Vercingetorix surrenders to Julius Cesar.

The Romans conquered “Aquitania” after a bitter fight against the Celts led by Vercingetorix, a local hero. The ensuing Pax Romana allowed the creation, and growth, of centers of commerce such as Burdigala (which became Bordeaux), Versunna (Perigueux), and Aginum (Agen).

The collapse of the Roman Empire unleashed new tribes upon the rich region, eventually allowing them to take control: first the Vandals, then the Visigoths and finally the Franks, led by Clovis.

As with most of France, the region was then kept under a succession of feudal regimes, but was the last of the great feudal duchies be assimilated into the Kingdom of France. By the mid-XIth century, the duchy of Aquitaine became the property of local dukes who were vassals to the King of France. When Eleonor d’Aquitaine married Louis VII, she added her vast assets to the French throne.

However, fate was to play a particular game with Eleonor, Aquitaine, France and Britain. After her marriage to the French King Louis VI was annuled on grounds of consanguinity, Eleonor was quick to marry again.2 weeks after her marriage, her second husband, Henry Plantagenet became King of England and was crowned as Henry II. Aquitaine became wedded to England, its commercial strength closely tied to the health of the English economy. It was only in 1451 that Charles VII finally succeeded in ousting the English presence, and annexing Aquitaine to the French crown.

The region was central to the following Hundred Years War, which ended in a battle won by the France in Castillon (now known as Castillon-La-Battaille), and was further rocked, as all of France, by the wars of Religion, which lasted until Henri of Navarre acceded to the throne of France as Henri IV. By coming to the throne, Henri IV brought to the Kingdom the territory now known as the Pays Basque.

By the eighteenth century, the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Bordeaux extended along the Garonne Basin and into the southern Massif Central, making it one of the biggest and richest provinces of France.

Bordeaux’s main involvment in the Revolution was through a moderate group of intellectuals, the Girondins. In much of the region, the early Revolution was relatively calm, with little of the bitter infighting which marked the relations between royalists and patriots elsewhere. Local leaders showed restraint in the face of requisitions and provocations from Paris. And except in a few specific areas – the Pays Basque, parts of the Landes and Dordogne, and Bordeaux itself – the guillotine was used fairly sparingly.

Economic expansion was slowed down by the revolution. The Napoleonic wars had a particularly disastrous effect on Bordeaux, which suffered greatly from the British blockades of French ports.

Aquitaine was slow to participate in the industrial revolution because the south west had become under-populated and had no coal. Empress Eugenie and the court of Napoleon III made Biarritz a favorite tourist spot, launching an era of tourism that lasts to this day.

The British and the Dutch who began to purchase secondary homes have contributed greatly to the revival of foreign tourism. today the Aquitaine is a bustling, modern region only 3 hours from Paris on the TGV

The Valois Dynasty succeeded the Capetian Dynasty as rulers of France. They were descendants of Charles of Valois, the second son of King Philip III of France.

• Philippe VI, the Fortunate 1328-1350
  Jean II, the Good 1350-1364
  Charles V, the Wise 1364-1380
  Charles VI, the Well-Beloved 1380-1422
  Charles VII, the Victortius 1422-1461
  Louis XI 1461-1483
  Charles VIII , the Affable 1483-1498
  Louis XII, the Father of His People 1498-1515
  Fran

The caves of Lascaux, in France, contain some of the earliest known representational art, dating to between 17,000 and 15,000 years before the present.

These Paleolithic cave paintings consist mostly of realistic images of large animals, most of which are known from fossil evidence to have lived in the area at the time. The other common theme of the paintings is outlines of the human hand.

The cave was discovered in 1940 by a dog named Robot, and public access was made easier after World War II. By 1955, the carbon dioxide produced by 1200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. The cave was closed to the public in 1963, in order to preserve the art. After the cave was closed, the paintings were restored to their original state, and are now monitored on a daily basis.

A replica of two of the cave halls — the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery — was opened in 1983. Reproductions of other Lascaux artwork can be seen at the Centre of Prehistoric Art at Le Thot, France.

