colony of [[Devil's Island]] (L'île du Diable) off the coast of [[French Guiana]].<ref name=EB1911/>

In 1896, Lieutenant-Colonel [[Georges Picquart]], the then-new head of the Intelligence Service, uncovered a letter sent by [[Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen]] (at the time German military attache to Paris) to Esterhazy. After comparison of Esterhazy's handwriting with that of the ''bordereau'', he became convinced of Esterhazy's guilt of the crime for which Dreyfus had been convicted.

In 1897, after fruitless efforts to persuade his superiors to take the new evidence seriously and being transferred to [[Tunisia]] in an effort to silence him, Picquart provided proof to Dreyfus' lawyers. They started a campaign to bring Esterhazy to justice. In 1898 an ex-lover of Esterhazy made public letters of his in which he expressed his hatred of France and his contempt for the army. However, Esterhazy was still protected by the Army's General Staff, which did not want to see the judgment of 1895 put into doubt.

Esterhazy asked for a trial behind closed doors by the French Military Justice (10–11 January 1898). He was acquitted, a judgment which ignited anti-Semitic riots in Paris.

On 13 January 1898, [[Émile Zola]] published his famous ''[[J'Accuse…!]]'', which accused the French government of anti-Semitism and especially focused on the court-martial and jailing of Dreyfus.

[[File:Headstone Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.jpg|thumb|Headstone: buried under the alias of Count de Voilemont]]

===Flight to Britain and later years===
Esterhazy was discreetly put on military pension with the rank of major. On 1 September 1898, having shaved off his moustache, he fled France, via Brussels, for the relative safety of England. [[Rachel Beer]], editor of ''[[The Observer]]'' and the ''[[Sunday Times]]'', English newspapers, knew that Esterhazy was in London because ''The Observer'''s Paris correspondent had made a connection with him; she interviewed him twice, and he confessed to being the culprit: ''I wrote the bordereau''. She published the interviews in September 1898,<ref>Beer, Rachel, Interviews with Major Esterhazy, ''The Observer'', 18 and 25 September 1898.</ref> reporting his confession and writing a [[Editorial|leader column]] accusing the French military of antisemitism and calling for a retrial for Dreyfus.<ref name=observer>{{Cite news |title=Rachel Beer, editor of the Observer 1891–1901 |last=Narewska |first=Elli |work=The Guardian |date=2 March 2018 |url= https://www.theguardian.com/gnmeducationcentre/2018/mar/02/rachel-beer-editor-of-the-observer-archive }}</ref>

From Milton Road in the town of [[Harpenden]], Esterhazy continued to write in anti-Semitic papers such as ''[[La Libre Parole]]'' until his death in 1923. He is buried in [[St Nicholas Church, Harpenden|St Nicholas' churchyard, Harpenden]], under the name of ''Jean de Voilemont''. A headstone was erected shortly after with the false name and a false birthdate with an inscription from [[Percy Bysshe Shelley]]: "He has outsoared the shadow of our night".

===Revisionist thesis: Esterhazy as double agent===
[[File:003 Bordereau recto.jpg|thumb|The ''bordereau'' (memorandum) which sparked the Dreyfus affair]]
French historian [[:fr:Jean Doise|Jean Doise]] espoused the revisionist hypothesis that Esterhazy might have been a French double agent masquerading as a traitor in order to pass along misinformation to the German Army. Doise was not the first writer to explore the hypothesis of Esterhazy as a double agent: earlier writings by Michel de Lombarès and Henri Giscard d'Estaing, though they differed in the details of their theories, also presented this line of argument.<ref>{{cite book |last=Bredin |first=Jean-Denis |title=The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus |url=https://archive.org/details/affair00jean |url-access=registration |publisher=George Braziller |location=New York |year=1986 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/affair00jean/page/512 512]–515 |isbn=0-8076-1109-3 }}</ref> According to Doise, Esterhazy's perceived bitterness and utter lack of patriotic feeling, along with his fluency in German, were qualities that would have helped him to pose as an effective and unrepentant traitor.<ref name=autogenerated1>[http://www.worldwar1.com/france/dreyfus.htm France at War&nbsp;– The Dreyfus Case and the French 75<!-- Bot generated title -->] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101028101444/http://www.worldwar1.com/france/dreyfus.htm |date=28 October 2010 }}</ref>

