Alfred dreyfus wife and children trial#

Two years later of his conviction, in 1896, there was some evidence showing that the real culprit was indeed someone else. There, he had to live under inhumane conditions (isolation, bad diet, later he had to sleep shackled to his bed.) Throughout all of this, his wife Lucie kept corresponding with him through letters - although she was not permitted to write about the case itself -, and this communication helped Alfred get through, in hope to prove his innocence and to once again return to the arms of his wife and children. This context helps us to understand, among other key aspects, how the Jewish community stood on the society and how the Frenchmen held their Army really high in prestige.Īs a result of his wrongful conviction, Dreyfus was sentenced for life imprisonment and deported to the Devil’s Island, which is located off the coast of the French Guiana, in South America.

Alfred dreyfus wife and children trial#

Only he was innocent.īefore jumping into Dreyfus’s trial in 1894, the author rightly gives us a political and religious context of France some years before it all happened, going back to the French Revolution that took place from 1789 to 1799. The Dreyfus Affair, by Piers Paul Read, depicts the sad but unfortunately true story of French captain Alfred Dreyfus, Jewish descent and military involved in a trial and conviction for treason for having sold Army secrets to a member of the German Embassy in Paris. While reading his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, I grew interested on this political scandal who seemed to have divided France in two opposing sides - the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards - because, for being such an important part of French history, it was largely present throughout Proust’s story and characters. Marcel Proust introduced me to the Dreyfus Affair. It is a key to an understanding of later history the Holocaust and Zionism: the virulent anti-Semitism of the anti-Dreyfusards and the decision that the Jews must have a state of their own. But how did an innocent man come to be convicted? And why was he kept locked up for so long? The Dreyfus Affair uniquely combines a fast-moving mystery story with a snapshot of France at a moment of great social flux and cultural richness - the Belle Epoque, the Impressionists, novelists such as Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts, Proust. Not long afterwards Dreyfus was incarcerated on Devil's Island. Despite minimal evidence against him he was placed under arrest for the crime of high treason. On October 13, Captain Dreyfus was summoned by the General de Boisdeffre to the Ministry of War. Many of them came from the impoverished Catholic aristocracy and disliked Dreyfus because he was rich, bourgeois and, above all, a Jew. However, Dreyfus' rise in the army had not made him friends. Shy, reserved, sometimes awkward, but intelligent and ambitious, Dreyfus had everything he might have hoped for: a wife, two enchanting children, plenty of money and a post on the General Staff. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, then aged 35, was a high-flying career artillery officer. He told Schwarzkoppen that he was a French army officer serving on the General Staff that he was in desperate need of money and was therefore prepared to sell military secrets to the Germans. Colonel Maximillien von Schwarzkoppen received a visit from a seedy-looking middle-aged Frenchman who would not give his name.