Wrongly accused of espionage, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to Devil's Island on the basis of remarkably tenuous evidence. Many critics, including the famous writer Emile Zola, argued that Dreyfus was unfairly charged simply because he was a Jew in the French army. As evidence mounted that another officer was guilty, the Dreyfus Affair exposed the persistence of pervasive and deep-rooted antisemitism, questioning how effectively Jews were accepted in French society a full century after they were first emancipated.
