DREYFUS, ALFRED. - French officer, b. 9 Oct. 1859 at Mulhouse, d. 12 July 1935 at Paris. A staff captain in 1893, he was arrested on 15 Oct. of the following year, on suspicion of high treason.
On the basis of a letter, whose handwriting analysis presented characteristics not very divergent from D.'s writing, the officer, although he proclaimed his innocence, was condemned by a military tribunal to life imprisonment and interned on Devil's Island, in French Guiana. His wife and brother, convinced of the relative's innocence, having discovered the true culprit, turned for help to the vice-president of the Senate, Scheurer-Kestner, and to Leo XIII, but the Pontiff, not wishing to give French anticlericalism the pretext of exploiting his intervention for an anticlerical campaign, did not deem it opportune to provoke a revision of the trial through a diplomatic intervention. With France divided into two parties, those favoring a revision of the trial on the one hand, 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 good part of the Catholic press and of the politicians close to it, opposed to D., determined a lively resentment toward Catholicism and influenced not a little the anticlerical campaign then under way, which provoked, in 1905, the law on the separation of Church and State.
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Silvio Furlani