Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus was an Alsatian artillery captain of Jewish descent. In October 1894 he was arrested for allegedly passing military secrets to the German Embassy, on evidence that rested mainly on an unsigned note, the bordereau, whose handwriting was disputed. A military court convicted him in secret in December 1894 and gave him a life sentence. On 5 January 1895 he was stripped of his rank in public in Paris, protesting his innocence. He spent about five years on Devil's Island in French Guiana.

From 1896 Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart identified another officer, Major Esterhazy, as the likely culprit. The army suppressed this, and a court acquitted Esterhazy in January 1898. Days later Emile Zola published J'accuse. A retrial at Rennes in 1899 convicted Dreyfus a second time, with extenuating circumstances, and he was pardoned on 19 September 1899, a pardon that did not clear his name. On 12 July 1906 the Court of Cassation ruled that nothing remained of the charges and annulled the Rennes verdict. On 21 July 1906 he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour at the Ecole militaire, where the crowd shouted his name and he answered with a cheer for France. He died in 1935.