Alfred Dreyfus

Background

Alfred Dreyfus was born in Mulhouse, Alsace in 1859. Dreyfus was the youngest of nine children born to Raphaël and Jeannette Dreyfus.

Education

In 1877, Alfred enrolled in the elite École Polytechnique military school in Paris, where he received military training and an education in the sciences. From 1880 to 1882, he attended the artillery school at Fontainebleau. In 1891 he was admitted to the École Supérieure de Guerre or War College. Two years later, he graduated ninth in his class with honorable mention.

Career

Alfred Dreyfus became a sub-lieutenant in the artillery in 1882, and was promoted captain in 1889; and, after passing through the École de Guerre with distinction, he was appointed to the general staff. His name was, however, unknown to the general public till he was arrested on the 15th of October 1894 on a charge of selling military secrets to Germany, condemned, publicly degraded (January 4, 1895), and transported (March 10) to the Ile du Diable, French Guiana.

The story of the subsequent proceedings in this celebrated case is told in the article Anti-Semitism, and need not here be repeated. It was not till 1899 that the unfortunate prisoner was brought back to France for retrial by court-martial, and even then, so strong was the anti-Semitic and military prejudice, he was again found guilty “with extenuating circumstances” at Rennes (September 9), though ten days later he was “pardoned” by President Loubet. It was not till the Cour de Cassation ordered a further investigation, and on the 12th of July 1906 decided that his conviction had been based on a forgery and that Dreyfus was innocent, that the agitation came to a final conclusion.

He was then restored to his rank in the army and promoted major. But the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfusard spirit in certain French circles could not easily be quelled even then; and on the occasion of the translation of the remains of Emile Zola (Dreyfus’s determined champion) to the Pantheon on the 4th of June 1908, Major Dreyfus was shot at and wounded by a fanatical journalist named Gregori, who was subsequently acquitted by a Paris jury of the charge of attempted murder, his own plea being that he had merely intended a “demonstration. ”

Achievements

• Alfred Dreyfus was remembered as a military officer whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French history with a wide echo in all Europe, known today as the Dreyfus affair.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Five Years of My Life, 1894-1899 (Classic Reprint)

    (Five Years of My Life 1894 1899 Classic Reprint)

Connections

In 1891, Dreyfus married 20-year-old Lucie Eugénie Hadamard. They had two children, Pierre and Jeanne.

Father:

Raphaël Dreyfus

Textile manufacturer

Mother:

Jeannette Dreyfus

Spouse:

Lucie Eugénie Hadamard

1870–1945

Daughter:

Jeanne Dreyfus

1893–1981

Son:

Pierre Dreyfus

1891–1946

References

• Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash (Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History)
• The Affair The Case of Alfred Dreyfus
• Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair That Divided France
• Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century