Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy

Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin - Esterhazy ( born December 16, 1847 in Paris, † May 21 1923 in Harpenden, England) was a French officer and German spy. He was the trigger for the Dreyfus affair, the actual author of the Bordero that you originally Alfred Dreyfus attributed and for which one had condemned this.

Esterházy was only distantly related to the Hungarian magnate family of the same name: His grandfather Jean Marie Auguste Walsin - Esterhazy, born in Valleraugue in the department of Gard, was the illegitimate son of Countess Marie Anne Esterhazy de Galántha and of Marquis Jean André César de Ginestous. He was the personal physician of the Esterházy family, the French physician Walsin, adopted.

Ferdinand was a student at the Lycée Bonaparte, now Lycée Condorcet, joined the Foreign Legion and was built in 1874 as a captain adjutant of General Grenier. In 1877 he was assigned to the Deuxième Bureau, the Intelligence Department of the Army. From 1894 he began to spy for the German side, probably from mainly financial motives.

After, written in November 1897 Mathieu Dreyfus, brother of the unjustly convicted Alfred Dreyfus to the Secretary of War and of Esterházy had called the author of the Bordero with the espionage offer to the German ambassador, Esterhazy demanded even a military trial against him. He was acquitted on 10 January 1898 in a secret trial. Subsequently, Émile Zola published his famous J'accuse and was sentenced out of insulting the army.

As a result, Esterházy fled to London. He was never convicted. In the newspaper Le Matin Esterházy offered in July 1899 to have written the Bordero, but claimed to have acted on the instructions of his superiors.

The Forchtensteiner line of the Esterházy family later paid him 50,000 francs, that he no longer called Esterhazy, but Jean de Voilemont.