On February 11, 1912, an estimated 120,000 people in Paris participated in a ceremony that was at once moving and macabre: a public procession to Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where the remains of a soldier named Albert Aernoult would be incinerated after a series of angry speeches denouncing the circumstances of his death. This ceremony occurred at a pivotal point in the Aernoult-Rousset Affair, a three-year agitation over the practice of French military justice that was labeled a proletarian Dreyfus Affair. Aernoult had died in one of the French Army s Algerian penal camps in the summer of...
On February 11, 1912, an estimated 120,000 people in Paris participated in a ceremony that was at once moving and macabre: a public procession to P...
