More than a decade after being convicted of treason Alfred Dreyfus was rehabilitated when French officials conceded that he had fallen victim to injustice against a backdrop of antisemitism.
The Jewish army captain, whose case divided France in the late 19th century, never lost his patriotism despite spending more than four years in solitary confinement in the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony off French Guiana. After the case against him had finally been recognised as void, he signed up again to fight for his country when war broke out in 1914.
But the French military establishment was less magnanimous, reinstating him with the rank of chef d’escadron (major), a downgrade for an officer who had seemed destined for the highest posts until his wrongful conviction.
Now dozens of parliamentarians have signed two private member’s bills calling for Dreyfus to be made a brigadier general, 130 years after the start of the scandal that presaged the rise of Nazism and the fight against it.
Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister, who has introduced a bill in the National Assembly, said he wanted to right a historic injustice by elevating Dreyfus to the rank he would have achieved without the antisemitism that blighted his career.
Attal said the move was symbolically significant at a time when France was facing a surge in antisemitism after the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France registered 1,570 antisemitic acts last year, after 1,676 in 2023. In 2022 the figure was 436.
“The antisemitism that targeted Alfred Dreyfus is not in the distant past,” Attal said. “Today’s acts of hatred remind us that the fight is still ongoing.”
Attal’s backers also argue that the legislation will serve as a bulwark against radical leftists who, they say, have turned their backs on the lessons of the Dreyfus case to fuel verbal and physical attacks on Jews in France.
Dreyfus was given a life sentence in 1894 after being found guilty of passing secret information on new artillery equipment to Germany.
The case was based on a note found earlier that year in the German military attaché’s waste paper basket at his country’s embassy in Paris, which was proclaimed to be in Dreyfus’s handwriting. The army captain was tried and found guilty, largely because he was Jewish and much of the French establishment viewed him as an ideal culprit.
A campaign to free him split the country between Dreyfusards — led by the novelist Émile Zola — and anti-Dreyfusards such as Maurice Barrès, the far-right political leader.
In 1899 Dreyfus was brought back to France for a retrial, found guilty again, and given a ten-year sentence, but was almost immediately pardoned. In 1906 he was cleared of all previous convictions when the original verdict was overturned.
Last month Pierre Moscovici, the first president of France’s Court of Audits, Frédéric Salat-Baroux, a prominent lawyer, and Louis Gautier, chairman of the Dreyfus Museum, signed an open letter calling for Dreyfus to be made a brigadier general.
They asked: “Why, so many years later, reopen this debate when the world is at boiling point and French people struggling with daily difficulties?” Their response was that France remained blighted by antisemitism, pointing out that Barrès is still honoured through street names, even though the right-wing nationalist once said: “That Dreyfus is capable of treason, I conclude it from his race.”
The letter’s signatories said that a posthumous promotion for Dreyfus would be particularly important because “part of the Left … is operating a terrible return to the past. Turning its back … on the lessons…drawn from the Dreyfus Affair, it is nourishing and nourishing itself off a new antisemitism.”
