Clearly, the most effective way to secure the release of Alfred Dreyfus would be to find the true traitor, and ‘it was widely rumoured that the Dreyfus family was trying to set up a “patsy” (un homme de paille, a straw man), another army officer who could be blamed for the treason of which Alfred Dreyfus was guilty’.2 The Director of the Sûreté – the criminal investigation department of the police – reported that Alfred’s mother-in-law, Mme Hadamard, had promised 100,000 francs to a former policeman, Soudari, if he would find the guilty man.
The police kept Mathieu Dreyfus and other members of the family under surveillance; it seemed possible that Mathieu had been complicit in his brother’s treason. They also wanted to know what they were doing to secure Alfred’s release. To avoid this surveillance, Mathieu and his wife Suzanne used the alias ‘Monsieur and Madame Mathieu’, and had Mathieu’s sister and brother-in-law, Henriette and Paul Valabrègue, sign leases and other official documents.3 In the wake of the hysteria that arose around Alfred’s trial and degradation, life became difficult for the traitor’s immediate family, or indeed anyone with the name of Dreyfus. After the degradation ceremony, many of those called Dreyfus, who were no relation of the family, abandoned the name ‘which had become synonymous with treason’.4 In January 1895, Alfred’s nephew was expelled from the lycée in Belfort, ‘for defending his uncle’s reputation and making insulting remarks about French officers; the expulsion, it was said, “is generally approved in Belfort”’. At the same time ‘another nephew abandoned a place at the École Polytechnique to go instead into the family firm’.5 In some circles the family of the traitor were treated as social pariahs: ‘many honest people . . . wanted to have nothing to do with Mathieu, with Alfred’s in-laws, or with anyone who was known to have contact with them. Any association with these rich and secretive Jews was assumed to be dangerous to an honest person’s reputation.’6
Mathieu Dreyfus was to devote not just his fortune but all of his time to Alfred’s rehabilitation. He gave up his position in the family firm in Mulhouse, leaving its direction to his brother Jacques, and moved to Paris. Lucie was happy to let Mathieu take charge. She had left the apartment on the avenue du Trocadéro and moved in with her parents. She told her children, Pierre and Jeanne, that their father had gone on a long journey, but she dressed in black as if a widow. The children were tutored at home, avoided playgrounds, and on trips to the country – the villa at Chatou belonging to their grandparents, or at Le Vésinet with the Lévy-Bruhls – were escorted by detectives hired by Mathieu.
Mathieu had to proceed with care. He was being watched, his mail was opened and attempts were made to suborn his servants by government agents. Since the theory was still current that the Germans had paid off Dreyfus by means of an insurance claim for a factory that was burned down in Mulhouse, it was possible that Mathieu might be charged as an accomplice. Edgar Demange, now emotionally as well as professionally engaged in the fate of his former client, warned Mathieu against keeping important documents in his home, to keep an eye on his servants and to avoid department stores where he might be arrested for shop-lifting after an item of merchandise had been surreptitiously slipped into his pocket.7 And, when it became known that money was on offer for information that might exonerate Alfred Dreyfus, Mathieu was approached by a number of ‘tricksters and fortune hunters’, any one of whom might have been an agent provocateur from the Sûreté or the Statistical Section.
Outside the family, there were few who were prepared to jeopardise their careers or social standing by joining the campaign for Dreyfus’s rehabilitation. Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, the celebrated lawyer and champion of liberty, was a close friend of Edgar Demange and must have known from him of the weakness of the case against Dreyfus, but if he had not been prepared to court political unpopularity by taking the case himself, he was certainly not prepared to stick his neck out now.
More courageous was Forzinetti, the Governor of the Cherche-Midi military prison, who had been convinced from the start that Dreyfus was innocent and now joined the small group who assembled at the Hadamards’ apartment to discuss how the campaign for his rehabilitation should proceed. Forzinetti had taken from the prison the copy of d’Ormescheville’s indictment as annotated by Alfred and now gave it to Mathieu, enabling him to see more precisely how biased the military magistrate’s inquiry had been. Patin, the Governor of the civilian prison of La Santé where Dreyfus had been held after his degradation, also believed that Dreyfus was innocent and offered his support to the family.