The original caves are located near the village of Montignac, in the Dordogne d

The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 was the peace treaty that was created as a result of the six-month-long Paris Peace Conference of 1919 which put an official end to World War I. The treaty was ratified on January 10, 1920 and required that Germany accept responsibility for the war and was thus obliged to pay large amounts of compensation (known as war reparations). Like many other treaties, it is named for the place of its signing: the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. On January 18, 1919 a peace conference opened in Versailles, France to work on the treaty.

The treaty provided for the creation of the League of Nations, a major goal of US president Woodrow Wilson. The purpose of the organization was to arbitrate conflicts between nations before they lead to war.

Woodrow Wilson with the American Peace Commissioners
Other provisions included the loss of German colonies and loss of German territories. The list of the former German provinces that changed their affiliation:

Alsace-Lorraine) restored to France,
northern Schleswig at Tondern in Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark,
most of Province Posen and West Prussia, part of Silesia to Poland,
the city of Danzig with the delta of Vistula river at the Baltic Sea was made the Free City of Danzig under the League of Nations and Polish authority.
Article 156 of the treaty transferred German concessions in Shandong, China to Japan rather than returning sovereign authority to China. Chinese outrage over this provision led to demonstrations and the cultural movement known as the May Fourth Movement.

The treaty of Versailles also greatly restricted the German armed forces.

The treaty established a commission which was to determine the exact size of the reparations to be paid by Germany. In 1921, this number was officially put at $33,000,000,000, a sum that many economists deemed to be excessive. The economic problems that the payments brought are cited as one of the causes of the end of the Weimar Republic and the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, which inevitably led to the outbreak World War II.

The United States never ratified the treaty. The elections of 1918 had seen the Republicans gain control of the United States Senate, and they blocked ratification twice (the second time on March 19, 1920), some favoring isolationism and opposing the League of Nations, others lamenting the excessive reparations. As a result, the US never joined the League of Nations and later negotiated a separate peace treaty with Germany: the Treaty of Berlin of 1921 which confirmed the reparation payments and other provisions of the Treaty of Versailles but explicitly excluded all articles related to the League of Nations.

A Compromise
The “Big Three” consisted of Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson of America. At the Treaty of Versailles it was difficult to decide on a common ruling, because each had been treated differently by Germany during the War. Because of this, the result was said to be a compromise, which nobody liked.
France had suffered most of the casualties during the War, and much of it had been fought on French soil. The country was in ruins, with much damage done to historic and important buildings and resources. George Clemenceau of France wanted reparations from Germany to rebuild and repair the damage done by the Germans. In all, 750,000 houses and 23,000 factories had been destroyed, and money was demanded to pay for the reconstruction of a country in tatters. In 1871, France and Germany had also been at war, and Germany had taken an area of France, Alsace-Lorraine. Clemenceau also wanted to protect against the possibility of an attack ever coming from Germany again, and demanded a demilitarisation of the Rhineland in Germany, and Allied troops to patrol the area. This was called a “territorial safety zone”. They also wanted to reduce drastically the numbers of soldiers in the German army to a controllable point. As part of the reparations, France wanted to be given control of many of Germany’s factories. Not only did France want to severely punish Germany, they also wanted to preserve their great empire and their colonies. While America put forward a belief in national or ethnic “self-determination”, France and Britain wanted to keep their valuable Empires. Clemenceau largely represented the people of France in that he wanted revenge upon the German nation. Clemenceau also wanted to protect secret treaties and allow naval blockades around Germany, so that France could control trade imported to and exported from the defeated country. He was the radical member of the Big Three, and was named “Le Tigre” for this reason.

Great Britain had played a backseat role only in that the country itself was never invaded. Many British soldiers died on the front line in France, and so the people in Britain wanted revenge as much as the French. Prime Minister Lloyd George still wanted reparations, but of less severity than the enraged French. Lloyd George was aware that if the demands made by France were carried out, France could become extremely powerful in Central Europe, and a delicate balance could be unsettled. Although he wanted to ensure this didn’t happen, he also wanted to make Germany pay. Lloyd George was also worried by Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for “self-determination” and, like the French, wanted to preserve the British Empire. This position was part of the competition between two of the greatest empires of the world, and their battle to preserve them. Like the French, Lloyd George also supported naval blockades and secret treaties.

