It was a cold January morning in 1895 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus stood in the cobbled courtyard of the École militaire. Flanked by soldiers, he was stripped of his rank, with his epaulets torn from his uniform and his sword broken in two in a ceremonial act of degradation. A jeering crowd spat invectives—“Judas!” “Death to the Jews!”—as France’s only Jewish officer on the general staff was paraded before them. Convicted of treason on forged evidence, he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Yet Dreyfus’s true crime was being Jewish in a republic where, a century after the French Revolution, anti-Semitism had entered the mainstream.
Now, 130 years later, the National Assembly, the lower house of France’s parliament, has unanimously voted to promote Dreyfus posthumously from major to brigadier general. On June 2, all 197 deputies present supported the legislation, which was introduced by the former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who is currently the general secretary of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party. The bill now awaits approval by the French senate. Attal described the promotion as an act of “reparation, a recognition of his merits, and a tribute to his commitment to the republic.” He added, “The anti-Semitism that hit Alfred Dreyfus is not a thing of the past,” urging France to uphold its “absolute commitment against all forms of discrimination.”
In a France again grappling with this surge in Jew-hatred, the rehabilitation of Dreyfus is not just an attempt to right a historical wrong. It is a test of whether the republic still believes in its own founding ideals.
What the French still call l’Affaire was never simply about a miscarriage of justice. It was a reckoning that nearly tore the republic apart as well as a signal moment in the modern history of European anti-Semitism. In 1894, Dreyfus, a promising thirty-five-year-old artillery officer from Alsace, was accused of passing secrets to the Germans. The evidence was circumstantial, the handwriting analysis disputed, and the trial conducted in secret. When the facts didn’t suffice, they were fabricated. The military lied, then covered up the lie, all to protect the sanctity of its own myths. The machinery of state and press turned on him—not simply for supposed espionage but for embodying a nationalized paranoia about Jewish disloyalty to the republic.
But the myth cracked. Published on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898, Émile Zola’s thunderous open letter “J’Accuse!’ shattered public complacency. It indicted not only the generals but the republic itself. Zola accused the army and the government of orchestrating a conspiracy—a provocation that triggered riots, lawsuits, and a split that cleaved French society. It named names. It split families, intellectual circles, and entire cities. The Dreyfus Affair revealed that anti-Semitism was not the property of cranks or fanatics—it was state-sponsored, court-backed, and press-amplified. Left-wing intellectuals demanded justice; the right-wing press shrieked betrayal. Catholic nationalist leagues organized torchlit rallies chanting “Death to Dreyfus.” Inside the Chamber of Deputies, hateful slurs were commonplace. The affair was not just about one man—it forced the French Republic to redefine itself.
The army’s refusal to admit error, even after incontrovertible evidence surfaced, led to two retrials. In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated and quietly reinstated as a major. But the promotion that was owed to his seniority—and the symbolic reversal of his humiliation—never came. Now, finally, it may.
Too often, Dreyfus has been depicted as a passive, broken figure—a wronged man who endured, stoically and silently, the gross injustice done to him. An excellent and timely recent exhibition at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris helped subvert that narrative. “Alfred Dreyfus: Truth and Justice,” which closed on August 31, presented him not as a martyr but as an unyielding advocate—“a tireless fighter for the truth,” in the words of the exhibition’s curator, Claire Lévy-Vroelant—who refused to disappear into the margins of history.
Drawing on hundreds of newly digitized letters, private family papers, and previously unpublished documents, the exhibition restored Dreyfus’s voice to the center of his own story. From his prison cell on Devil’s Island, he composed letter after letter—lucid, forceful, indignant—asserting his innocence and demanding justice. After his release, he reentered public life not as a recluse, but as a resolute citizen: lobbying for full exoneration, rejoining the army, and serving valiantly during World War I. His was a forgiveness born not of meekness, but of the conviction that the republic, though gravely flawed, was still worth believing in.
“In his letters and notebooks Dreyfus does not present himself as a victim, and he resented being turned into a sacrificial figure to satisfy the emotional needs of colleagues and strangers,” wrote the historian Ruth Harris in her 2010 book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century. “Instead, he saw himself as a determined, active man, able to maneuver, constantly in touch with those in power and ever seeking justice.”
Importantly, the Paris exhibition resisted the moral convenience of sanctification. Dreyfus was shown as a meticulous, principled, and courageous soldier. He would not accept injustice from the institutions he had once trusted to uphold the law. And in that sense, he has become more than a symbol. He is a test case for the republic itself—for what it demands of its citizens, and what it owes them in return.
