France posthumously promotes Jewish officer Dreyfus to brigadier general, 130 years after wrongful treason conviction

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French soldier who was wrongfully convicted of treason in 1894, has been posthumously promoted to the rank of brigadier general 130 years after the infamous case of antisemitic injustice. President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu jointly signed the promotion into law on Monday. "The French nation posthumously promotes Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general," the new legislation states. 

Dreyfus, who was a French patriot, was singled out for his Jewish background and falsely accused of spying for Germany. 

Yaël Perl-Ruiz, the great-granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, welcomed the new legislation concerning her great-grandfather. 

“This is a historic moment. The long-awaited correction has come! My great-grandfather’s life and career were destroyed, and he bravely resisted the false charges against him. He never harbored a trace of hatred toward his accusers. He is a model of courage and loyalty," she said.

However, she admitted that it was painful that justice had only arrived long after the death of her great-grandfather. 

"It is painful that this correction comes only after his death and that he will never know of it. But amid the rise in antisemitism in France and around the world, it is heartening that this bill – initiated by [former French prime minister] Gabriel Attal – was adopted unanimously by the French National [Assembly],” she argued.

In May, the French Embassy in Israel announced that the French National Assembly’s Defense and Armed Forces Committee unanimously greenlighted the legislation to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus.

“The French nation is committed to justice and does not forget. To right a wrong. To honor a soldier. To affirm that antisemitism – whether of the past or the present – has no place and will never have a place in the Republic,” the French Embassy in Tel Aviv wrote in a post on 𝕏. 

Dr. Yoav Heller, a historian who leads the Fourth Quarter Movement, an Israeli social movement, compared the false charges against Dreyfus with the current false charges against the Jewish state of “genocide” and “starvation” in Gaza. 

“It took 131 years for the libel against Dreyfus to be erased! Now the question is, how long will it take the Western world to retract the blood libels it spread against Israel during the war – accusations of genocide, starvation and other lies. These charges are the product of rotten international institutions (the UN, the Hague court) and of deep-rooted antisemitism and anti-Zionism that are spreading like a virus across both the Muslim world and the West,” Heller assessed.

The antisemitic Dreyfus Affair and the trial against the French Jewish soldier ignited in the late 19th century the “Jewish question” concerning the future and place of the Jewish people in Europe and the wider world. 

The Dreyfus trial was covered at the time by Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jewish journalist who resided in Vienna. Herzl, who hailed from an assimilated Jewish family, admitted that he was deeply influenced by the antisemitic trial against the innocent Dreyfus.

The humiliating public degradation of Dreyfus eventually convinced Herzl to embrace Zionism and conclude that the solution to antisemitism was to establish a modern Jewish state in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.