Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (16 December 1847 – 21 May 1923) was an officer in the French Army from 1870 to 1898. He gained notoriety as a spy for the

German Empire The German Empire (),Herbert Tuttle wrote in September 1881 that the term "Reich" does not literally connote an empire as has been commonly assumed by English-speaking people. The term literally denotes an empire – particularly a hereditary ...

and the actual perpetrator of the act of

treason Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...

of which

Captain Captain is a title, an appellative for the commanding officer of a military unit; the supreme leader of a navy ship, merchant ship, aeroplane, spacecraft, or other vessel; or the commander of a port, fire or police department, election precinct, e ...

Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused and convicted in 1894. After evidence against Esterhazy was discovered and made public, he was eventually subjected to a closed military trial in 1898, only to be officially found not guilty. Esterhazy retired from the military with the rank of major in 1898—presumably under pressure—and fled by way of Brussels to the United Kingdom, where he lived in the town of

Harpenden Harpenden () is a town and civil parish in the City and District of St Albans in the county of Hertfordshire, England. The population of the built-up area was 30,240 in the 2011 census, whilst the population of the civil parish was 29,448. Ha ...

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For gov ...

until his death in 1923.

Biography

Ancestry

Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was born in Paris, France, the son of General Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy (1807–1857), who later distinguished himself as division commander in the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the ...

. His paternal grandfather, Jean Marie Auguste Walsin-Esterhazy, born in 1767 at

Valleraugue Valleraugue (; oc, Valarauga) is a former commune in the Gard department in southern France. On 1 January 2019, it was merged into the new commune Val-d'Aigoual.Le Vigan (Gard).Maurice Baumont, Aux sources de l'affaire: l'Affaire Dreyfus d'après les archives (1959), p. 137 Jean Marie was adopted by a Dr Walsin, a French doctor in the service of the Austrian emperor. Growing up under the name of Jean Marie Auguste Walsin, he became a business man and landowner in

Nîmes Nîmes ( , ; oc, Nimes ; Latin: ''Nemausus'') is the prefecture of the Gard department in the Occitanie region of Southern France. Located between the Mediterranean Sea and Cévennes, the commune of Nîmes has an estimated population of ...

, and added the name of

Esterházy The House of Esterházy, also spelled Eszterházy (), is a Hungarian noble family with origins in the Middle Ages. From the 17th century, the Esterházys were the greatest landowner magnates of the Kingdom of Hungary, during the time that it ...

, apparently without the agreement of the family, after being acknowledged by his mother about 1797. This branch of the Esterházys had settled in France at the end of the 17th century and provided military officers to France, namely in its hussar regiments.

Early life and military career

Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was left an orphan in September 1857, aged only nine. After some schooling at the

Lycée Bonaparte Lycée Bonaparte is a French international school in Doha, Qatar. It includes levels ''maternelle'' (preschool) through ''lycée'' (senior high school). The École Française de Doha was established in a rented villa in Slata Al Jadida in the 197 ...

in Paris, he attempted in vain to enter the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. He disappears from public records in 1865; by 1869 he had been enlisted in the

Legion of Antibes The Legion of Antibes was recruited under direction of Pope Pius IX's secretary of state, Giacomo Antonelli, following the September Convention of 1864, to replace French troops garrisoned in Rome, during the closing phase of Italian unification, th ...

, a unit of French volunteers in the service of

Pope Pius IX Pope Pius IX ( it, Pio IX, ''Pio Nono''; born Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti; 13 May 1792 – 7 February 1878) was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878, the longest verified papal reign. He was notable for convoking the First Vatican ...

Franco-Prussian War

In June 1870, his uncle's influence enabled Esterhazy to be commissioned into the

French Foreign Legion The French Foreign Legion (french: Légion étrangère) is a corps of the French Army which comprises several specialties: infantry, cavalry, engineers, airborne troops. It was created in 1831 to allow foreign nationals into the French Army ...

. It was an irregular appointment as he had neither been promoted from the ranks after service as a non-commissioned officer, nor graduated from a military academy. However, the start of the Franco-Prussian War in July precluded any action being taken against him. He then assumed the title of count, to which he was not entitled. There being a dearth of officers after the catastrophe of Sedan, Esterhazy was able to pass muster as a lieutenant and then as a captain. He served as an infantry officer in the campaigns of the

Loire The Loire (, also ; ; oc, Léger, ; la, Liger) is the longest river in France and the 171st longest in the world. With a length of , it drains , more than a fifth of France's land, while its average discharge is only half that of the Rhôn ...

and of the Jura Mountains. After peace was declared, he remained in the army.

