The statue of Alfred Dreyfus will finally find a permanent location in Paris

After forty years of wandering around the capital, the sculpture of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, will receive a permanent location in the very center of Paris.

Forty years. That's how long it took for the statue of Captain Alfred Dreyfus to find a permanent home in Paris. Moved several times since its creation, the artwork had never been able to establish itself permanently in the public space of the French capital.

The French army twice refused to allow the sculpture to be placed at the École Militaire, the very place where Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was publicly degraded in 1894. This episode remains one of the most resounding acts of anti-Semitism in French history: wrongly accused of having given military secrets to Germany, Dreyfus was convicted on the basis of false documents, before being rehabilitated after a long legal and political battle that deeply divided the country.

The statue will now receive a permanent location in the center of Paris, ending decades of instability for this memorial dedicated to one of the most tragic figures in the history of the French Republic.