It was one of the most notorious travesties of justice in legal history: in December 1894, a promising young Jewish army captain from Alsace was wrongly convicted at a secret French court martial of selling secrets to the Germans and sent to a bleak penal island off the coast of south America for life, reports The Sunday Times.
Alfred Dreyfus was finally exonerated a decade later, but his case continued to divide France, inspiring countless articles, books and films — most recently Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, based on Robert Harris’s best-selling novel of the same name.
Last week, 90 years after his death, the “Dreyfus Affair” took a new turn when the National Assembly voted to make him a brigadier general, a promotion that supporters say he would have earned if his career had not been interrupted by his enforced spell on Devil’s Island.
The move has prompted speculation that President Macron may be planning to pay Dreyfus the ultimate honour of adding him to the 82 members of the great and good interred in the Panthéon — a highly symbolic move at a time when France faces a wave of antisemitism.
Sources at the Élysée Palace have told French media the president has been thinking about “a necessary gesture”, which “should not be long in coming”.
The unanimous Assembly vote is expected to be confirmed by the Senate. It delighted members of Dreyfus’s extended family, more than a dozen of whom watched proceedings from a place of honour, among them his granddaughter, Aline, 90, and great-grandson, Michel, 72. When MPs were told of their presence, they broke into applause.
For Michel Dreyfus, the posthumous promotion of his great-grandfather was the long overdue righting of an injustice that continued to weigh on him long after his legal travails had been ended by the Cour de Cassation, the country’s highest court.
“He had been found guilty for something he hadn’t done, he had been imprisoned, and then even when it was over he still met something completely unfair because he wasn’t reinstated in the position he deserved,” Michel said. “And it’s something that he really suffered from. It was a deep wound for him.”
Read more of this report from The Sunday Times.