In Tunis, he was judged to have become too intimate with the [[German Army (German Empire)|German military attaché]]. In 1892, he was the object of an accusation made to the head of the staff, General [[Brault]]. In 1893, he entered (or, if one accepts the revisionist explanation, pretended to enter) the service of [[Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen]], the German military attaché in Paris. According to later disclosures he received from the German attaché a monthly pension of 2000 marks (equivalent to over €12000 in 2015 terms).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html|title = Historical Currency Converter}}</ref> In return, Esterhazy furnished him in the first place with information (or, as argued, misinformation) about [[artillery]].

Esterhazy reportedly got his information from Major Henry, who had been his comrade in the [[Military of France|French military]] counter-intelligence section of the War Ministry, in 1876. However, Henry, limited to a very special branch of the service, was hardly in a position to furnish details on technical questions. The main architect of the disinformation campaign is claimed to have been Colonel Sandherr, head of French military counter-intelligence.<ref name=autogenerated1 />

The lack of value of the material furnished by Esterhazy soon became so apparent that [[Alessandro Panizzardi]], the Italian military attaché, to whom Schwartzkoppen communicated it without divulging the name of his informant, began to doubt his qualifications as an officer. To convince the attaché, it was necessary for Esterhazy to show himself one day in uniform, galloping behind a well-known general.{{cn|date=April 2022}}

The infamous document, or ''bordereau'', which was used to convict Dreyfus had been retrieved from a wastepaper basket at the German Embassy by a cleaning lady who was in the employ of French military counterintelligence. This document had been torn up but was easily pieced together. It announced, among other items, a forthcoming report on a new French 120mm howitzer ''[[Obusier de 120 mm C modèle 1890|Canon de 120C Modele 1890 Baquet]]'' and the comportment of its hydraulic recoil mechanism, as well as detailed manuals describing the current organization of French field artillery."<ref name=autogenerated1 />

However, the French Army had already rejected the 120&nbsp;mm model as unworkable and had begun development of the revolutionary (for its time) 75&nbsp;mm field gun. The argument is this ''bordereau'' document was a supposed design to prevent the German military from discovering the development of the [[Canon de 75 modèle 1897|French 75]].<ref name=autogenerated1 />

However, there are reports of Esterhazy admitting that he had "indeed been a spy for Germany".<ref>[http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/193419/Ferdinand-Walsin-Esterhazy Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy profile], Britannica.com. Accessed 29 April 2022.</ref>


==References==
==References==
*{{1911}}
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* [http://www.dreyfus.culture.fr/en/bio/bio-html-ferdinand-walsin-esterhazy.htm Dreyfus Rehabilitated] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200129120504/http://www.dreyfus.culture.fr/en/bio/bio-html-ferdinand-walsin-esterhazy.htm |date=29 January 2020 }}


{{Authority control}}
[[Category:1847 births|Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin]]
[[Category:1923 deaths|Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin]]
[[Category:French nobility|Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin]]
[[Category:Dreyfus affair|Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin]]
[[Category:Esterházy|Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy]]


[[fi:Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin}}
[[Category:1847 births]]
[[fr:Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy]]
[[Category:1923 deaths]]
[[he:פרדיננד אסתרהאזי]]
[[Category:Burials in Hertfordshire]]
[[ja:フェルディナン・ヴァルザン・エステルアジ]]
[[Category:Military personnel from Paris]]
[[pt:Charles-Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy]]
[[Category:People associated with the Dreyfus affair]]
[[Category:French people of Hungarian descent]]
[[Category:Esterházy family|Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy]]
[[Category:Officers of the French Foreign Legion]]

