Armand du Paty de Clam (21 February 1853-3 September 1916) was a French Army Lieutenant-Colonel who played a key role in the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s. He died of wounds received at the First Battle of the Marne in 1914.
Biography[]
Armand du Paty de Clam was born in Paris, France on 21 February 1853, and he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1870 and went on to serve in the French Army. He became a lieutenant in 1874, captain in 1877, and major in 1890, and, as a member of the General Staff, he worked to find the spy involved in an 1894 plot to deliver information on France's new artillery to the German Empire. He and his superior officers decided to scapegoat the Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, with Du Paty de Clam feigning an injury to his writing hand and dictating a note for Dreyfus to write, before using the note to accuse Dreyfus of treason and arrest him immediately. Du Paty de Clam was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel for his role in securing Dreyfus' conviction in the Dreyfus affair, but, following the publication of Emile Zola's J'accuse...! op-ed in January 1898, Du Paty de Clam was identified "at the root of it all," in Zola's words. He was made inactive by the Army in September 1898 and arrested in June 1899, but he and all the others involved in the case were amnestied later that year. Du Paty de Clam resigned from the Army in 1901, but he was readmitted in 1913 as a Lieutenant-Colonel of reserves. He was wounded at the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, and he died from his wounds in Versailles two years later.