Carl Yonker

On July 12, 2025, the Élysée announced that France would annually mark July 12 as a national day of commemoration for Captain Alfred Dreyfus.[1] On that day in 1906, the Court of Cassation annulled the conviction that had sent Dreyfus to Devil’s Island on charges of treason. The new commemoration day will stand alongside France’s four other main civic and military national holidays: Bastille Day (July 14); Labour Day (May 1); Victory in Europe Day (May 8); and Armistice Day (November 11).

President Emmanuel Macron said that the annulment of Dreyfus’ conviction was a historical milestone that reflected “the victory of justice and truth against hatred and antisemitism.” Macron warned that today, more than ever, “we must always show vigilance and perseverance against these old antisemitic demons,” as “the lineage of the heirs of the anti-Dreyfusards, anti-Republicans, and antisemites of the early and mid-20th century has never been extinguished.”[2]

Macron’s announcement followed another symbolic political act. On June 2, 197 members of the National Assembly voted unanimously to posthumously promote Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general in a parliamentary motion of reparation 130 years in the making. Portrayed as an important symbolic step in the fight against antisemitism in today’s France, the bill was put forward by former French prime minister MP Gabriel Attal, the leader of President Macron’s liberal-centrist Renaissance party (RE).

The vote was swift and broadly supported across the political spectrum. In November 2025, the French Senate approved the promotion and Macron and French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu signed it into law.[3] MP Charles Sitzenstuhl of Macron’s Renaissance party, who praised the promotion as an act that “will go down in history,” went further and suggested that Dreyfus be entombed in the Panthéon in Paris, the mausoleum where France’s greatest heroes are buried.[4]

Not everyone was happy, though, with what Le Monde described as the “symbolic and highly politicized return of the Dreyfus Affair” to public discourse.[5] The centrist Democratic Movement party (MoDem) abstained, warning that the gesture risked offering the far right a “certificate of honorability” on antisemitism without forcing it to confront its anti-Dreyfusard legacy and that it would not participate so as “not to allow some people to buy cheaply” such a certificate at Dreyfus’ expense.[6]

MP Gabriel Amard from the left-wing La France Insoumise party (LFI) was even more blunt, taking direct aim at the National Rally (RN), the far-right party established in 1972 (known from then until 2018 as the National Front) by Jean-Marie Le Pen. After RN MP Thierry Tesson expressed support for the initiative, citing it as a response to rising antisemitism across France and the importance of defending the principles and unity of the Republic, Amard castigated the RN for “double-talk” on antisemitism. He warned that antisemitism was still rife within the RN and the legacy of the Dreyfusards was not the RN’s.[7]

That a nineteenth-century judicial scandal still commands the energy of the Fifth Republic reveals much. The Dreyfus Affair, more than any other episode in modern French history, functions as a drama through which France tests its ideals of justice, equality, and citizenship, and the distance between those ideals and reality. The Affair serves as a mirror and moral barometer, re-examined and re-engaged with at times when France doubts its self-image and identity.

The Affair endures and does so, as historian and literary scholar Maurice Samuels observed in an interview with the Report, because it dramatizes a key moment “in the guerre franco-française [the Franco-French war], a kind of internal war between the left and the right that started during the French Revolution.”[8] On one side, a universalist France, open and civic, rooted in the Enlightenment and the Revolution’s promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité; on the other, a blood-and-soil France, Catholic, ethnically and culturally exclusive.

“That’s a battle that continues to play out,” Samuels explained, “and the Dreyfus Affair was the key moment in that battle, because it came at a time when the so-called ‘Jewish question’ – rising with the arrival of Jews in large numbers from Western Europe and [the intensification of the debate] about who belongs in France – came to the fore.”[9]

***

In October 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy. The evidence was tenuous: a single, clumsily forged memorandum, the bordereau, wrongly attributed to Dreyfus. In December that year, following a secret military trial steeped in antisemitic prejudice, Dreyfus was convicted of treason unanimously in a court-martial, stripped of his rank in a humiliating ceremony at the École Militaire, where he was degraded with chants of “Death to Judas, death to the Jew,” and exiled to Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana, to serve a life sentence.[10]

His guilt was less a matter of proof than of societal bias. In fin-de-siècle France, to be Jewish was enough to provoke suspicion, and “many French people leapt to the twin conclusions that a traitor in the army must be a Jew and that a Jew in the army must be a traitor.”[11] Such a conclusion challenged a fundamental core of Republican universalism, which held that one’s identity and origin should have no bearing on determining one’s citizenship.[12]

The Affair might have ended there, had the real culprit, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, not been exposed in 1896 by Colonel Georges Picquart, an intelligence officer. When the army attempted to suppress Picquart’s discovery, a small group of intellectuals and politicians transformed the affair into a moral crusade and national drama, dividing France not only over one man’s guilt, but over the soul of the Republic itself.