Post-war career

Between 1880 and 1882 Esterhazy was employed to translate German at the French military counter-intelligence section, where he became acquainted with Major Henry and Lieutenant Colonel Sandherr, both to become major figures in the

Dreyfus affair The Dreyfus affair (french: affaire Dreyfus, ) was a political scandal that divided the French Third Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. "L'Affaire", as it is known in French, has come to symbolise modern injustice in the Francop ...

. He was then employed at the French War Ministry. He never appeared in his regiment at

Beauvais Beauvais ( , ; pcd, Bieuvais) is a city and commune in northern France, and prefecture of the Oise département, in the Hauts-de-France region, north of Paris. The commune of Beauvais had a population of 56,020 , making it the most popul ...

, and for about five years led a life of dissipation in Paris, as a result of which his small fortune was soon squandered. In 1882 Esterhazy was attached to the expedition sent to

Tunis ''Tounsi'' french: Tunisois , population_note = , population_urban = , population_metro = 2658816 , population_density_km2 = , timezone1 = CET , utc_offset1 ...

. While there he was employed in the Intelligence Department, then in the Native Affairs Department of the regency. On his own initiative he inserted a citation within official records mention of his "exploits in war", which was later recognised as being falsely concocted. Returning to France in 1885, Esterhazy remained in garrison at

Marseille Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Fra ...

for a long time. Having come to the end of his financial resources, he married in 1886, but he soon spent his wife's

dowry A dowry is a payment, such as property or money, paid by the bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage. Dowry contrasts with the related concepts of bride price and dower. While bride price or bride service is a payment ...

. In 1888 she demanded a separation. In 1892, through the influence of General Félix Gustave Saussier, Esterhazy succeeded in getting a nomination as garrison-major in the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the line at Rouen. Being thus in the neighborhood of Paris, he resumed a life of speculation and excess. His inheritance squandered, Esterhazy had tried to retrieve his fortune in gambling-houses and on the stock-exchange; hard pressed by his creditors, he had recourse to extreme measures. Having seconded André Crémieu-Foa in his duel with Édouard Drumont in 1892, Esterhazy claimed that this action had made his family, as well as his military seniors, quarrel with him. He produced false letters to support this allegation and threatened to kill both himself and his children. Through the medium of Zadoc Kahn, chief

rabbi A rabbi () is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi – known as '' semikha'' – following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form o ...

of France, Esterhazy obtained assistance from the Rothschild family (June 1894). At the same time he was on good terms with the editors of the antisemitic newspaper '' La Libre Parole'', which he supplied with information. For an officer whose original commission had been irregular, Esterhazy's military advancement had been unusually rapid: lieutenant in 1874, captain in 1880, decorated in 1882, major in 1892. The reports on him were generally excellent. Nevertheless, he considered himself wronged. In his letters he continually launched into recrimination and abuse against his chiefs. He made negative written comments on the

French Army History Early history The first permanent army, paid with regular wages, instead of feudal levies, was established under Charles VII of France, Charles VII in the 1420 to 1430s. The Kings of France needed reliable troops during and after the ...

, and even France herself, for which he predicted and hoped that new disasters were in store.

Dreyfus affair

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy Vanity Fair 26 May 1898

The Dreyfus affair was triggered in September 1894 when an office cleaner at the German embassy in Paris, who was also an agent of French military intelligence, passed on to her French contacts a handwritten memorandum (widely known as the ''bordereau''), evidently written by an unnamed French officer, offering the German Embassy various confidential military documents. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was picked by the army as the alleged traitor in October 1894. Suspicion seems to have fallen on Dreyfus mainly because the handwriting was a match for his own, but also because he was a Jew. The official evidence against him depended overwhelmingly on the contention that his handwriting matched that on the ''bordereau''. Convicted, he was

cashiered Cashiering (or degradation ceremony), generally within military forces, is a ritual dismissal of an individual from some position of responsibility for a breach of discipline. Etymology From the Flemish (to dismiss from service; to discar ...

(formally stripped of his military rank in a public ceremony of degradation), and then shipped to the penal colony of Devil's Island (L'île du Diable) off the coast of

French Guiana French Guiana ( or ; french: link=no, Guyane ; gcr, label= French Guianese Creole, Lagwiyann ) is an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France on the northern Atlantic coast of South America in the Guianas ...

