Dreyfus Affair: France's late-19th-century political and social crisis

Auguste Scheurer-Kestner had died in 1899 on the day Dreyfus was pardoned. The French Senate honoured him and Ludovic Trarieux, who had also died in the meantime, in 1906 by deciding to place their busts in the Senate's Gallery of Honour. Émile Zola also did not live to see the complete rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus; he died in 1902 in his Paris apartment from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blockage in his fireplace.

Alfred Dreyfus attended the funeral with his brother, despite Zola's widow's initial concern that his presence would cause riots, and was among those who held vigil at Zola's coffin the night before. Dreyfus, his wife Lucie, and his brother Mathieu were also present when Zola's remains were ceremoniously transferred to the Panthéon on June 4, 1908. During the ceremony, the extreme right-wing journalist Louis-Anthelme Grégori made an assassination attempt on Dreyfus. The two bullets Grégori fired, however, only lightly grazed Dreyfus's arm. He was acting on behalf of Action Française to disrupt the ceremony. In doing so, according to Duclert, he intended to hit both "traitors" Zola and Dreyfus. Ruth Harris describes Grégori's subsequent acquittal by a Paris court as an indication of how strongly the Dreyfus affair continued to shape French society.

Dishonorably discharged from the French army in 1899, Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy spent the rest of his life in exile in England. Impoverished for many years, he complained that Jews had destroyed his existence and that the army had betrayed him. The Forchtenstein line of the Esterházy family paid him money, among other things, so that he would take another name. A small inheritance finally secured him a livelihood until he found work as a journalist under various pseudonyms. Esterhazy died in 1923; he claimed shortly before his death that he had written the Bordereau at the behest of Jean Sandherr, then head of the intelligence service. Du Paty, who had been compulsorily retired at half pay after the discovery of the faux henry, was allowed to return to the reserves in 1912 and re-entered active service at the start of the war in 1914. He succumbed to a war wound in 1916. Édouard Drumont, who was one of the most radical anti-Semites with his newspaper La Libre Parole, died impoverished and largely forgotten in 1918. The former war minister Mercier, whose prejudgement of Dreyfus had set the wheels of lies and deception in motion, held a seat in the French Senate until 1920 and maintained that he had acted righteously until his death in 1921.

Many of the Dreyfusards held influential political posts in the years following the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus. Picquart became Minister of War in the cabinet of the Dreyfusard Georges Clemenceau in 1906, the year in which he had been rehabilitated together with Dreyfus, and held this office until 1909. He died in 1914 as the result of a riding accident. Jean Jaurès fought vehemently for workers' rights during Clemenceau's government and was one of the staunchest opponents of increasing militarism and entry into the war against the German Reich. He was assassinated in 1914 just before the war began. For Léon Blum, who was French Prime Minister for a short time several times between 1936 and 1950, the Dreyfus affair was the defining political event of his younger years.

Alfred Dreyfus lived a largely reclusive life after his retirement from the army. In 1901, he published Cinq années de ma vie (Five Years of My Life), an account of his life dedicated to his two children Pierre and Jeanne, covering the period from the day of his arrest until his release from the military prison in Rennes. In it, one can read the bitter disappointment of his firm confidence, even during solitary confinement, that his superiors would do everything possible to clear up his conviction. He also writes about his admiration for all those who had stood up for him.

At the beginning of the First World War, the 55-year-old returned to active service in the army. He first served in the northern military district of Paris, where he had to inspect defensive installations to protect Paris, and later not far from the front in an artillery detachment stationed first near Verdun and then at the Chemin des Dames. By the end of the war, he had been promoted to colonel and officer of the Legion of Honour.

Mathieu Dreyfus' only son Émile and Adolphe Reinach, the son of Joseph Reinach, who had married Mathieu's daughter Marguerite, both fell in the first year of the war. Alfred Dreyfus's son Pierre survived the First World War, in which he had fought as a young officer on the battlefields of the Somme and before Verdun. He was promoted to captain in 1920 and was admitted to the Legion of Honour in 1921.

Alfred Dreyfus died on 12 July 1935; his wife Lucie survived him by more than ten years. During the Second World War, like most members of her family, she fled to the so-called Zone libre and changed her name to escape persecution of the Jews. She spent the last years of the war hiding in a convent of nuns and returned to Paris after the liberation of France, where she died shortly afterwards.