For the next six years Georgina divided her time between England and France. She spent several months each summer at Gisors, but also rented an apartment in Paris, at 2 Rue de Narbonne. By the mid 1890s her interest in the supposed descendants of Louis XVII had waned. Instead, in 1898 she took up the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian-Jewish descent who had been accused of communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. In 1894 he had been tried and found guilty of treason and sentenced to deportation for life to Devil's Island, a disease-ridden penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. A widespread belief that Dreyfus had been framed had led to a campaign to persuade the government to reopen the case. This culminated in the publication on 13 January 1898, on the front page of the Parisian newspaper L’Aurore (the Dawn) of an open letter, ‘J’accuse’, by Émile Zola. The eminent author hoped to provoke the authorities into prosecuting him for libel so that new evidence exonerating Dreyfus could be made public. The ‘Dreyfus Affair’, as it became known, developed into a full-blown political scandal that was to divide French society for the next eight years, with the anticlerical, pro-republican Dreyfusards lined up against the pro-Army, predominantly Catholic, and anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfusards.

The Dreyfus affair included all the ingredients that most attracted Georgina – involving, as it appeared to do, persecution by the establishment and a miscarriage of justice. It will be remembered that she had previously been a passionate supporter of two imposters, the Tichborne claimant and Naundorff. This time, for once, she was on the side of reason. She had long admired Zola and was immediately drawn into the Dreyfusard camp. It was, she wrote in her diary, all ‘a ridiculous mare's nest, [an] anti-Semitic crusade’. She was, however, critical of Zola's letter: ‘It is not strong and he puts on white gloves instead of using his fists, and speaks far too civilly of Justice etc. He can't hold a candle to me. The beginning is especially weak.’ She began to write letters to the French and British newspapers. When Zola was sentenced to a year in gaol, she sent him a postcard.