Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus was a highly placed French army officer when, beginning in 1894, he became the subject of the most dramatic and politically significant antisemitic persecution of the turn of the century. Born in Mulhouse (Alsace) to Jeanette (Libmann) and Raphaël Dreyfus, a successful textile manufacturer, Dreyfus was raised a fervent French patriot and expected to serve the Republic. Excelling in elite state and military educational institutions, he became a career officer in the French military in the 1880s. In 1894, Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany, court-martialed, and given a life sentence at the penal colony at Devil’s Island, Guyana. From the first, the accusation against him became a lightning rod for antisemitic sentiments, agitation, and violence in French society. Conversely, a public campaign on Dreyfus’s behalf, waged first by his family and then joined by prominent figures such as the novelist Émile Zola, drew widening public support, and “the Affair,” as it became known in France and around the world (it was, along with the trial of Oscar Wilde, one of the two most widely followed media events in the era’s newly global mediascape), became a key battleground in the larger struggle between rightist-nationalist forces in France and defenders of the secular-national, integrationist Republican tradition linked to the legacy of the French Revolution. After years of legal back-and-forth, the exposure of the real spy, and a painful process of compelling the French military to admit its error, Dreyfus was finally pardoned, exonerated, and reinstated. He commanded troops during World War I and was appointed an officer of the French Legion of Honour.