Abstract
Dreyfus is capable of treason, I conclude from his race', wrote Edouard Drumont, a notorious antisemit figure, in La Libre Parole. Such a statement is representative of the tone of a certain press, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Captain Dreyfus was prosecuted and convicted guilty of collusion with Germany, the greatest enemy of France at the time. From the beginning, doubts on his culpability were voiced. They gave way to a long and passionate confrontation between the dreyfusards, convinced of the innocence of Dreyfus and advocates of the Republican values and the antidreyfusards, persuaded that he was guilty and that the so-called raison d'Etat had to be preserved. Thereby, the Affair leads to question the very essence of the newly established Third Republic. In reality, looking at this episode conducts to look at the legacy of the Revolution, the emancipation of the Jews, and evaluate whether it bore its fruits. One could thus wonder whether the Dreyfus Affair is the expression of a French modern antisemitism, that would find its final expression in the Vichy regime, or if the fate of Alfred Dreyfus rather demonstrates the success of the integration of the Jews into the French fabric.
