![]() ![]() Sometimes when longstanding anecdotes are investigated they are found to be false. Thus it is said that when Dreyfus learned that some unknown man had been arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, and it was pointed out that no one knew what was the evidence against him, then it was Dreyfus, of all people, who said 'There's never smoke without fire'. There are many anecdotes which cannot be verified. And Clemenceau, who had published Zola's famous article J'Accuse which was the turning-point of the affaire, was dismissive about Dreyfus the man, saying that he looked like a pencil salesman. One of Dreyfus' most ardent supporters said, 'we were prepared to die for Dreyfus. He would have been among the army officers saying that there should never be a re-trial and that one must not question military authority. Thus it has been said that had Dreyfus not been involved in the controversy, he would never have been a Dreyfusard. Some of the things said about Dreyfus have been repeated so many times that they have been accepted as established truths. Dreyfus is invariably given as the best example of this. It is often said that the hero of a cause célèbre is never a real hero, and rarely an attractive or likeable man. ![]() They also involved hi friends and supporters. But his misfortune did not end with the agonies of exile on Devil's Island. Everyone knows too that the simple fact that he was Jewish was in itself enough to convince many, both in 1894 and now, that he must have been guilty. Everyone knows that he was unjustly condemned for treason. ![]() To say that Alfred Dreyfus was unfortunate would be the unacceptable phrase of understatement. He died as he would have wished to live, peacefully, like a respectable bourgeois citizen. He died surrounded by his family (his doctor, Pierre-Paul Levy, was his son-in-law) in his comfortable dwelling place in the 17th arrondissement. Alfred Dreyfus died in Paris on the evening of July 12th, 1935, aged seventy-four. ![]()
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