Latest revision as of 04:06, 23 November 2024

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
Esterhazy, c. 1893-1898
Birth nameCharles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
Born(1847-12-16)16 December 1847
Paris, France
Died21 May 1923(1923-05-21) (aged 75)
Harpenden, England, UK
AllegianceFrench Third Republic France
German Empire Germany
Service / branchFrench Army
Years of service1870–1898
RankMajor
UnitFrench Foreign Legion
74th Line Infantry Regiment
Battles / warsFranco-Prussian War

Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (16 December 1847 – 21 May 1923) was an officer in the French Army from 1870 to 1898. He gained notoriety as a spy for the German Empire and the actual perpetrator of the act of treason of which Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused and convicted in 1894.[1]

After evidence against Esterhazy was discovered and made public, he was eventually subjected to a closed military trial in 1898, only to be officially found not guilty. Esterhazy retired from the military with the rank of major in 1898—presumably under pressure—and fled by way of Brussels to the United Kingdom, where he lived in the town of Harpenden in Hertfordshire until his death in 1923.[2]

Part of a series on the
Dreyfus affair
People

Biography

[edit]

Ancestry

[edit]

Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was born in Paris, France,[3] the son of General Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy (1807–1857), who later distinguished himself as division commander in the Crimean War. His paternal grandfather, Jean Marie Auguste Walsin-Esterhazy, born in 1767 at Valleraugue, was the illegitimate son of Countess Marie Anne Esterhazy de Galántha (1741–1823), by her affair with Jean André César de Ginestous (1725–1810), governor of Le Vigan (Gard).[4]

Jean Marie was adopted by Dr Walsin, a French doctor in the service of the Esterházy princely family. Growing up under the name of Jean Marie Auguste Walsin, he became a business man and landowner in Nîmes, and added the name of Esterházy, apparently without the agreement of the family, after being acknowledged by his mother about 1797.[4][5] This branch of the Esterházys had settled in France at the end of the 17th century and provided military officers to France, namely in its hussar regiments.

Early life and military career

[edit]

Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was left an orphan in September 1857, aged only nine. After some schooling at the Lycée Bonaparte in Paris, he attempted in vain to enter the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. He disappears from public records in 1865; by 1869 he had been enlisted in the Legion of Antibes, a unit of French volunteers in the service of Pope Pius IX.

Franco-Prussian War

[edit]

In June 1870, his uncle's influence enabled Esterhazy to be commissioned into the French Foreign Legion. It was an irregular appointment as he had neither been promoted from the ranks after service as a non-commissioned officer, nor graduated from a military academy.[6] However, the start of the Franco-Prussian War in July precluded any action being taken against him. He then assumed the title of count, to which he was not entitled.[7]

There being a dearth of officers after the catastrophe of Sedan, Esterhazy was able to pass muster as a lieutenant and then as a captain. He served as an infantry officer in the campaigns of the Loire and of the Jura Mountains. After peace was declared, he remained in the army.

Post-war career

[edit]

Between 1880 and 1882 Esterhazy was employed to translate German at the French military counter-intelligence section, where he became acquainted with Major Henry and Lieutenant Colonel Sandherr, both to become major figures in the Dreyfus affair. He was then employed at the French War Ministry. He never appeared in his regiment at Beauvais, and for about five years led a life of dissipation in Paris, as a result of which his small fortune was soon squandered.

In 1882 Esterhazy was attached to the expedition sent to Tunis. While there he was employed in the Intelligence Department, then in the Native Affairs Department of the regency. On his own initiative he inserted a citation within official records mention of his "exploits in war", which was later recognised as being falsely concocted.

Returning to France in 1885, Esterhazy remained in garrison at Marseille for a long time. Having come to the end of his financial resources, he married in 1886, but he soon spent his wife's dowry. In 1888 she demanded a separation.

In 1892, through the influence of General Félix Gustave Saussier, Esterhazy succeeded in getting a nomination as garrison-major in the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the line at Rouen. Being thus in the neighborhood of Paris, he resumed a life of speculation and excess. His inheritance squandered, Esterhazy had tried to retrieve his fortune in gambling-houses and on the stock-exchange; hard pressed by his creditors, he had recourse to extreme measures.

