Jews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

The young Alfred Dreyfus, born in 1859, had watched in dismay as German troops occupied his eastern town of Mulhouse in 1870. Like many other Jews from Alsace, he fled to Paris, where he progressed successfully through élite officer training schools. By the 1890s he was a handsome and wealthy officer with a brilliant career and a happy marriage.