The new face of France's far-right is reopening the wounds of a century-old scandal

It’s been more than a century since the Dreyfus affair first electrified France.

But when a museum dedicated to the infamous saga flung open its doors recently on the banks of the River Seine, it seemed to carry an unwelcome resonance.

The false accusation that a Jewish army captain was a German spy divided France at the time but has long stood as a symbol of the nationalist fervor that swept the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This new effort to memorialize the episode was launched amid fresh fears of far-right success — and a renewed fight over French identity and history.

Éric Zemmour, a firebrand TV pundit turned presidential candidate who is himself Jewish, shocked many in the country and beyond by questioning the innocence of the wrongly convicted Alfred Dreyfus, according to local media reports, and by claiming that France’s wartime Vichy regime had “protected” French Jews while handing over foreign ones. Zemmour has said he wants France to be proud of its history. “Our glorious past speaks in favor of our future,” he said in a video announcing his candidacy last month.