At the forefront of the public debate was French novelist, playwright, and journalist Émile Zola, whose open letter “J’Accuse…!” in the liberal and socialist Parisian newspaper L’Aurore in January 1898 publicly condemned the army and the state as being complicit in framing Dreyfus and attempting to silence debate.[13] Zola himself would be charged and convicted of libel. He was forced to flee into exile in England to avoid imprisonment.[14]

France became bitterly divided. The Republic split into Dreyfusards, an alliance of republicans, radicals, Jews, Protestants, and secular intellectuals, and anti-Dreyfusards, including monarchists, Catholics, nationalists, and antisemites, who claimed to defend the army and the nation from “cosmopolitan corruption.” The Dreyfusards believed they were defending the ideals of truth, equality, and justice, upholding the universalist values of the Republic; the anti-Dreyfusards viewed claims of Dreyfus’ wrongful conviction as an assault on the army, on the state, and on tradition.

In September 1899, Dreyfus returned from Devil’s Island and was brought to trial again in Rennes. Despite growing awareness of Esterhazy’s probable guilt, the military court once more convicted Dreyfus, sentencing him to ten years in prison, albeit with “mitigating circumstances.” Abroad, protests broke out, including in London, New York, and Berlin. Yet inside France, the mobilization was principally urban, intellectual, journalistic, confined to large cities like Paris.[15] The government’s response to Dreyfus’ new guilty verdict was politically astute, if morally ambiguous, as it attempted to restore public order. President Émile Loubet intervened and granted Dreyfus a presidential pardon, but did not overturn the guilty verdict.[16]

The most dramatic turning point came in 1906, after further investigations and pressure, when the Court of Cassation annulled the Rennes verdict without remand, declaring that Dreyfus’ condemnation had been “by error and in an unjust manner.” Parliament then promoted Picquart to brigadier general and reinstated Dreyfus to the army with promotion to chef d’escadron (major) and awarded him the Legion of Honor in the very courtyard of the École Militaire where he was stripped of his rank and subjected to the antisemitic taunts of “Death to the Jews.”[17]

But the restoration was incomplete. Although declared innocent, Dreyfus never rose above the rank of lieutenant-colonel as he deserved for his service during the First World War, ultimately dying in relative obscurity on July 11, 1935.

The court’s eventual reversal in 1906 closed the judicial case but did not provide real justice. Moreover, its cultural and political significance was never resolved. The Affair became a template for French political and moral discourse throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “a proxy for the question of what kind of nation France is,” as described by Maurice Samuels.[18] It has been a trauma perpetually revived, each time reinterpreted through the anxieties of the age and serving as a mirror through which France can scrutinize and self-reflect.

Despite Dreyfus’ vindication, the forces that had condemned him reemerged. The French author and politician Charles Maurras (1868-1952), the ideologue of the monarchist and nationalist political movement Action Françaiseand virulent critic of Dreyfus, framed the Affair as the triumph of anti-France forces, presenting Dreyfus’ exoneration as an anti-Catholic, anti-militarist, and anti-patriotic national defeat.[19] This Maurrassian narrative appeared during the Second World War under the Vichy regime, which repurposed anti-Dreyfusard rhetoric to justify collaboration and persecution, portraying such rhetoric as a moral correction of the Republic’s supposed failures.[20] Under Vichy, mention of Dreyfus was expunged from French textbooks and antisemitic material was disseminated. Still, anti-Dreyfusard rhetoric was not central to the Vichy regime’s propaganda.[21]

When Maurras was arrested and convicted for conspiring with the enemy after the fall of the Vichy regime, he declared his life sentence was “Dreyfus’ revenge!”[22]

After the Second World War, the Dreyfus Affair largely faded from public discourse and was muted. Under Charles de Gaulle, stories of internal division and institutional failure contradicted the national narrative of heroism and moral clarity. Priority lay in national reconstruction, colonial struggles, and the broad narrative of Resistance and Liberation. The Dreyfus Affair, too divisive, too tied to the fissures of secularism, the army, antisemitism, and Jewish identity, was ill-suited for constructing such a national story. Dreyfusard interpretations of history were dominant, but consensus regarding his innocence and the miscarriage of justice still did not prevail, particularly on the right.

