Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain at the centre of a 19th century treason scandal fuelled by antisemitism, is set to be awarded a promotion some 90 years after his death.
The Jewish officer was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, stripped of his rank and deported to the penal colony of Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
The Dreyfus Affair, as it came to be known, provoked the contemporary polemic ‘J’Accuse’ by Émile Zola and has spawned recent literary adaptations including Robert Harris’s novel An Officer and a Spy.
He was pardoned in 1899 after four years in the penal colony, and his conviction was overturned in 1906. At that point he returned to duty with a promotion to major, but had fallen behind his peers. He retired as a lieutenant colonel after serving in the First World War.
On Wednesday, French lawmakers in the National Assembly's Defence and Army Committee voted unanimously to approve the bill promoting Dreyfus to brigadier general, the rank he would probably have achieved without the lost decade.
The bill, which is expected to go to a full vote in the National Assembly on 2 June, serves as a form of posthumous reparation for the officer whose condemnation was symbolic of late 19th century French antisemitism.
Alfred Dreyfus has his sword ceremonially broken and his stripes removed in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, after being found guilty of treason by a court-martial in 1894. (Getty Images)Getty Images
The French Embassy in Israel said in a statement on X: “The French nation is imbued with justice and does not forget, and it posthumously promotes Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general.
“To right a wrong. To honour a fighter. To emphasise that antisemitism – yesterday's as well as today's – has no place and will have no place in the Republic.”
The bill to posthumously promote Dreyfus was introduced by former prime minister Gabriel Attal, whose father was Jewish. Attal argued that Dreyfus was a highly competent officer who would have risen to the highest ranks had his career had not been derailed.
“The antisemitism that struck Alfred Dreyfus is not a thing of the past. Today's acts of hatred are a reminder that this fight is still relevant today,” he said.
Antisemitic acts in France nearly quadrupled in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to the Council of Jewish Institutions in France, reflecting a surge in anti-Jewish hate since Hamas’ attack on October 7.
Born to a rich Jewish textile manufacturer in 1859, Dreyfus decided on a military career and studied at the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau. In October 1894, as a young officer in the Ministry of War, he was accused of selling military secrets to the Germans and arrested.
His trial went on behind closed doors, and the evidence was specious. He was framed based on a note containing secret details about new artillery equipment that had been discovered by a housekeeper in the German embassy’s wastepaper basket in Paris, which was proclaimed to be in Dreyfus’s handwriting.
Dreyfus vehemently denied the charge but public opinion, spurred on by entrenched antisemitism in the French establishment and the press, relished the dubious verdict and the Jewish officer’s public downfall.
As the gaps in the prosecution were revealed, a campaign to secure his release gathered pace, led by public figures including Zola. Other public intellectuals such as Maurice Barrès, a right-wing writer and politician, maintained an anti-Dreyfusard stance.
Alfred Dreyfus is reinstated by General Gillain and welcomed with public honours at the Ecole Militaire, Paris in July 1906, after the French Parliament passed a bill pronouncing him innocent of espionage. (Getty Images)Getty Images
The antisemitic nature of the framing was widely recognised by Dreyfus’s contemporary supporters, with Zola explicitly making that charge in his 1898 newspaper article ‘J’Accuse’.
In 1899, Dreyfus was brought back to France for a retrial. He was found guilty but immediately pardoned, a situation he deplored but accepted to avoid being returned to the penal colony. It wasn’t until 1906 that all convictions were reversed.
For some in France, the affair is still not settled. Far-right politician Éric Zemmour said in 2020 that the details of the case were still “murky” and Dreyfus’s innocence was “not obvious”.
