Tel Aviv is going to have its statue of captain Dreyfus. Replica of the bronze is installed at the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and the boulevard Raspail in Paris, the work of the sculptor and cartoonist Tim must be inaugurated Tuesday by Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv-Yafo and Anne Hidalgo, in the presence of the descendants of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus. The statue represents both Alfred Dreyfus, the foot, holding his sword broken in front of the face. It was commissioned in 1985 by Jack Lang when he was minister of Culture and had to be placed in the courtyard of the military School of Paris to the place where the captain was degraded.
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The idea made controversy. «It is necessary to give the military a example, not a remorse», commented François Mitterrand. «The homage to captain Dreyfus» was implanted after dilly-dallying in 1988 in the garden of the Tuileries. An attempt to transfer to the military School failed again in 1994 for the centenary of the arrest of the captain.
Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris, decided then to travel in the Life district. «There was pressure from all sorts of backgrounds against a maintenance in the Tuileries gardens. It was unpleasant,» recalls Claude Sitbon, a friend of Louis Mitelberg said Tim, who died in 2002. «I had proposed to the mayor of Jerusalem, that I would be advising at the time, to come but it was impossible because there are no statues of depictions of humans in that city in respect of judaism and islam,» says the essayist and sociologist. It is ultimately the double of the statue that has found its place in Israel at the French institute of Tel Aviv.