Into the 1970s and 1980s, Dreyfus remained a marginal presence. The naming of a school after Dreyfus in Rennes was refused. Films on the subject faced censorship or institutional roadblocks. Intellectual talk shows, a popular genre in France, avoided the Affair.[23] A proposal in the 1980s by French President François Mitterrand to erect a statue of Dreyfus at the École Militaire ignited a fierce controversy. Even Mitterrand’s Defense Ministry opposed the idea.[24]

***

The Affair’s return to prominence in the 1990s coincided with the surge of the French far right, which continued to circulate violently anti-Dreyfusard works, including at National Front gatherings where tracts denying Dreyfus’ innocence and accusing Jews of conspiring against France and the Church were openly distributed. These texts, drawing on long-standing antisemitic and conspiratorial traditions, presented the Affair not as a miscarriage of justice but as evidence of a Masonic and Jewish plot to undermine national and Catholic values.

The culmination of such rhetoric occurred in January 1994, when Sirpa Actualité, a French Army weekly magazine, published an article by Col. Paul Gaujac, a reservist serving as head of the army’s Historical Service. It cast doubt on Dreyfus’ innocence by suggesting it was simply “a thesis now generally accepted by historians.” Dismissive of Dreyfus’ wrongful conviction and ignoring the French army’s attempts to cover up the Affair, Gaujac considered the controversy to have been an assault by leftists and radicals on the army that led to the dismantling of French military intelligence and defunding the armed forces.[25]

The backlash was immediate and reignited public debate. The New York Times noted how strange it was “that French army historians should again cast doubt on [Dreyfus’] innocence in a study published to mark the centenary of his arrest.”[26] Le Monde pointed to numerous blunders of fact and misrepresentations in the article.[27] Jewish organizations, human rights groups, and historians denounced the article as an act of historical revisionism by what they described as elements within the military still unwilling to acknowledge the institutional antisemitism that had condemned Dreyfus a century earlier.[28]

The scandal was an embarrassment to the French military. The Defense Ministry disavowed the publication, and Defense Minister François Leotard fired Gaujac. Nevertheless, the damage was done, and the controversy revealed how unsettled the affair remained within France’s armed forces, and how close to the surface and present the bitter disagreement between the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards was in French society.

Gaujac’s dismissal was criticized by the National Front, one of whose members suggested it reflected “the misfortunes” of France.[29] The following year, as France prepared to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the episode forced the nation to reconsider whether it had ever truly reckoned with its past, paving the way for the moral reckoning that President Jacques Chirac would undertake.

When Chirac stood before the Vel d’Hiv memorial in July 1995, a mere two months after taking office, his words marked a decisive rupture with decades of official silence. For the first time, a French president acknowledged that the crimes of Vichy were committed “by the French, by the French state.”[30]

The phrase shattered the Gaullist myth that had neatly separated the Republic from the collaborationist regime that rounded up ten thousand Jews on July 16-17, 1942, in Paris and sent them to their deaths. “France, land of Enlightenment and Human Rights, land of hospitality and asylum,” Chirac said, “France, on that day, committed an irreparable act.”[31] He invited the nation to look backward without illusion on its complicity in the Holocaust, and, by implication, to reexamine the Affair that had once exposed the Republic’s deepest contradictions. Dreyfus returned to public discourse not as distant history but as a living moral template, a warning of how easily institutions could betray justice when animated by fear and prejudice.

