"I say, Holmes– what do you make of this Dreyfus business? I've been meaning to ask you for quite a while."
"You don't say, Watson. That little case has been setting France ablaze, sometimes literally, for very nearly the last six years…"
"Well, it was a French case, as you say. Its clamour sounds from far off, it might be said, here in England. Quite apart from the many extraordinary cases– phantom hounds, swamp adders, criminal masterminds– that have continually occupied your unique talents."
"Hmm! You surely recall, Watson, that the interest and even significance of a crime has often no relation to the noise it makes. The most fascinating chains of cause and effect may wind back from the most obscure sixpenny slaying. Daily horrors hidden among the slums and lonely cottages of this country would throw this French affair into the shade. While the vulgar world roars on over the most trite and shallow pilfering from a wastebasket, because it involves secret papers and a wronged Jew."
"Yes; the religion of this Dreyfus has certainly been given remarkable emphasis, in the accounts of the popular press. While the lower class of French newssheets paint the Jew as some kind of soulless, bloodthirsty reptilian enemy alien, our own yellow papers tar all France with anti-Semitism, high and low alike.
"The irony is doubtlessly lost on them. Prejudice of any kind is anathema to me; a Jew may be guilty, or he may be innocent, as solid evidence must demonstrate. I did look over the mere surface facts of the case, some time ago…but surely you must have formed your own view from some rather better papers than that, my dear Watson?"
"Well, I'd hardly dare to say I'd looked over more than the surface myself, with new documents and evidence seemingly uncovered every month. Only one clear point really struck me among the fog. As a formerly military man, I cannot conceive that the French army should have proceeded so far against a brother officer, nor exposed the armed forces to such controversy and question, without morally certainty that they had their man."
"Moral certainty is hardly evidential certainty, Watson–and if the main body of evidence against Dreyfus had not been presented six years ago in a closed military court, we would have all been spared this ridiculous mess of speculation. While respecting the gallantry of our soldiers, I have not often found the military conductive to successful detective work– excepting present company, of course. For example, that Major Henry who confessed to forging one of the documents incriminating Dreyfus, and committed suicide in prison…?"
"An overzealous maniac. No true officer– a clear freak anomaly."
"Almost so great an anomaly, my dear Watson, as an intelligent, fervently patriotic officer with a spotless character– untroubled by want of money, and with every prospect of a brilliant future career– turning petty spy and traitor?"
"…I take your point, Holmes. One can scarcely imagine the motive for such a terrible treachery, by an honourable soldier, unless… dash it all, Holmes, we both know those asinine canards about murdered children and global conspiracies are false. We're respectable, educated men. And yet, that Dreyfus should have turned Judas seems only explicable by some inborn moral deficiency. Some terribly poisonous and powerful hereditary trait…"
"Such as twisted Professor Moriarty from a respectable academic to a monster of depravity. He was not Jewish, of course; he was of Irish decent. As was his deputy, Moran– the crimes of that once-honourable soldier tower above the petty treacheries laid upon this French captain. Hereditary is one of the most powerful forces that act on human nature… no race of humankind has escaped the pollution of dangerous strains, and they would long remain with such an insular people as the Jews. Thankfully, the future– from whence hope springs eternal– promises assimilation, sharing of knowledge, ever increased understanding of these inborn tendencies to crime, and their eventual elimination. When that new Jerusalem has been built with human hands, all the nations gather in peace, and crime has gone to sleep with the dinosaurs…how gloriously boring it would be. All many years in the future, naturally, and the concern of the scientist, principally, rather than the criminal agent."
"Indeed. Turning back to the rather more unsavoury subject of Dreyfus… do you have some serious doubt regarding the evidence against him? If an innocent man has been left to rot on a fever-ridden island for six years, it would be a monstrous miscarriage of justice."
"I can say little regarding the evidence in this case, and thus nothing at all regarding the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, while said evidence remains sub rosa for alleged reasons of state security. Hardly a promising circumstance for any investigation– or any conviction."
"Then, did you never consider offering your services once more to the French Republic? To finally resolve one of the most celebrated and baffling mysteries of the nineteenth century…?"
"Really, Watson? Dreyfus was convicted of communicating the most elementary and outdated information to the German Empire– no naval treaty, no Bruce-Partington Plans– nothing to pose a serious threat to European peace. The actual case may be the simplest thing in the world, but it has been a political case from the start, mired in the obfuscation, secrecy and press controversy that attends such things. You will recall how I worked so long to capture the Whitechapel murderer, only for his arrest to prove impossible, without the monarchy itself being disastrously compromised. I freely confess that I have no stomach for politicised cases. In the past six years I have resolved a great many murders, averted international crises, and cleared several of those innocent men who will continue to fill our prisons while a jury of Englishmen remains capable of honest error. You doubtless recall the matters of the West End Horror, and the Glasgow battery case. Poor Slater was of the Jewish faith as well. The Case of the French Artilleryman, however, will be brought to a final resolution by another agent than myself; until then, Dreyfus must remain like Crusoe on his island I can hardly be everywhere and accomplish everything."
"Sometimes it seems you are, my old friend; but you are right, of course. One more thing; who is the indefatigable detective who has obtained a further trial, six years after the original conviction? He must possess the persistent of an Athelney Jones, and rather more than his intelligence."
"Rather more indeed, Watson. My contacts in the Paris police inform me that none other than the celebrated criminologist Bertillion has been engaged in the Dreyfus investigation from the very first. I was not, in fact, aware that analysis of handwriting was numbered among his many masteries– but, naturally, the greatest criminal agent in France would turn his attention to every possible skill that may aid in detection. As he would make certain of comprehending every possible facet of such a complex and public case. Indeed, whatever their other deficiencies, the French military investigators could hardly have called upon a better man for their purpose."
A/N: Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew, was wrongly convicted by a closed military court of spying for Germany in 1894 and imprisoned on Devil's Island for about six years. There was never any evidence against him whatsoever; the conviction was motivated by the bias and anti-Semitism of senior officers, and then their extensive efforts to cover up their own errors. Many respectable persons in France and England, due to the misinformation and prejudice still very much at work in current events, believed in Dreyfus's guilt. G.K. Chesterton, for one, displayed a shocking ambivalence regarding the case, comfortably identifiable as anti-Semitism. The case left a legacy of violent division in France between liberal and conservative faction, and was the origin of the movement for a Jewish homeland in Israel.
Bertillion was a French criminologist who Holmes canonically admired greatly for his pioneering forensic work and use of biometics to systematically identify criminals. He was not a handwriting expert, and by presenting himself as such he helped consign an innocent man to years of such isolated, unsupported and murderously unhealthy confinement that Dreyfus almost became insane before his eventual release. Apart from the tireless campaigning of his own family, this was considerably effected by a Colonel Picquart of French Military Intelligence. The long campaign to see justice done, exposing and building a movement against established corruption along the way, could be said to be more more notable, realistic and, in that sense, more desirable, than Holmes getting Dreyfus out of jail before teatime.
There is at least one non-canonical novel in which Holmes comes in at the tail end of the Dreyfus case, but there are more about his supposed pursuit of Jack the Ripper, a case of far lesser importance to the history of Europe and the Jewish people (though of greater importance to the five murdered women). The West End Horror and Glasgow battery mentioned allude to further miscarriages of justice that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself helped to reverse, though I cannot find that he took a direct interest in the Dreyfus case.