🇫🇷 The Glitched Gavel S01E11: The Republic vs. The Officer (The First Trial of Alfred Dreyfus)

Gavel (The Narrator/Prosecutor): "Paris, 1894. It was the moment that split France in two. Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was accused of passing military secrets to Germany. His swift court-martial was shrouded in a toxic fog of secrecy and rampant antisemitism, resulting in a devastating conviction for treason. This week, we examine the initial, corrupted record of a case that became a national trauma." (The sound of heavy official seals being stamped rapidly is heard, followed by a brief, high-frequency radio jam.)

Static (The Analyst/Defense): "Dreyfus’s conviction was based entirely on a secret 'dossier'—a collection of documents presented only to the judges and deliberately withheld from the defense. This key piece of evidence, a handwritten memo known as the bordereau, was a fraudulent forgery that pointed to another officer, Major Esterhazy. We trace the corruption from the highest ranks of the French General Staff, who manufactured evidence and protected their own reputations over justice."

Gavel: "We detail the punishment: Dreyfus was publicly humiliated, his rank stripped from him in a public ceremony, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. His case would spark the 'Dreyfus Affair,' a decade-long political and social crisis that exposed the deep rot of prejudice within the French government. The Glitched Gavel reveals that the conviction was not simply an error of law, but a willful sacrifice of an innocent man to appease a nation consumed by fear and hate. The court's Gavel struck here, but the echo of injustice would not fade."