Initial approaches to potentially sympathetic journalists and politicians drew a blank. Mathieu secured interviews with senators such as Jules Siegfried and Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, Vice-President of the Senate and, as the last representative of the conquered Alsace, a senator for life. Siegfried, a former minister, promised to ensure that Alfred was well treated, while Scheurer-Kestner, after considering the matter, told Mathieu that ‘the information I have received leads me to believe in his guilt’.8 The same response came from another Mulhousian, a Monsieur Zurcher, who was a cousin of the new Minister of War, General Zurlinden: he told Mathieu that the Ministry had ‘copious and clear evidence’ of Alfred’s guilt. Mathieu even approached Ernest Judet, a nationalist journalist on Le Petit Journal, who on 13 January 1895 had attacked Edgar Demange, saying that his continuing insistence on the innocence of his client led to suspicions that he was complicit in his crime.9 Judet seemed to take on board what Mathieu had said and, when he departed, shook him by the hand.10
Mathieu followed every lead, however unpropitious. There was a doctor in Le Havre, a Protestant, Dr Joseph Gilbert, who thought Alfred was innocent. He took an interest in clairvoyance and invited Mathieu to Le Havre to consult a medium called Léonie. Spiritualism and clairvoyance were then in fashion, and this Norman peasant woman of around fifty impressed Mathieu with some of her inexplicable insights into his brother’s case. Mathieu travelled to and fro between Le Havre and Paris. Léonie revealed that the real traitor was an officer in the Ministry of War, that he worked through a German agent called Greber and that he was a former friend of Alfred’s who had turned against him when Alfred had refused to lend him money.11
Mathieu had such faith that Léonie would discover the name of the traitor in a hypnotic trance that he brought her to Paris and put her up in a flat on the rue de l’Arcade belonging to his sister, Louise Cahn. Later he moved Léonie into his own home. He had been shown by Dr Gilbert how to induce these trances and thought that her second sight would enable her to ‘visit’ his brother on Devil’s Island. In 1897 she told him that ‘Monsieur Alfred can no longer see the ocean. They have built a stockade for him.’ However, though the séances obsessed the whole family, they did not come up with the name of Monsieur Alfred’s false friend.
Dr Joseph Gilbert, the physician from Le Havre who had introduced Mathieu to Léonie, had been the family doctor of Félix Faure, formerly deputy for Le Havre and now President of France. The two men remained friends, and Gilbert, at Mathieu’s prompting, asked to see Faure. The request was made on 20 February 1895, but it was only on the morning of 21 October that the President received the physician at the Élysée Palace. In the face of his old friend’s nagging questions about the Dreyfus case, and his insistence that the evidence of the bordereau was wholly inadequate as proof, Faure, exasperated, told him that there had been other evidence not shown to the defence. ‘Dreyfus is guilty. He is guilty, there can be no doubt on that score. Very well, my dear friend, to put your mind at rest, I will tell you that he was not condemned on the facts that came out during the hearing, but upon the production of a document which was not shown to him, nor to M. Demange, for reasons of state.’12
With the President’s permission, Dr Gilbert repeated this dramatic revelation to Mathieu Dreyfus, who had been waiting for him at the Hôtel de l’Athénée. Mathieu was appalled. He was appalled not just by the fact that his brother had been condemned on the basis of secret evidence, but also by the insouciance
of the French President at this transgression of the most fundamental rules of justice. Worse still, he was to discover that this insouciance was shared by a handful of officers and politicians to whom the fact of this irregularity had been leaked by some of the judges at the court martial. Lieutenant-Colonel Echeman had mentioned it to a journalist on Le Gaulois and Commandant Freystaetter to Captain Picard, Alfred’s fellow stagiaire at the École de Guerre, also marked down in his final exams by General de Bonnefond who had said that he ‘did not want Jews on the General Staff’. Picard had passed on the information to a friend, Léon Lévy. Another of the judges, Commandant Florentin, had told a fellow officer, a Captain Potier, about the secret dossier. All in all, around twenty officers knew of the illegality, Jews among them, but all seem to have accepted that it was justified by raison d’état.
