Lucie Dreyfus

Origins and early life

Lucie Eugénie Hadamard was born at Chatou on 23 August 1869 into a Jewish family from Koblenz settled in Paris since the early nineteenth century; her father David was a diamond merchant, and the mathematician Jacques Hadamard was a cousin.

Work and career

She married the artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus on 21 April 1890 in a ceremony conducted by Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France. When her husband was convicted of treason in 1894 and sent to Devil's Island she asked, and was refused, permission to be deported with him, and she then fought for eleven years in the only ways open to a woman of her position: she petitioned the Chamber of Deputies, addressed a plea to the Pope on 16 September 1896, published letters, and kept up a correspondence with the prisoner that was itself an act of resistance, since his mail was censored and often withheld.

Those who worked for the revision, Émile Zola among them, said afterwards that her steadiness had held the Dreyfusard side together; her husband was acquitted and reinstated in 1906.

Later years

Under the German occupation she was hidden in a convent at Valence under the name Madame Duteil, only the mother superior knowing who she was, and she survived; her granddaughter Madeleine Lévy, arrested by the Milice, died at Auschwitz in 1944. Lucie Dreyfus died in Paris on 14 December 1945.