"The French nation posthumously elevates Alfred Dreyfus to brigadier general," reads the extremely short law that was finally voted through in the upper house of the French parliament, the Senate, on Thursday.
Dreyfus was convicted of espionage in 1894 and formally acquitted only in 1906, after it was discovered that he had been used as a scapegoat instead of the real perpetrator. The case became widely publicized, not least after the writer Émile Zola gave him his support in a famous polemic entitled “J'accuse...!” (I accuse).
Dreyfus later returned to the army and died as a lieutenant colonel in 1935.
