The Dreyfus Affair represented both a judicial scandal and a military scandal of epic proportions. France's humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870 spurred a great deal of right-wing nationalist rhetoric and action, all of which was obsessed with avenging the French defeat. A variety of political and military scandals, such as General Georges Boulanger's suicide and the sale of Legion of Honor medals, shook the Third Republic through the 1880s and 1890s. To the French these scandals seemed to reveal a government and a military that were unprepared for France's future wars, especially against Germany. As paranoia over France's perceived inability to meet the German military threat mounted, anti-Semitism rose to a fever pitch. Though there were not more than ten thousand Jews in France (out of a population of forty million), the belief that the Jews were...