Alfred dreyfus wife and children9/1/2023 ![]() A week later he became a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur and, by October that year, he was in command of an artillery unit at Saint-Denis. The following day he was readmitted into the army at the rank of major. He had to wait until 1906 for a military commission to formally exonerate him and restore his honour. Public opinion by this time was at boiling point and France was widely condemned in the foreign press.īowing to pressure, new president Emile Loubet granted a pardon and Dreyfus was released from prison.Īccepting the pardon meant it seemed Dreyfus was admitting guilt – but the truth is his health had suffered and it was unsure how much longer he would have been able to survive in prison.Īrriving back in France he said: “The government of the Republic has returned my freedom. “It was so provocative that, in 1898, 30,000 people demonstrated in London in support of Dreyfus.”Įsterhazy was tried again in 1899 – but despite mounting evidence of his guilt he was acquitted a second time, much to the fury of the legions of ‘Dreyfusards’ (Dreyfus supporters). In the UK it provoked massive reaction, and all the leading newspapers denounced French injustice and discrimination. ![]() ![]() “Other countries didn’t understand the French attitude. “Across the whole of Europe, and even the world, there were real repercussions,” Mr Joumas said. It pointed out judicial errors and lack of evidence in the case.Įven Oscar Wilde – by that time, broken, penniless, and in the last year of his life – became embroiled in the affair having met Esterhazy in a cheap drinking den in Paris. He was transported to Devil’s Island in French Guiana to begin a life sentence. He is reported to have shouted: “I swear that I am innocent! I remain worthy of serving in the army. In the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, his rank insignia, buttons and braid were cut off his uniform and his sword was ceremonially broken. In January 1895, he was publicly stripped of his rank. Suspicion swiftly fell on Dreyfus, and he was arrested. In 1894, French counter-intelligence learned that information about new artillery parts was being passed to the Germans by a spy on the General Staff. He enrolled in the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre and, having graduated with an honourable mention, became a trainee in the Army’s General Staff headquarters, where he was the only Jewish officer. He married Lucie Eugénie Hadamard in 1891, and they had two children. By 1889, he had been promoted to captain. He then spent two years in specialist training at the artillery school in Fontainebleau after which he was assigned to a regiment. He came from a wealthy family of Jewish descent, and was commissioned in 1880 after graduating from the elite Ecole Polytechnique military school in Paris. L’Affaire Dreyfus, as it was known, made the front pages worldwide, and France was especially condemned by the British press.Īlfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was an artillery officer from Alsace. It effectively meant that the press were free to print articles based on racial and religious discrimination. The right-wing press continued to attack his reputation, and his Jewish ancestry – even after his death in 1935 – until anti-Semitism in France was made illegal after the Second World War.Īuthor and historian Georges Joumas, whose book Alfred Dreyfus, Citoyen came out last year, notes that the only legal defence against any kind of discrimination, racism or anti-Semitism at that time was to sue for defamation. It began in 1894 when Army captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for spying, and officially continued until 1906 when he was finally exonerated.īut it continued for many years afterwards. ![]() The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that shamed France for decades. ![]()
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