French bill moves forward to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus

France’s National Defence and Armed Forces Committee of the National Assembly has voted unanimously to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, to the rank of brigadier general, the French Embassy in Israel announces.

This clears the way for the bill’s adoption by the full Assembly in a plenary session on June 2.

“The French Nation is just and does not forget,” the embassy says in a statement. “This rights an injustice, honors a warrior, and clarifies that antisemitism, from history to today, will never have a place in the Republic.”

The trial of Alfred Dreyfus was a pivotal event in French and Zionist history, revealing deep underlying antisemitism that brought Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, to the conclusion that Jews would only be safe in a nation of their own.

After Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer, was wrongfully convicted of treason for allegedly passing military secrets to Germany, he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island based on flimsy and forged evidence. When new evidence later emerged that another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the real culprit, the affair ignited public outrage, especially after Émile Zola’s famous open letter “J’accuse!” accused the government of a cover-up.

Dreyfus was exonerated in 1906 and reinstated with the rank of major. He served during World War I and died in 1935, aged 76.