On the Île de la Cité, Thursday June 4, a crane slowly placed a 3.5 meter bronze on Rue de Harlay: the Hommage au Captain Dreyfus statue, created by the artist Louis Mittelberg, known as Tim. The work left the 6th arrondissement to settle a few steps from the courthouse, the place where the Court of Cassation rehabilitated Dreyfus in 1906. It took forty years for the statue to find its definitive place.
The work represents Alfred Dreyfus in full length, holding his broken saber in front of his hidden face. The posture shows a man devastated, but still standing straight. On the base, a sentence taken from a letter that the captain sent to his wife Lucie from Devil’s Island, where he was detained: “If you want me to live, make me restore my honor. »
The statue of Alfred Dreyfus will now be in front of the Court of Cassation and the Palace of Justice on the Ile de la Cité.
See you on July 12 for the inauguration. pic.twitter.com/fGGw4mjKFu
— Paris Center Town Hall (@MParisCentre) June 4, 2026
I manage my choices I authorize
The statue was commissioned in 1985 by the Ministry of Culture, at the instigation of Jack Lang, as part of a series of monuments to great men desired by François Mitterrand. Tim, whose fame was above all due to his press cartoons, wanted to install it in the courtyard of the Military School. It was precisely there where Dreyfus had been degraded on January 5, 1895, banished from the army before being sent to the penal colony in Guyana for a treason he had not committed.
The military says no
The proposal to install the statue at the military school then met with a double refusal. Defense Minister Charles Hernu objects that the courtyard of the Military School is not accessible to the public. As for President François Mitterrand, he is not in favor either: “We must give the military an example, not remorse,” he is said to have declared, according to comments reported by lawyer David Curiel and published in Le Monde in February 2025.
Place Dauphine, opposite the courthouse, is also excluded. In 1988, the statue was then placed by default in the Tuileries gardens. In 1994, on the occasion of the centenary of Dreyfus’s arrest, Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, had it transferred to Place Pierre-Lafue, in the 6th arrondissement, at the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Boulevard Raspail. A location certainly close to the Cherche-Midi prison where Dreyfus had been incarcerated, but less visible. This did not prevent the monument from being vandalized in 2002, stained with yellow paint with the insult “dirty traitor” and a Star of David.
For the centenary of the rehabilitation of Dreyfus by the Court of Cassation, in 2006, Jack Lang and the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë renewed the request for transfer to the Military School. Refusal, again, from the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. The statue remains, in the words of lawyer David Curiel, “abandoned in a space where its voice could not resonate”.
Two replicas in Paris and Tel Aviv
Meanwhile, copies travel further than the original. A resin replica was made in 2003 and installed in the courtyard of the Museum of Art and History of Judaism (Mahj) in Paris. Another was inaugurated on November 27, 2018 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, not far from the French Institute. The original remains in its square in the 6th arrondissement.
The situation begins to unravel in 2024, when the Mahj, on the occasion of its Alfred Dreyfus exhibition, “Truth and Justice”, relaunches the demand for travel. The following year, a law elevated Dreyfus posthumously to the rank of brigadier general.
The State, the City of Paris and the Mahj finally converge. The choice ultimately fell on the area around the Palais de Justice, on the Île de la Cité. Not where he was degraded, but where he was rehabilitated. The inauguration will coincide with the national day of commemoration in memory of Alfred Dreyfus, celebrated every July 12, the day when in 1906 the Court of Cassation gave him his honor.