Having seconded André Crémieu-Foa in his duel with Édouard Drumont in 1892, Esterhazy claimed that this action had made his family, as well as his military seniors, quarrel with him. He produced false letters to support this allegation and threatened to kill both himself and his children. Through the medium of Zadoc Kahn, chief rabbi of France, Esterhazy obtained assistance from the Rothschild family (June 1894). At the same time, he was on good terms with the editors of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole, which he supplied with information.

For an officer whose original commission had been irregular, Esterhazy's military advancement had been unusually rapid: lieutenant in 1874, captain in 1880, decorated in 1882, major in 1892. The reports on him were generally excellent. Nevertheless, he considered himself wronged. In his letters he continually launched into recrimination and abuse against his chiefs. He made negative written comments on the French Army, and even France herself, for which he predicted and hoped that new disasters were in store.

Dreyfus affair

[edit]
Main article: Dreyfus affair
Esterhazy as caricatured by Jean Baptiste Guth in Vanity Fair, May 1898

The Dreyfus affair was triggered in September 1894 when an office cleaner at the German embassy in Paris, who was also an agent of French military intelligence, passed on to her French contacts a handwritten memorandum (widely known as the bordereau), evidently written by an unnamed French officer, offering the German Embassy various confidential military documents.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was picked by the army as the alleged traitor in October 1894. Among those who might have had access to some of the documents, suspicion seems to have fallen on Dreyfus mainly because he was a Jew. The official evidence against him depended overwhelmingly on the contention that his handwriting matched that on the bordereau. Convicted, he was cashiered (formally stripped of his military rank in a public ceremony of degradation), and then shipped to the penal colony of Devil's Island (L'île du Diable) off the coast of French Guiana.[1]

In 1896, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, the then-new head of the Intelligence Service, uncovered a letter sent by Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen (at the time German military attache to Paris) to Esterhazy. After comparison of Esterhazy's handwriting with that of the bordereau, he became convinced of Esterhazy's guilt of the crime for which Dreyfus had been convicted.

In 1897, after fruitless efforts to persuade his superiors to take the new evidence seriously and being transferred to Tunisia in an effort to silence him, Picquart provided proof to Dreyfus' lawyers. They started a campaign to bring Esterhazy to justice. In 1898 an ex-lover of Esterhazy made public letters of his in which he expressed his hatred of France and his contempt for the army. However, Esterhazy was still protected by the Army's General Staff, which did not want to see the judgment of 1895 put into doubt.

Esterhazy asked for a trial behind closed doors by the French Military Justice (10–11 January 1898). He was acquitted, a judgment which ignited anti-Semitic riots in Paris.

On 13 January 1898, Émile Zola published his famous J'Accuse…!, which accused the French government of anti-Semitism and especially focused on the court-martial and jailing of Dreyfus.

Headstone: buried under the alias of Count de Voilemont

Flight to Britain and later years

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Esterhazy was discreetly put on military pension with the rank of major. On 1 September 1898, having shaved off his moustache, he fled France, via Brussels, for the relative safety of England. Rachel Beer, editor of The Observer and the Sunday Times, English newspapers, knew that Esterhazy was in London because The Observer's Paris correspondent had made a connection with him; she interviewed him twice, and he confessed to being the culprit: I wrote the bordereau. She published the interviews in September 1898,[8] reporting his confession and writing a leader column accusing the French military of antisemitism and calling for a retrial for Dreyfus.[9]

From Milton Road in the town of Harpenden, Esterhazy continued to write in anti-Semitic papers such as La Libre Parole until his death in 1923. He is buried in St Nicholas' churchyard, Harpenden, under the name of Jean de Voilemont. A headstone was erected shortly after with the false name and a false birthdate with an inscription from Percy Bysshe Shelley: "He has outsoared the shadow of our night".

