Alfred Dreyfus exhibited in Paris

How many times has he looked at her, this photograph of Pierre and Jeanne, his young children, that he had the right to receive in the prison? Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), imprisoned on the island of the Devil, in Guyana, from 1895 to 1899, undoubtedly drawn from this contemplation the energy of not sinking into madness. “I gave in to the authorities of my dear wife, I had the courage to live,” he confides to his newspaper. Throughout the exhibition of the Museum of Art and History of Judaism, in Paris, is thus, through objects and personal documents, the right and solid personality of the man behind “the affair”. This Dreyfus affair, “a real state crime” as well as qualified by Philippe Oriol, co-commissioner of the exhibition, who divided France from the Belle Époque.

If Dreyfus has never stopped claiming his innocence of the accusations of high betrayal, he was often seen as a loot victim. It is true that at his second trial, in Rennes, in 1899, the captain refused to move the jury by the evocation of his sufferings on the island of the Devil. Born into a family of Jewish industrialists in Mulhouse, he received “this bourgeois education who wants us to be forward, explains the commissioner. Polytechnician, Alfred believes more in reason than in emotion. This is in essence what he had explained to Lucie, then his fiancée, to justify her lack of demonstration of love! Under this modesty, also hides his love of the fatherland “inherited from a family which chose, in 1871, to leave Alsace to remain French, abandoning part of his property to the Germans”, underlines the historian. His commitment to the army goes in the same direction and is worth the brilliant young man to become an intern at the staff … and only Jewish officer.

“My name is sali”

The captain humiliated by his degradation on January 5, 1895, will seek without truce to restore his honor: “My name is sali”, he wrote, then in despair. Throughout his notebooks, Alfred Dreyfus lets his disappointment with the great military leaders but continues to believe in the army. “He is concerned about the actions of the French Action and rectifies the errors of the commentators of the case,” notes Philippe Oriol who published his complete works. If his conviction was very rapid, based on false documents and heavy prejudices against the Jews, his complete rehabilitation will require years. First pardoned by a second conviction to Rennes, he was amnestyed in 1900. In 1906 finally, the reindeer judgment was broken and the captain reinstated in the army … But he was refused the five years of seniority linked to his imprisonment! In 1907, seeing his career blocked, he retired … to re -engage himself in 1914, during the First World War: the love of France and the Republic, the sense of duty were, at home, stronger than anything.