Alfred dreyfus wife and children9/2/2023 ![]() In spite of the Supreme Court’s declaration of Dreyfus’ innocence and his award of the Légion d’Honneur in 1906, the Affair cast a long shadow into the 1940s, when the anti-Dreyfusard Action Française was influential in France’s shameful treatment of Jews under the Vichy regime. Read cites anti-Semitism as a primary contributory factor towards Dreyfus’ arrest on 15 October 1894 and subsequent exiling on the notorious Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Graphologists analysed the bordereau to link it to Dreyfus, even without convincing evidence. This cause célèbre started with a scrap of a letter (or bordereau) containing French military details, found in a German embassy wastepaper-basket by a cleaning lady working for French Intelligence.īrilliant, rich and, importantly, Alsatian, Dreyfus had risen quickly through the army ranks but had attracted attention because of his Jewishness and introspectiveness. The subtitle of Read’s book is borne out by his detailed reconstruction of how officers and commanders deliberately ignored or, worse, fabricated evidence. This notorious case has undergone numerous academic and popular study, following the centenary of Alfred Dreyfus’ rehabilitation in 1906. It is a book that unquestionably resonates with us today.The Dreyfus Affair: The Story of the Most Infamous Miscarriage of Justice in French History “įive Years of My Life speaks to the fortitude, perseverance, and love of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, two innocent people snared in a web of evil. All too soon, I am awakened from my dream and brought back to reality by a child’s voice. Then I believe myself to be near you, I speak softly of hope. With a supreme effort I seek to reach out to you. ”There are moments when my heart is so swollen, when your sufferings re-echo in my soul with such force, so piercingly, that I can no longer control myself. Lucie writes back with passion and courage: (March 6, 1898). But my spirit soon revives, quivering with pain, with energy, with implacable desire for the most precious thing in this world, our honor, the honor of our children, the honor of us all.” “Truly,” he writes to Lucie, “were it a question of myself alone, long ago would I have gone to seek in the peace of the tomb forgetfulness of all that I have seen, all of that I have heard. ![]() ![]() Imprisoned in a walled-in hut in brutal heat, for months chained to his bed at night so that he could not turn over, watched 24-hours a day by guards who were forbidden to speak to him, denied books to read or any means of exercising, and only at several months lapse receiving any letters from his wife, (and those often just censored copies), his health rapidly deteriorated, but his determination to survive and prove his innocence remained strong. “I live only by feverish will from day to day,” Dreyfus wrote to Lucie on September 4, 1897. Their letters are one of the great love stories of all times. Excerpts from the letters that Alfred and Lucie wrote to each other, between Devil’s island and Paris, are included in Five Years. Alfred left behind in Paris his wife Lucie, who, forbidden to join her husband in exile, struggled to protect their two children from the rampant anti-Semitism that swirled about them, while she begged her husband to hold onto life as she tried to clear his name. ![]() ![]() His prison diary, published as Five Years of My Life in 1901 is a heroic tale of survival against daunting odds: isolation, deprivation, torture. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army was court martialed in 1894 on a trumped up charge of treason and condemned to life imprisonment on Devil’s island, a penal colony off French Guiana. ![]()
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