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Historically the French press has become an active participant in the political system rather than just a means of reporting it. An example of such an involvement came at the end of the nineteenth Century with what is known as the “ Dreyfus Affair”, a scandal that lasted over a hundred years. The affair centres on captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer in the French army, and his wrongful imprisonment for treason in 1894. The reaction of this was a divide in public opinion between those who said he was guilty and those who wanted him freed. The press echoed and perhaps induced this feeling with many prominent newspapers taking sides. Alfred Dreyfus came from a Jewish family that had left Alsace for Paris when Germany invaded in1871 during the Franco-Prussian war. In 1894 papers discovered in a wastebasket in the office of a German military attaché made it appear that a French military officer was providing secret information to the German government. Dreyfus came under suspicion, probably because he was a Jew and also because he had access to the type of information that had been supplied to the German agent. The army authorities declared that Dreyfus’ handwriting was similar to that on the papers. Despite his p