The Dreyfus Affair, the wrongful conviction of French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894, is most often remembered as an example of antisemitism and a miscarriage of justice. What receives far less attention however is the role the Affair played in the secularization legislation that would sweep across France in the years to come.

This project argues that the group most responsible for enabling that legislation was the anti-Dreyfusards themselves, drawn overwhelmingly from Catholic institutions and organizations. French republican politicians had sought to reduce the Church's role in public life for decades but lacked the political conditions to do so. By committing themselves against Dreyfus, even after that position had been publicly disproven, Catholic institutions had discredited themselves more thoroughly than decades of republican anti-clerical arguments had managed to do beforehand. It was this continual overreach that handed anti-clerical politicians the mandate to finally make various secularization laws and acts of the early twentieth century possible, a phenomenon far from isolated to this single chapter of French history. 

This project employs historical and legal analysis of primary sources, including parliamentary records and contemporary press, as well as drawing on works by historians Maurice Larkin, Ruth Harris, and John McManners. This case also illustrates a pattern visible well beyond France: from the collapse of Prohibition to the current backlash against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, institutional overreach in moments of political crisis has repeatedly accelerated a movement's own disempowerment, handing opponents a mandate they could not have built alone.