Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy (December 16, 1847 - May 21, 1923 ) was the French officer later discovered to be guilty of the crime of which Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted. See Dreyfus affair.

Born in Paris, Esterhazy belonged to an illustrious Hungarian family, a branch of which had established itself in France at the end of the 17th century, and the head of which had organized there a regiment of hussars. His great-grandmother had an illegitimate son, who was brought up under the name of Walsin, but who, after she had acknowledged him during the Revolution, took the name of Esterhazy and settled as a merchant at Nimes. Two of the sons of this man followed a military career with distinction, and both became generals of division during the Crimean war. One of these two (Ferdinand) was the father of Major Esterhazy. Left an orphan at an early age, after some schooling at the Lycée Bonaparte in Paris, Ferdinand Esterhazy disappeared in 1865. In 1869 he was found engaged in the Roman legion, in the service of the pope; in 1870, in the foreign legion, which his uncle's influence enabled him to enter with the rank of ensign; he then assumed the title of count, to which it is claimed he was not entitled. At this time came the war with Germany. There being a dearth of officers after the catastrophe of Sedan, Esterhazy was able to pass muster as a French lieutenant, then as a captain, and went through the campaigns of the Loire and of the Jura. Though set back after peace was declared, he still remained in the army. In 1876 he was employed to translate German at the Intelligence Office; then, under various pretexts, at the War Office. He never appeared in his regiment at Beauvais, and for about five years led a life of dissipation in Paris, as a result of which his small fortune was soon squandered. In 1881 he was attached to the expedition sent to Tunis, and did nothing whatever to distinguish himself in it; employed later in the Intelligence Department, then in the native affairs of the regency, on his own authority he inserted in the official records a citation of his "exploits in war," the falseness of which was recognized later. Returning to France in 1885, he remained in garrison at Marseille for a long time. Having come to the end of his resources, he married in 1886; but he soon spent his wife's dowry, and in 1888 she was forced to demand a separation. In 1892, through the influence of General Saussier, Esterhazy succeeded in getting a nomination as garrison-major in the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the line at Rouen. Being thus in the neighborhood of Paris, he plunged afresh into a life of speculation and excess, which soon completed his ruin.

His Career

His inheritance squandered, Esterhazy had tried to retrieve his fortune in gambling-houses and on the stock-exchange; hard pressed by his creditors, he had recourse to the most desperate measures. Having seconded Crémieu-Foa in his duel with Drumont in 1892, he pretended that this chivalrous rôle had made his family, as well as his chiefs, quarrel with him; he produced false letters to support his words, threatened to kill both himself and his children, and thus obtained, through the medium of Zadoc Kahn, chief rabbi of France, assistance from the Rothschilds (June, 1894); this did not prevent him from being on the best of terms with the editors of "La Libre Parole," even to the extent of supplying them with information.

For an officer who had come from the ranks Esterhazy's military advancement had been unusually rapid: lieutenant in 1874, captain in 1880, decorated in 1882, major in 1892, his reports were generally excellent. Nevertheless, he considered himself wronged. In his letters he continually launched into recrimination and abuse against his chiefs; he went still further, bespattering with mud the whole French army, and even France herself, for which he predicted and hoped that new disasters were in store. Such a man, a regular landsknechtof yore, without a single spark of patriotism, was destined to become the prey of treason. Fate decreed that he should sink to the degradation of a paid spy; he sank. In Tunis he was judged to have become too intimate with the German military attaché; in 1892 he was the object of an accusation made to the head of the staff, General Brault; in 1893 he entered Schwarzkoppen's service.

According to later disclosures he received from the German attaché a monthly pension of 2,000 marks ($480). He furnished him in the first place with some interesting information about the artillery; he pretended that he got his information from Major Henry, who had been his comrade in the Intelligence Office in 1876. But Henry, limited to a very special branch of the service, was hardly in a position to furnish details on technical questions; Esterhazy must have had other informants, who were not necessarily his accomplices?for example, his intimate friend Maurice Weil, district orderly officer to General Saussier, and a distinguished military writer and a regular news-hunter. The information furnished by Esterhazy soon became of so little importance that Panizzardi (to whom Schwarzkoppen communicated it without divulging the name of his informant) began to doubt his qualifications as an officer; to convince the attaché it was necessary for Esterhazy to show himself one day in uniform, galloping behind a well-known general! The garrison-major, being entrusted with the duties of mobilization, is always well informed in regard to the details of this subject; but as far as the artillery is concerned (the improvements in which department especially interested the German officials), the difficulties which Esterhazy experienced in getting information were very apparent in the text of the bordereau, and in the attempt which he made (in Aug., 1894) to borrow the "manuel de tir" from Lieutenant Bernheim (of Le Mans), whose acquaintance he had made by chance.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.