AD
Civil Rights & Human Rights

Alfred Dreyfus

Share
Who

Alfred Dreyfus · Civil Rights & Human Rights

What

The officer at the center of the Dreyfus Affair, falsely convicted and fully rehabilitated in 1906

When

9 octobre 1859, Mulhouse, France — 12 juillet 1935, Paris, France

Where

Mulhouse, Paris, île du Diable

Biography

Alfred Dreyfus is recognized among Jewish contributors to Civil Rights & Human Rights — The officer at the center of the Dreyfus Affair, falsely convicted and fully rehabilitated in 1906

How & why

Origins and early life

Alfred Dreyfus was born on 9 October 1859 in Mulhouse, into a prosperous Alsatian Jewish family long established in the region, textile manufacturers who chose France when Alsace was lost in 1871.

Work and career

A graduate of the École polytechnique and an artillery captain on the army's General Staff, he was in 1894 falsely convicted of treason on fabricated evidence, publicly degraded, and shipped to the silence of Devil's Island. The fight to free him tore France in two: the Affair, with Zola's J'accuse in 1898, laid bare the antisemitism running through the institutions of the Republic and forged the modern alliance of intellectuals and justice — it was while covering the degradation that Theodor Herzl weighed what it meant.

Retried at Rennes in 1899 and convicted again against all evidence, then pardoned, Dreyfus was fully rehabilitated in 1906, reinstated in the army and made a knight of the Legion of Honor.

Later years

He asked for no revenge, served again through the First World War at Verdun, and died in Paris on 12 July 1935 — the man whose ordeal taught the Republic what its own principles cost.

Sources & external links

Verify and go deeper with these external references.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Dreyfus

This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.

Contributions & Sources

The officer at the center of the Dreyfus Affair, falsely convicted and fully rehabilitated in 1906

1906

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Dreyfus