On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson had very different views about how to punish Germany. He had proposed the Fourteen Points before the war ended, which were less harsh than what the French or British wanted. Since the American people had been in the war only since April 1917, they felt that they should get out of the European mess as rapidly as possible. However, President Wilson wanted to institute a world policy that ensured that nothing like this could ever happen again. In order to maintain peace, the first attempt at a world court was created- the League of Nations. The theory was that if weaker and more fragile nations were attacked, others would guarantee to protect them from the aggressor. On top of this, Wilson promoted “self-determination” which encouraged nationalities (or ethnic groups) to think, govern, & control themselves. This notion of self-determination resulted in increased patriotic sentiment in many countries that were or had once been under the control of the old empires, and also received much popular support in the home countries of the Empires. Self-determination was, and continues to be, a source of friction between different ethnic groups around the world as each group seeks to define and enhance its position in the world. The acceptance by many peoples of the concept of self-determination was the beginning of the end for the empires, including those of Britain and France. Self-determination is partly the reason so many new countries were created in Eastern Europe; Wilson was not willing to increase the size of Britain, France, or Italy. There were also fighting in the eastern provinces of Germany, that were loyal to the emperor, but didn’t want to be a part of the republic: Great Poland Uprising in Provinz Posen and 3 Silesian Uprisings in Upper Silesia.

Territorial adjustments were made with the aim of grouping together ethnic minorities in their own states, free from the domination of once powerful Empires, specifically the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Secret treaties were also to be discouraged, and Britain and France greeted a reduction in armaments by all nations with disapproval. This was supposed to indirectly reduce the ability of navies to create blockades.

When the Treaty of Versailles h
ad been concluded, Germany was forced to pay the Allies £6,600,000,000; hand over all its colonies; accept all blame for the war (the War Guilt Clause); reduce the size of its armed forces (six warships, 100,000 infantry, and no air force); and give land to many countries, including Belgium, France, Denmark, and Poland.

The Big Three were undecided in their punishment of Germany. France wanted revenge, Britain wanted a relatively strong economically viable Germany as a counterweight to French dominance on the Continent, and America wanted a permanent peace to be constructed as quickly as possible, and a destruction of the old Empires. The result was a compromise, which left nobody satisfied. Germany was neither crushed nor concilliated, which did not bode well for the future of Germany, Europe and the world as a whole.

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House of Bourbon

Descended from France’s ruling Capetian dynasty, the house of Bourbon became monarchs of France, Spain and southern Italy.

The Bourbon Dynasty owes its name to the marriage (1268) of Robert, count of Clermont, sixth son of king Louis IX of France, to Beatrice, heiress to the lordship of Bourbon. Their son Louis was made duke of Bourbon in 1327. Though his line was dispossessed of the dukedom after two centuries, a junior line of the family went on to gain the crown of Navarre (1555) and of France (1589).

Other lines descended from the French Bourbon dynasty went on to rule Spain (from 1700-1808, 1813-1868, and 1875-1931, and again from 1975 to the present) and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1734-1806 and 1815-1860, and Sicily only in 1806-1816), but the French line lost the throne for a first time in 1792 and finally in 1830 after a sixteen-year restoration.

The Bourbon dynasty in France:

Henri IV, the Great 1589-1610
Marie de MÈdicis (Regent) 1610-1617
Louis XIII, the Well-Beloved 1610-1643
Anne of Austria (Regent) 1643-1651
Louis XIV, the Sun King 1643-1715
Philippe of Orleans (Regent) 1715-1723
Louis XV, the Well-Beloved 1715-1774
Louis XVI 1774-1793
Louis XVII (never actually reigned) 1793-1795
Following the French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, the House of Bourbon was restored:

Louis XVIII 1814-1824
Charles X 1824-1830
The Orleanist July monarchy, which took power in July 1830, brought to the throne the head of the Orleanist cadet branch of the Bourbons:

Louis-Phillippe, King of the French 1830-1848
With the advent of the Second Republic in 1848, Bourbon monarchy in France ended.

