General Mercier’s proposal was accepted. The law re-establishing the Salvation Islands as a place of deportation was passed without a debate by the Chamber of Deputies on 12 February 1895. Vincent Duclert believes that Mercier changed the place for Dreyfus’s exile not merely to appease public opinion and ensure that Dreyfus did not escape, but also to punish him for his stubborn refusal to confess. ‘The idea of a law re-establishing the Salvation Islands was his response to Dreyfus’s defiance of the established truth’; and this change to the law was only one part of the ‘expiatory punishment’ that he planned for the guilty man. A whole raft of orders and directives particular to Dreyfus added up to a truly horrific regime.69
Mercier may also have borne in mind some statistics: of the 7,000 convicts sent to the Salvation Islands in 1856, some 2,500 had died before the year was out.70 The death penalty may have been abolished for political crimes, but for a man as enfeebled as Alfred Dreyfus already was, malaria would do the work of the guillotine.
* The same argument was advanced, and was accepted by the courts, by the British intelligence service in the twenty-first century.
7
The Salvation Islands
1: Transportation
Awaiting deportation in a cell in the Santé prison, Dreyfus was without the modest solace of a governor who believed him innocent, as had Forzinetti at the Cherche-Midi. He could receive visits and enter into correspondence; together with an English grammar which Alfred had requested to help pass the time by learning the language, Lucie had sent into the prison ‘a sturdy portable inkwell’. Her visits were severely circumscribed; they had to be in the presence of the Governor who would place himself between Dreyfus and his wife, and Dreyfus was not allowed to approach her, let alone embrace her.1 Lucie asked if she could be allowed to kiss her husband if her hands were tied behind her back. Her request was refused.
It was therefore easier for them to express their feelings in their correspondence, and Lucie’s letters, sent to Dreyfus while he was in prison both before and after his degradation, reveal a remarkable devotion unaffected by what she must have learned about Alfred’s philandering in the course of his trial, and it was this devotion that saved him from despair. ‘You are the single thread that attaches me to life,’ he wrote to her from Cherche-Midi prison on Christmas Eve of 1894. ‘I am proud of you and will try to be worthy of you.’2 Vincent Duclert describes their exchange of letters as ‘one of the most beautiful love correspondences of all time’,3 and it is notable that, even though others had not read her letters,* Lucie’s devotion to her husband inspired respect in even his most vociferous detractors. Ruth Harris points out that ‘as the daughter of a wealthy diamond merchant, and an Alsatian Jewess, Lucie . . . could have made an irresistible target for anti-Semitism and envy. However, despite its savagery, La Croix never once attacked her; she was a model of motherly and wifely virtue utterly beyond reproach . . .’4
‘Mon trésor chéri’, ‘Poor dear Freddy’, ‘Je t’embrasse comme je t’aime’, ‘Bon soir et bonne nuit’, ‘Je t’embrasse de toutes mes forces’.5 In the same way as a sailor fished out of a freezing ocean is revived by the warmth of another human body, so Lucie’s letters, imbued with conjugal passion, sustained her husband. She was still only twenty-five, ten years younger than Dreyfus, but she now revealed a strength of character all the more remarkable given her sheltered upbringing. She made Alfred promise not to take his own life and fortified him with her own fervent belief in his rehabilitation. ‘My line of conduct is clear. I will never leave you. Never. I do not want to live, I cannot live, except for you.’6 ‘God will make up to you for it all and will recompense you a hundredfold for your suffering.’7 ‘You are strong in your innocence; imagine that it is someone other than yourself who is being dishonoured; accept the unmerited punishment; do it for me, for the wife who loves you. Give this proof of affection, do it for your children; they will be grateful to you one day.’8
Like the wives of the Russian Decembrists who accompanied their husbands to exile in Siberia, Lucie was determined to join Alfred in New Caledonia, his presumed destination. ‘The law allows the wives and children of convicts to follow them. I don’t see what objection there could be to that.’ When Alfred tried to deter her, she rounded on him:
Do you not wish me to join you? No, my treasure, you won’t make me change my mind. By refusing me the happiness of living with you out there you are demanding a sacrifice which is beyond me. I am ready to support anything, but I want to suffer with you, at your side, I want to fight with you. I will not abandon you. Our children will be well brought up by my parents and your brothers, until we are able to look after them ourselves. I have already said it, my darling, far from you I cannot win, I would suffer too much.9
