Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859-12 July 1935) was a French-Jewish artillery officer who, in 1894, was wrongly accused of passing on military secrets to the German Empire in an anti-Semitic conspirachy which became known as the "Dreyfus affair".
Biography[]
Alfred Dreyfus was born in Mulhouse, Alsace, France on 9 October 1859, the youngest of nine children of a French-Jewish textile manufacturer. His family moved to Paris after the German Empire annexed Elsass-Lothringen at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and Dreyfus was motivated by his family's flight to join the French Army in 1880. In 1892, however, he failed the War College exam after one of the panelists gave him poor marks for "likability", feeling that Jews were not desired on the army staff.
In 1894, when French counter-intelligence officer Jean Sandherr learned that a source in the French Army was leaking infantry on new artillery parts to the German Empire, Dreyfus was immediately accused of treason and was arrested on 15 October 1894. On 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was summarily convicted by a court martial, publicly stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. In 1896, however, France's new intelligence chief, Georges Picquart, found evidence that the real spy was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, leading to Picquart being transferred to Tunisia. When reports of an army cover-up reached the press, Emile Zola published his famous J'accuse op-ed in 1898, accusing the Army's high command of engaging in an anti-Semitic conspiracy to scapegoat Dreyfus.
In 1899, Dreyfus was again found guilty of treason at his retrial, but President Emile Loubet pardoned Dreyfus that same year. From 1904 to 1906, he was held under house arrest at Carpentras, and, on 12 July 1906, he was officially exonerated by a military commisison. Dreyfus was awarded the Legion of Honor and commanded artillery units at Vincennes and Saint-Denis before being wounded in an assassination attempt by right-wing journalist Louis Gregori on 4 June 1908.
Dreyfus retired from the Army in October 1907 at the age of 48 and re-entered the army with the rank of Major during World War I, being promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel for his service. Dreyfus died on 12 July 1935 at the age of 75, dying exactly 29 years after his exoneration.