Alfred Dreyfus promoted to general 130 years after wrongful treason conviction

The posthumous honor symbolizes a government effort to combat the rising antisemitism in France.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

French officer Alfred Dreyfus was posthumously promoted Monday to the rank of brigadier general, 130 years after being wrongly convicted of treason due to antisemitism in a case that rocked the country for years.

President Emmanuel Macron and Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu signed the promotion into law after the lower house of Parliament unanimously approved it in June and the Senate supported it earlier this month.

It is widely seen as a symbol of the government’s declared determination to fight antisemitism, which has soared in France, as well as globally, since Oct. 7.

Dreyfus was a 36-year-old Jewish captain in 1894 when he was charged with treason for passing military secrets to the Germans.

With no credible evidence against him, virulent antisemitism played the largest role in his court-martial, as the eminent novelist Émile Zola charged in a famous J’accuse (I accuse) pamphlet he published four years after Dreyfus was banished to a notorious prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana to serve a lifetime sentence.

The pamphlet, which caused a ruckus in France, came two years after a new head of army intelligence reinvestigated the case in secret and found the guilty party: Maj. Ferdinand Esterhazy.

Esterhazy was quickly found innocent, however, to cover up the fact that the army had knowingly railroaded Dreyfus.

In 1899, after much political fighting between the Jewish officer’s supporters and enemies, with the press heavily involved, Dreyfus was given a second trial.

Although Esterhazy had confessed to a reporter in the meantime that he had framed Dreyfus, he was again found guilty.

Due to public outrage, however, he was offered and accepted a presidential pardon that freed him because he could not face going back to prison.

The pardon did not clear him of the charges, however, which deeply wounded him.

“The government of the Republic has given me back my freedom. It is nothing for me without my honor,” he said at the time.

It took until 1906 for the French to fully exonerate him.

He was readmitted into the army with the rank of major, awarded the Legion of Honor decoration, and fought for France in World War I, dying at age 76 in 1935.

The Dreyfus affair, as it came to be known, was the spark that led Theodor Herzl to found the modern Zionist movement, as he covered the original case as a journalist and was deeply affected by the antisemitism he witnessed.