The Dreyfus Affair has been recounted in books, plays, and films for over a century. From Georges Méliès’ early silent reels to José Ferrer’s I Accuse! (1958) to Roman Polanski’s controversial 2019 drama An Officer and a Spy (which received a belated U.S. theatrical release last month), each iteration reflects the preoccupations of its era. As much as Dreyfus has served as a moral lodestar, he’s also been a prism for national anxieties about authority and citizenship.
These retellings do not resolve the affair. They restage it. And they remind us that the question at the heart of Dreyfus’s ordeal—can a Jew be fully French?—has never been definitively answered. Today, it echoes in debates over laïcité and immigration and in the rhetorical flourishes of populist demagogues.
In this light, the National Assembly’s proposed promotion becomes less about a long-dead officer and more about a living nation.
The past years, in particular, have seen an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents across France, home to the largest Jewish population outside of America and Israel, including desecrated graves, vandalized synagogues, and old canards recycled for digital platforms. As it has elsewhere, anti-Jewish violence has surged here in the wake of Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. In France, anti-Jewish acts accounted for a substantial portion of the 11 percent increase in hate crimes that the police reported for 2024.
Some examples: the torching attempt at Beth Yaacov synagogue in La Grande-Motte in August of last year; the brutal gang rape of a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, who was taunted with anti-Semitic slurs, in Courbevoie, the following June; a petrol-bomb attack on the Rouen synagogue in May 2024; and the desecration of at least ten Jewish homes, businesses, and a synagogue in Paris and Rouen with swastikas in January of this year.
Physical assaults continue. In Nantes, Rabbi Arié Engelberg was punched, bitten, and insulted while walking with his young son this March—a hate crime condemned by President Macron as a “poison of anti-Semitism.” Just days later, Rabbi Elie Lemmel was attacked twice: once in Deauville and then at a café in Neuilly-sur-Seine, suffering blows to his stomach and head.
Statistics are stark: the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF) reports a near quadrupling of anti-Semitic crimes in 2023 compared to 2022—up to 1,676 incidents—and another slight uptick in 2024. Scholars note that anti-Zionism often morphs seamlessly into hatred of Jews in the suburbs and that online conspiracy discourse normalizes anti-Semitic tropes. Violence now includes sexual assault, arson, vandalism, physical attacks against clergy, and repeated threats to Jewish students, many traced to the aftershocks of the Gaza war.
Islamist extremism has been responsible for some of the most violent crimes against French Jews, including a 2012 shooting at a Jewish day school in Toulouse, the murder of a retired physician and Orthodox Jew who was thrown from her balcony in 2017, and the 2024 firebombing of a synagogue in Rouen. But Muslim anti-Semitism is only part of the story. Alarmingly, French anti-Semitism now cuts across class, ethnicity, and creed. As Yonathan Arfi, CRIF’s president, put it back in October, “For the first time since the Second World War, anti-Semitism is being fueled at all levels of French society.”
Against the disturbing background, symbolically righting a historic wrong might seem comically insignificant. Yet to restore Dreyfus’s rank now is not merely to amend the record. It is to confront—in the language of military honor—a ritual of public disgrace. He was stripped of his commission in spectacle. Let the restoration be no less visible.
But symbolic acts alone, however overdue, are not enough. Dreyfus belongs in the Panthéon alongside Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola, who risked everything to expose the truth. His reinterment in the mausoleum reserved for France’s greatest heroes was recently suggested by Charles Sitzenstuhl, a member of the Renaissance Party. It would signal that France honors not only its writers and statesmen but also its moral witnesses. (Macron recently declared July 12 an annual day of commemoration for Dreyfus, starting in 2026.)
The affair must also be taught not as an aberration, but as a case study in systemic failure. Its logic—scapegoating, disinformation, bureaucratic complicity—is not a relic. It is a manual, and one still in use.
What the Vichy regime did to French Jews—76,000 were deported, and most never returned—was enabled by habits of mind honed during the Dreyfus years. And the long silence that followed—silence shattered by the courageous documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who died in May at the age of ninety-seven—made it possible for France to uphold the myth of widespread resistance to fascist barbarity rather than confront the “uncomfortable truths” of Nazi collaboration.
France likes to think of itself as a nation of principles, but principles untested are mere slogans. Alfred Dreyfus tested the republic—and the republic blinked. To correct that now is not to rewrite history but to accept its verdict.
This is the work of democracy: to honor those who held the line when the state abandoned it. Dreyfus did not ask to be a symbol. He asked to be seen, to be heard, and to be judged fairly.
It’s not too late for the republic to listen.