Even when she learned that Alfred was to be deported not to New Caledonia but to the inhospitable Salvation Islands, Lucie was determined to join him. ‘I suffer so much from being separated from you that I have made another appeal to go and share your exile. I shall at least have the happiness of living the same life as you, of being near you, and showing you how much I love you.’10 Her family, however, knew better than she did what the living conditions were likely to be on the Salvation Islands, as did the French authorities. When the Minister for the Colonies asked the Governor of French Guiana about the possibility of Lucie joining ‘the convict’ in October 1895, he received the answer: ‘Just returned from a tour of Devil’s Island. Judge it impossible to introduce a woman convict.’11
Alfred himself must have realised that the Salvation Islands would be a less pleasant place to serve his sentence than New Caledonia, but this did not unduly upset him because he was confident that it would not be long before the grotesque judicial error of which he was a victim was revealed. Such was his respect for the army hierarchy, he could not conceive of any bad faith behind his prosecution; he had particular confidence in General de Boisdeffre, the Chief of the General Staff, who had once taken him aside on an army inspection and shown great interest in what he had to say. His hopes were also pinned on promises made to him by Commandant du Paty de Clam on that final visit to the Cherche-Midi prison when du Paty had tried to get Dreyfus to admit that he had given documents to the Germans in an attempt to obtain secrets from them in return.
The deal offered by du Paty was merely that, in return for a partial confession, Dreyfus would be subjected to a less rigorous regime when serving his sentence. When Dreyfus had repeated yet again that he had had no dealings with the Germans whatsoever, du Paty said: ‘If you are innocent, you are the greatest martyr of all time.’12 Dreyfus’s protestations of innocence, however, were not merely to avoid martyrdom; he was as horrified as were his accusers to think that there was a traitor at the heart of the High Command. Knowing that he was not that traitor, he tried to impress upon du Paty de Clam the need to continue his investigations. He extracted from du Paty a promise that they would continue, and that he personally would keep Dreyfus informed of their progress.
Once du Paty had left, Dreyfus wrote a letter to General Mercier to make the same point as he had made to du Paty – that the traitor was still at large. ‘I have been convicted, and have no special mercy or pardon to ask of you. But in the name of my honour, which I hope will be restored to me one day, I have the duty to implore you to continue your investigation. After I am gone, keep the search alive. This is the sole mercy that I request.’13 Of course neither du Paty nor Mercier was disposed to show mercy in this or any other way. They had found the traitor. Dreyfus was guilty. The case was closed.
Mercier also had other, more important matters on his mind. On 14 January 1895, while Dreyfus was still in the Santé prison, the Prime Minister, Charles Dupuy, resigned. The next day, the President of France, Jean Casimir-Perier, followed suit. He had been elected six months before following the assassination of President Carnot. Hitherto an active politician, he had been sidelined and ignored as President by ministers, while at the same time being vilified in the press
because of his wealth and privileged background. This led to a rapid disenchantment and now his resignation.
Under the constitution of the Third Republic, the president was chosen by the deputies and senators of the National Assembly. These now dismissed Casimir-Perier’s resignation as the nervous tantrum of a spoiled dilettante too sensitive for the rough and tumble of political life,14 and looked for a man to replace him who was more likely to appreciate the perks and trappings that went with being France’s head of state. General Mercier’s name was put forward as ‘the patriot general’ who had unmasked the traitor Dreyfus, but the memory of Boulanger was too fresh in the minds of the politicians for them to consider a soldier, even a republican one, as head of state. In the first round of voting, he received only three votes. The final choice was a genial businessman, the deputy for the northern port of Le Havre, Félix Faure. Once elected President, Faure asked Léon Bourgeois to form a government and, when Bourgeois had failed to secure a majority, Alexandre Ribot. Ribot disliked Mercier and chose General Émile Zurlinden as his Minister of War. General Mercier, now out of government, returned to active service as Commander of the 16th Army Corps.