Three years later, in January 1998, on the occasion of the centenary of Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse,” Chirac sealed Dreyfus’ return to the civic canon. He denounced the trials prosecuting Dreyfus as “charades” and the Affair as “a dark stain, unworthy of our country and our history, a colossal miscarriage of justice and shameful compromise of state.”[32] Chirac made clear that Zola was a hero for standing up for Dreyfus, whose only crime was being Jewish. He said Dreyfus and Zola should be recognized for giving full meaning to the values of liberty, dignity, and justice, and for demonstrating “love of the fatherland against intolerance and hatred.”[33]

Chirac’s words encapsulated the transformation of a national trauma into a moral asset. Only by confronting its failures, Chirac suggested, could France affirm its faith in Republican values, the same faith Dreyfus and Zola had demonstrated through their deep love of the country. Liberté, égalité, fraternité were now tied to the exoneration of Dreyfus; the Affair became the Republic’s moral turning point and its permanent test, a story of betrayal and injustice redeemed by the courage of men who embraced the values of the nation and the Republic.

In July 2006, on the centenary of Dreyfus’s rehabilitation, Chirac returned to the École Militaire, the same courtyard where Dreyfus’ sword had been broken and he had been publicly shamed, to honor him in a national ceremony.[34] In his remarks at the ceremony, Chirac reinforced the legacy of those who “refused the conspiracy of injustice and fought the battle of honor and truth in the face of adversity,” and thanks to whom the plot against Dreyfus was exposed. [35] He emphasized that the French Republic emerged from the low point of the Affair stronger than before, as it served “as the crucible through which the humanist values of respect and tolerance were finally developed.”[36]

For Chirac, Dreyfus’ rehabilitation should be remembered as a national victory. It represents the unity of the Republic, the rejection of racism and antisemitism, the defense of human rights, and the primacy of justice. France, he asserted, must not take this heritage for granted and remain vigilant in the fight against injustice, intolerance, and hatred, which is never definitively won.[37]

Chirac’s appeal to unity came amid renewed social tensions. During his presidency, debates over immigration, headscarves, and the place of religion in public life were already fracturing the supposed harmony of the Republic. Nicolas Sarkozy, who entered the Élysée in 2007, inherited Chirac’s moral script on the Affair but with a nuance. He considered it an argument in defense of a robust, secular Republic and against what he portrayed as the encroachment of religious extremism.

In doing so, he echoed arguments that surfaced in the public debate that led to the strict separation of state and religion in 1905. At the time, Samuels argued, “laïcité became a way to punish the Catholic Church for its role in the Affair, for fomenting right-wing nationalism and opposing Dreyfus. The [original] meaning of secularism was that the three major religions in France, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, should be treated equally. [Following the Dreyfus Affair], the meaning was expanded and secularism meant that the public sphere should be free of religion and that French Republican universalism demands the suppression of minority difference.”[38]

François Hollande, in his turn, returned to Chirac’s path. In 2012, marking the 70th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jews, Hollande echoed his predecessor’s first official admission of French culpability in the Holocaust under the Vichy regime, declaring: “The truth is that the crime was committed in France, by France.”[39] Though not explicitly mentioning Dreyfus, Hollande invoked the Affair at different times throughout his presidency, highlighting, like Chirac did, Zola and other citizens who had the courage to stand for truth and justice.

One such citizen was Jean Jaurès, a French socialist leader and member of parliament at the time of the Affair, who was one of Dreyfus’ most outspoken supporters. Hollande praised Jaurès’ commitment to justice, a core Republican value, which led him “to defend Dreyfus in the face of indifference and sometimes even hostility.”[40]

In 2016, Hollande inaugurated the Maison Zola in Médan, west of Paris, turning Zola’s home into a place of remembrance and tribute to the author’s life work and his courage in defending Dreyfus. The renovation of the house was a decade-long labor of love by the industrialist Pierre Bergé, and the first part of a larger project to establish a museum dedicated to Dreyfus as well on the property.[41]

Hollande described Dreyfus as “a patriotic soldier, victim of pure injustice […] of antisemitism, of the worst humiliation.”[42] Zola’s lesson, according to Hollande, is that everyone has a choice in a moment of adversity, that there is always a ray of hope in the darkest night, and that one voice can change the destiny of history by standing up for justice and sharing the same convictions that Zola and Dreyfus shared.[43]

***

Between 2020 and 2025, President Emmanuel Macron’s invocation of Dreyfus evolved from memorial ritual to republican catechism. More so than his predecessors, Macron made the Affair a reference for civic moral instruction on Republican values and the fight against antisemitism, one cited often.

When in October 2021 Macron inaugurated Maison Dreyfus at Médan beside Zola’s restored home, he declared that doing so was to “right an injustice.” Almost 500 artifacts fill the museum’s rooms: photographs, court documents, personal objects, and press articles, connected to the Affair.

