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Hello. In 1894, a Jewish staff officer in the French Army was convicted of spying. To cries of down with Judas from a large Parisian crowd, he was publicly stripped of his badges of rank before being deported to Devil's Island.

This display of antisemitism was ugly enough, and years later, after heinous punishment, it transpired that the officer was innocent. This was the Dreyfus affair, and it tore France apart.

The scandal of Alfred Dreyfus' treatment set Republicans against Catholics and led to the prosecution of the novelist Emile Zola. It threatened the foundations of the French Republic itself, provoked a separation of church and state, and established the model of the French intellectual.

Half a century later, during a Nazi occupation, the affair was still influencing France.

To discuss the Dreyfus affair, I'm joined by Robert Gilday, professor of modern history at Oxford University, Ruth Harris, lecturer in modern history, fellow of New College at Oxford, and Robert Thumes, professor of French history at Cambridge University.

Robert Gilday, can you set the scene for us in 1894, beginning with the military position, because Dreyfus was in the army.

The Franco-Prussian War ended with a defeat of France in 1871, and that was still casting a long shadow.

Yes, one could say probably that in 1894, France was still suffering the traumatic shocks from the 1870 defeat at the hands of Bismarck's Germany.

France had gone to war in an attempt to prevent German unification under the leadership of Napoleon III.

Napoleon III hoped to reinvent the glories of his uncle, Napoleon I, but it all went pear-shaped for him. He was captured and surrendered.

Then the Republic was proclaimed, and you went into a sort of people's war. The French people under the new Republican government rose up and tried to throw the Germans out, but it again failed.

Paris was put under siege. The French government had to leave the capital. A heavy defeat, a heavy peace was imposed on the French.

They lost Alsace the reign. They had to pay huge amount of money to Germany.

War became civil war because the people of Paris refused to lay down their arms after the armistice. They rose up and that was the Paris commune, an enormously bloody conflict.

In the 25 or 30 years after that, the French tried to recover a sense of national identity and national greatness.

People wanted a war of revenge, but that was not possible. They decided to go out and build an empire. They built an empire in India, China, what's now Vietnam, in Africa, and that put them in competition with the British.

By 1894, the French have got a certain amount of self-esteem back, but they were extremely concerned about anything that might threaten their own sense of themselves and their own security.

Did this have a particular, but you must have had. What effect did this have on the French army?

Well, the French army, again, was an army that had a long past of success. It was an army that had achieved greatness during the French revolution.

Obviously, under Napoleon, it was an army with a huge amount of self-esteem, but it was an army that found it difficult to integrate with the republic.

The republican government was very keen to impose its own regime, and this meant that a lot of opponents of the French Republic were army officers and generals, and there was a huge amount of tension there.

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