More than a century ago, he was wrongfully convicted of treason in a case that shocked France and revealed a rising antisemitic tendency. The first step in righting the wrong was taken Monday when French parliamentarians unanimously approved a symbolic move to promote Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish captain of the French army, to brigadier general.
Gabriel Attal, the ex-prime minister who introduced the law, said it was the first step in giving Dreyfus the title he had been denied.
A French counterintelligence officer discovered a torn-up paper at the German embassy in Paris in 1894, which is when the investigation first began. vital officials targeted Dreyfus, a 36-year-old army captain from the Alsace area of northeastern France at the time, as they frantically tried to determine who was giving the Germans vital secrets.
However, Charles Sitzenstuhl, a member of President Emmanuel Macron‘s centrist Renaissance party, told a parliamentary committee last month that Dreyfus was not the note’s author. He stated: “Dreyfus was accused without any proof and this accusation was absurdly persistent because of the antisemitism of a section of the military leadership at the time, possibly combined with jealousy over his exceptional qualities, all played out against a backdrop of pressure from the press and nationalist and antisemitic movements.”
After a trial, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason. He was publicly deposed and given a life sentence on Devil’s Island. However, a new head of intelligence services took up the investigation after seeing that the torn-up document’s handwriting resembled that of another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. However, the intelligence head was expelled from the military and imprisoned for a year once the evidence was shown to high-ranking officials, and Esterhazy was exonerated.
Dreyfus’s case gained momentum while he was incarcerated. One of his most fervent supporters was author Émile Zola, who brought the issue to the public’s attention with the open letter J’accuse, accusing the government of wrongful detention and antisemitism. The case caused a rift in French society between the Dreyfusards, who believed he was innocent, and the anti-Dreyfusards, who believed he was guilty.
Dreyfus was sent to France for a second trial in June 1899. Although he was not exonerated of the allegations, he was officially pardoned after being found guilty and given a 10-year jail term. The Supreme Court of Appeals would not reverse the initial decision and clear Dreyfus until 1906. He later served during World War I after being restored with the rank of major. At the age of 75, he passed away in 1935.
The proposal introduced on Monday was the result of years of debate among politicians on posthumously praising Dreyfus. Earlier this year, Sitzenstuhl informed the National Assembly’s defence committee that the measure in front of them was the outcome of a special legislative strategy meant to address a special circumstance. “It is a symbolic acknowledgement of an exceptional case that has never been matched in the republic’s history.”
Additionally, Sitzenstuhl proposed that Dreyfus be buried in the Pantheon, the Paris mausoleum designated for the greatest heroes of France. The Senate will now discuss the measure.
The law makes it apparent that the drive to properly recognize Dreyfus also served to draw attention to the fact that prejudice still affects France’s Jewish population, which is among the biggest outside of Israel and the US. According to the law, the struggle against antisemitism that affected Alfred Dreyfus is “still relevant today” and “is not a thing of the past.”