According to museum director Louis Gautier, the exhibition aims mostly at hosting schoolchildren and informing them of the issues of “antisemitism, racism, justice, the role of media and social networks, and the place of intellectuals in democracy.”[44] The museum attracted tens of thousands of visitors already in its first year, proof that history, when properly staged, could still command moral attention.

For Macron, the symbolism of establishing the first museum dedicated to Dreyfus at Zola’s house was “to say that the Republic only holds together through the struggles of women and men. Never a given, always to be reconquered.”[45] Commemorating the Affair through Zola and Dreyfus, thus, was a lesson to teach the Republic to look at itself and remember that it only endures through struggle; it is not to be taken for granted.

When asked if he would posthumously appoint Dreyfus to the rank of general, Macron deferred, arguing that such a “repair” needed to be made by the French military, not the president. His reasoning – to avoid trouble and controversy and not to set a precedent of presidential intervention in promoting or demoting military officers.[46]

Yet controversy was anyhow unavoidable, as always when it comes to the Dreyfus Affair. For France’s far right, the Affair has remained a moral battlefield rather than a closed case. This was demonstrated in 2020, when far right polemicist Éric Zemmour, a Jew educated in private Jewish schools, claimed on national television that Dreyfus’ innocence was not so clear, calling the affair “murky” and suggesting it would never be possible to know whether the allegations against him were false.[47]

Zemmour’s revisionist comments were a deliberate provocation, designed not to reopen the judicial question but to reopen a cultural one. His France was a besieged republic, victimized by liberal elites and moral censors who were weakening the Republic and undermining its identity and pride as Dreyfus and the Affair had done.

His statement that “the innocence of Dreyfus is not obvious” functioned, moreover, as a coded appeal to those who felt dispossessed by the multicultural republic, particularly on the far right. “It was a dog whistle,” Samuels remarked, “a way of saying, I’m with you; I think this is a white Christian nation – even though he himself is Jewish.”[48]

Such words about Dreyfus remain appealing among the far right and ultranationalists in France, but French politicians and intellectuals are concerned that once relegated battles over identity and history may resurface more intensely and legitimize hate and exclusionary policies contrary to the values of the French Republic.[49]

During 2025, the concerns grew stronger. France was thrown into a period of political crisis following the snap legislative elections of the summer of 2024, announced by Macron in response to the success of National Rally in the European Parliament elections. The national elections resulted in an impasse of three major blocs: a left-wing New Popular Front alliance, Macron’s centrist alliance Ensemble, and the far right National Rally. Difficulties in building coalitions abounded, and by October 2025, three governments had collapsed, shaking France’s social, political, and economic stability.[50]

At the same time, antisemitic incidents once again became an imposing, widespread phenomenon in French life, in particular in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack. In 2024, the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ) recorded 1,570 antisemitic incidents across France, compared to 1,676 in 2023, 436 in 2022, and 589 in 2021.[51]

Macron and the French government unequivocally and forcefully condemned Hamas’ October 7 attacks and affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself. However, the massive number of civilian Palestinian casualties and growing concerns within French society about Israel’s handling of the war prompted Macron to recalibrate his policy, maintaining a balance between France’s moral rhetoric, strategic calculations, and domestic political pressures.

The French government, while declaring Israel’s fight just, called for humanitarian pauses in fighting, reaffirmed its support for a two-state solution, and urged Israel to act responsibly. That was still not enough for some on the French left.

It is within this context – one of instability, uncertainty, and frustration over domestic and international issues – that the acts regarding Dreyfus were undertaken in the summer of 2025. While it is, to use Samuels’ words, “complicated to tease out Macron’s motivations and not possible to know for certain” why he declared a national day for Dreyfus and why his party ultimately advanced Dreyfus’ rank promotion in parliament, it has nevertheless been suggested he did so as a way to counterbalance France’s recognition of Palestinian statehood through a gesture to the Jewish community.[52]

No definitive evidence points to this being the motivation, nor does such motivation contradict the clear message Macron sought to convey by marking the date upon which “the spirit of the Enlightenment, the principles of 1789, and the republican promise finally triumphed.”[53] One way or another, the message the President sent was clear. In the guerre franco-française, the victory of the universalist France, open and civic, rooted in the Enlightenment and the Revolution’s promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité, must be defended and prevail.

