Lucie Dreyfus

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Lucie Dreyfus and her family. On the left the daughter Jeanne, born in 1893, behind her her husband Alfred Dreyfus and on the right the son Pierre, born in 1891

Lucie-Eugénie Dreyfus (born August 23, 1869 in Chatou , † December 14, 1945 in Paris ), born Lucie-Eugénie Hadamard, was the wife of the artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus , who was wrongly involved in the so-called Dreyfus affair in December 1894 was found guilty of treason by a French court martial and was first publicly demoted in January 1895 and then banished to Devil's Island by the French Chamber of Deputies . Lucie Dreyfus, along with other family members, especially her brother-in-law Mathieu Dreyfus, was one of the people who fought hard to get the trial back to life and to revise the miscarriage of justice.

Life

Lucie Hadamard was born on August 23, 1869 in Chatou, a suburb of Paris. Her devout father was a wealthy diamond dealer, and her second cousin was the mathematician Jacques Hadamard . She met Alfred Dreyfus in 1889 in her parents' house. The two married on April 21, 1890. The ceremony was performed by Zadoc Kahn , Chief Rabbi of France, in the main synagogue in Paris .

Alfred Dreyfus was the son of a family of industrialists from Alsace . When Alsace came to the newly founded German Reich in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War , his parents opted to keep their French citizenship and in 1872 moved part of the family to Paris. Here Dreyfus passed the Baccalauréat and passed the entrance examination to the traditional École polytechnique in 1878 , which at that time was mainly technical officers, e.g. B. for the artillery trained. He became a professional officer as an artilleryman and, due to his academic achievements, was accepted into the École supérieure de guerre in 1890 . Due to his graduation as the ninth best of his class, Alfred Dreyfus was then accepted into the French General Staff. His service in the General Staff began on January 1, 1893. There he was to be transferred to a different area of ​​the General Staff every six months on a rotation basis. The couple were very wealthy. Alfred Dreyfus received an annual income of 40,000 francs from his fortune alone, a multiple of the annual salary of a French officer.

In 1894 it was discovered in the General Staff that a French officer was selling secret documents to the German military attaché Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen . The reason for this conclusion was the delivery of an unsigned letter, the so-called bordereau, which apparently had enclosed a delivery of five confidential military documents. On the basis of handwriting comparisons, the French intelligence service came to the conclusion that the manuscript was similar to that of the artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus. He was arrested on October 15; Lucie Dreyfus was initially not informed of the reason for the arrest. The officer in charge of the investigation, who among other things carried out a house search, forbade her to share the news of her husband's arrest with anyone. It was not until October 28 that she was allowed to tell the rest of the family. On December 23, 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict in the trial, which had taken place in camera before a court martial, had been made on the basis of dubious handwriting reports and unlawful evidence. Alfred Dreyfus was demoted on January 5th in a humiliating public procedure and a little later deported to Devil's Island .

Lucie Dreyfus worked tirelessly for her husband in the years that followed. The most important thing was the emotional support she gave him. She was deeply convinced of his innocence and tried to get him to be confident and persevering. She was also involved in her husband's active defense and tried to get a retrial. For this purpose, she directed numerous requests to various French authorities and, in September 1896, a request for revision directly to the Chamber of Deputies, which was refused. In order to convince the public of her husband's innocence, she released the letters that she had received from her husband out of prison.

In September 1898, Lucie Dreyfus turned directly to the French government with a request to initiate revision proceedings. She managed to get the Council of Ministers to forward her request to the Court of Cassation. Her husband was convicted again in 1899, but this time sentenced to ten years imprisonment for "mitigating circumstances" and pardoned shortly afterwards. Together with her husband, she continued to fight for her husband's honor. The misjudgment was only overturned in July 1906, her husband rehabilitated and reinstated as a major in the French army. Shortly afterwards he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Lucie Dreyfus outlived her husband by almost ten years. During her struggle for her husband's honor, she was worshiped as an exemplary wife and exemplary mother by the so-called Dreyfusians - people who were convinced of the innocence of their husbands .

Under the Vichy regime , Lucie Dreyfus withdrew to Toulouse , the city where her son-in-law came from. However, this family was scattered to the winds under the pressure of the persecution of the Jews. After wandering around in the south of France for a while, she finally found an asylum under the cover name Madame Duteil in the nursing home of the nuns of Valence and was thus able to survive the Holocaust . After the country was liberated , she returned to Paris with her youngest daughter Simone, who was now seriously ill.

literature

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Whyte, p. 45.
  2. ↑ Kotowski et al., P. 66.
personal data
SURNAME Dreyfus, Lucie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dreyfus, Lucie-Eugénie (full name); Hadamard, Lucie-Eugénie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French wife of Alfred Dreyfus
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Chatou
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1945
Place of death Paris