Dreyfus

Dreyfus, ALFRED, born in 1854 at Müllhausen in Alsace, the son of a rich Jewish manufacturer, migrated in 1874 to Paris. He was an artillery captain, attached to the General Army Staff, when in 1893-94, for delivering to a foreign government documents connected with the national defence, he was court-martialled, degraded, and transported to the Cayenne Île du Diable. The efforts of his wife and friends to prove him an innocent victim of malice, injustice, and forgery plunged France into a chaos of militarism and anti-Semitism. He was brought back to France in 1899, retired at Rennes, reconvicted 9th September, sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, but immediately pardoned. See works by Conybeare (1899) and G. W. Steevens (1899); and the article ZOLA.