Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde: A Tale of Two Scandals

The innocence of France’s Captain Dreyfus – a Jewish officer incarcerated on Devil’s Island after he was accused of spying for Germany – has long been established. But was there a real traitor? And what part did Oscar Wilde play in the murky affair?

Oscar Wilde arrived in Paris, the city where he would die impoverished less than three years later, on February 13th, 1898. Coincidentally, on the same day his last literary work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a passionate poetic protest at the cruelty of Victorian penal policy, was published in England.

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