On the evening of Thursday, 17 January, Dreyfus was already asleep on his bunk in his cell in the Santé prison, looking forward to a visit from Lucie the next day, when the door was opened and an official of the Ministry of the Interior, accompanied by three deputies, entered the cell. The official told Dreyfus to get dressed at once and then ‘had me hurriedly handcuffed while I was scarcely dressed, and gave me no time even to pick up my eye-glasses’.15 With no overcoat to protect him from the cold, he was taken in a closed cab to the Gare d’Orsay. There he was locked into a narrow cage in a railway compartment fitted out for the transport of prisoners; handcuffed and shackled, he had space in which to sit down but not to stretch his legs.
The train left the station for La Rochelle on the western coast of France. After frequent requests, Dreyfus was given some bread, cheese and black coffee. It was a journey of many hours in cramped conditions and, even after they had reached La Rochelle at midday on Friday the 18th, Dreyfus was not removed from his coach. A number of curious onlookers gathered to watch the prisoners taken from the train for transportation to the Île de Ré, a couple of miles off the coast, sensed from the demeanour of the guards that someone of significance was among the convicts, and then learned that that someone was the traitor Alfred Dreyfus. The word spread, and the group became a crowd. The shout went up: ‘Death to the traitor! Death to the Jew!’ Dreyfus remained the whole afternoon in the barred compartment of the stationary carriage, listening to the abuse of the growing crowd outside. Finally at nightfall he was taken from the coach. As soon as he was seen leaving the train, the crowd surged forward to attack him. He was struck by fists as his guards formed an inadequate cordon around him. Dreyfus, by his own account, remained impassive: ‘I even felt myself alone in the middle of the crowd, and was ready to give up my body. My soul remained my own.’
Were it not for the phalanx of guards, Dreyfus would no doubt have been lynched by the crowd. He remained remarkably sanguine about the hatred he inspired. ‘I heard the perfectly legitimate cries of a brave and noble people raised against a man they thought was a traitor, the lowest of wretches,’ he would later write to Lucie, who had been ignorant of his ordeal; her family had removed the newspapers describing the fracas at La Rochelle before she had a chance to read them. He had an almost mystical desire to break away from his guards and offer up his body to the crowd hoping that this would somehow convince them of the purity of his soul. But the guards knew their duty: they threw him into a prison wagon and drove him, pursued by the crowd, to the port of La Palice where he embarked on a boat to take him to Saint-Martin on the Île de Ré.
It was snowing and extremely cold. From the jetty, Dreyfus was marched through the snow to the gates of the huge fortress built to the design of Vauban during the reign of Louis XIV; it replaced an earlier citadel which had held out against an English army under the Duke of Buckingham sent to raise Cardinal Richelieu’s siege of the Protestants in La Rochelle. Huguenots and Jansenists had been imprisoned there and, since the Revolution of 1789, it had been used to assemble prisoners condemned to deportation to penal colonies – the bagne. During the Directory, several hundred Catholic priests who had refused to take the oath of loyalty to the republican regime had been held there, their deportation thwarted by the British fleet; many had died from their ill-treatment and privations.
At the gates of the fortress, the official of the Ministry of Justice handed Dreyfus over to the prison Governor. He was strip-searched, then locked up in a cell adjacent to the guard post; there was an aperture in the cell door through which, every two hours, day and night, the guards checked up on their illustrious prisoner. He remained in solitary confinement. His daily exercise was taken alone. He was searched daily. Smoking was forbidden. Twice a week, paper and pen were brought into his cell so that he could write to his wife. Other forms of writing or study were forbidden.
After two and a half weeks held incommunicado, Dreyfus was told that he was to be allowed a visit from his wife. Lucie made the arduous journey in the bitter cold to the Île de Ré on 13 February accompanied by Alfred’s brother-in-law, the businessman from Carpentras, Joseph Valabrègue. Once again, the Governor had received instructions not to allow the married couple to touch one another, and sat between the two during their twenty-minute encounter. Only news of family members was permitted; they could not discuss Alfred’s case or his incarceration. Nonetheless, both felt ‘a great interior happiness’ at seeing one another once again.
