As soon as he arrived in Paris, Mathieu Dreyfus set to work to expose the absurdity of the charges brought against his brother. The only contact that Lucie had had with the prosecuting authorities was Commandant du Paty de Clam, and Mathieu at once sent his nephew Paul, the eighteen-year-old son of his brother Jacques who was in Paris at the time, to the offices of the General Staff to request an interview. Paul was received by du Paty. ‘I have searched for the truth,’ the monocled officer told the young man. ‘Your uncle is guilty. He is a wretch, a two-faced monster leading a double life – normal and correct with his wife, secretive and mysterious with loose women.’ He then raved about his own marriage and the death of his wife, spoke of the ‘indignity’ of treason against women, and said that a man who betrayed his wife was quite capable of betraying his country. The young Paul Dreyfus left in tears.33
That afternoon, du Paty called on Lucie and Mathieu Dreyfus at the apartment at 6, avenue du Trocadéro accompanied by the archivist from the Statistical Section, Félix Gribelin. ‘The charges are devastating,’ he told Mathieu. ‘There is not one chance in a thousand that your brother is innocent. Moreover, he has already half confessed to me.’ He repeated what he had said to Paul. ‘Your brother was leading a double life. He was seeing women. He is a monster, a two-faced monster. He had a hole right here.’ Du Paty pointed to his forehead.
Mathieu asked if he could see his brother and confront him with these charges. ‘Put the witnesses that you need in the same room behind doors, or in a next-door room; conceal them in such a way that my brother believes that he is alone with me. I swear to you that I will ask him “Alfred, did you do it? Tell me whether you are guilty or not.” If he says yes, I will hand him a gun with which to kill himself.’
‘Never, never,’ said du Paty. ‘One word, a single word, could mean a European war.’34
It was now clear to Mathieu that Commandant du Paty de Clam was not susceptible to a reasoned argument: he felt he was talking to a lunatic and was appalled that his brother’s fate lay in this man’s hands.35 The court martial would go ahead and his brother would need the very best legal representation. Who would take the brief? Lucie’s cousin, the philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, knew one of France’s pre-eminent lawyers, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. A native of Nantes, Waldeck-Rousseau had impeccable republican credentials: his father René had played a role in the revolution of 1848. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1876, he promoted reforms to France’s judicial system and the legal recognition of trades unions. Despite coming from a Catholic family, he had supported the laicisation of primary education enforced by Jules Ferry in 1881–2, and had voted in favour of military service for seminarians, Sunday working and divorce.
In 1889, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau had given up politics to devote his time to the practice of law. Big money was being made at the Paris bar by lawyer-politicians such as Eugène Étienne, Georges Leygues, Louis Barthou and Raymond Poincaré (Poincaré represented the Schneider-Creusot armaments industry).36 The year before the arrest of Dreyfus, Waldeck-Rousseau had successfully defended Gustav Eiffel on charges of corruption following the Panama Canal scandal. Lévy-Bruhl arranged a meeting between Mathieu and this eminent lawyer, but after considering the brief for a couple of days, Waldeck-Rousseau turned it down. He claimed that he no longer took on criminal cases – but, had that been the case, he would not have agreed to look at the brief in the first place. The true reason was that he was about to return to politics, standing for the Senate in the staunchly Catholic department of the Loire. A lifelong proponent of liberty and equality before the law, he nonetheless sensed the political risks involved in defending a Jewish officer accused of treason. His advice to Mathieu was to approach another eminent lawyer who had no involvement in politics and specialised in criminal law, Edgar Demange.
Edgar Demange, at the age of fifty-three, was at the summit of a successful career. Having won a national debating contest as a young man, he had made his name by taking on sensational cases, successfully defending Prince Pierre Bonaparte – the son of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, charged with the murder of a twenty-two-year-old journalist, Victor Noir – and some of the anarchists arraigned after a bomb was thrown into the Chamber of Deputies. It was Demange who had secured the acquittal of the Marquis de Morès after his duel with Captain Armand Mayer. Of particular value in the case of Dreyfus were Demange’s religious beliefs and links to the army: he was a devout Catholic, the son of an army officer and married to the daughter of a general.
