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The blade had been sawn nearly through beforehand so it would break on cue. Every part of the eight minutes was rehearsed.

The ceremony took eight minutes in the courtyard of the École Militaire on the morning of 5 January 1895. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, 35, an Alsatian Jew and a graduate of the artillery staff, had been convicted of selling secrets to Germany on the strength of a handwriting comparison and a secret file the defense never saw. Now a giant of an adjutant tore the buttons, braid and insignia off his uniform and broke his sword across a knee. The sword had been sawn most of the way through beforehand so it would snap cleanly, which is the kind of detail that tells you how carefully the theater was staged. Dreyfus shouted as he was marched past the ranks that he was innocent, that they were degrading an innocent man, long live France. Outside the railings a crowd chanted death to the Jews. He went to Devil's Island off Guiana and spent four years alone on it, at one stage shackled to his bed at night by a double bar, while in Paris the case rotted. In 1896 the new head of army intelligence, Colonel Georges Picquart, matched the handwriting to a Major Esterhazy and reported it; the army's response was to post Picquart to Tunisia and acquit Esterhazy in a closed hearing lasting minutes. Then, on 13 January 1898, three years to the day after the newspaper cover you are looking at, Émile Zola published an open letter to the president on the front page of L'Aurore under a headline his editor supplied: J'Accuse. Zola named names, was convicted of criminal libel, and fled to England. Circulation that day was 300,000. The affair divided France into two countries that shared a language, and it did not resolve cleanly: a retrial in 1899 found Dreyfus guilty again with extenuating circumstances, an outcome so absurd that it took a presidential pardon to get him off the island and another seven years to get the verdict quashed. He was exonerated in 1906, reinstated, decorated, and served through the whole of the First World War. He died in 1935, and a spectator at his funeral procession is said to have asked who he was. One journalist covering the degradation for a Vienna paper was Theodor Herzl, who watched a French crowd howl at a Jewish officer in the capital of the country that had emancipated the Jews first. Within eighteen months he had written Der Judenstaat. Le Petit Journal, which put this scene on a million breakfast tables, had no idea it was illustrating that too.