Another Dreyfus storm blows up

Press, 16 August 1985, Page 23

Another Dreyfus storm blows up

From R<

ROBIN SMYTH

in Paris

Ninety years after the French Army publicly disgraced Captain Alfred Dreyfus in the greatest of all French political scandals, a statue of Dreyfus is spreading a chill in official circles in Paris. The Dreyfus statue has been commissioned from Tim, the illustrator and sculptor, by the Culture Minister, Jack Lang. But the idea of setting it up in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, where Dreyfus had his sword broken and his epaulettes cut off, in January, 1895, has been politely turned down by the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu. Although declaring himself fully in agreement with the idea of a statue in Dreyfus’s fronour, Mr

Hernu thought the eighteenth century staff college in the heart of Paris was an unsuitable site because it is closed to the public. In a national outburst of antisemitism, Captain Dreyfus was found guilty of spying for the Germans and condemned to a life sentence on Devil’s Island. After a long campaign in his defence led by Emil Zola, Dreyfus was “pardoned” by the President and brought home. He was finally declared innocent by the Supreme Court in 1906. , t Other sites fAr the statue are

being proposed and Mr Lang is trying to efface the unfortunate impression that the French establishment is still closing doors, albeit apologetically, in the Jewish outcast’s face.

“One couldn’t imagine two Ministers who get on better together than Charles Hernu and I,” Mr Lang says. The Tim statue will be finished in six months time, he adds, and there is no hurry to choose an appropriate setting for it.

But the Socialist newspaper “Le Matin” has taken a Severe view of

the Defence Ministry’s refusal to have Dreyfus back on the very spot where he was unjustly condemned. “That there can be a dispute on this subject certainly shows that a century after L'Affaire all the French have not drawn the right conclusions.” The Defence Minister has won some support from people who favour a more public setting for the statue than the Ecole Militaire, but unwelcome endorsement for the Minister’s decision comes from the far-Left Socialist P.S.U. party. It expresses the view that a Dreyfus monument in the Ecole Militaire would be doing the army too much honour. — Copyright, London Observer Service. $