Work on the Eiffel Tower would complete just five years later, for the World’s Fair held in Paris, a recognition of the power and modernism of the new French Republic. And yet there was something remarkably backward about the new modern system. A series of scandals occurred around members of the French polity: the president’s son-in-law was caught selling medals of honor to anyone who wanted one; a reformist General Georges Ernest Boulanger was expelled from the army. Then there was the Dreyfus affair: an obscure Jewish soldier in the French army who unexpectedly found himself accused of treason.

On this day, December 22, in 1894, at a secret military trial – at which the accused was refused to examine the evidence against him – Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason, stripped of all rank and title, and sentenced to a life of hard labor.

The most troubling aspect of the affair was Dreyfus’s Jewish background and the mounting evidence exonerating him that was suppressed. Rampant anti-semitism in France likely played some role in the affair: after his conviction a gamut of publications focused on his Jewishness. It took the noted author Émile Zola, publisher of the famous “J’accuse!” letter in a French newspaper, to bring to light the cover-up – and Zola himself had to flee to England as a result of the publication.