Revisionist thesis: Esterhazy as double agent

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The bordereau (memorandum) which sparked the Dreyfus affair

French historian Jean Doise espoused the revisionist hypothesis that Esterhazy might have been a French double agent masquerading as a traitor in order to pass along misinformation to the German Army. Doise was not the first writer to explore the hypothesis of Esterhazy as a double agent: earlier writings by Michel de Lombarès and Henri Giscard d'Estaing, though they differed in the details of their theories, also presented this line of argument.[10] According to Doise, Esterhazy's perceived bitterness and utter lack of patriotic feeling, along with his fluency in German, were qualities that would have helped him to pose as an effective and unrepentant traitor.[11]

In Tunis, he was judged to have become too intimate with the German military attaché. In 1892, he was the object of an accusation made to the head of the staff, General Brault. In 1893, he entered (or, if one accepts the revisionist explanation, pretended to enter) the service of Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché in Paris. According to later disclosures he received from the German attaché a monthly pension of 2000 marks (equivalent to over €12000 in 2015 terms).[12] In return, Esterhazy furnished him in the first place with information (or, as argued, misinformation) about artillery.

Esterhazy reportedly got his information from Major Henry, who had been his comrade in the French military counter-intelligence section of the War Ministry, in 1876. However, Henry, limited to a very special branch of the service, was hardly in a position to furnish details on technical questions. The main architect of the disinformation campaign is claimed to have been Colonel Sandherr, head of French military counter-intelligence.[11]

The lack of value of the material furnished by Esterhazy soon became so apparent that Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché, to whom Schwartzkoppen communicated it without divulging the name of his informant, began to doubt his qualifications as an officer. To convince the attaché, it was necessary for Esterhazy to show himself one day in uniform, galloping behind a well-known general.[citation needed]

The infamous document, or bordereau, which was used to convict Dreyfus had been retrieved from a wastepaper basket at the German Embassy by a cleaning lady who was in the employ of French military counterintelligence. This document had been torn up but was easily pieced together. It announced, among other items, a forthcoming report on a new French 120mm howitzer Canon de 120C Modele 1890 Baquet and the comportment of its hydraulic recoil mechanism, as well as detailed manuals describing the current organization of French field artillery."[11]

However, the French Army had already rejected the 120 mm model as unworkable and had begun development of the revolutionary (for its time) 75 mm field gun. The argument is this bordereau document was a supposed design to prevent the German military from discovering the development of the French 75.[11]

However, there are reports of Esterhazy admitting that he had "indeed been a spy for Germany".[13]

References

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  1. ^ a b Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dreyfus, Alfred" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 579.
  2. ^ “ESTERHAZY, Ferdinand” in Register of Deaths for the St Albans Registration District, volume 3a (1923), p. 7143
  3. ^ Singer, Isidore (1912). The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 4. New York, London: Funk and Wagnalls. p. 671. ISBN 978-1-23-218889-6.
  4. ^ a b Maurice Baumont, Aux sources de l'affaire: l'Affaire Dreyfus d'après les archives (1959), p. 137
  5. ^ "Généalogie de Jean Marie Auguste WALSIN-ESTERHAZY". Geneanet.
  6. ^ Serman, W. (1979). Les Origines des officers français. 1848–1870 (in French). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. ISBN 2-85944-015-1.
  7. ^ As descendant of a bastard of a daughter of Esterhazy, he was not entitled to a title which does not pass (1) to bastards (2) to daughters.
  8. ^ Beer, Rachel, Interviews with Major Esterhazy, The Observer, 18 and 25 September 1898.
  9. ^ Narewska, Elli (2 March 2018). "Rachel Beer, editor of the Observer 1891–1901". The Guardian.
  10. ^ Bredin, Jean-Denis (1986). The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. New York: George Braziller. pp. 512–515. ISBN 0-8076-1109-3.
  11. ^ a b c d France at War – The Dreyfus Case and the French 75 Archived 28 October 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ^ "Historical Currency Converter".
  13. ^ Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy profile, Britannica.com. Accessed 29 April 2022.
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