4 days ago
Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted of treason, gets redemption after 130 years
Antisemitism is (unfortunately) nothing new, but making good on it after more than a century certainly is. People these days may not be familiar with the name Alfred Dreyfus, but the little-known artillery officer's conviction for treason in 1899 still divides French politics.
In a surprise move, however, France is making amends for a notorious act of political extremism. In June 2025, French lawmakers unanimously backed a promotion for Alfred Dreyfus. His new rank is brigadier general. France24 called the legislation 'a symbolic step in the fight against antisemitism in modern France.'
Late 19th-century relations between Germany and France were surprisingly warm, despite the absolute ass kicking the Germans delivered during the Franco-Prussian War. But that doesn't mean the two sides weren't spying on each other. The French were desperate to get any intelligence they could from the German embassy in Paris.
After inserting one of their agents into the embassy housekeeping staff, they acquired a document addressed to the German military attaché, Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. The paper contained only one piece of sensitive military information: a note about the hydraulic compressed air brakes on a French artillery piece. It prompted France's general staff to look for the source of the leak.
War Minister Gen. Auguste Mercier, already criticized in the press for his incompetence, was seeking an easy target on which to pin the blame. Considering the content of the message, he began to scrutinize the artillery officers in the general staff. That's how he stumbled upon Capt. Alfred Dreyfus.
There was nothing really extraordinary about Alfred Dreyfus. He was from a well-to-do family in Alsace, which emigrated to Switzerland and then Paris after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. His experience in the war led him to the elite École Polytechnique military academy. By 1882, he was a respected artillery officer.
But he was just the easy target Mercier was looking for. As an Alsatian, he could be portrayed as a German sympathizer. Most importantly, he was Jewish in an antisemitic society looking for a scapegoat. The army claimed the handwriting on the artillery note belonged to Dreyfus (it did not). When he was called in to confess to Mercier, he refused and was arrested for conspiring with the enemy.
After a secret, two-day trial, Dreyfus was convicted and his rank was cancelled. He was to be publicly degraded, which meant his medals, epaulettes, sword, and other symbols of his position would be ceremoniously ripped away from him. He was then shipped off to the Devil's Island penal colony in French Guiana.
The only problem was that Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, head of French intelligence services, learned who the real spy was: a counterintelligence officer named Maj. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.
The French press, which was torn between wild antisemitism and anti-government conspiracies, had a field day with the revelation that Esterhazy was sending letters to the German embassy and that his handwriting matched the original note.
Still, despite all the evidence, the army acquitted the real spy, who not only wrote ten years' worth of letters about how much he hated France, but also promptly moved to England and later confessed. Picquart was driven out of the French army for his troubles.
Dreyfus was eventually retried and somehow convicted again. After the second conviction, he was offered a pardon if he accepted guilt, an offer he accepted just to end his ordeal. The backlash sparked a culture war from which the French far right never recovered, forever separated church and state in France, and led many Jewish Europeans to believe that only a Jewish state could protect them – the seeds of the Zionist movement were planted.
Both trials caught the world's attention, but the story doesn't end there. In 1906, Alfred Dreyfus was reinstated, promoted to major, and served in World War I. He served in artillery supply and fought at the Battle of Verdun. He died in 1935, having retired from the military with the Legion d'Honneur and a Croix de guerre.
Despite his later history, the Dreyfus Affair, as it became known, remains a divisive issue in French politics. The act of posthumously promoting him to general is seen as a kind of reparation in a country that houses the largest Jewish population outside of Israel itself.
