Major Esterhazy Military Officer and Spy

Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (1847-1923), Military Officer, was born in Paris of Hungarian parents and was educated at the Lycée Bonaparte. Esterhazy began his military career as a Lieutenant in the French Army where he gained promotion through a series of sinister deceptions and misdemeanours, eventually becoming a spy for Germany. Esterhazy is remembered by history for his role in one of the greatest scandals in French history, 'The Dreyfus Affair'. Esterhazy was the perpetrator of the crime for which Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly accused and convicted. Emile Zola (1840-1902) exposed the affair to the general public in a famous open letter to the Président of the Republic, entitled J'accuse! (1898). Esterhazy spent his last years in self-imposed exile in England, where he admitted his involvement in the crime, but was not convicted. He died near London in 1923.

He has quite recently acquired a quite sudden notoriety by implication in L'Affaire Dreyfus: of which, perhaps, more will be heard.... He has been heard to say that he does not love Zola. He is a spare, nervous, well-hated man, with a drooping nose; whose face and swarthy complexion betray his race.

Vanity Fair, 'Men of the Day', No. 714, 1898.