Eventually Maître Demange himself was told of the perversion of the legal process by a colleague, Maître Albert Salle, who had heard about it from one of the judges. Demange demanded an immediate interview with the Minister of Justice, Ludovic Trarieux, who had already been told about the secret dossier by his colleague Gabriel Hanotaux, the Foreign Minister. It was Hanotaux who had consistently opposed the arrest and trial of Dreyfus but had been overruled by General Mercier: Mercier, in an attempt to win over Hanotaux, had shown him the letter mentioning ‘the scoundrel D.’. But even Trarieux, ‘a serious and scrupulous man’13 who was worried about the rise of anti-Semitism, did not feel that this ‘procedural irregularity’ was enough to cast doubt on the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus. Clearly, the traitor had to be punished, and the end justified the means.
2: Bernard Lazare
Disheartened, despairing of doing anything for his brother through discreet contacts with influential politicians, Mathieu now took up a suggestion made by the Governor of the Santé prison, Patin, and endorsed by his colleague Forzinetti, that he commission a professional journalist to go over the heads of the politicians to reach the wider public through the press. ‘It is before public opinion’, Patin told Mathieu, ‘that your brother’s cause must be defended.’14 Bizarrely, the first name suggested by Patin was that of Édouard Drumont, who, though undoubtedly a brilliant polemicist, had done much to stir up paranoid suspicion of Jewish officers in the French Army. A second name was put forward – that of the Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare.
Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard had inverted his first and last names to produce the nom de plume of Bernard Lazare. He came from a Jewish family in Nîmes, in the south of France; like the Dreyfus family, the Bernards had established a successful textile business and, again like the Dreyfuses, were no longer strictly observant Jews but continued to keep the traditional Jewish holidays. As is apparent from his disdain for the Dreyfuses’ wealth, the young Lazare rebelled against his bourgeois background, moving to Paris at the age of twenty-one, enrolling at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, writing for the theatre and newspapers and declaring himself an anarchist. He defended the anarchists Jean Grave and Félix Fénélon with his pen, and in 1896 went as a delegate to the Socialist Congress in London where he attacked his fellow Jew, Karl Marx, as ‘a jealous authoritarian’.
Lazare was preoccupied with the Jewish question: he knew Theodor Herzl and also Achad Ha’am, one of the founders of the Lovers of Zion. The eruption of anti-Semitism at the time of Dreyfus’s trial exasperated him because he had believed that, with the decline of Talmudic Judaism, the phenomenon should also be in decline. This was the theme of his L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes) which was published to critical acclaim in Paris a few months before the arrest of Dreyfus in 1894. The work was in some sense a riposte to Drumont’s La France juive, and though Lazare wrote that Drumont was ‘a historian of poor documentary evidence, a mediocre sociologist and especially philosopher’,15 Drumont praised his history as ‘a remarkable book, nourished with facts and dominated from end to end by a fine effort at impartiality, a discipline imposed on the mind not to yield to influences of race’.16
Lazare’s history appealed to Drumont because, while it lacked the abusive tone, fanciful historicism, scurrilous anecdotes and pseudo-scientific theorising of La France juive, it accepted a number of Drumont’s contentions. Why, asked Lazare, was the Jew ‘ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians and the Romans, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the Christian nations? Because, everywhere up to our own days, the Jew was an unsociable being.’17 He was more than unsociable; as a member of God’s chosen race, he believed himself superior to non-Jews, and the disdain Jews showed for their gentile neighbours inevitably made them disliked by the host communities when they settled abroad. Long before they were relegated to ghettos, the Jews themselves avoided integration and assimilation by their strict adherence to the Law.
A deep-rooted animosity towards the Christian religion was equally inevitable: ‘the development of the dogma of the divinity of Christ made a breach between the Church and the Synagogue. Judaism could not admit the deification of a man.’18 ‘The Gospels must be burned, says Rabbi Tarphon, for paganism is not as dangerous to the Jewish faith as the Christian sects.’ The loathing of the Jews for the Christians was reciprocated by Christian loathing for the Jews: ‘Thus everything concurred to make of the Jew a universal foe, and the only support he found during this terrible period of several centuries was with the popes, who wanted to preserve the Jews as witness of the excellence of the Christian faith.’
