The lower house of France’s Parliament on Monday voted to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus, amid a surge in antisemitic incidents in the country in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.
All 197 lawmakers present at the National Assembly supported the legislation, which was introduced by former prime minister Gabriel Attal of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party, AFP reported.
The Senate still needs to pass the bill to promote the Jewish army captain, whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 was widely seen as a symbol of antisemitism in Europe and a major catalyst for modern Zionism.
Dreyfus’s promotion to brigadier general would constitute an act of “reparation, a recognition of his merits, and a tribute to his commitment to the Republic,” AFP quoted Attal as saying. “The antisemitism that hit Alfred Dreyfus is not a thing of the past,” he added, urging France to uphold its “absolute commitment against all forms of discrimination.”
Dreyfus’s case is one of France’s most infamous miscarriages of justice. Accused of passing military secrets to Germany, he was convicted amid a wave of antisemitic fervor and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. His innocence was later championed by figures such as novelist Émile Zola, who famously wrote J’accuse, and by intelligence officer Georges Picquart, who exposed the real culprit.
Dreyfus was eventually exonerated in 1906 and reinstated as a major. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World Zionist Congress, covered Dreyfus’s trial as a journalist, and this is widely thought to have been a formative experience for Herzl.
Under Macron, France has imposed a weapons embargo against Israel and has warned that it might work to end the E.U.-Israel Association Agreement, which regulates trade and other aspects of bilateral relations between the Jewish state and the bloc.
Macron has accused Israel of “barbarism” in its attacks on Hamas in Gaza. He is also advancing an international conference on Palestinian statehood in Saudi Arabia this month, in which some analysts predict France will recognize a Palestinian state.
Israel’s foreign ministry has accused Macron of pursuing a “crusade against Israel,” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday suggested Macron’s stance was encouraging antisemitic attacks.
A recent spate of attacks on Jewish sites in Paris were “a direct result of the rampant incitement against Jews in France,” wrote Netanyahu. Macron “should stop pushing for a Palestinian terror state in the heart of the Jewish homeland and start acting against antisemitism in his own country,” added Netanyahu.
In 2024, the Service for the Protection of the Jewish Community in France (SPCJ) recorded 1,570 antisemitic acts in the country, a 6.3% decrease from 2023. That year, SPCJ documented an increase of 284% in antisemitic hate crimes over the previous year. About three-quarters of the 2023 incidents happened in that year’s final quarter.
Similar statistics were documented across Western Europe and beyond, where Muslims targeted Jews in connection with Oct. 7, 2023. On that day, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 251 to Gaza, plunging the region into war amid an explosion of antisemitic sentiment worldwide.