Today, a copy of the statue of Dreyfus holding his broken sword stands at the entrance to the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. The original can be found at Boulevard Raspail, n°116–118, at the exit of the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station. Honoring a delayed debt to a soldier it disgraced almost 100 years ago, France on 6/9/88 put up a controversial bronze statue of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris. The Dreyfus affair (French: l'affaire Dreyfus, pronounced: [la.fɛʁ dʁɛ.fys]) was a political scandal that divided France from its beginning in 1894 until it was finally resolved in 1906. The affair is often seen as a modern and universal symbol of injustice,[1] and remains one of the most striking examples of a complex miscarriage of justice, where a major role was played by the press and public opinion.

The scandal began in December 1894, with the treason conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian and Jewish descent. Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he would spend nearly five years.

Evidence came to light in 1896—primarily through an investigation instigated by Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage—identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real culprit. After high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army then accused Dreyfus of additional charges based on falsified documents. Word of the military court's framing of Dreyfus and of an attempted cover-up began to spread, chiefly owing to J'accuse, a vehement open letter published in a Paris newspaper in January 1898 by famed writer Émile Zola. Activists put pressure on the government to reopen the case. Eventually all the accusations against A