Alfred Dreyfus statue to finally receive permanent home in central Paris | France

The statue of Captain Alfred Dreyfus has been moved all over Paris for 40 years and has never found a permanent home.

The French army twice refused to allow Dreyfus, a Jewish officer falsely accused of treason in 1894, to stop at l’École Militaire, where he was stripped of his rank in one of the most notorious acts of antisemitism in French history.

A location across from the city’s Palace of Justice was considered and rejected. For lack of a better location, the bronze statue, made in 1985, was placed in the Tuileries garden and later hidden along the River Seine, near the former site of the Cherche-Midi prison, where Dreyfus was imprisoned after his arrest.

Now, 120 years after the officer’s name was cleared and a year after he was posthumously promoted to the rank of brigadier general, his statue has been given what many believe is its rightful place in the center of Paris.

On July 12, a national Dreyfus commemoration day, French president Emmanuel Macron and Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire will unveil the 3.5-metre (12 ft) figure on Rue de Harlay in the Île de la Cité. The trial will eventually stop before the Cour de Appellate Court, France’s highest civil court, which exonerated Dreyfus on July 12, 1906.

“From now on, every July 12, there will be a commemoration for Dreyfus, celebrating the victory of justice and truth over hatred and antisemitism,” Macron wrote last year.

“Thus Alfred Dreyfus, and through him those who fought for freedom, equality and fraternity, will continue to be the example that should inspire our conduct.”

Ariel Weil, Mayor of Central Paris and a descendant of the Dreyfus family, was one of the main people pushing for the statue to have a prominent, permanent home. He said that the attitude of the state and the authorities so far has been: out of sight, out of mind.

“He’s been wandering around Paris for years,” Weil said. “The general idea was: We’ll put it in a corner of Paris where it won’t embarrass anyone and won’t be seen, and we can forget about it.

“It was a place that no one wanted, not historians, not the Dreyfus family, not artists.”

The Dreyfus affair is one of the most infamous political events in French history and nearly brought down the Third Republic. The army accused Dreyfus of passing military secrets to the Germans and convicted him of treason in a secret court-martial in 1894.

He then cashiered him in a humiliating public ceremony in which his sword was broken and the buttons and braid of his rank insignia were ripped from his uniform – dishonorably discharged and stripped of his military rank. He was transferred to life in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.

Three years later the French military discovered that most of the evidence against Dreyfus was fake and that the person who had passed the infamous “bordeau” note to the Germans was another officer. However, they kept the discovery secret.

After the incident came to light and Dreyfus was still not pardoned, novelist Émile Zola angrily published his open letter: I blame.

When the Supreme Court cleared Dreyfus, he was readmitted to the army and became a member of the Légion d’honneur. After serving behind the western fronts in the First World War, he retired and died in Paris in 1935, aged 75.

Fifty years later, the government of Socialist president François Mitterrand commissioned the statue by political cartoonist and Polish Jew Louis Mitelberg, known as Tim. Engraved on the plinth is the sentence “If you want me to live, help me regain my honour”, taken from a letter written by the prisoner Dreyfus to his wife Lucie.

The statue was planned to be placed in the courtyard of l’École Militaire. However, when military authorities vetoed this, Mitterrand did not insist. Several other proposed sites were rejected.

Weil said: “Mitterrand, as president, was in charge of the army, and if he had said, ‘He is going to the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire,’ he would have gone where he needed to go. But he did not.”

After six years in the Tuileries, the statue was moved in 1994 and removed to Place Pierre Lafue.

Resin copies of the work, one placed in the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and the other in Tel Aviv, became better known than the original. In 2002, vandals painted a Star of David and a “dirty Jew” image on the statue.

“The Dreyfus affair is one of the five most politically important events in the history of France,” Weil said. “As well as anti-Semitism, there was also the question of the influence of the army within the state and all the values ​​that the republic promised. A lot was at stake in the Dreyfus affair.

“The statue is placed in an incredibly powerful spot in the very center of Paris. It is perhaps fitting that the statue be placed not at the École Militaire, where Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of his rank, but outside the court that completely exonerated him. This corrects one final injustice.”