The Bourbon pretender to the throne of France, the Comte de Chambord, was offered a restored throne following the collapse of the empire of Emperor Napoleon III in 1870. However the stubborn Chambord refused to accept the throne unless France abandoned the traditional tricolour and accepted what he regarded as the true Bourbon flag of France, something the French National Assembly could not possibly agree to. (The tricolour, having been associated with the First Republic, had been used by the July Monarchy, Second Republic and Empire.)

A temporary Third Republic was established, while monarchists waited for Chambord to die and for the succession to pass to the Comte de Paris, who was willing to accept the tricolour. However Chambord did not die for over a decade, by which public opinion switched to support the republic as the ‘form of government that divides us least.’

The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL.
All other elements are (c) copyright France.com 2003. All Rights Reserved.

The Celts are an indigenous people of central Europe with large numbers in the United Kingdom, in France, and in Ireland where they are in the majority.

The first literary reference to the Celtic people as keltoi or hidden people, is by the Greek Hecataeus in 517 BC.

“Celt” is pronounced /kelt/, and “celtic” as /keltIk/ (in SAMPA). The pronunciation /seltIk/ should only be used for certain sports teams (eg. Boston Celtics NBA team).

The Origins of the Celts
The Urnfield people were the largest population grouping in late Bronze Age Europe and were preeminent from c. 1200 BC until the emergence of the Celts in c. 600 BC. The period of the Urnfield people saw a dramatic increase in population probably due to innovations in technology and agricultural practices. The spread of iron-working led to the development of the Hallstatt culture (c. 700 to 500 BC). The Hallstatt culture effectively held a frontier against incursions from the east by Thracian and Scythian ethnic tribesmen.

The subject of the succession of Halstatt culture by La T

Alfred Dreyfus (October 9, 1859 – July 12, 1935), French military officer best known for being the focus of the Dreyfus affair.

[img]436|left|Capitaine Dreyfus[/img]Born in Mulhouse, Alsace, France, Dreyfus was the youngest of seven children in the family of a Jewish textile manufacturer who had accepted French nationality in 1871. The family had long been established in Alsace. He was accepted into the …cole Polytechnique for military training in 1877 and graduated in 1880 as a sub-lieutenant. His entry into the military was very much influenced by the experience of seeing the Prussians enter his hometown in 1871 when he was 11 years old. From 1880 until 1882 he attended at Fontainebleau for more specialized training as an artillery officer. On graduation he was attached to the first division of the 32nd cavalry regiment and promoted to lieutenant in 1885. In 1889 he was made adjutant to the director of the pyrotechnical school in Bourges, and promoted to captain.

On April 18, 1891 he was married to Lucie Hadamard (1870-1945) who would later bear his son Pierre and daughter Jeanne. A mere three days later he received notice that he had been admitted to the Superior War College. Two years later he graduated ninth in his class with honourable mention, and is immediately designated as a trainee at army headquarters where he would be the only Jew. RaphaÃŽl, his father, died on December 13, 1893.

At the college examination in 1892, his friends had expected him to do well and be attached to the general staff. However, one of the members of the jury, General Bonnefond, under the pretext that "Jews were not desired" on the staff, lowered the total of his marks by making a very bad report; he did the same thing for another Jewish candidate, Lieutenant Picard. Learning of this injustice, the two officers lodged a protest with the director of the school, Gen. Lebelin de Dionne, who expressed his regret for what had occurred, but was powerless to take any steps in the matter. The protest would later count against Dreyfus.

In an article from the AcadÈmie de Poitiers the author remarks that "Dreyfus was a profoundly patriotic man, and if he had not been the victim of this affair he would certainly have been anti-dreyfusard. He was a haughty, intransigent man, linking very little with his fellow officers. He was a "pisse-froid" as would then have been said in the army." In a report in 1891 on his admission to army headquarters a Colonel Fabre characterized him as "an incomplete officer, very intelligent and capable, but pretentious and whose character in not filling out, and with the conscience and manner required for fulfilling the conditions needed for being employed at army headquarters." This cold personality later proved a deterrent to some of his would-be defenders.

