DREYFUS, ALFRED. — French officer, b. 9 Oct. 1859 at Mulhouse, d. 12 July 1935 at Paris. In 1893 he was a staff captain, and on 15 Oct. of the following year he was arrested on suspicion of high treason.
On the basis of a letter whose handwriting analysis presented characteristics not greatly different from D.’s own, the officer, although proclaiming his innocence, was sentenced by a military court to life imprisonment and confined on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. His wife and brother, convinced of his innocence, discovered the true culprit and sought the aid of the Vice-President of the Senate, Scheurer-Kestner, and of Leo XIII. The Pope, however, unwilling to give French anticlericalism the pretext to exploit his intervention for an anti-Catholic campaign, deemed it unwise to provoke a retrial through diplomatic means. With France divided into two camps—those favoring a retrial on one side and those convinced of D.’s treachery on the other—the struggle continued until a new trial in 1899 resulted in his pardon and his reinstatement in 1906 with the rank of major in the army. The stance of much of the Catholic press and of the politicians allied with it, which opposed D., aroused strong resentment against Catholicism and contributed significantly to the anticlerical campaign then underway, culminating in the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State.