In Today’s Almanac we unravel the origins of the Dreyfus case. On December 22, 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life in prison for high treason and sent to Devil’s Island. An army officer, he had been found guilty of espionage in the service of Germany.
He was clearly innocent, but had been chosen as a scapegoat by the military leaders because he was Jewish. The real person responsible was someone else, a Catholic.
The origins of the Dreyfus case
The affair exploded in all its gravity only four years later, in 1898, when the Parisian newspaper L’Aurore published on its front page an open letter to the President of the French Republic Félix Faure, entitled «J’Accuse…!». In the article, Émile Zola denounced the unjust conviction of artillery captain Dreyfus.
A frontal attack on the corruption and anti-Semitism that pervaded the army and politics, which marked the birth of the modern figure of the “committed” intellectual, ready to expose himself personally to “urge the explosion of truth and justice”.
Recently the Dreyfus case has been cited by the Wanted war Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu in reference to being accused of war crimes by the ICJ.