At first, Demange proved to be as reluctant as Waldeck-Rousseau to take the case. However, Mathieu persisted and Demange agreed to consider the brief when, after d’Ormescheville had completed his inquiries, he could study the papers. The report was submitted to General Saussier on 3 December. The next day Demange was permitted to visit Alfred Dreyfus in the Cherche-Midi prison and there he told him bluntly that if, after studying the papers that he was to receive later that day, he felt that Dreyfus was guilty, he would not take the case. He warned both Alfred and Mathieu of the risk they ran in accepting these terms. ‘If my conscience prevents me from defending your brother, my refusal will become known . . . I will be your brother’s first judge.’37 Confident that he would find no credible evidence, the two brothers asked him to go ahead.
Demange read d’Ormescheville’s dossier overnight and on 5 December summoned Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus to his chambers. He told them that he had studied the indictment and that, in his view, Alfred Dreyfus had no case to answer. The only evidence against him was a single unsigned, undated document which might or might not be in his handwriting – a matter upon which the expert graphologists failed to agree. He told them that he was appalled by ‘the incoherence and hate’ emanating from d’Ormescheville’s report: an examining magistrate should have been impartial. ‘If Captain Dreyfus were not Jewish,’ he concluded, ‘he would not be in prison.’38
The court martial opened on 19 December 1894, in a small courtroom within the Cherche-Midi military prison. Interested parties such as Mathieu Dreyfus and a large number of journalists jostled to find seats. There were seven judges, presided over by Colonel E. Maurel. None had any particular training in the law. One had been seconded from a cavalry regiment, six from the infantry. None was from a regiment of artillery. The prosecutor was Commandant André Brisset, counsel for the defence Edgar Demange.
The defendant, Alfred Dreyfus, was escorted into the court. He saluted the judges. When he gave his age as thirty-five, André Bataille, covering the trial for Le Figaro, was incredulous: he seemed more like fifty. Brisset, the prosecutor, opened the proceedings by asking that, in the interests of national security, the court martial be held in camera. Demange protested, but he was overruled: the judges agreed to a closed session. The public gallery was cleared. Only the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine, and Commandant Georges Picquart, appointed as their official observer by the War Ministry and General Staff, were permitted to remain.
Alfred Dreyfus was called to the witness stand; he gave evidence in the same monotonous tone that had consistently been remarked upon throughout his career. His answers were clear and precise. There were no histrionics, no displays of emotion. This cerebral man with his faith in reason was confident that a dispassionate demonstration of the facts would be enough to establish his innocence.
