French lawmakers want Dreyfus promoted, 130 years after treason scandal
Nod to falsely convicted French Jewish military officer would advance modern battle against antisemitism, draft law says
A group of French members of parliament said Tuesday they wanted Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, to be awarded the rank of brigadier general.
The parliamentarians, led by former prime minister Gabriel Attal, said a law to that effect would be an act of reparation for Dreyfus, whose condemnation came against a backdrop of the late 19th century’s rampant antisemitism in the French army and wider society.
It would, said Attal, also send the signal that the fight against antisemitism continues today, more than a century after the Dreyfus affair divided French society and gave rise to writer Emile Zola’s famous “J’accuse” pamphlet in favor of the disgraced captain.
“The antisemitism that targeted Alfred Dreyfus is not in the distant past,” Attal said in a draft law to be submitted to parliament.
“Today’s acts of hatred remind us that the fight is still ongoing.”
There has been a rise in reported attacks against members of France’s Jewish community since Israel launched a military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in response to the Palestinian terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Southern Israel.
Hamas led some 5,600 attackers to invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 people as hostages to Gaza.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 50,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January 2025 and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Dreyfus, a 36-year-old army captain from the Alsace region of eastern France, was accused in October 1894 of passing secret information on new artillery equipment to the German military attache.
The accusation was based on a comparison of handwriting on a document found in the German’s waste paper basket in Paris.
Dreyfus was put on trial amid a virulent antisemitic press campaign.
Despite a lack of evidence, he was convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment in the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guiana and publicly stripped of his rank.
But Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the intelligence services, reinvestigated the case in secret and discovered the handwriting on the incriminating message was that of another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.
When Picquart presented the evidence to the general staff of the French army, he himself was driven out of the military and jailed for a year, while Esterhazy was acquitted.
In June 1899, Dreyfus was brought back to France for a second trial. He was initially found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison, before being officially pardoned — though not cleared of the charges.
Only in 1906, after many twists, did the high court of appeal overturn the original verdict, exonerating Dreyfus.
He was reinstated with the rank of major. He served during World War I and died in 1935, aged 76.
Attal said that without the years in exile and his public humiliation, Dreyfus “would have risen to the highest ranks naturally.”
No date has been set yet for a vote on the proposal.
The Times of Israel Community.