***

The legacy of the Dreyfus Affair was very much present in Paris this summer, with the exhibition Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et Justice, which ran from March to August 2025 at Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (MAHJ). The exhibition returned not just to a historic scandal, but also to the uneasy moral conscience of the French Republic itself.

Curated by Isabelle Cahn and Philippe Oriol, the exhibition placed Dreyfus, the man, the soldier, back at the center of his own ordeal. Letters written from Devil’s Island, fragments of the uniform torn from his shoulders, and the haunting precision of his prison notebooks were shown beside paintings by Pissarro, Vallotton, and Carrière, artists whose works once mirrored the fractures of a nation.[54]

The museum’s intent, as director Paul Salmona explained, was not remembrance for its own sake but a confrontation with the present, a reminder that the mechanisms of injustice are never entirely past. The objective of the museum was to continue to raise awareness and train a new generation of students in the values of citizenship, truth, justice, and secularism.[55]

The exhibition’s design moved deliberately from the intimate to the public, tracing Dreyfus’ journey from his Alsatian childhood through the frenzy of accusation and the slow, bureaucratic violence of exile. The small desk where Dreyfus wrote to his wife Lucie, the stark isolation of his cell, and the riotous front pages of La Libre Parole were staged. In one of the rooms stood Tim’s Hommage au capitaine Dreyfus, a monumental resin cast of the 1988 bronze statue depicting the officer upright, sword broken, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon.[56] It was an image of steadfastness rather than martyrdom, suggesting that Dreyfus’ greatest act of defiance was his endurance. “I want the light,” he wrote from his prison, a phrase that now reads less like a plea than a civic principle.

On the last day of the exhibition, tickets sold out. “Why the great demand? Do we have anything there that has not been seen before?” one of the guards was asked. He shrugged his shoulders. “Not really. But this is Dreyfus, and it is always a big deal here in France.”

Policy Recommendations

  1. Context of Remembrance. Whatever the motivations were, France and its President should be congratulated on establishing an annual national day that commemorates the Dreyfus Affair. When the commemoration is put into practice, it is essential for the following to be recognized: there are many lessons to be learned from the Affair, and all are valid and important. Yet its teaching must never lose sight of the root cause of the ordeal: the rise of modern antisemitism, which the Affair manifested, and whose ultimate tragedy it anticipated.
  2. Journalists and Democracy. In a world where freedom of the press is increasingly threatened and the distinction between facts and fiction is more pervasive, education about the Affair must serve, across the world rather than only in France, also to highlight the essentiality of independent, fearless, and fact-based press.
  3. Experiential Learning. Building on the Maison Dreyfus and the MAHJ exhibition, France should increase funding for immersive, curriculum-integrated educational programs that use museums, archives, and digital tools to teach students about the Dreyfus Affair as a case study in justice, prejudice, and Republican values.
  • Dr. Carl Yonker, Project Manager and Senior Researcher at the Center

[1] Le Monde with AFP, “Macron Declares July 12 Annual Dreyfus Commemoration Day,” Le Monde, July 12, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/07/12/macron-declares-july-12-annual-dreyfus-commemoration-day_6743305_5.html.

[2] Emmanuel Macron, “A Day of National Commemoration for Alfred Dreyfus, for the Victory of Justice and Truth against Hatred and Antisemitism [French],” elysee.fr, July 12, 2025, https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2025/07/12/une-ceremonie-de-commemoration-pour-alfred-dreyfus-pour-la-victoire-de-la-justice-et-de-la-verite-contre-la-haine-et-lantisemitisme.

[3] Le Monde with AFP, “Captain Alfred Dreyfus Receives Posthumous Promotion 130 Years after Scandal,” Le Monde, November 18, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/11/18/captain-alfred-dreyfus-receives-posthumous-promotion-130-years-after-scandal_6747575_5.html.

[4] Le Monde with AFP, “French Lawmakers Unanimously Back Posthumous Promotion for Captain Alfred Dreyfus,” Le Monde, June 2, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/06/02/french-assemblee-unanimously-backs-posthumous-promotion-for-captain-alfred-dreyfus_6741933_5.html.

[5] Robin Richardot, “A Symbolic and Highly Politicized Return of the Dreyfus Affair to Parliament [French],” Le Monde, June 2, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2025/06/02/un-symbolique-et-tres-politique-retour-de-l-affaire-dreyfus-au-parlement_6610135_823448.html.

