![]() Three days after the wedding, Dreyfus learned that he had been admitted to the École Supérieure de Guerre or War College. On 18 April 1891, the 31-year-old Dreyfus married 20-year-old Lucie Eugénie Hadamard (1870–1945). In 1889, he was made adjutant to the director of the Établissement de Bourges, a government arsenal, and promoted to captain. Dreyfus was subsequently transferred to a mounted artillery battery attached to the First Cavalry Division (Paris), and promoted to lieutenant in 1885. ![]() On graduation, he was assigned to the 31st Artillery Regiment, which was in the garrison at Le Mans. From 1880 to 1882, he attended the artillery school at Fontainebleau to receive more specialized training as an artillery officer. In 1880, he graduated and was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the French army. Following his 18th birthday in October 1877, he enrolled in the elite École Polytechnique military school in Paris, where he received military training and an education in the sciences. The childhood experience of seeing his family uprooted by the war with Germany prompted Dreyfus to decide on a career in the military. Alfred was 10 years old when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in the summer of 1870, and following the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany after the war, he and his family moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he attended high school. Raphaël Dreyfus was a prosperous, self-made Jewish textile manufacturer who had started as a peddler. It ultimately ended with Dreyfus' complete exoneration.Įarly life, family, and education īorn in Mulhouse, Alsace in 1859, Dreyfus was the youngest of nine children born to Raphaël and Jeannette Dreyfus (née Libmann). The incident has gone down in history as the Dreyfus affair, the reverberations from which were felt throughout Europe. The debacle of the Dreyfus affair brought about greater liberalization in France, a reduction in the power of the military, and a formal separation of church and state.Alfred Dreyfus ( / ˈ d r eɪ f ə s/ DRAY-fəs, also US: / ˈ d r aɪ-/ DRY-, French: 9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was a French artillery officer of Jewish ancestry from Alsace whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most polarizing political dramas in modern French history. However, a new French administration pardoned him, and in 1906 the supreme court of appeals overturned his conviction. In 1899, he was found guilty in another show trial and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The military was forced to order a new court-martial for Dreyfus. In 1898, Major Hubert Henry, discoverer of the original letter attributed to Dreyfus, admitted that he had forged much of the evidence against Dreyfus and died by suicide. Meanwhile, out of the scandal a perilous national division was born, in which nationalists and members of the Catholic Church supported the military, while republicans, socialists, and advocates of religious freedom lined up to defend Dreyfus. One month later, Zola was sentenced to jail for libel but managed to escape to England. By the evening, 200,000 copies had been sold. In response, the French novelist Emile Zola published an open letter on the front page of the Aurore entitled “J’Accuse,” which accused the judges of being under the thumb of the military. A court-martial was held in January 1898, and Esterhazy was acquitted within an hour. The army attempted to suppress this information, but a national uproar ensued, and the military had no choice but to put Esterhazy on trial. Interest in the case lapsed until 1896, when evidence was disclosed that implicated French Major Ferdinand Esterhazy as the guilty party. The Dreyfus case demonstrated the anti-Semitism permeating France’s military and, because many praised the ruling, in France in general. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil’s Island Prison in French Guyana four months later. ![]() French officer Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans, is stripped of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony in the courtyard of Paris’ Ecole Militaire.
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