Strauss-Kahn is modern-day Dreyfus

He was then – in front of a crowd of 20,000 – sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in South America.

Captain Dreyfus was exonerated a decade later, but the case prompted outrage from a number of intellectuals including writer Emile Zola, who claimed he had been made a scapegoat because of his religion.

During the trial a contemporary of Dreyfus, Maurice Barrès, famously said: "That Dreyfus is guilty, I deduce not from the facts themselves, but from his race." Mr Lévy commented that he believed we were now seeing "the appearance of a new variation on Maurice Barrès's phrase" – one motivated by economic status.

He wrote: "[It] has become, 'That X-in this case Dominique Strauss-Kahn-is guilty, I deduce not from his race, but from his class'."