Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy

French army officer and spy for Germany

• Born: December 16, 1847
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 21, 1923
• Place of death: Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England

Cause of notoriety: Esterhazy sold French military secrets to the Germans. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of Esterhazy’s crime, which led to his wrongful conviction and exile and the start of the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal that divided fin-de-siècle France.

Active: 1894-1899

Locale: Paris, France

Early Life

Marie-Charles-Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (EHS-tur-hah-zee) was the descendant of a military family that had seen many French-Hungarian marriages. He was a mediocre student and did not manage to qualify for the French military academy as his family had hoped. He took a roundabout route into the French army, volunteering to take part in the guarding of estates abroad and transferring into the French Foreign Legion. After some service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, he was temporarily promoted. However, he was then restored to his previous rank, and the demotion left him embittered about the French military establishment.

Esterhazy was an inveterate gambler and womanizer, traits that led him to spend more money than he had. He gambled away his inheritance and tried to amend his fortunes by marriage to an heiress. Legal action on her family’s part prevented him from being able to touch the bulk of her wealth and left him financially strapped.

Treasonous Career

Esterhazy decided to improve his financial situation in 1894 by offering to sell French military secrets to the Germans. He made contact with the German legation in Paris, which was instructed by the higher authorities in Berlin to deal with Esterhazy. He argued in subsequent accounts that he was serving as a double agent and that the military secrets he was offering were outdated. No one was able to authenticate his claims.

Information about the deal with the Germans came to the attention of the French intelligence forces, which proceeded to investigate. Suspicion was initially cast on a Jewish officer in the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Despite his otherwise blameless record and a family history of French patriotism, Dreyfus became the victim both of a general distrust of Jews in French service and of the presence within French intelligence of Hubert Joseph Henry, an old friend of Esterhazy. In what became known as the Dreyfus affair, Dreyfus was convicted, stripped of his military ranking, and exiled to Devil’s Island. Esterhazy hoped that the efforts of Henry would keep him uninvolved in the case.

Henry did not, however, succeed to the position of head of French intelligence, and Georges Picquart, who did, rapidly came to the conclusion that Dreyfus was innocent. Various pieces of evidence led to suspicion of Esterhazy, but it seemed for a time that the French military establishment would protect him. Picquart, however, despite being sent abroad for further military service, was able to excite a great deal of public sympathy for Dreyfus, especially with the help of the novelist Émile Zola. Zola’s 1898 letter to the French president—titled “J’accuse” (“I Accuse”) and appearing on the front page of a Parisian daily—was a masterpiece of polemic. French society argued the rights and wrongs of the case against Dreyfus. After Henry was imprisoned and committed suicide in 1898, Esterhazy fled to England, where he spent the rest of his life and was never charged with the crime of treason.

Esterhazy’s public image was further damaged in 1898 by the publication of a passage from a letter in which he spoke contemptuously of the French. Dreyfus was pardoned the next year and was fully exonerated in 1906 and readmitted into the army. Esterhazy continued to publish various accounts of his involvement from abroad. The die-hard anti-Dreyfusards, who had discounted the earlier evidence against Esterhazy, claimed that his confessional writings were the result of his being in the pay of an international Jewish conspiracy.

Impact

The Dreyfus affair was a watershed in French society, pitting conservative against liberal elements. It also gave liberal Jews in Europe cause for concern as the level of anti-Semitism became clearer and thereby spawned the birth of Zionism. Esterhazy himself did not appear to have been anti-Semitic and was perfectly happy interacting with Jews if he felt there was money to be made from it. The enormous consequences of Esterhazy’s attempt at treason dwarf his importance on the stage of French history.

Bibliography

Bredin, Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: George Braziller, 1986. Remains the most complete account in English of the background and details of Esterhazy’s story, leaving no doubt about his guilt.

Brennan, James F. The Reflection of the Dreyfus Affair in the European Press, 1897-1899. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Presents thorough documentation of the crucial stages of the change in public opinion in France and elsewhere.

Burns, Michael, ed. France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Gives translations of the crucial documents that created the mystery and subsequently unraveled it.

Derfler, Leslie. The Dreyfus Affair. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Gives detailed chronology and provides a full account of the Dreyfus affair.

Forth, Christopher E. The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Looks at the way fin-de-siècle concerns about degeneracy worked against Dreyfus originally and then against Esterhazy.