On Thursday, two years after France's controversial retirement age increase, the National Assembly voted to withdraw the reform. While the news was politically explosive because the far-right National Rally helped the left-wing opposition gain a majority in the vote, the decision hasn't yielded any actual legal results.

The situation reflects the country's ongoing failure to address structural reforms since the parliamentary elections last summer, which left the government won without an absolute majority.

But in the area of remembrance policy there has been significant movement. In the same week as the toothless retirement resolution, parliamentarians adopted three texts that reclassify historical events or offer the prospect of reparations.

On June 2, the French parliament voted unanimously to posthumously appoint Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general. The Jewish officer was wrongly accused of high treason in 1894, based on falsified evidence that he revealed military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Dreyfus subsequently spent four years in the notorious Devil's Island penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.

The Franco-German dimension of the case had explosive foreign policy implications even then. The suspect's Jewish origins and........

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