It was one of the most notorious travesties of justice in legal history: in December 1894, a promising young Jewish army captain from Alsace was wrongly convicted at a secret French court martial of selling secrets to the Germans and sent to a bleak penal island off the coast of south America for life.
Alfred Dreyfus was finally exonerated a decade later, but his case continued to divide France, inspiring countless articles, books and films—most recently Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, based on Robert Harris’s best-selling novel of the same name.
90 years after his death, the “Dreyfus Affair” took a new turn when the National Assembly voted to make him a brigadier general, a promotion that supporters say he would have earned if his career had not been interrupted by his enforced spell on Devil’s Island.
The move has prompted speculation that President Macron may be planning to pay Dreyfus the ultimate honor of adding him to the 82 members of the great and good interred in the Panthéon—a highly symbolic move at a time when France faces a wave of antisemitism.
Sources at the Élysée Palace have told French media the president has been thinking about “a necessary gesture”, which “should not be long in coming”.
The unanimous Assembly vote is expected to be confirmed by the Senate. It delighted members of Dreyfus’s extended family, more than a dozen of whom watched proceedings from a place of honor, among them his granddaughter, Aline, 90, and great-grandson, Michel, 72. When MPs were told of their presence, they broke into applause.
For Michel Dreyfus, the posthumous promotion of his great-grandfather was the long overdue righting of an injustice that continued to weigh on him long after his legal travails had been ended by the Cour de Cassation, the country’s highest court.
“He had been found guilty for something he hadn’t done, he had been imprisoned, and then even when it was over he still met something completely unfair because he wasn’t reinstated in the position he deserved,” Michel said. “And it’s something that he really suffered from. It was a deep wound for him.”
It was the refusal by military authorities to promote Dreyfus to brigadier general, the rank his supporters believed he would have attained if he had not spent five years in captivity that prompted him to leave the army in 1907, the year after his exoneration.
Yet, despite everything he had endured, he enlisted again after the outbreak of the First World War, although by then he was aged 55. “He wasn’t just in an office signing papers, he fought very courageously,” said Michel, citing a number of battles in which he took part.
Missing from the chamber for last week’s vote was his father, Charles, 98, the only family member still alive to have known Dreyfus, who was prevented from attending because of a broken hip.
Still as mentally sharp as ever, he has fond memories of the grandfather he used to visit as a child in the 1930s at his home near the Arc de Triomphe, where he lived in his last years with his beloved wife, Lucie, who had stood by him throughout his legal battles and imprisonment.
“He died when I was eight years old. I remember him as a gentle and warm man,” Charles Dreyfus told Le Monde in a recent interview. “He was described as having been physically damaged by Devil’s Island, but he was in robust enough health to have survived there. He was no ordinary person, and his incredible capacity for abstraction saved him from madness.”
Michel, a retired psychiatrist, is also amazed by his great-grandfather’s resilience. “I don’t know many people that would have survived what he went through at Devil’s Island, physically, psychologically, mentally, and then fighting for six more years after that to regain his honor.
“If you read things he wrote, he’s a really very, very bright man and very cultured too. While he was on Devil’s Island, he wrote commentaries on Montaigne, on Shakespeare, things like that. He was able to completely disconnect from what he was living and to escape into an intellectual world.”
The bitter passions aroused by the affair in the years around the turn of the 20th century are brought home by an exhibition at Paris’s Museum of Jewish Art and History, which Michel showed me round, pointing out favorite exhibits.
The newspaper headlines and magazine covers on display reflect the deep rift in French society between the Dreyfusards—the captain’s largely republican, anti-clerical supporters—and his mostly conservative, Catholic and pro-army accusers.
Most famous was the writer Émile Zola’s open letter to the French president published in January, 1898 on the front page of L’Aurore, headlined simply “J’accuse”. But there were also paintings, a board game and even vases emblazoned with slogans.
Although Dreyfus was completely cleared, many remained convinced of his guilt, as his son, Pierre, born in 1891, experienced when studying at a prestigious Paris engineering school in the years before the First World War.
“Some of his fellow students never talked to him because they considered him the son of a traitor,” Michel said.
Such sentiments were expressed more strongly in the Second World War under France’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Some of its older leaders and supporters had been ardent anti-Dreyfusards and considered him a symbol of Jewish disloyalty and betrayal.
Michel, himself, first learnt of his illustrious predecessor’s role in French history while at primary school in the early 1960s when his teacher began to tell his class about famous miscarriages of justice.
“She was talking mainly about Joan of Arc but since she knew my name, asked me if I knew anything about the Dreyfus Affair,” he recalled. “I didn’t understand what she meant but when I went home, I asked my father. Of course he laughed, but that day he started explaining things to me.”
Suspicion of Dreyfus lingered on for decades, especially among more conservative members of the army. Such sentiments periodically came to the surface, such as in the mid-1980s, after François Mitterrand, the socialist president, commissioned a statue of Dreyfus as one of a series of great historical figures.
The artist wanted it to be positioned in front of the École militaire, in whose courtyard Dreyfus had been cashiered, his sword snapped in two and the stripes torn off his uniform. The army was opposed, however, and Mitterrand took their side, declaring: “One must provide the military with an example, not a sense of remorse.”
The statue found a permanent home a decade later on the Left Bank on a site unconnected with Dreyfus, though the family are optimistic it will soon be moved to a square opposite the Cour de Cassation.
Doubts have also continued to be raised over the years by some on the far right about Dreyfus’s innocence. Among the most recent was Eric Zemmour, an unsuccessful candidate in the 2022 presidential election, who is himself Jewish. He described the Dreyfus Affair as “murky” and claimed Dreyfus was persecuted “because he was German, that is to say, Alsatian”, rather than because he was Jewish.
By contrast, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the main force on the nationalist right, has long since become a staunch backer of Israel and distanced itself from the views of her late father, Jean-Marie, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail” of history.
These days, concerns center instead on the emergence of a “new” antisemitism on the left, which has been reinforced by a growing identification with the Palestinian struggle, especially among those of north African origin. This has intensified since Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 and the latter’s military response.
This appears to have helped fuel a growing number of recent attacks on synagogues and other symbols of Jewish life in France. Like the National Rally, the far-left France Unbowed Party nevertheless backed the motion.
For the family, it is not just a matter of antisemitism. Charles Dreyfus, and more recently, his son, have long fought to defend Dreyfus’s reputation against those who have sought to portray him merely as a victim rather than a hero who fought back against persecution.
Michel cites Harris’s book, which centered not on Dreyfus himself but on Marie-Georges Picquart, a fellow officer, who uncovered the plot to frame him—and was also prosecuted, before being eventually rehabilitated.
After its publication in 2013, Charles wrote “tactfully” to the author pointing out what he considered errors.
Harris wrote back to confirm he had invented things but said this was acceptable because the book was fiction.
Hearing a few years later about Polanski’s planned film, Charles then contacted the director, who assured him there would be “nothing unpleasant” in it about Dreyfus. He was again to be disappointed. Michel says one scene, in particular, between Dreyfus and Picquart makes his great-grandfather seem paranoid about antisemitism.
“Polanski is a very good film director, so the film is very well-made and some scenes are remarkable,” he said. “But there are also some very, very inaccurate things in it.”
Peter Conradi is the Europe editor at The Sunday Times of London