Dreyfus was arrested for treason on October 15, 1894 and the events that follow until his eventual exoneration on July 12, 1906 are chronicled in this article on the Dreyfus affair concerning which he was best known. On January 5, 1895 Dreyfus was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island

[img]438|right|Alfred Dreyfus at 74[/img]From the time of his pardon on September 19, 1899 Dreyfus was at least out of prison. During that time he lived with one of his sisters at Carpentras, and later at Cologny.

The day after his exoneration he was readmitted into the army with the rank of Squadron Chief. A week later he is made a Knight in the Legion of Honour, and subsequently named to the artillery command at Vincennes. On October 15, 1906 he was placed in commend of the artillery unit at Saint-Denis.

Dreyfus’ time in prison, notably at Devil’s Island, had been difficult on his health, and he was granted retirement in October 1907. He was re-mobilized during World War I when he held assignments in the Paris region.

Dreyfus was present at the translation of Emile Zola’s ashes in 1908 when he was wounded in the arm by a gunshot from a disgruntled journalist.

Two days after Dreyfus’s death in Paris, France his funeral cortege passed the Place de la Concorde through the ranks of troops assembled for the National Holiday. He was interred in the Cimetiere de Montparnasse, Paris, France.

Publications of Dreyfus

Lettres d’un innocent (1898)
Les lettres du capitaine Dreyfus†‡ sa femme (1899), written at Devil’s Island
Cinq ans de ma vie (1901)
Souvenirs et correspondance, posthumously in 1936

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Born in Italy in 1922, Reggiani came to France with his parents at the age of eight, and after acting school was discovered by Jean Cocteau who gave him a role in his wartime theatrical production of “Les parents terribles.”

He moved into film with Marcel Carne’s 1946 “Les portes de la nuit,” and won his laurels with his interpretation of a hoodlum in love with Simone Signoret in Jacques Becker’s “Casque d’Or.” Over the next half century he appeared in some 80 films.

In 1965 he started a second career as a singer, with the help of Signoret and her husband Yves Montand. His first album was of songs based on texts by the cult writer Boris Vian.

His next album in 1967 forged his reputation, and in the 1970s he was one of the most acclaimed performers of French “chanson.” Though in his 40s, his craggy looks and bad-boy image assured him an enormous following among the young. ]]> http://www.france.com/blog/french-actor-singer-serge-reggiani-dies-at-82/feed/ 0 http://www.france.com/blog/louis-xvi/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=louis-xvi http://www.france.com/blog/louis-xvi/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:41:22 +0000 France.com http://blog.france.com/blog/louis-xvi/

[img]737|left|Louis XVI|[/img]Louis XVI of France (August 23, 1754 – January 21, 1793) succeeded his grandfather (Louis XV of France) as King of France on May 10, 1774; he was crowned on June 11, 1775. His father, the dauphin, had died in 1765.

On May 16, 1770 he married Marie Antoinette, daughter of Francis I of Austria and Empress Maria Theresa , a Habsburg. They had four children:

Marie-Therese Charlotte (December 20, 1778 – October 1851);
Louis-Joseph-Xavier-FranÁois (October 22, 1781 – June 4, 1789);
Louis-Charles (March 27, 1785 – 1795);
Sophie-Beatrix (July 9, 1786 – June 19, 1787).

[img]440|right|Louis XVI[/img]The government was deeply in debt, the radical reforms of Turgot and de Malesherbes disaffected the nobles (parlements) and Turgot was dismissed and de Malesherbes resigned in 1776 to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Louis supported the American Revolution in 1778, but in the Treaty of Paris (1783) the French gained little except an addition to the country’s enormous debt. Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by de Calonne and de Brienne before being restored in 1788. A further taxes reform was sought, but the nobility resisted at the Assembly of Notables (1787).

In 1788 Louis ordered the first election of an Estates-General (…tats GÈnÈraux) since 1614 in order to have the monetary reforms approved. The election was one of the events that transformed the general malaise into the French Revolution, which began in June 1789. The Third Estate had been admitted to the assembly and had proved radical, Louis’ attempts to control them resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (Jeu de Paume, June 20) and the declaration of the National Assembly. In July , an act which provoked the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. In October the royal family were forced to move to the Tuileries palace in Paris.