. In 1896, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, the then-new head of the Intelligence Service, uncovered a letter sent by Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen (at the time German military attache to Paris) to Esterhazy. After comparison of Esterhazy's handwriting with that of the ''bordereau'', he became convinced of Esterhazy's guilt of the crime for which Dreyfus had been convicted. In 1897, after fruitless efforts to persuade his superiors to take the new evidence seriously and being transferred to

Tunisia ) , image_map = Tunisia location (orthographic projection).svg , map_caption = Location of Tunisia in northern Africa , image_map2 = , capital = Tunis , largest_city = capital , ...

in an effort to silence him, Picquart provided proof to Dreyfus' lawyers. They started a campaign to bring Esterhazy to justice. In 1898 an ex-lover of Esterhazy made public letters of his in which he expressed his hatred of France and his contempt for the army. However, Esterhazy was still protected by the Army's General Staff, which did not want to see the judgment of 1895 put into doubt. Esterhazy asked for a trial behind closed doors by the French Military Justice (10–11 January 1898). He was acquitted, a judgment which ignited anti-Semitic riots in Paris. On 13 January 1898, Émile Zola published his famous '' J'Accuse…!'', which accused the French government of anti-Semitism and especially focused on the court-martial and jailing of Dreyfus. Headstone Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy

Flight to Britain and later years

Esterhazy was discreetly put on military pension with the rank of major. On 1 September 1898, having shaved off his moustache, he fled France, via Brussels, for the relative safety of England. Rachel Beer, editor of ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...

'' and the '' Sunday Times'', English newspapers, knew that Esterhazy was in London because ''The Observers Paris correspondent had made a connection with him; she interviewed him twice, and he confessed to being the culprit: ''I wrote the bordereau''. She published the interviews in September 1898, reporting his confession and writing a leader column accusing the French military of antisemitism and calling for a retrial for Dreyfus. From Milton Road in the town of

, Esterhazy continued to write in anti-Semitic papers such as '' La Libre Parole'' until his death in 1923. He is buried in St Nicholas' churchyard, Harpenden, under the name of ''Jean de Voilemont''. A headstone was erected shortly after with the false name and a false birthdate with an inscription from Percy Bysshe Shelley: "He has outsoared the shadow of our night".

Revisionist thesis: Esterhazy as double agent

French historian Jean Doise espoused the revisionist hypothesis that Esterhazy might have been a French double agent masquerading as a traitor in order to pass along misinformation to the German Army. Doise was not the first writer to explore the hypothesis of Esterhazy as a double agent: earlier writings by Michel de Lombarès and Henri Giscard d'Estaing, though they differed in the details of their theories, also presented this line of argument. According to Doise, Esterhazy's perceived bitterness and utter lack of patriotic feeling, along with his fluency in German, were qualities that would have helped him to pose as an effective and unrepentant traitor.France at War – The Dreyfus Case and the French 75
In Tunis, he was judged to have become too intimate with the German military attaché. In 1892, he was the object of an accusation made to the head of the staff, General Brault. In 1893, he entered (or, if one accepts the revisionist explanation, pretended to enter) the service of Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché in Paris. According to later disclosures he received from the German attaché a monthly pension of 2000 marks (equivalent to over €12000 in 2015 terms). In return, Esterhazy furnished him in the first place with information (or, as argued, misinformation) about

artillery Artillery is a class of heavy military ranged weapons that launch munitions far beyond the range and power of infantry firearms. Early artillery development focused on the ability to breach defensive walls and fortifications during si ...

. Esterhazy reportedly got his information from Major Henry, who had been his comrade in the French military counter-intelligence section of the War Ministry, in 1876. However, Henry, limited to a very special branch of the service, was hardly in a position to furnish details on technical questions. The main architect of the disinformation campaign is claimed to have been Colonel Sandherr, head of French military counter-intelligence. The lack of value of the material furnished by Esterhazy soon became so apparent that Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché, to whom Schwartzkoppen communicated it without divulging the name of his informant, began to doubt his qualifications as an officer. To convince the attaché, it was necessary for Esterhazy to show himself one day in uniform, galloping behind a well-known general. The infamous document, or ''bordereau'', which was used to convict Dreyfus had been retrieved from a wastepaper basket at the German Embassy by a cleaning lady who was in the employ of French military counterintelligence. This document had been torn up but was easily pieced together. It announced, among other items, a forthcoming report on a new French 120mm howitzer '' Canon de 120C Modele 1890 Baquet'' and the comportment of its hydraulic recoil mechanism, as well as detailed manuals describing the current organization of French field artillery." However, the French Army had already rejected the 120 mm model as unworkable and had begun development of the revolutionary (for its time) 75 mm field gun. The argument is this ''bordereau'' document was a supposed design to prevent the German military from discovering the development of the French 75. However, there are reports of Esterhazy admitting that he had "indeed been a spy for Germany".Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy profile
Britannica.com. Accessed 29 April 2022.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin 1847 births 1923 deaths Burials in Hertfordshire Military personnel from Paris People associated with the Dreyfus affair French people of Hungarian descent Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy Officers of the French Foreign Legion