French Assembly Votes To Posthumously Promote Jewish Officer to General

It is no longer Colonel Dreyfus. It's now General Dreyfus! In an attempt to cover up the government's rampant anti-semitism, the National Assembly has posthumously promoted Dreyfus to Brigadier General.

From The European Conservative

By Hélène de Lauzun, PhD

For some, praising a Jewish man who was falsely accused over 130 years ago is a good way to make one’s antisemitism forgotten.

The French National Assembly has just voted unanimously to promote Captain Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of general. In 1894, Dreyfus was the victim of an antisemitic conspiracy that became known as the Dreyfus Affair, which took place against the backdrop of Franco-German tensions leading up to the First World War. The eagerness of some MPs to vote for this public honour for a past event is intended to compensate for their antisemitism of today. 

The bill was proposed by former Macronist Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, currently leader of the presidential party’s MPs. 

On Monday, June 2nd, MPs voted unanimously to posthumously promote Captain Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general. 

Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of espionage in 1894. He was accused of delivering confidential documents to the German Empire based on  false accusations intended to cover up the real culprits. The affair, which went relatively unnoticed in its early stages, became a state scandal in 1898 when the writer Emile Zola entered the fray with a famous article denouncing the judicial scandal of Dreyfus’s conviction. 

France at the time was torn between the ‘Dreyfusards’—those who believed in Dreyfus’ innocence and defended individual rights and justice—and the ‘anti-Dreyfusards’—those who were convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt and defended the army, the nation, and the raison d’État. This battle left deep scars in French political life as, even today, the division between the Right and the Left is still, in some ways, a legacy of the tensions of more than a century ago. 

After being deported to a penal colony in Cayenne, Dreyfus was finally pardoned in 1899, and then retried and rehabilitated in 1906. At the time, following the verdict, Alfred Dreyfus himself asked for his career to be restored, but to no avail. He left the army in 1907, before serving again during the First World War. In 2006, on the centenary of his rehabilitation, a national tribute was paid to him, during which President Jacques Chirac acknowledged that “justice had not been fully done” and that he had not been able to “benefit from the reinstatement of his career to which he was entitled.”

Today, no one seriously disputes Dreyfus’ innocence. The law was therefore passed in a climate of general unanimity, although some voices were raised to question the relevance of such a gesture more than a century after the events. The centrist MPs of the MoDem (PM François Bayrou’s party) did not take part in the debate, expressing their fear in an open letter that the Dreyfus case was now being “exploited” by the Rassemblement National (RN) on the Right and La France Insoumise (LFI) on the Left, who would use it to “buy themselves a licence to be respectable.” 

The issue is worth raising. Indeed, while the RN has clearly taken a stand against antisemitism in all its recent public statements, this is not the case for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI party, whose positions, especially since the October 7th attacks by Hamas against Israel, have been condemned in the public arena on numerous occasions. The eagerness of far-left MPs to support Attal’s bill sounds like a need to clear their conscience in this tense context.