Macron urges army to promote historical ‘traitor’

President Emmanuel Macron has taken a stand against antiSemitism on the far Right in the French presidential race by saying the army could posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus to general to make amends for his false treason conviction.

Macron had the campaign of Eric Zemmour, the antiimmigrant polemicist, in his sights when on Wednesday he twice addressed the wrongful espionage conviction of Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, in 1894.

The exposure of an antiSemitic army plot to frame Dreyfus, who was eventually exonerated in 1906, stained the French establishment and stirred a bitterness that lingers on among ultra-nationalists.

Zemmour, 63, who has burst into the presidential campaign with a racially tinged manifesto, claims that the Dreyfus affair remains murky and that he may not have been innocent of accusations that he passed state secrets to the Germans.

After the president had inaugurated the Alfred Dreyfus Museum in Medan near Paris beside the home of Emile Zola, the novelist who campaigned to clear Dreyfus, Haim Korsia, the chief rabbi of France, asked Macron about proposals that Dreyfus should be promoted to general. Macron said that it would be inappropriate to do so himself because ‘‘that would open the possibility of a president reinstating or demoting anyone over time’’.

However, he said, Dreyfus was a special case because there was an irrefutable need to ‘‘reconstitute the career that was suspended’’.

Macron delivered pointed warnings at the Dreyfus museum and later with religious leaders about the continuing need to combat the anti-Semitic doctrines that fuelled the persecution of Dreyfus, who after his conviction was imprisoned in the Devil’s Island penal colony.