Head of the Rothschild Frères Bank and regent of the Banque de France, Alphonse de Rothschild is here depicted as a cephalopod whose eight tentacles are anti-Semitic short-hand for the international stranglehold of Jewish capital.
Alphonse Rothschild’s son and recipient of the Legion of Honor for his bravery in battle, Baron Henri de Rothschild is here depicted as a parasitical fly or cockroach emerging from a latrine, a sign of infestation and surely not a sign of luck.
After Dreyfus was stripped of his military honors, the degradation continued. Amato’s illustration captures his humiliating parade around the courtyard of the École Militaire, the the chorus of heckles from fellow soldiers. As Dreyfus recalled it: "I heard the howls of a deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France….The round of the square made, the torture would be over, I believed." But the agony of that long day was only beginning.
While Henri Meyer of Le Petit Journal chose to name his picture “Le Traître” and refuses Dreyfus his title, Amato refrains from such judgments and continues to use the rank of Captain in his captions. Do these subtle differences in almost identical scenes betray the political sympathies of each illustrator and their editors? Given how polarizing the Affair had been, it is safe to say that even those tasked with the most apparently objective depictions found themselves choosing sides.
Pierre René Waldeck-Rousseau, Prime Minister of the Republic (1899 – 1902) initiated Dreyfus’s pardon. Because of his initial doubts about the Captain, he is depicted as a flip-flopper, performing “a last summersault.”
Devil’s Island was part of a French penal colony devoted primarily to political prisoners off the coast of French Guiana. Dreyfus was exiled there in 1894, and did not leave until 1899, when he returned to France for his retrial.
In this image, Dreyfus turns away from his book in frustration, lost in his thoughts, as a prison guard watches him. Here, Le Petit Journal satisfies the French public’s curiosity to imagine Dreyfus’ condition after his highly publicized trial. A year earlier, they expressed their outrage at the presence of his mustache, claiming that alongside his imprisonment, he should be stripped of such symbols of his nationality: "We were told that the traitor, upon imprisonment, was to have his mustache shaved, hair cut, and be forced to don a prison uniform. None of this has happened
