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April 21, 2025
On the morning of Oct. 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a staff member of the French Army’s High Command, was at home with his wife and two young children when he was unexpectedly and summarily requested to report to the Ministry of War. Upon arriving, the unsuspecting Dreyfus was accused of treason.
The evidence? The notorious bordereau, a wrinkled leaf of paper revealing French military plans, found in a trash basket at the German embassy in Paris. The hand that wrote the bordereau, the investigating officers concluded, despite jarring discrepancies between the two styles, belonged to none other than Dreyfus.
Any doubts were dynamited by one absolute certainty: Dreyfus was the sole officer in High Command who happened to be Jewish.
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Locked in a cell where he battered his head against a wall in disbelief and despair, Dreyfus was quickly sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement. His destination was a bleak rock, aptly named Devil’s Island, part of the (ironically named) Salvation Islands off the coast of French Guyana. But first came a stunning son et lumière that fed the furies of nationalism and antisemitism.
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