Picquart and Picard

One finds that those general knowledge-type things everyone is supposed to know, like those historical facts we all had in school--it was there in the textbook, there in the lecture, and you must have remembered it long enough to answer the question on the test--almost nobody knows, in the sense of being able to recall them, let alone say anything of substance about them. Just consider how many British kids don't know what the Battle of Britain is, in spite of the ceaseless output of Heritage drama about it.

I would imagine that, especially for those of us outside France, the Dreyfus Affair is considerably more obscure than that, and that those who remember at least hearing of it, and are perhaps even capable of saying something about what it involved, can still tell us less about Alfred Dreyfus than his distant relation, Julia-Louis Dreyfus.

As it happens a crucial figure in the affair was French Army intelligence chief, Colonel Georges Picquart, who discovered evidence of the innocence of the court-martialed Alfred Dreyfus and refused to let it go, at great personal cost and risk to himself, ultimately contributing to the clearing of Dreyfus' name.

Picquart, as described by William Shirer in his classic The Collapse of the Third Republic, was a "deep student of history, philosophy, and literature," whose "cultivated mind never ceased to grow, so that his horizons were broader than those of most of his colleagues." He was also "a man of strong character who had a burning allegiance to abstract justice that outweighed any considerations of career."

Naturally I have often wondered if "Georges Picquart" was not an inspiration for "Jean-Luc Picard."

So far as I can tell, though, no one has tried to connect those two particular dots, likely because so few are aware one of those dots even exists.