Marie-Charles-Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
The son of a distinguished Crimean War veteran of Hungarian descent, Esterhazy joined the French Foreign Legion and fought during the Franco-Prussian War, later becoming a German translator for France’s military counter-intelligence section and the War Ministry. He participated in France’s 1882 expedition to its protectorate, Tunisia, during which time he inserted combat exploits into the official record that were later identified as inaccurate. Despite his quarrelsome nature and profligate spending, Esterhazy advanced in his military career. However, in June 1894, after squandering his inheritance, his wife’s dowry, and speculating in stocks and gambling, Esterhazy, cleverly manipulated France’s chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, to facilitate financial assistance from the wealthy Jewish Rothschild family – while he simultaneously contributed to the popular, anti-Semitic journal, La Libre Parole.
The following month, Esterhazy secretly met with Germany’s military attaché in Paris, Colonel Max von Schwartzkoppen. A few months later, Madame Bastian, a cleaning woman employed by French counterintelligence in the German embassy, recovered from Schwartzkoppen’s wastepaper basket, the ripped-up remnants of a memorandum, or bordereau, listing secret French military information. Assuming that a spy was operating out of the French General Staff’s headquarters and prompted by a pervasive anti-Semitic sentiment within the army, but with no evidence other than a similarity in handwriting, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested, tried and convicted of treason as the author of the bordereau. He was banished for life to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, off the shore of French Guiana in South America.
Although many high-ranking officers soon became aware of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’ innocence, the army resolutely protected Esterhazy and hid its own complicity. Despite interrogations by counterintelligence and warnings that the vice president of the Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, was attempting to prove his guilt, Esterhazy continued meeting with Schwartzkoppen.
At the end of August 1898, Esterhazy’s accomplice, Major Hubert-Joseph Henry, confessed his own forgeries to the Minister of War, Godefroy Cavaignac, prompting resignations throughout the army. Henry committed suicide in prison on August 31, 1898 – the next day Esterhazy crossed the border into Belgium. “He then fled Paris for London, where he settled under the name of de Bécourt,” (The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, Bredin). Esterhazy lived the remainder of his life in the Hertfordshire village of Harpenden, supporting himself by drafting articles for the French press.
Our letter regarding financial transactions seems to reference the Imperial Ottoman Bank, a French-British investment bank founded in 1856.
Folded and in generally fine condition.
