The Dreyfus Affair: A Long Road To Justice

This miscarriage of justice took more than a century to fix and split France down the middle

On June 3, 2025, the French National Assembly voted unanimously to promote to the rank of brigadier-general an army officer who had been dead for nearly a century.

As a young major, Alfred Dreyfus had been branded a traitor, stripped of his stripes, and sent to rot in solitary confinement on a remote South American island.

So why rehabilitate him now?

It’s hard to pinpoint, but the rise of antisemitism and extremism in France may have something to do with it: Alfred Dreyfus was Jewish. He also happened to be innocent.

Who exactly was Alfred Dreyfus?

To most of us, he is a name in a textbook and on statues and squares. But to our great-grandparents, he was a figure whose fate tore French society apart.

Dreyfus was born in 1859 in Mulhouse, in Alsace, a region that France would lose to Germany in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War. When the war ended, French citizens were allowed to choose between Germany and France, and his family became “optants”, legally choosing to retain French nationality and relocating across the new border, only to find their loyalty questioned by the very Republic they had chosen.

Dreyfus had trained at the prestigious École Polytechnique, one of France’s grandes écoles. This particular institution focused on military engineering and science and shaped the nation’s technocratic elite. After graduation, he joined the army and rose quickly through the ranks, but as the only Jewish officer on the (conservative Catholic) General Staff, his presence was tolerated, but little more.

The climate that polarized France

Antisemitism hadn’t yet exploded into public view in France but it simmered near the surface, the social climate so broken someone would have to be blamed. Remember, the Second Empire of Napoleon III had just fallen, France had been amputated by its loss of the Franco-Prussian War, and there was widespread concern about the decline of the country’s influence. Jews were blamed, especially those seen as cosmopolitan, wealthy or “non-French”. In an ironic twist, these included many families so deeply integrated into France that they had abandoned much of their Jewish heritage or had ceased to practice.

Across France, many people took up the antisemitic cause, from writers to clergy to nationalist politicians, bringing their thoughts slowly into the mainstream and providing a dysfunctional backdrop to what would come to be called the Dreyfus Affair.

It all started in 1894, with a torn letter that was discovered in a German embassy waste basket. Known as the "bordereau," the letter listed French military secrets offered to Germany. After a cursory handwriting analysis, investigators jumped to conclusions and, on the flimsiest of evidence (tainted with a great deal of prejudice and bias), Dreyfus was convicted of being a German spy.

He was sentenced to life on Devil’s Island.

Alfred Dreyfus being stripped of rank, illustration by Henri Mayer

Devil’s Island

Dreyfus would spend the next four years in total isolation on a hot, humid and mosquito-filled slab of rock off the coast of French Guiana.

His letters were read and censored, and guards were ordered not to speak to him. He was forbidden to stand when they entered his cell. For an officer, being forced to remain seated while guards of lower rank stood was a show of disrespect and dishonor.

At night, they chained him to his bed.

He wasn’t allowed any human contact. When his brother came all the way from France to try and see him, he wasn’t even allowed ashore. They spoke briefly from separate boats.

Dreyfus later wrote: “My heart is breaking, rent by the consciousness of so much unmerited suffering.”

Dreyfus on Devil’s Island

The Dreyfus Affair would tear France apart. On one side stood the Dreyfusards, made up of republicans, teachers and intellectuals who rallied around secularism and individual rights. On the other were the anti-Dreyfusards, whose ranks included the army, the Church and conservative monarchists, determined to defend tradition and national honor (even at the cost of justice, it seems).

None of this “just happened”, by the way. What the Dreyfus Affair did was expose fault lines in society that had been festering since the French Revolution, when two visions of France collided: on the one hand, liberty and reason, and on the other, tradition and order. Little, it appears, had changed in the divisions that had been haunting France since 1789.

In defence of Dreyfus

While authorities were doing what they could to erase Dreyfus’s existence from France’s memory, his defenders were hard at work and refused to let the story fade. Possibly the most famous of these was Émile Zola, the writer, who in 1898 published J’Accuse, an open letter that named names, laid blame and demanded justice. Tensions ran so high around Zola’s letter that he was tried for libel, convicted, and forced into exile in England.

He wasn’t alone. Also pleading for Dreyfus were his wife Lucie, who advocated tirelessly for his release; Georges Clemenceau, an outspoken journalist who would eventually become Prime Minister; and Joseph Reinach, a Jewish journalist and historian who dug deep to prove Dreyfus’s innocence. But perhaps one of the most intriguing was Georges Picquart.

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🧲 Sidebar: The man who exposed the truth

Georges Picquart was a career officer, loyal to the French army. But in 1896, as head of military intelligence, he stumbled upon a document that changed everything: a new bordereau in the same handwriting as the original “evidence”, this time clearly pointing away from Dreyfus and towards Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.

What made Picquart remarkable was not just what he found, but what he did about it. Risking his career, he insisted on reopening the case. As a reward, he was reassigned to Tunisia and later imprisoned. But his conscience wouldn't let him rest and his persistence ultimately became a turning point in exonerating Dreyfus.

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Eventually, evidence confirmed Major Esterhazy’s guilt, but the army refused to backtrack, protecting its lie rather than admitting it was wrong. When Esterhazy was finally brought to trial, he was quickly acquitted.

In 1899, Dreyfus was brought back for a second trial but was convicted again, this time with “extenuating circumstances.” It would take until 1906 for France’s highest court to exonerate him but even then, he never fully recovered, remaining at a grade far below what he deserved. He eventually fought in World War I, but when he died in 1935 at the age of 75, he was still marked by the betrayal.

And then the Vichy regime erased him again, deleting his name from textbooks, yet another step in France’s long discomfort with this story.

Reintegration of Alfred Dreyfus into the army in 1906. Photo: Charles Chusseau-Flaviens

With the Dreyfus Affair, antisemitism in France burst into the daylight, its hatred printed on front pages, shouted in Parliament and embedded in the military courts. A deputy cried “Death to the Jews” during a debate. The press published grotesque caricatures, and the Republic’s institutions, which should have helped shield Dreyfus, failed him and did just the opposite.

When memory fades

While Dreyfus’s name was legally cleared in 1906 and his rank eventually elevated to lieutenant-colonel, it has taken more than a century to finish the job of rehabilitation. Had the five years he spent on Devil’s Island been taken into account, he would have reached the rank of brigadier-general, and the 2025 vote to award him the title not only restored what should have been his but also helped recognize the importance of justice, for the dead as well as the living. France got it wrong back then, but it couldn’t afford to do so again.

France has a long history of delayed apologies — like Olympe de Gouges, dismissed as a nuisance and executed for demanding women’s rights and now hailed as a feminist pioneer; General Toussaint Louverture, the former Haitian slave (he was born on Santo Domingo before Haiti became independent) betrayed by Napoleon and left to die in a freezing cell in the Jura Mountains, later honored by a Paris memorial; and Josephine Baker, sidelined in her lifetime and only commemorated with a Panthéon burial nearly 50 years after her death.

It’s a curious habit, this selective memory — turning away from those who don’t fit the national image, then honoring them once it’s safe to do so.

And now, with his posthumous promotion, Dreyfus too can be added to the list.

Sources

• The Guardian – France finally acts to deliver justice in infamous Dreyfus case

• L'Orient-Le Jour – Assembly unanimously elevates Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of general

• Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme – Fonds Alfred Dreyfus

• The Letters of Captain Dreyfus to his Wife

• J’accuse by Émile Zola

• Wikipedia – Alfred Dreyfus