Alfred Dreyfus statue finally gets a permanent home outside the court that cleared him
Forty years after it was made, Louis Mitelberg's bronze of the wronged Jewish officer was unveiled in front of France's Court of Cassation on the first national Dreyfus day.
On 12 July 2026, exactly 120 years after France's highest court annulled his conviction, a statue of Alfred Dreyfus was inaugurated at its permanent site on the Rue de Harlay on the Île de la Cité in Paris, directly in front of the Court of Cassation. The ceremony was the first observance of a national day of commemoration for Dreyfus that President Emmanuel Macron announced in 2025, to be held every 12 July.
The 3.5-metre bronze by the artist and cartoonist Louis Mitelberg, known as Tim, dates from 1985. It shows Dreyfus standing upright and holding the broken sword of his public degradation. Commissioned under President François Mitterrand, it was meant for the courtyard of the École Militaire, where Dreyfus had been stripped of his rank, but the army twice refused it and several other proposed sites were also turned down. For decades it stood in out-of-the-way corners of the city. Ariel Weil, mayor of central Paris and a descendant of the Dreyfus family, campaigned for years for a more prominent place.
Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain from Alsace, was convicted of treason in 1894 on the basis of a handwriting comparison and amid a fierce antisemitic press campaign, then sent to Devil's Island. The affair split France and prompted Émile Zola's open letter J'accuse. Convicted again in 1899 and then pardoned, Dreyfus was fully exonerated only in 1906, when the Court of Cassation quashed the verdict and he was reinstated. He later served in the First World War and died in Paris in 1935. In 2025 the National Assembly voted unanimously to promote him posthumously to brigadier general.
Speaking at the unveiling, Macron warned that the old demons of antisemitism had never fully disappeared from France. Dreyfus's grandson Charles Dreyfus, aged 99, said he felt deep joy at seeing a permanent public monument to his grandfather in the capital.
“It was in a place nobody wanted, not historians, not the Dreyfus family, not the artist.”
The Dreyfus affair remains a defining lesson in how prejudice can corrupt justice, and how citizens, writers and courts can correct it. Placing his statue at the court that cleared him gives that lesson a permanent, visible place in the heart of Paris.
Sources
- Dreyfus statue given permanent new home outside court which cleared him of all chargesThe Jewish Chronicle, July 12, 2026
- Statue Honoring Alfred Dreyfus Finds Permanent Home in Paris More Than a Century After His ExonerationThe Algemeiner, July 14, 2026
Summarised in our own words from the reporting above.
Tikkun olam, today. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.