The Two Shots Fired at Dreyfus at the Panthéon During Zola's Reburial in June 1908

Alfred Dreyfus had been formally rehabilitated by the French Supreme Court of Appeal on 12 July 1906 — almost twelve years after his original treason conviction. He had been restored to the French Army with the rank of major, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and pensioned at the rate appropriate to his full career service. The political fight over the Dreyfus Affair was substantively over by 1906. The bitterness was not.

On the morning of 4 June 1908, the body of Émile Zola — who had died of carbon-monoxide poisoning in his Paris apartment six years earlier — was carried in a state procession to the Panthéon for transfer to the national mausoleum of French heroes. Zola had been the literary champion of the Dreyfusard cause throughout the affair (his open letter J’accuse of January 1898 had been the moment that broke the affair into the European political mainstream); the Panthéon transfer was substantively the official Third Republic acknowledgement of his role.

Alfred Dreyfus attended the ceremony as the official representative of his own case.

The shooting

Louis-Anthelme Grégori — a 65-year-old former military journalist who had written under various pseudonyms for the anti-Dreyfusard press through the 1890s — pushed his way through the crowd at the Panthéon entrance during the ceremony’s military honours and fired two pistol shots at Dreyfus from close range. Both shots struck. The first bullet hit Dreyfus’s right arm above the elbow; the second hit the same arm below the elbow. Neither wound was life-threatening. Dreyfus was treated immediately by army medical personnel and was reported in stable condition by that afternoon.

Grégori made no attempt to escape and was arrested at the scene. His public statement at the moment of arrest was substantively that he had acted in the name of “the patrie betrayed by the Affair,” that his target had been “the symbol of the campaign of national humiliation,” and that he expected to be prosecuted but believed himself “morally vindicated by history.”

The trial and acquittal

Grégori was tried before the Cour d’assises de la Seine on 10 and 11 September 1908. The charges were attempted murder (carrying a potential life sentence) and illegal carrying of a firearm. The trial was substantively political: the prosecution presented the elementary physical evidence (the pistol, the bullets, the eyewitness identification, Grégori’s own admissions); the defence — handled by the Action Française’s senior advocate Henri-Robert — substantively presented the broader anti-Dreyfusard political argument that Grégori had acted from patriotic motive against a man whom the defence continued to characterise as a traitor.

The Parisian jury acquitted Grégori on the attempted-murder charge in approximately ninety minutes of deliberation. He was convicted only on the minor firearms charge and sentenced to a fine of 100 francs. He walked out of the Palais de Justice a free man.

The verdict was substantively the closing demonstration that significant fractions of the French civilian political class continued to reject Dreyfus’s rehabilitation. The Dreyfusard press characterised the acquittal as a national disgrace; the anti-Dreyfusard press characterised it as a vindication of the popular conscience against the legalistic verdicts of the Court of Cassation. The Republican government — under premier Georges Clemenceau, himself a longstanding Dreyfusard — let the verdict stand and did not appeal.

What Dreyfus did afterwards

Dreyfus recovered from the wounds within a few weeks and returned to ordinary military duty. He served as a reserve officer through the First World War (he was 55 when the war began in 1914; he served in artillery-staff positions through 1918 and was promoted to lieutenant colonel) and retired in 1919. He died at home in Paris in July 1935, aged 75.

His granddaughter Madeleine Lévy was killed at Auschwitz in 1944 — the unfinished consequence of the antisemitic political tradition that had produced the original treason conviction in 1894 and that the Panthéon acquittal of 1908 had substantively confirmed remained politically viable in the French Republic.

Grégori never wrote his memoirs and died in obscurity in 1916.