Special Guest Blogger: Alfred Dreyfus

I was 10 years old when the Franco-Prussian War broke out and being Jewish, we had to move after the Germans annexed my home town which made me determined to join the military when i was old enough and on my 18th Birthday i enrolled in military school and three years later graduated as a sub-lieutenant in the French army and was assigned to the First Cavalry Division.
Life was good, i was in my chosen career and married the local beauty and then i was being truly smiled upon because i was chosen as a trainee in the French Army's General Staff headquarters, and after passing my exams, only had to have my job rubber stamped by the panel and i was a General although one of the other Generals refused to admit me, saying that i was Jewish and therefore unlikable and not desirable to have in his French Army and lowered my grade so i was beneath the cut off to be accepted.
Obviously i protested but was told it was out of their hands and that protest would come back to haunt me when a torn-up handwritten note containing French military secrets was found by a cleaner in a wastebasket addressed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache in Paris.
The Generals concluded that it had been written by a spy in the French military and suspicion fell upon the disgruntled, unlikable Jewish trainee who had been recently turned down for promotion.
I was arrested and convicted in a court martial where the main evidence was that my handwriting was different to the hand writing on the note which proved i had forged it (so much for French military intelligence) and i was stripped of my army rank and after having the rank insignia and braid cut from my uniform and my sword broken, i was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana.
For five long years i pleaded my innocence until the French military intelligence discovered that the real spy was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy who fled to England before he could be arrested and safely out of the French reach, confessed to a Newspaper that he wrote the note and therefore i should face a retrial.
I did get my retrial and was again found guilty of treason despite the evidence of my innocence as the military did not want to admit they had got it wrong but the public uproar forced the President to pardon me which set me free but meant that i had to accept guilt and remained  a traitor to France.
While at a funeral of one of my most vocal supporters, i was wounded in the arm by a gunshot after a failed assassination attempt by a right-wing journalist but i was finally found innocent and readmitted into the army just as World War I broke out and after serving throughout the war, i retired due to my ill health from my time in the prison and died aged 75 in Paris, a few years before the Nazi's invaded and installed the Vichy government with it's delirious antisemitism and demonising Jews which, to France's shame, was only slightly more Jew hating than the Government it replaced.