In 1983, the French Ministry of Culture commissioned a statue of Captain Alfred Dreyfus from the Polish-born Jewish caricaturist and sculptor Leyzor (Louis) Mittelberg, better known by his pseudonym Tim (1919–2002). After its completion in 1986, the work remained for two years in the foundry, awaiting a decision by the Paris authorities on its location. The political dispute over the statue’s placement attracted wide attention, for the memory of the Dreyfus affair still aroused strong emotions and recalled the deep divisions that had marked French society at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

History of the Sculpture’s Creation

That same year, France launched a government programme to erect monuments to neglected national heroes. Tim, widely known for his work as a cartoonist in “Le Monde”, “Time” and “The New York Times”, was selected to create one of the monuments. Presented with a list of ten proposed subjects, he chose Alfred Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish descent, was accused of espionage for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. His conviction proved to be unjust, yet the authorities refused to admit error, even after his defence lawyers presented exculpatory evidence. Captain Dreyfus became a protagonist in one of the most notorious espionage scandals in history. The long judicial struggle, extending over more than a decade, exposed negligence, falsification of evidence, corruption and entrenched anti-Semitism in the French army, judiciary and political establishment, precipitating one of the gravest political crises of the Third Republic. The affair also underscored the broader question of Jewish integration into French society. In 1895, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, reporting on the trial for the German and Austrian press, advanced his call for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in “Der Judenstaat”. The Dreyfus case attracted international attention. In 1899, President Émile Loubet issued a pardon, though full exoneration did not come until 1906. On 13 July that year, the day after the verdict clearing him was pronounced, Dreyfus was reinstated in the army, promoted to the rank of major as partial reparation for the injustice he had endured.

The Dispute over the Statue’s Location: the “New Dreyfus Affair”

Tim portrayed Dreyfus in military uniform, standing at attention and holding a broken sword at face level, a symbol of the humiliation he had endured. At his feet lies a plaque inscribed with the soldier’s words: “If you want me to live, give me honour”.

The sculptor proposed that the monument be placed in the courtyard of the École Militaire, on the very spot where Dreyfus had been degraded in 1895. The Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, endorsed this location. Yet the proposal met resistance from the Minister of Defence, Charles Hernu, who objected that the site was inaccessible to the general public, and from President François Mitterrand, who maintained that “soldiers should be set an example, not a reproach”. A subsequent plan to install the statue in Place Dauphine, at the western end of the Île de la Cité near the Palace of Justice and the Court of Appeal which had exonerated Dreyfus in 1906, was likewise rejected. Only after Mitterrand’s re-election in 1988, the resignation of Jacques Chirac’s second government and the return of the Socialists to power was the project revived. At Chirac’s initiative, the statue was unveiled on the centenary of Dreyfus’s arrest in Place Pierre Lafue, close to the former Cherche-Midi prison where he had been confined in 1894.

Copies of the Monument at the Museum of Jewish Art and History and at the French Institute in Tel Aviv-Jaffa

In 2003, to mark Tim’s retrospective exhibition “Tim, être de son temps”, an enlarged version of the Dreyfus statue, cast in epoxy resin to imitate bronze, was installed in the courtyard of the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. The slender, austere figure, recalling the work of Alberto Giacometti, stands in striking contrast to the warm tones of the seventeenth-century façade of the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, the museum’s headquarters. Its presence evokes a moment of profound significance for an institution dedicated to the history of Jews in France.

In 2018, a bronze cast of the statue was unveiled near the French Institute in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.