1-157-110 - Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images

Alfred Dreyfus, French army officer of Jewish extraction, 1899. A French army officer of Jewish extraction, Dreyfus (c1859-1935) was wrongly accused of handing secret documents to a German agent. He was court-martialled and disgraced, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island as a traitor. Although the legal proceedings were irregular, the verdict was widely approved of in French society and the press, where anti-Semitism was rife. The case, which became known as 'l'Affaire Dreyfus' continued to divide France, with the author Emile Zola writing a famous open letter accusing the army of a cover-up. A retrial, at Rennes in 1899, again found Dreyfus guilty, although the sentence was reduced to 10 years. Eventually, in 1906, Dreyfus received a full pardon from the President of France, and he went on to serve with distinction in the French army in the First World War. From Vanity Fair. (London, 7 September 1899).