Latest news with #Dreyfus
Local France
14 hours ago
- General
- Local France
OPINION: 130 years on, the Dreyfus affair still matters to France and the world
In 1894 an obscure Jewish French army captain was falsely convicted of espionage and treason. Alfred Dreyfus spent five years alone in a cage on Devil's Island in the French Caribbean before he was pardoned and finally rehabilitated in 1906. For many decades 'the Dreyfus case' divided France. To the Catholic fundamentalist, antisemitic and ultra-patriotic Right, his guilt – no matter the lack of evidence - became an article of patriotic faith. To the Left, and not just the Left, the struggle to prove his innocence symbolised the importance and the fragility of the democratic and personal freedoms won by the French Revolution. On Monday, the National Assembly voted unanimously to promote Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general 90 years after his death. Until relatively recently, any unanimous parliamentary decision on the Dreyfus case in France would have been unthinkable. Advertisement This week's vote managed to be both unanimous and controversial. Of the 577 deputies, only 197 voted. Thirty-eight were from the far-right Rassemblement National, direct descendants of the Vichy regime of 1940-44 which rehabilitated the senior officers who lied and cheated to frame Dreyfus. Forty-one of the pro-Dreyfus votes came from the hard-Left La France Insoumise, which has been accused in recent months of anti-semitism in its unconditional support for the Palestinian cause. The centrist Modem party, the party of the prime minister François Bayrou, refused to take part. They said that the vote, sponsored by their coalition partners, Renaissance, the party of President Emmanuel Macron, gave the far-right and the hard-left a cheap opportunity to white-wash their anti-semitism. There may be some truth in that but it misses a larger point. The Dreyfus case IS partly about anti-semitism. The persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus persuaded Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, that the future for the Jewish people was the creation of a Jewish state. But 'the case' is also about something broader - something which threatens democratic values in the 2020s as much as it did in the 1890s. The trampling of the rule of law in the name of patriotism? Politics in which facts do not shape political opinions but quasi-religious beliefs establish bogus facts? We are confronted in 2025 with the same issues which the novelist Emile Zola addressed in 1898 in his celebrated front-page article on the Dreyfus case under the banner headline: 'J'accuse'. Twenty-seven years ago, in a speech to mark the centenary of Zola's article, President Jacques Chirac said: 'The Dreyfus Affair…tore French society apart, divided families, split the country into two enemy camps, which attacked each other with exceptional violence ... It was a reminder, that the forces of darkness, intolerance and injustice can penetrate to the highest levels of the state.' The last sentence is prophetic and chilling. Chirac might have been speaking about Donald Trump. Advertisement In that centenary year of the Zola article, I interviewed Nelly Wilson, a British academic who was an expert on both Zola and Dreyfus. Ms Wilson, who died in 2017, came to Britain in 1945 at the age of 15 as one of 150 young concentration camp survivors invited to settle by the UK government. 'It is perhaps not so surprising that the (Dreyfus) affair remains so vivid in the French mind,' she told me in 1998. 'It describes a conflict at the heart of French political psychology which has not changed so very much to this day. On the one hand, a fierce nationalism and a temptation to justify almost anything for raisons d'etat ; on the other hand, a fierce attachment to justice for the individual, for the rights of the individual.' Nelly Wilson believed that the Dreyfus case changed the course of French history. It discredited the forces of extreme nationalism, anti-semitism, clericalism and nostalgic royalism which might otherwise have pushed France into a kind of proto-fascism or Francoism 30 years before Hitler, Mussolini or Franco. That conflict is still with us but is no longer at the centre of French politics alone. It can be seen in the lies and law-trampling of President Trump, in the brutal creed of Vladimir Putin and in the kleptocratic rule of Viktor Orban in Hungary. Advertisement And, yes, the 'temptation to justify almost anything for raisons d'etat ' also describes the murderous and cynical forever war for his own survival waged by Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. The Dreyfus affair has never had quite the same resonance outside France (Jewish communities apart). In the early 20th century, British newspapers wrote puzzled or mocking articles, demanding to know what all the fuss was about. The parallels are not exact but you can see similar comments today minimising the Trump administration's wrongful arrest and imprisonment in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We should no longer ask why France is obsessed with Alfred Dreyfus. History has told us, and continues to tell us, that 'the case' was about more than anti-semitism and far more than the persecution of one innocent man.
France 24
a day ago
- Business
- France 24
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New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
France Moves to Atone by Elevating Alfred Dreyfus as Antisemitism Spreads
For Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain arrested in 1894 on false espionage charges that were a reflection of virulent antisemitism in the French military, reparations have been a long time coming. The French National Assembly, or lower house of Parliament, took a big step in that direction on Monday when it voted unanimously to promote Dreyfus, who was publicly stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment, to the rank of brigadier general. It was an apparent acknowledgment that, after more than 130 years and at a time of repeated desecrations of Jewish sites in France, the Republic's atonement had been incomplete. The Senate must still vote for the bill to become law, but it is expected to pass with a large majority. 'We are very happy and moved,' Michel Dreyfus, the great-grandson of the officer, told RTL radio. 'He was rehabilitated judicially but never militarily, a wound that led him to leave the army.' Gabriel Attal, the centrist former prime minister who authored the bill, wrote last month, 'Accused, humiliated and condemned because he was Jewish, Alfred Dreyfus was dismissed from the army, imprisoned and exiled to Devil's Island,' a reference to a penal colony in French Guiana. Mr. Attal said the promotion would be 'a recognition of his merits, and a tribute to his commitment to the Republic.' The Dreyfus case split France down the middle, exposing divisions that had been festering since the Revolution a century earlier. A traditional Roman Catholic France strongly represented in the armed forces clashed with the ardent, secular believers in a Republic that had emancipated the Jews and that was constituted not by God but by the will of its equal citizens. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
France 24
a day ago
- General
- France 24
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France 24
a day ago
- General
- France 24
Portugal: Police start new investigation in Madeleine McCann case
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