It was only when the court started to hear the testimony of some of Dreyfus’s superiors – Gonse, Fabre, d’Aboville and, above all, Commandant du Paty de Clam that it became evident that common sense might not prevail. Du Paty claimed that Dreyfus had given himself away when writing to his dictation in the office of General de Boisdeffre on 15 October: realising that the words he was writing were those of the bordereau, he had started to tremble. Demange, in cross-examination, pointed to the paper in question and showed that there was no change whatsoever in the handwriting. That was only to be expected, du Paty replied. Dreyfus, aware that he was under suspicion, had mastered his emotions. ‘I wanted to see if he had b
een warned; questioned closely by me, he should have trembled. But he did not tremble, so he was pretending, he was warned. An innocent individual who had been brought there with nothing to hide would have trembled at the accusation, would have made a movement of some kind.’39
Commandant Picquart, the official observer from the War Ministry, was ‘embarrassed’ by du Paty’s line of argument and it did not seem to convince the judges. At this stage in the trial, Picquart thought that Dreyfus would be acquitted, and so did the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine. The lack of a clear motive was a grave weakness in the prosecution’s case. Du Paty scraped the barrel in suggesting that money paid by a German insurance company after a fire in one of the Dreyfus family’s factories was a covert reward for treason.40 No reference was made in the prosecution’s submission to Dreyfus’s religion or race: ‘the prosecution did not try to bolster it by aspersions [sic] about Dreyfus’s racial or religious background, by asserting that Jews were naturally treacherous’.41 But Dreyfus was nonetheless plausible in the role in which he had been cast. Lépine, who was a civilian and an experienced witness of many trials, found that the manner in which Dreyfus protested his innocence was unconvincing. ‘His voice was atonal, lazy, his face white . . . Nothing in his attitude was of a kind to evoke sympathy, despite the tragic situation in which he found himself . . . Occasionally, in the course of the debates, his face twitched convulsively; sometimes a tremor came over it, but there was no expression of indignation, no cri de coeur, no expression of feeling . . .’42 Picquart, too, thought that Dreyfus should have risen to the occasion and defended himself ‘in the style of the times’. The clerk of the court, Vallecalle, was later to say: ‘in his place, I would have yelled my head off’.43
Commandant Picquart reported daily on the progress of the trial to General Mercier and Colonel Sandherr; Sandherr was also kept informed by Henry and Lauth, ‘who shuttled between the court room and the Ministry of War’.44 All became worried by the prospect of an acquittal. It was time for a dramatic intervention. Henry, who was a friend of one of the judges, Commandant Gallet, sent him a note asking to be recalled to give further evidence.
Henry, the officer who had risen from the ranks, with the Légion d’Honneur pinned on his breast, returned to the witness stand. With his bluff manner he came across as the kind of honest trooper who could be relied upon to call a spade a spade. He now told the court that in his earlier testimony he had withheld evidence because of its sensitivity, but now he felt he must tell all. In February of that year, ‘an honourable person’ had warned the Statistical Section that an officer in the Second Bureau was selling secrets to the Germans. He had repeated his warning in June. Henry was referring to Val Carlos, the agent in the Spanish Embassy, but he then went far beyond what Val Carlos had said. Pointing at Dreyfus, Henry said in a loud, portentous voice: ‘And that is the man!’
Furious, Dreyfus leaped to his feet and demanded to know the name of this ‘honourable’ man. Demange, equally indignant, insisted that the informant be summoned as a witness. What was his name? Slapping his head, Henry said: ‘When an officer has a secret like that in his head, he keeps it even from his cap!’
‘Do you affirm, on your honour,’ Colonel Maurel, the President of the court, asked Henry, ‘that the treasonous officer was Captain Dreyfus?’
Pointing now at the crucifix on the wall, Henry said solemnly: ‘I swear to it.’
The character witnesses now called in favour of Dreyfus did not undo the impression left by Henry’s testimony. The Chief Rabbi of Paris, also called Dreyfus and speaking in a Yiddish accent, told the court that it was inconceivable that Alfred would betray his country. The philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a physician named Vaucaire and Arthur Amson, a prominent industrialist, said the same but were not the kind of people to impress the military judges. Character witnesses from the army had been hard to find: Dreyfus now paid the price for his aloofness in the officers’ mess. At first Mathieu had found only one officer, Commandant Clément, willing to testify in his brother’s favour. Subsequently, ‘after much prodding by the family’, four other officers agreed to submit depositions describing Dreyfus as a ‘good and loyal soldier’.45
Dreyfus himself would later make excuses for the failure of his comrades to come forward to defend him. Told by General Gonse that he was guilty, and that there was proof of his guilt, it was impossible for them to believe otherwise. ‘From that time on,’ he was later told by a colleague at the École de Guerre, ‘we forgot all your qualities, all the friendly relations we had had with you, and concentrated only on searching in our memories for any fact that might corroborate the certainty of your guilt. All was grist to that same mill.’46
The criminologist Bertillon took the stand to testify that, in his opinion, Dreyfus had written the bordereau. Certainly, there were small but clear differences between samples of Dreyfus’s handwriting and the handwriting of the bordereau noted by the graphologists Gobert and Pelletier, but these showed only that Dreyfus had tried to disguise his own handwriting. It was an ‘auto-forgery’. He had traced letters used by his brother and his wife. A spy who knew he was under suspicion would hardly write spontaneously in his own hand.
