Chirac seeks closure over Dreyfus affair
In a "national ceremony" described by the Elysée Palace as " a great moment in history", M. Chirac will make a speech to mark the centenary of the final acquittal of Captain Dreyfus on 12 July 1906.
The speech will take place in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, where in 1895 the young, jewish officer was stripped of his badges of rank before a baying crowd of 20,000 people.
The President is expected, in effect, to re-habilitate Dreyfus fully for the first time. He will describe him as not just the victim of an appalling miscarriage of justice but as a great patriot and a great Frenchman. M. Chirac is also likely to give a warning against the rise of a "new" anti-semitism amongst some black people in France - and the survival of an older kind of anti-semitism amongst some ultra-Catholic whites.
The President has, however, rebuffed moves by the captain's latest biographer and several prominent politicians for the remains of Dreyfus to be exhumed and placed in the Pantheon, the resting place of the official heroes of the French state.
The Elysee has declined to explain its decision officially. Sources suggest that M. Chirac decided that the Pantheon was for people who "did something" important. Dreyfus, famously, did nothing. In other words, he was mostly an innocent victim, rather than a hero. This is hotly disputed by many Dreyfus supporters or "Dreyfussards".
His most recent biographer, the historian Vincent Duclert, says that the courage of Dreyfus in never giving up on democracy and justice helped to prevent France from plunging into a kind of fascist, ultra-Catholic authoritarianism.
Captain Dreyfus was an obscure captain at military headquarters in Paris in October 1894 when he was accused of selling to the Germans a document showing the results of tests on a new piece of artillery. There was no scrap of evidence against him but he was found guilty by a military court, largely because he was jewish.