Brutal military prisons on remote islands. Government cover-ups. Forged documents. Ahh, the old classics never grow old.

We speak, of course, not of current events but of the Dreyfus Affair, the scandal that nearly tore France apart at the turn of the 19th century. Betrayal, suicide, forgery, a vigorous press exercising its newly won power, a society ripped in two over what would easily have been swept under the rug in an earlier time - this one had everything you could want in a government scandal.

In fact, it was this week in 1898 that the great novelist Emile Zola went to jail for daring to print the truth about the whole sack of trouble. Does the phrase "J'accuse" ring a bell?

Seems the French military, which in early 1890s was the pride of the nation, was having some trouble with intelligence leaks. They fingered a drab little fellow named Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, court-martialed him, and sent him off to rot on Devil's Island.

But some French intellectuals thought the whole thing smelled strange. One of the documents used to convict Dreyfus was an obvious forgery, and other pieces of evidence were kept hidden, including one referred to only as "The Secret File." They accused the government of framing Dreyfus and demanded a re-trial.

The thing dragged on for years. The anti-Dreyfus crowd insisted he was guilty, called his defenders traitors, and cast the whole thing as part of a far-reaching Jewish plot they called "The Syndicate" (Dreyfus was of the Hebrew faith). The Dreyfusards maintained the affair showed how rotten official France had become, and so in thrall to its army that the door was wide open for a military coup. For years, it seemed as if the country could talk of nothing else. The affair even divided the creative class - the pro-Dreyfus side got Monet and Andre Gide; the nationalists had Debussy.

The winner?

As with most scandals, there's no such thing. Dreyfus was eventually released and much later his name was cleared. But it took more than a decade, and the poor fellow never did get his pension. The generals who arranged his conviction were generally let off, except for one sad bloke who killed himself.

If anyone won it was the media - 30 or more daily newspapers, plus pamphlets, books, magazines - that kept the affair alive and proved they were more powerful than king or army. Zola may even have been right when he said, "The Truth is on the move, and nothing will stop it."

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