On 21 December, the prosecutor Brisset summed up the case against Dreyfus that followed closely the indictment prepared by d’Ormescheville. The next day, Demange made his final plea for the defence. In a three-hour oration he demonstrated that none of the evidence against Dreyfus amounted to proof. He dismissed the stories of Dreyfus’s love affairs as worthless gossip and ridiculed du Paty’s suggestion that Dreyfus’s knowledge of foreign languages, excellent memory and curiosity about military matters meant he was a spy. Equally absurd was du Paty’s inverted logic – that the failure to find any incriminating evidence in Dreyfus’s flat proved that it had been either hidden or destroyed, and that the absence of any change in Dreyfus’s handwriting when taking dictation showed the sangfroid of a traitor. And the prosecution had failed to come up with a credible motive. Why would an officer with substantial private means who was well known for his patriotism, and whose career in the army had been a remarkable success, sell military secrets to the Germans?
However, Demange told the judges, these were all matters of secondary importance. At the heart of the case was the torn scrap of paper filched from the waste-paper basket of the German military attaché – the bordereau – and there was no proof that it had been written by Dreyfus. First, as to its substance: no evidence had been presented to establish that Dreyfus had seen documents relating to the hydraulic brake on the new cannon or that he had had access to confidential information on the deployment of ‘covering troops’; and no officer from the First Bureau had been found to say that Dreyfus could have obtained confidential information on artillery formations or plans for the invasion of Madagascar. No superior officer had given evidence that Dreyfus had asked to see the artillery manual of 1894, let alone asked to take it away for study. As for the final phrase, ‘I am off on manoeuvres,’ at no point when serving as an intern on the General Staff had Dreyfus taken part in manoeuvres.
And finally the handwriting of the bordereau: Demange ridiculed Demange’s theory of an auto-forgery, and insisted to the judges that difference of opinion among the expert graphologists on the question of the handwriting meant that at the very least there was a reasonable doubt, and if there was a reasonable doubt Captain Dreyfus must be acquitted.
Dreyfus himself was pleased with his counsel’s closing speech. ‘Maître Demange, in his eloquent address, refuted the expert reports, demonstrated all the contradictions and asked how it could have erected a charge of this kind without supplying any motive. An acquittal seemed certain.’47 Lépine, having seen Demange act for the anarchists, had a high opinion of his skills as an advocate and judged his closing speech ‘very fine’, but thought he laid too much emphasis on the bordereau and seemed to rein in his eloquence for fear it would alienate the military judges. In a civilian court, his strategy would have been co
rrect: the bordereau was at the heart of the case against Dreyfus and, had he been addressing civilian judges trained in the law, he would only have had to establish that there was a reasonable doubt and the case would have collapsed. But the judges were soldiers, not lawyers, and it went against the grain of their military training to doubt the judgement of their superiors on the General Staff.
Demange himself realised that the protocols found in civilian courts had not been adhered to by the military: he had observed the comings and goings of du Paty, Sandherr, Lauth and Picquart and the exchanges these officers had had with the prosecutor, Commandant Brisset, the witnesses and even the judges.48 What he could not know was that, when the judges retired to consider their verdict, they took with them a sealed envelope that Commandant du Paty de Clam had handed to the President of the court, Colonel Maurel, asking him to consider its contents in the name of the Minister of War. Maurel broke the seal and the seven judges now saw the different pieces of evidence compiled by the Statistical Section with du Paty’s commentary, showing how they corroborated the evidence against Dreyfus. None of the judges appeared to appreciate that it was illegal to submit evidence not seen by the defence.
The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two Page 12