[6] La Nouvelle République with AFP, “Why Does the National Assembly Want to Elevate Alfred Dreyfus to the Rank of Brigadier General? [French],” La Nouvelle République, June 2, 2025, https://www.lanouvellerepublique.fr/a-la-une/pourquoi-l-assemblee-nationale-veut-elle-elever-alfred-dreyfus-au-rang-de-general-de-brigade-1748871498.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Interview by the author, October 11, 2025.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), p. 1.

[11] Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 95.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Émile Zola, “I Accuse… – A Letter to the President of the Republic [French],” L’Aurore, January 13, 1898, p. 1, https://web.nli.org.il/sites/nli/english/digitallibrary/pages/viewer.aspx?docid=EDU_XML_ENG003560244&presentorid=EDU_XML_ENG.

[14] Harris, Dreyfus, pp. 2-3.

[15] Marc Knobel, “The Dreyfus Affair: Fractures, Memory and Contemporary Issues [French],” La Régle du Jeu, June 2, 2025, https://laregledujeu.org/2025/06/02/43324/laffaire-dreyfus-fractures-memoire-et-enjeux-contemporains-dune-crise-fondatrice/.

[16] Harris, Dreyfus, pp. 3-4.

[17] Knobel, “The Dreyfus Affair.”

[18] Interview by the author, October 11, 2025.

[19] Knobel, “The Dreyfus Affair,” and Maurice Samuels, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), pp. 160-161.

[20] Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 6-7.

[21] Knobel, “The Dreyfus Affair.”

[22] Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, p. 81.

[23] Scott Kraft, “Europe: A Century-Old Scandal Haunts Frances Army,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-18-mn-24478-story.html.

[24] Ibid., and Knobel, “The Dreyfus Affair.”

[25] Alan Riding, “100 Years Later, Dreyfus Affair Still Festers,” The New York Times, February 9, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/09/world/100-years-later-dreyfus-affair-still-festers.html/, and Alan Riding, “Feb. 6-12: The Dreyfus Affair, Cont’d.’; A French Officer Is Accused of Betraying History,” The New York Times, February 13, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/13/weekinreview/feb-6-12-dreyfus-affair-cont-d-french-officer-accused-betraying-history.html/.

[26] Riding, “100 Years Later.”

[27] Le Monde, “The New Dreyfus ‘Affair’: The Errors of the Army’s Historical Service [French],” Le Monde, February 17, 1994, https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1994/02/17/la-nouvelle-affaire-dreyfus-les-erreurs-du-service-historique-de-l-armee_3794596_1819218.html.

[28] Scott Kraft, “Europe: A Century-Old Scandal Haunts France’s Army,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-18-mn-24478-story.html/.

[29] Riding, “100 Years Later.”

[30] Marlise Simons, “Chirac Affirms France’s Guilt in Fate of Jews,” The New York Times, July 17, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/17/world/chirac-affirms-france-s-guilt-in-fate-of-jews.html.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Jacques Chirac, “Letter from Mr. Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic, Addressed to the Family of Captain Dreyfus and that of Émile Zola, Paris, January 8, 1998 [French],” elysee.fr, January 8, 1998, https://www.elysee.fr/jacques-chirac/1998/01/08/lettre-de-m-jacques-chirac-president-de-la-republique-adressee-a-la-famille-du-capitaine-dreyfus-et-a-celle-demile-zola-paris-le-8-janvier-1998.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Béatrice Gurrey, “The Republic Pays Tribute to Alfred Dreyfus [French],” Le Monde, July 12, 2006, https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2006/07/12/la-republique-rend-hommage-au-capitaine-dreyfus_794629_3224.html.

[35] Jacques Chirac, “Statement by Mr. Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic, on the Dreyfus Affair and the Defense of the Values of the Republic in Paris, July 12, 2006 [French],” vie-publique.fr, July 12, 2006, https://www.vie-publique.fr/discours/162627-declaration-de-m-jacques-chirac-president-de-la-republique-sur-laffa/.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., and Gurrey, “The Republic Pays Tribute to Alfred Dreyfus.”

[38] Interview by the author, October 11, 2025.

