Alfred Dreyfus. Truth and justice

By showcasing close to 250 archive documents, photographs, film extracts and some sixty works of art - by Jacques-Émile Blanche, Gustave Caillebotte, Eugène Carrière, Émile Gallé, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro, Félix Vallotton and Édouard Vuillard - the exhibition tells the story of the Affair "with" Dreyfus, putting him back at the centre of the story. This new approach corrects the image of a self-effacing Dreyfus. It reveals a tireless fighter for the truth, the author of numerous writings, many of them unpublished and recently brought out of oblivion.

Alfred Dreyfus was born in 1859 into an Alsatian family marked by the defeat of 1871 and the annexation of Alsace-Moselle. A fervent patriot and graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, he had a brilliant military career, which was cut short in 1894 when he was unjustly accused of high treason on behalf of Germany, sentenced by a military court, degraded and deported to French Guiana.

The exhibition unravels the plot hatched by the General Staff and illustrates the virulent anti-Semitism on display at the end of the 19th century. Thanks to the many works on display, it places the affair in the context of the ‘Belle Époque’, and sheds light on some lesser-known aspects of the period: the diversity of Jewish reactions, the ‘birth’ of intellectuals and the ‘rise’ of the Jewish community, and the ‘rise’ of the Jewish movement, the ‘birth’ of intellectuals and the response to anti-Semitism. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and rehabilitated in 1906, but his career was never reconstructed.

The exhibition provides an insight into the current state of affairs in the Affaire, against a backdrop of renewed anti-Semitism, while Alfred Dreyfus's innocence is still the subject of conspiracy theories.

This exhibition, which has received exceptional support from the Musée d'Orsay, is based on the rich Dreyfus collection at the mahJ, on loans from institutions - the National Archives, the French National Library, the Army Museum, the Paris Bar Association Museum, the Carnavalet Museum, the Ecole de Nancy Museum, the Maison Zola-Musée Dreyfus in Medan - and from private collections.