Louis himself was very popular and not unobliging to the social, political and economic reforms of the Revolution, but the bad influence of his wife in politics caused him to reject the principles of the Revolution. This caused his popularity to drop dramatically and the mistrust against him grew, thus undermining his position as monarch. Other persons who had bad influence on him were his brothers, the comte d’Artois and the comte de Provence. Especially Artois had much influence on Louis’ reactionary tedencies.

[img]739|left|Louis XVI Execution|[/img]On June 21, 1791 Louis attempted to flee secretly from France to Germany with his family, but on the way they were recognized at Varennes and captured by the revolutionaries. He was returned to Paris where he remained as constitutional king until 1792. In August 1792 the National Assembly abolished the office of King. Louis was arrested (August 10), tried (from December 11) and convicted of treason before the National Assembly. He was sentenced to death (January 17) by guillotine with 361 votes to 288, with 72 effective abstentions.

King Louis XVI was beheaded in front of a cheering crowd on January 21, 1793. On his death, his eight-year-old son, Louis-Charles de France, automatically became to royalists the de jure King Louis XVII of France, the ‘lost dauphin’.

His wife, Marie Antoinette, followed him to the guillotine on October 16, 1793.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia†.

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The Dreyfus Affair was a political cover-up which divided France for many years in the late 19th century.

[img]435|left|J’accuse![/img]It centered on the 1894 treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army. Dreyfus was, in fact, innocent: the conviction rested on false documents, and when high-ranking officers realised this they attempted to cover up the mistakes. The writer Emile Zola exposed the affair to the general public in the literary newspaper L’Aurore (The Dawn) in a famous open letter to the PrÈsident de la RÈpublique FÈlix Faure, titled J’accuse! (I Accuse!) on January 13, 1898. In the words of historian Barbara W. Tuchman, it was "one of the great commotions of history".

[img]437|right|Dreyfus’ degradation[/img] The virulence of the passions aroused by the case was due to the spread of Anti-Semitism in France. This may have been due partly to the failure of the Union GÈnÈrale–a Roman Catholic banking establishment which aimed at superseding Jewish finance–in 1885; it also may have been partly due to the publication of Edouard Drumont’s book La France Juive in 1886.

But the case itself was more immediately the outcome of the continuous attack upon the presence of the Jews as officers in the French army, spearheaded by Drumont and others in the journal "La Libre Parole" (founded with the help of the Jesuits in 1892.) The articles of the "Libre Parole," which denounced French Jewish officers as being future traitors, led a Jewish captain of dragoons, CrÈmieu-Foa, to declare that he resented as a personal insult the slanderous assault made upon the body of Jewish officers. He fought a duel, first with Drumont, then with Lamase, under whose name the articles had appeared. It had been agreed that the report of the proceedings should not be made public. The brother of CrÈmieu-Foa, following the advice of Captain Esterhazy, one of the Jewish captain’s seconds, communicated the information to the journal "Matin."

The Marquis de MorËs, who had been chief second of Lamase, and was a well-known anti-Semite and famous duellist, held Captain Mayer, chief second of CrÈmieu-Foa, responsible for the breach of confidentiality. Though innocent of the matter, Mayer accepted a challenge from the marquis. The duel was fought on June 23, the Jewish captain being mortally wounded at the first attack; he died a few days after the duel. Owing to the sensation that was caused by this event, the "Libre Parole" thought it wise to stop the campaign against the Jewish officers until further orders.

[img]434|left|Zola at Trial[/img] Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899, readmitted into the army, and made a knight in the Legion of Honour. The factions in the Dreyfus affair remained in place for decades afterwords. The far right remained a potent force, as did the moderate liberals. The liberal victory played an important role in pushing the far right to the fringes of French politics. It also helped encourage regulations such as the 1911 separation of Church and state. The coalitions of partisan anti-Dreyfusards remained toghether, but turned to other causes. Groups like Maurras’ Action Francais that were created during the affair continued for decades. The right-wing Vichy regime was composed mostly of old anti-Drefusards or their descendants. It is now universally agreed that Dreyfus was innocent, but his statues and monuments continue to be vandalised.

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