Alfred Dreyfus

Born in Mulhouse in 1859, Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer from an Alsatian Jewish family. In 1894 he was wrongly convicted of treason in a case driven by forged evidence and intense antisemitism, then sent to the brutal prison colony on Devil’s Island.

The campaign to prove his innocence became one of the most famous political scandals in modern French history. Writers, journalists, and public figures rallied to his cause, and after years of public struggle his conviction was overturned; he was restored to the army in 1906.

Dreyfus later served again during World War I and lived until 1935. Though he was not primarily known as a literary figure, books about his ordeal — including his own writings from imprisonment and the many works inspired by the affair — remain central to understanding justice, state power, and prejudice in modern Europe.