[39] Scott Sayare, “France Reflects on Its Role in Wartime Fate of Jews,” The New York Times, July 28, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/world/europe/france-reflects-on-role-in-rounding-up-jews-for-death-camps.html.

[40] François Hollande, “Statement by Mr. François Hollande, President of the Republic, on Jean Jaurès and the Government’s Policy in Carmaux, April 23, 2014 [French],” https://www.elysee.fr/francois-hollande/2014/04/23/declaration-de-m-francois-hollande-president-de-la-republique-sur-jean-jaures-et-sur-la-politique-du-gouvernement-a-carmaux-le-23-avril-2014.

[41] “2011: Maison Zola – Maison Dreyfus [French],” museeyslparis.com, nd, https://museeyslparis.com/en/biography/maison-zola-maison-dreyfus.

[42] François Hollande, “Statement by Mr. François Hollande, President of the Republic, in Tribute to the French Writer Émile Zola, in Médan, October 2, 2016 [French],” elysee.fr, October 2, 2016, https://www.elysee.fr/francois-hollande/2016/10/02/declaration-de-m-francois-hollande-president-de-la-republique-en-hommage-a-lecrivain-francais-emile-zola-a-medan-le-2-octobre-2016.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Cnaan Liphshiz, “France Opens World’s First Museum Dedicated to Dreyfus Affair,” Times of Israel, October 27, 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/france-opens-worlds-first-museum-dedicated-to-dreyfus-affair/, and Ouest-France with AFP, “Emmanuel Macron Will Inaugurate the Dreyfus Museum in the Maison Zola in Médan on Tuesday [French],” Ouest-France, October 25, 2021, https://www.ouest-france.fr/politique/emmanuel-macron/emmanuel-macron-va-inaugurer-le-musee-dreyfus-dans-la-maison-zola-a-medan-mardi-f41741dc-357b-11ec-89a8-4dd33f25dc35.

[45] Emmanuel Macron, “Inauguration of the Dreyfus Museum by President Emmanuel Macron [French],” elysee.fr, October 26, 2021, https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2021/10/26/inauguration-du-musee-dreyfus-par-le-president-emmanuel-macron.

[46] Le Monde with AFP, “According to Emmanuel Macron, It Is Up to the Military Institution to Appoint Captain Dreyfus General Posthumously [French],” Le Monde, October 27, 2021, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2021/10/27/selon-emmanuel-macron-c-est-a-l-institution-militaire-de-nommer-le-capitaine-dreyfus-general-a-titre-posthume_6100000_823448.html.

[47] Jon Henley, “Rise of Far Right Puts Dreyfus Affair into Spotlight in French Election Race,” The Guardian, October 30, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/oct/30/rise-of-far-right-puts-dreyfus-affair-into-spotlight-in-french-election-race.

[48] Interview by the author, October 11, 2025.

[49] Saphora Smith, “From Museums to TV, Far Right Gives Dreyfus Affair New Meaning in France,” NBC News, December 25, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/dreyfus-affair-france-far-right-zemmour-macron-antisemitism-rcna8869.

[50] Riya Misra, “The French Political Crisis That Keeps Getting Worse,” Politico, October 8, 2025, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2025/10/08/the-french-political-crisis-that-keeps-getting-worse-00599112.

[51] “Data: Antisemitic Incidents Worldwide 2023,” Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2023 (Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Justice and Human Rights, Tel Aviv University, April 2025), p. 18, https://cst.tau.ac.il/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/AntisemitismWorldwide_2023.pdf; Uriya Shavit and Carl Yonker, “Voices from the Field: Neither Here. Nor There – Is There Any Place Where French Jews Can Still Feel Safe?,” Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2023 (Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Justice and Human Rights, Tel Aviv University, April 2025), pp. 27-32, https://cst.tau.ac.il/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/AntisemitismWorldwide_2023.pdf; and “Data: Antisemitic Incidents Worldwide 2024,” Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2024 (Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Justice and Human Rights, Tel Aviv University, April 2025), p. 16, https://cst.tau.ac.il/antisemitism-worldwide-report-for-2024/.

[52] Interview by the author, October 11, 2025.

[53] Macron, “A National Day of Commemoration.”

[54] Dossier de presse, Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et justice, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, 2025, pp. 4–6.

[55] Paul Salmona, Dossier de presse, Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et justice, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, 2025, pp. 22-23.

[56] Dossier pédagogique, Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et justice, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, 2025, p. 17.