On one hand was Le Vélo, the first and the largest daily sports newspaper in France,[13] which sold 80,000 copies a day;[14] on the other was L'Auto, which had been set up by journalists and businesspeople including Comte Jules-Albert de Dion, Adolphe Clément, and Édouard Michelin in 1899. The rival paper emerged following disagreements over the Dreyfus Affair, a cause célèbre (in which the 'anti-Dreyfusard' de Dion was implicated) that divided France at the end of the 19th century over the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer convicted—though later exonerated—of selling military secrets to the Germans.[n 1] The new newspaper appointed Henri Desgrange as the editor.