A second visit under the same conditions took place the following day. Lucie then returned to Paris but was back on the Île de Ré for two further visits on 20 and 21 February. Lucie again asked that, if her hands were tied behind her back, she might be allowed to kiss her husband; again the request was refused. This final meeting lasted an hour. Lucie then left the fortress and Alfred was taken back to his cell. They would not see one another again for more than four years.
Only hours after the departure of his wife, Dreyfus was told to put his few personal effects into a suitcase and prepare to depart. After being strip-searched yet again, he was escorted by six guards to a steam-launch which took him to the warship Saint-Nazaire. Once on board, he was locked into a cell beneath the bridge, with a metal grille gate that provided no protection against the cold. A hammock was thrown into the cell. He was not told where he was being taken. He was given no food. After having so recently been with his wife, knowing that he was to be cut off from her and his children in an unknown location and for an indefinite period of time, Dreyfus’s morale collapsed. He threw himself on to the floor in the corner of his cell and wept.
2: Devil’s Island – 1
The Îles du Salut, or Salvation Islands, lie in the Atlantic Ocean around sixteen kilometres off the coast of French Guiana and 150 kilometres north-west of its border with Brazil. Though closer to the port of Kourou at the mouth of the Kourou river, the islands were served by the larger port and regional capital, Cayenne, forty-three kilometres to the south-east. The two larger islands, the Île Royale and Île Saint-Joseph, had, since the early years of the Second Empire, housed a penal colony which had taken the name of the third and smallest of the three, Devil’s Island.* Devil’s Island itself, difficult to access because of the strong currents in the Passe des Grenadines which separated it from the Île Royale, had been used to isolate those convicts with leprosy. Ruins of the leper colony remained among the scrub and palm trees, the only vegetation on the island of volcanic rock.
Throughout the month of March and the first half of April 1895, Alfred Dreyfus was held in the prison on the Île Royale. This was part of a network of penal settlements in French Guiana, some on the mainland such as a centre for deportees at Saint-Jean-du-Maroni or camps deep in the jungle such as Godebert or Charvein where convicts condemned to forced labour would work in abominable condition
s clearing the forests for roads and canals. Each metre of the road built linking Cayenne to Saint-Jean-du-Maroni was said to cost the life of a convict and each kilometre the life of a warden – an exaggeration, because twenty years after the construction started, the road had got no further than twenty-four kilometres and, of the 500 convicts who worked on it, 178 died.16
Three categories of offenders were sent to French Guiana. The first were the transportés, the deportees, guilty of serious crimes – armed robbers or murderers who for one reason or another had escaped the guillotine. Whatever the length of their sentence, these major criminals were forbidden ever to return to France. Even those with sentences of less than eight years were caught by the law of 1854 which imposed le doublage, confinement in French Guiana after their release for a period equal to their sentence.
The second category were the political prisoners, the déportés politiques, found guilty of espionage, treason, desertion, even counterfeiting. They were sentenced either to simple deportation or, like Dreyfus, not just to deportation but to detention in ‘a fortified enclosure’.
The third category of deportee were the relégués, recidivists who under the law of 27 May 1885 were sent to French Guiana if they had four convictions or more for theft, swindling, offences against public decency, habitual enticement of minors to debauchery, vagabondage or mendacity. Half of the deportees for life were petty criminals of this kind. They were not necessarily sentenced to forced labour; some had merely been deported and had only to report to the prison administration from time to time. They were even permitted to marry. Of the 52,000 convicts and 15,600 relégués transported to French Guiana, 850 were women.17 However, the more lenient regime of the relégués, like that of the libérés, the liberated prisoners, was still harsh. The prisoners who had served their sentence, often doubled, had no money to pay for a ticket back to France. Among the libérés, the journalist Albert Londres counted 2,448 ‘whites without a roof, without clothes, without food, without work and without hope of a job. All were hungry. They are dogs without owners. Their sentence is served. They have paid. Has one the right to condemn someone for the same fault twice over?’18
The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two Page 14