By Michael Levitt, Contributor

There’s no time like today to shine a light on yesterday, especially when recognizing the triumph of truth over lies, and justice over hate and inequity. Like individuals, nations often wrestle with dark moments in their history. In coming to terms with them — and drawing relevant lessons — it’s never too late to do right.

I was recently reminded of this while reading about an instructive action in France, which — like Canada and its treatment of Indigenous Peoples — has long grappled with difficult events from its past involving its Jewish citizens.

Next month, France will inaugurate an annual national day of commemoration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 in a shameful miscarriage of justice in one of the country’s worst scandals involving antisemitism. Among events planned for July 12, the 120th anniversary of France’s highest court recognizing Dreyfus’s innocence, an official state ceremony will take place in Paris. A few weeks ago, a 3.5-meter bronze statue of Dreyfus was relocated to a new, highly symbolic location in central Paris, near where he was famously exonerated in 1906.

Last November, in an act of reparation, France officially promoted Dreyfus posthumously to the rank of brigadier-general. “The antisemitism that stuck Alfred Dreyfus is not a thing of the past,” the National Assembly noted before first voting on the legislation to promote him, describing it as a fight that’s “still relevant today.”

In 1894, Dreyfus, a 36-year-old army captain, was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany. Although the only evidence was a handwritten note wrongly attributed to him, he stood trial amid rampant antisemitism in the French military and wider society. Found guilty as a traitor, Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment as the sole prisoner in the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony in South America. The case, known as the Dreyfus Affair, sharply divided France between pro- and anti-Dreyfusards.

In 1898, French novelist Émile Zola published a newspaper open letter to the French President, headlined “J’Accuse…!” which denounced those who conspired against Dreyfus and accused the government of antisemitism and unlawful imprisonment. By then, it had emerged that the handwriting on the incriminating note belonged to another officer who fled to England. Zola’s action strengthened public support for Dreyfus and demands to reopen the case. After rotting on Devil’s Island for five years, he returned to France to be retried and was again found guilty, before being officially pardoned, and later fully exonerated.

Among the journalists covering the case was Theodor Herzl, a Paris-based correspondent for an Austrian newspaper and later the founder of the modern Zionist movement. After witnessing the widespread anti-Jewish campaign against Dreyfus, including anti-antisemitic rioting, he wrote “The Jewish State,” which proved prophetic. The 1896 book called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland as the Dreyfus Affair convinced Herzl that only in their own country would Jews be safe from virulent antisemitism endemic to Europe.

The Dreyfus Affair became synonymous with the wrongful conviction of the innocent, and one of history’s most enduring examples of institutional antisemitism. That helps explain why it still commands great interest in France. In Paris, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme both hosted Dreyfus Affair-related exhibitions last year. Just outside the city, a museum devoted to Dreyfus opened in 2021.

For years, people have called for his remains to be transferred to the Pantheon, the final resting place of many of France’s most illustrious figures. Engraved on his current gravestone at Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery is the name and tragic fate of his granddaughter Madeleine killed at Auschwitz in 1944 after being arrested as a Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighter.

In announcing the national day to honour Dreyfus, French President Emmanuel Macron decried that the “ancient spectre” of antisemitism persists to this day. Indeed, the French Interior Ministry reported 1,320 hate crimes targeting Jews in France in 2025, mirroring a similar scourge in Canada. French Jews can be forgiven for thinking plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — or, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again.

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