DREYFUS, ALFRED. – French officer, born on 9 October 1859 in Mulhouse, died on 12 July 1935 in Parigi. A staff captain in 1893, he was arrested on 15 October of the following year on suspicion of high treason.
On the basis of a letter whose graphological examination revealed characteristics not greatly divergent from D.’s handwriting, the officer, although proclaiming his innocence, was sentenced by a military tribunal to life imprisonment and interned on Devil’s Island, in French Guiana. His wife and brother, convinced of their relative’s innocence and having discovered the real culprit, sought the help of the vice-president of the Senate, Scheurer-Kestner, and of Leone XIII; but the Pontiff, unwilling to give French anticlericalism the pretext to exploit his intervention for an anticlerical campaign, did not consider it advisable to bring about a revision of the trial through diplomatic intervention. With France divided into two parties—the supporters of a revision of the trial on one side, and those convinced of D.’s treason on the other—the struggle continued until, after a new trial was held in 1899, D. was pardoned and reinstated in 1906 with the rank of major in the army. The attitude of a large part of the Catholic press and of the politicians close to it, who opposed D., aroused strong resentment toward Catholicism and exerted considerable influence on the anticlerical campaign then under way, which in 1905 led to the law on the separation of Church and State.