Jews were confined to ghettos, which they often accepted and even sought in their eagerness to separate themselves from the world, to live apart without mixing with the nations, to preserve intact their beliefs and their race. Protected from extinction or forced conversion by the popes, they made themselves indispensable as moneylenders, a trade forbidden to Christians. ‘As possessors of the gold they became the masters of their masters, they dominated over them, and this was the only way to deploy their energy and activity.’19 The control of the purse strings of the European nations enabled this ‘energetic, vivacious nation, of infinite pride, thinking themselves superior to other nations’, to indulge a ‘taste for domination’, a taste which persisted after their emancipation at the time of the French Revolution.
What role did the Jews play in bringing that Revolution about? The Jews, wrote Lazare, ‘are not the cause of revolution’, but ‘the Jewish spirit is essentially a revolutionary spirit and, consciously or not, the Jew is a revolutionist’. The Jewish spirit was apparent ‘throughout the period of fierce revolt against Christianity which characterised the eighteenth century [and which] repeated concerning Jesus and the Virgin the outrageous fables invented by the Pharisees of the Second Century; we find them in Voltaire and in Parney, and their rationalist satire, pellucid and mordant, lives again in Heine, in Boerne and in Disraeli, just as the powerful logic of the ancient rabbis lives again in Karl Marx . . .’.20 ‘In labouring for the triumph of liberalism, they were looking for their own good. It is beyond a doubt that the Jews, through their wealth, their energy and their talents, supported and furthered the progress of the European revolution. During this period Jewish bankers, Jewish manufacturers, Jewish poets, journalists, and orators, stirred perhaps by quite different motives, were nevertheless all striving towards the same goal.’
Having helped to demolish the old order – the ancien régime – the Jews sought to dominate the new.
As conquerors, not as guests, did they come into modern societies . . . They were not warriors . . . but they made the only conquest for which they were armed, the economic conquest for which they had been preparing for many long years. They were a race of merchants and money-dealers, perhaps degraded by mercantile practice but, thanks to this very practice, equipped with qualities that were becoming preponderant in the new economic system.21
This, to Lazare, was the source of the anti-Semitism that was now so virulent in France. ‘So long as landed capital remained the political power, the Jew was deprived of any
right; the Jew was liberated on the day when political power passed to industrial capital, and that proved fatal.’ Having for so long constituted an alien and persecuted nation within other nations, the Jews were now able to dominate their former oppressors through their ascendancy in banking and trade.
Moreover, in modern society, where ‘Darwin’s principle of the struggle of life dominates’, the Jew has an advantage over his Christian competitor – the solidarity that exists among Jews. ‘In this daily struggle the Jew who, personally, as we have already seen, is better endowed than his competitors, increases his advantage by uniting with his co-religionists possessed of similar virtues, and thus augments his powers by acting in common with his brethren; the inevitable result being that they out-distance their rivals in the pursuit of any common end . . . This is the secret of their success.’
Jewish solidarity is all the stronger in that it goes so far back. ‘Its very existence is denied, yet it is undeniable. The links in the chain have been forged in the course of ages until the flight of centuries has made many unconscious of their existence.’ ‘The Jew, even though he may have departed from the synagogue, is still a member of the Jewish free-masonry, of the Jewish clique, if you will’; and ‘even the reformed Jew, who has broken away from the narrow restrictions of the synagogue . . . has not forgotten the spirit of solidarity’.22
What is notable about Lazare’s Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes, given the role that the author was to play in the Dreyfus Affair, is the support it implicitly offers to those French generals such as Bonnefond and Lebelin de Dionne who thought that Jews should be excluded from the General Staff. If Lazare’s analysis is correct, they would form a clique whose first loyalty would not be to the nation state of France. ‘Though often exceedingly chauvinist,’ wrote Lazare, ‘the Jews are essentially cosmopolitan in character; they are the cosmopolitan element in mankind . . . and with the aid of their instinct of solidarity, they have remained internationalists.’23
The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two Page 17