So, in the present instance, the Minister of War, General Mercier, who had recently committed some much-criticized administrative blunders, and who now wished to show his efficiency, caused the arrest of Dreyfus. Then, egged on by anti-Semitic newspapers which had got hold of Dreyfus's name, Mercier brought him before a court-martial. The trial was held in secret, and the War Department sent to the officers constituting the tribunal, without the knowledge of the prisoner or his counsel Maître Demange, a secret _dossier_, a collection of trumped-up incriminating documents. Demange devoted himself to proving that Dreyfus was not the author of the _bordereau_, but the members of the court-martial, believing in the genuineness of the additional documents, unhesitatingly convicted him of treason. Consequently, in spite of his protestations of innocence, Dreyfus was publicly degraded on January 5, 1895, and hustled off to solitary confinement on the unhealthy Devil's Isle, off the coast of French Guiana. Meanwhile the whole French people sincerely believed that a vile traitor had been justly condemned and that the secrecy of the case was due to the advisability of avoiding diplomatic complications with Germany. With dramatic unexpectedness, only ten days later (January 15), Casimir-Perier resigned the Presidency. During the whole Dreyfus affair Casimir-Perier had chafed because his ministers had constantly acted without keeping him informed, particularly when he was called upon by the German Government to acknowledge that it had had nothing to do with Dreyfus. He had lost by death the support of his friend Burdeau; he was discouraged by the campaign of abuse against him, especially the election as Deputy in Paris of Gérault-Richard, one of his most active vilifiers. In particular he felt that his own Cabinet, and above all its leader Dupuy, were false to him. A discussion in the Chamber concerning the duration of the state guarantees to certain of the great railway companies ended in a vote unfavorable to the Cabinet, which resigned, whereupon Casimir-Perier seized the opportunity to go too. The Socialists declared that Dupuy had provoked his own defeat in order to embarrass the President by the difficulty of forming a new Cabinet, and make him resign as well. Two days later the electoral Congress met at Versailles. The Radicals supported Henri Brisson. The Moderates and the Conservatives were divided between Waldeck-Rousseau and Félix Faure, but Waldeck-Rousseau having thrown his strength on the second ballot to Faure, the latter was elected. The new President, recently Minister of the Navy, was a well-meaning man, but full of vanity and naïvely delighted with his own rise in the world from a humble position to that of chief magistrate. The extent to which his judgment was warped by his temperament is shown by the later developments of the Dreyfus case.