DREYFUS DEAD

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18757, 13 July 1935, Page 5

DREYFUS DEAD

SPY DRAMA RECALLED DEVIL’S ISLAND REPRIEVE FINAL REII API LITATION (Elec. Tel. Conyriglit—United Press Assn.) (Received ,Julv 13, 11.45 p.m.) PARIS, July 12. Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, central figure in the famous espionage case which rocked the Parliamentary and military systems of Prance in the late ’9o's, has died, aged 81 years. Colonel Dreyfus was born in 1854 at Mulluiusen, in Alsace, then a province of Franco, and was the son of a rich Jewish manufacturer, who migrated to Paris when his son was 20 years of age. Young Dreyfus became a captain of artillery, and was attached to the French' general staff, when lie was arrested and court-martialled on a charge of delivering to a foreign government documents connected with the national defence. The verdict of the court-martial, in the course of which r the handwriting characteristics of Dreyfus were a local point of the prosecution, was that the prisoner was guilty, and the sentence was that he'be degraded from his military rank and banished for life to the Devil’s Island prison of Cayenne, the dreaded colonial prison _ maintained by France for the segregation of criminals of the worst type. The sentence was carried out to the letter, so far as his degradation and transportation were concerned, but the wife and friends ol Dreyfus, convinced that he had been the‘victim of malice, injustice and forgery, labored unceasingly to secure another trial for him. France was plunged into a chaos of militarism and anti-Semitism by the disclosures of the court-martial evidence, and it was a matter of the greatest difficulty for the supporters of Dreyfus to bring about another trial, which eventually was granted in 1899, five years after bis transportation. The retrial found the prisoner guilty, but paradoxically the court while sentencing him to 10 years’ imprisonment, recommended his being pardoned. The pardon was approved, as a means of closing a controversy which had threatened more than one ‘ French Government, but the friends of Dreyfus were not satisfied. Taking up their campaign again, they finally succeeded in having the whole proceedings quashed in July, 1906, when Dreyfus was reinstated in the French army with the rank of major. His innocence was held to have been fully proved, in later years, by the confession of a fellow-officer of the general staff who had given evidence against him, and who admitted complicity in a_ conspiracy to incriminate him. After devoted service to his country through the war period, Major Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of colonel, and was'awarded the Legion of Honor in 1919.