Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason in 1894 on forged evidence, and the twelve-year campaign to clear him split France in two. Born in Mulhouse in 1859 to an Alsatian Jewish textile family that chose France when Germany annexed the region in 1871, he was a captain of artillery and one of very few Jewish officers on the general staff. A cleaning woman working for French intelligence recovered a torn note from the German embassy's wastebasket offering military documents. The handwriting was compared, badly, and suspicion fell on Dreyfus because he was on the staff, was from Alsace, and was Jewish. He was court-martialled in secret, on a file the judges saw and the defence did not, and was publicly degraded in the courtyard of the École Militaire — his sword broken, his braid torn off, while a crowd outside shouted for death to the Jews — and sent to Devil's Island. Colonel Georges Picquart, the new head of intelligence, identified the real author in 1896 as Major Ferdinand Esterhazy and was posted to Tunisia for saying so. Esterhazy was acquitted in minutes in January 1898, and Émile Zola published J'accuse two days later on the front page of L'Aurore, accusing the war office by name and inviting his own prosecution to force the evidence into open court. He was convicted and fled to England. Dreyfus was retried, convicted again with extenuating circumstances, pardoned in 1899, and fully exonerated by the Court of Cassation in 1906. He served in the First World War.
- Lived: 1859 CE – 1935 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: military_leader, symbol_of_justice
