Patrick Comerford
The lower house of the French parliament, in a unanimous vote this week, has approved the retroactive promotion of Captain Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general,130 years after the Jewish French officer was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 in one of the most notorious cases of antisemitism in France.
The bill sets out to promote Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general, for one of the most notorious acts of antisemitism in France. The National Assembly or lower house unanimously approved the legislation, seen also as an act of reparation and a symbolic condemnation of modern antisemitism in France today.
The draft law was proposed by a former prime minister, Gabriel Attal, the leader of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party. All 197 deputies present voted in favour in the National Assembly on Monday. To take effect, it still needs the approval by the Senate or upper house in a separate vote.
The rapporteur of the proposed law, Renaissance deputy Charles Sitzenstuhl, said the vote ‘will go down in history’ and called on senators ‘to quickly adopt the text’.
Dreyfus was condemned at a time of rampant antisemitism in the French army and wider French society in the late 19th century. The symbolic promotion comes at a time of growing alarm over hate crimes targeting Jews in France.
‘Promoting Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general would constitute an act of reparation, a recognition of his merits, and a tribute to his commitment to the Republic,’ said Gabriel Attal, who was France’s youngest prime minister but was in office for less than eight months last year.
‘Accused, humiliated and condemned because he was Jewish, Alfred Dreyfus was dismissed from the army, imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island,’ Attal said in advance of the vote, calling on the National Assembly to unanimously ‘repair the indignity and bring honour to the Republic.’
‘The antisemitism that hit Alfred Dreyfus is not a thing of the past,’ said Attal, whose father was Jewish. He urged France to reaffirm its ‘absolute commitment against all forms of discrimination.’
Dreyfus was a 36-year-old army captain when he was accused in October 1894 of passing secret information on new artillery equipment to a German military attaché. The accusation was based on a comparison of handwriting on a document found in the German's wastepaper basket in Paris. Dreyfus was put on trial amid a virulent antisemitic press campaign and in the aftermath of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.
The novelist Emile Zola wrote his celebrated front-page article on the Dreyfus case under the banner headline J’accuse (‘I accuse’), accusing the government and army of ‘treason against humanity’ by playing to the public’s antisemitism.
The Dreyfus affair is seen as a stain on French history. The trial reportedly persuaded Theodor Herzl, who covered it as a journalist, to turn to Zionism.
Despite a lack of evidence, Dreyfus was convicted of treason and he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the infamous penal colony in French Guiana, and publicly stripped of his rank.
Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the intelligence services, reinvestigated the case in secret and discovered the handwriting on the incriminating message was that of another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. When Picquart presented the evidence to the general staff of the French army, he was driven out of the military and jailed for a year, while Esterhazy was acquitted.
Dreyfus was brought back to France in June 1899 for a second trial. Initially he was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Later he was officially pardoned, but was not cleared of the charges.
The high court of appeal eventually overturned the original verdict in 1906, exonerating Dreyfus. He was reinstated with the rank of major, served during World War I and died in 1935 at the age of 76.
The supporters of the present bill believe that had Dreyfus been able to pursue his career under normal circumstances, he would have risen to the top in the French army.
The French parliament’s National Defence and Armed Forces Committee had voted overwhelmingly a few days earlier to promote Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general. When the committee was debating the bill, Charles Sitzenstuhl suggested Dreyfus could be reburied in the Pantheon in Paris, the mausoleum reserved for France’s greatest heroes, although that decision rests with President Macron. In 2021, he opened the world’s first museum about the Dreyfus affair in Paris.
The journalist John Litchfield wrote this week that the Dreyfus case ‘changed the course of French history. It discredited the forces of extreme nationalism, antisemitism, clericalism and nostalgic royalism that might otherwise have pushed France into a kind of proto-fascism or Francoism 30 years before Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.’
But for many decades ‘the Dreyfus case’ continued to divide France. In a speech to mark the centenary of Zola’s article in 1998, President Jacques Chirac said: ‘The Dreyfus Affair … tore French society apart, divided families, split the country into two enemy camps, which attacked each other with exceptional violence ... It was a reminder, that the forces of darkness, intolerance and injustice can penetrate to the highest levels of the state.’
Of the 577 deputies, only 197 voted on Monday: 38 were from the far-right Rassemblement National, the political heirs of the Vichy regime of 1940-1944 which rehabilitated the senior officers who lied and cheated to frame Dreyfus; the bill was also approved by 41 members of the hard-Left La France Insoumise, which has been accused in recent months of antisemitism in its unconditional support for the Palestinian cause.
The centrist Modem party, the party of the prime minister, François Bayrou, refused to take part. They said that the vote, sponsored by their coalition partners, Renaissance, gave both the far-right and the far-left a cheap opportunity to whitewash their antisemitism.
France is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel and the US, as well as one of the largest Muslim communities in the EU.
There has been a rise in reported attacks against the of Jewish community in France since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and the Israelis attacked the Gaza Strip.
The Holocaust memorial in Paris, three synagogues and the Chez Marianne restaurant were vandalised with paint last Friday night in what was seen as a co-ordinated antisemitic attack. Green paint covered the walls of the Agoudas Hakehilos synagogue, the Tournelles synagogue and he Belleville Synagogue, as well as the Shoah Memorial for French victims of the Holocaust. All five locations are close to each other in the Marais district, the historic Jewish centre of Paris.
‘Whatever the perpetrators and their motivations, these acts do not only target walls: they violently stigmatise French Jews, their memory and their places of worship,’ the French Jewish group CRIF said. ‘These paint sprays are a stain on our republican values.’
The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said: ‘I condemn these acts of intimidation in the strongest possible terms. Antisemitism has no place in our city or in our Republic.’
Last year, France registered 1,570 anti-Semitic acts, according to Interior Ministry figures, over three times more than the 436 recorded in 2022. Since 2012 they have fluctuated between 311 and 851 per year.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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