On December 22, 1894 - 126 years ago today - the Jewish French Army officer Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life in prison for treason - allegedly for delivering French secret documents to the German Empire.
Deprived of his military titles, his honor but above all his freedom, his sentence could have been forgotten if it had not started an unprecedented political scandal among French society that upset France for almost 12 years.
The reason? The antisemitic nature of his sentence, which came at a time of rising antisemitism in France, and in Europe more generally.
Born to a Jewish family in Mulhouse in Alsace, France, on October 9, 1859, Dreyfus moved to Paris in 1877 to enroll in the École Polytechnique military school, graduated three years later, and then attended the artillery school in Fontainebleau. In 1892, Dreyfus left the war college and moved to a new post at the French Army’s General Staff headquarters, where he was the only Jewish officer.
In 1894, Dreyfus was arrested and falsely accused by Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam of communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy.
On the morning of January 5, 1895, thousands of troops were massed in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, just across from the Eiffel Tower, to watch Dreyfus’s humiliation.
An adjutant of the Republican Guard walked up to him and broke Dreyfus’s sword into two and cut the buttons and military insignia off of Dreyfus’s uniform.A general pronounced: “Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the people of France, we degrade you,” although Dreyfus was shouting all along “I am innocent. I swear I am innocent. Vive la France! You have degraded an innocent man.”
The mob around was screaming “Death to the Jews,” in a scene evocative of pogroms and auto-da-fés.
After sentencing Dreyfus was sent from prison in Paris and imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guiana in South America and spent about 5 years there.
Dreyfus was subsequently released and pardoned after a public campaign spearheaded by Emile Zola - with his famous open letter "J'Accuse" - and other intellectuals led the case to be reopened.
His trial pushed a previously assimilated Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl to despair of the possibility of any true Jewish acceptance in Europe and to write the papmphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), and to become a fierce advocate, perhaps the father, of political Zionism.