Dreyfus Fully Exonerated and Reinstated
Alfred Dreyfus was declared innocent by the Court of Cassation in July 1906, twelve years after his conviction. He had been convicted in 1894 of passing artillery secrets to Germany on the evidence of a handwriting comparison, publicly degraded in the courtyard of the École Militaire, and imprisoned in solitary confinement on Devil's Island for over four years, part of it in leg irons. The case against him had rested on a document found in a wastepaper basket and on secret evidence never shown to the defence. Colonel Picquart found in 1896 that the handwriting was Esterhazy's and was posted to Tunisia; Esterhazy was acquitted in three minutes; Zola published his open letter in 1898 and was convicted of libel; and a forgery introduced to shore up the case was discovered, its author killing himself in prison. Dreyfus was brought back for a retrial at Rennes in 1899 and was convicted again, by five votes to two, with extenuating circumstances — a verdict that satisfied nobody and made the army's position untenable. He accepted a presidential pardon days later, which allowed him his freedom and left the conviction standing, and spent seven years pressing for a proper judgement. The Court of Cassation quashed the verdict without a further trial in July 1906, and he was reinstated with the rank of major and made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in the same courtyard where he had been degraded. He served through the First World War and died in 1935. The army's own reckoning took much longer. A plaque was placed at the École Militaire only in the 1980s, Dreyfus's statue was moved twice for lack of a willing site, and the military establishment resisted a formal admission of the frame-up into the 1990s.
- Year: 1906 CE
- Category: Social
