Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus was a French army officer whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 became one of the defining political scandals of the French Third Republic. The Dreyfus Affair exposed antisemitism, military secrecy and deep divisions over justice, nationalism and republican values.

Alfred Dreyfus was born in Mulhouse and died in Paris. His conviction for treason in 1894, based partly on secret and falsified evidence, divided France for more than a decade; after renewed investigation and a second court-martial, Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and fully exonerated and restored to the army in 1906.

In Robert Harris’ An Officer and a Spy, Colonel Georges Picquart takes command of the French army’s intelligence section after witnessing the public degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer convicted of treason. In Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery, Simonini’s career intersects with Italian unification, the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus Affair, while his fabrications draw upon older anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic myths.