The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  There was at the time (and well into the twentieth century), a network of pneumatic tubes under the streets of Paris through which letter-telegrams were sent to and from post offices in the different arrondissements, thereby ensuring delivery within a few hours. The message had to be written on a form printed on blue paper – the petit bleu or ‘little blue’. The piece of paper retrieved from Schwartzkoppen’s waste-paper basket and pieced together by Lauth was the draft of such a letter-telegram that had never been sent.

  Monsieur,

  Above all I await a more detailed explanation than the one you gave me the other day of the matter in hand. I suggest that you give it to me in writing so I can decide whether to continue my connection with the house of R. or not. C.

  The initial C. was known to be used by Schwartzkoppen, and the Statistical Section was also familiar with his handwriting from the many letters they had intercepted, and the handwriting of the petit bleu was not his. Nor was the handwriting of a second note on ordinary paper, written in pencil and also signed ‘C’, which – though partly illegible because the tear ran through some of the words – confirmed that a transaction was taking place between Schwartzkoppen and the person to whom the note was addressed. And the name of that person was spelled out in the appropriate box on the petit bleu: Monsieur le Commandant Esterhazy, 27, rue de la Bienfaisance, Paris.

  This was the same Marie-Charles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy who had acted as second for the Jewish Captain André Crémieu-Foa in the duel he had fought with Édouard Drumont in June 1892. It was also the same Esterhazy who had served in the Statistical Section as a German translator sixteen years earlier. Henry, when he returned to the office and was told of the petit bleu, was incredulous that this ‘old friend’, whom he remembered with fondness, could be a spy. Moreover, Esterhazy was now a protégé of the suspect Jewish officer Maurice Weil, and because Weil himself was a friend of General Saussier, the Military Governor of Paris – his wife was the General’s mistress and Weil himself a mari complaisant – any investigation had to proceed with caution. It was perhaps for this reason, or because he was distracted by the death of his mother, or because he had a low opinion of General Gonse, responsible for the Statistical Section to the General Staff, or simply because he wanted to keep this interesting new card close to his chest, that Picquart did not immediately report the discovery of the petit bleu to his superiors. He instituted an inquiry under his own direction. Esterhazy was placed under surveillance and discreet inquiries were made by a police agent, whom Picquart met outside his office in front of the Louvre. Esterhazy was observed visiting the German Embassy, but it was to obtain a visa to visit Alsace for a superior officer, Colonel Abria. Picquart asked an officer he knew from his days at Saint-Cyr, Commandant Curé, who was serving in the same regiment as Esterhazy, what he thought of Esterhazy. Curé told him that Esterhazy led a dissolute life and was perennially short of money. When Picquart asked if he would obtain a specimen of Esterhazy’s handwriting, Curé refused, considering it dishonourable to spy on a fellow officer.

  It was only in July, almost five months after the petit bleu had been filched from the German Embassy, that Picquart decided to report the matter to his superiors, going over the head of General Gonse to the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre. Picquart’s urgent request led to a meeting in the General’s private railway coach in the Gare de Lyon when he arrived back from taking the waters at Vichy on the evening of 5 August 1896. Picquart told Boisdeffre about the petit bleu addressed to Commandant Esterhazy. The General had never heard of him, and received the news of a second traitor with apparent indifference. Feeling, perhaps, that too much had been made of the bordereau, and too quickly, he did not want to repeat the same mistake. He, too, had other things on his mind: the Franco-Russian alliance which he had helped to negotiate as military attaché in St Petersburg had come to fruition. There was to be a state visit by Tsar Nicholas II and his Tsarina Alexandra in a couple of months’ time in which he, as Chief of the General Staff, would play a prominent role. A new scandal arising from another document stolen from their Embassy risked a fracas with the Germans at a particularly inopportune time.

  Boisdeffre did not seem concerned that Picquart had yet to inform Gonse of what he had discovered. He suggested that he should tell the Minister of War, General Jean-Baptiste Billot, and Picquart went to see him the following day, 6 August. Billot approved the way in which Picquart had conducted his investigation to date, but would not as yet issue an order for a sample of Esterhazy’s handwriting to be sent to the Statistical Section. As a result, when Picquart again met Boisdeffre during the month of August, they discussed the matter on the assumption that there was no link between Esterhazy and Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s name came up only in the context of the dangers of proceeding prematurely against Esterhazy. ‘I don’t want a new Dreyfus Affair,’ Boisdeffre told Picquart.9

  By the end of the month, however, Esterhazy had brought himself to the attention of the Minister, Billot, by writing to an officer serving in Billot’s cabinet, Commandant Theveney, and also to Billot’s chef de cabinet, Calmon-Maison, lobbying for a post at the Ministry of War. His application was supported by Maurice Weil, a friend of Theveney’s, and also by a deputy, Jules Roche, who was Vice-President of the Army Commission in the National Assembly. With these samples of Esterhazy’s handwriting actually in his office, Billot authorised Calmon-Maison to show them to Picquart. Studying them at his desk at the Statistical Section, Picquart was immediately struck by the similarity of the hand to that of the bordereau which had been so thoroughly scrutinised so many times.

  Picquart went to the files and took out a photograph of the bordereau. He compared it to the letters written by Esterhazy. The handwriting seemed to him identical. But Picquart was no expert. He therefore told Lauth to take photographs of Esterhazy’s letters after blocking out the names. He summoned du Paty de Clam and asked him to compare the writing of the letters with that of the bordereau. ‘It’s the writing of Mathieu Dreyfus,’ said du Paty. Alphonse Bertillon, the prosecution’s favoured expert in the court martial of Dreyfus, was then asked for his opinion on the handwriting of Esterhazy’s letters. ‘Why, that’s the handwriting of the bordereau.’

  ‘And what if it were written quite recently?’ Picquart asked.

  ‘Then the Jews have trained someone in the course of a year to imitate his handwriting.’10

  Picquart was unconvinced. He next asked the archivist, Gribelin, to reassemble the secret file shown to the judges at Dreyfus’s court martial so that he could familiarise himself with its contents, as Sandherr had suggested, to fend off any moves towards Dreyfus’s rehabilitation. He studied the different papers and the copy of du Paty’s commentary made by Sandherr and realised at once that they proved nothing. Clearly, Dreyfus had been convicted of Esterhazy’s crime.

  On 1 September 1896, Picquart completed a report for General de Boisdeffre which made clear that Esterhazy was guilty of selling secrets to the Germans but merely noting in a footnote that the bordereau had been ‘the occasion of other legal action’. To conceal the length of time during which he had kept his dramatic discovery to himself, Picquart wrote that he had received the petit bleu only at the end of April of that year. He delivered his report in person. When he came to mention du Paty’s commentary on the secret dossier, Boisdeffre looked surprised. ‘Why was it not burned as agreed?’ That look of surprise was his only reaction. The General was otherwise non-committal. When Picquart saw him again the following day, he admitted that this new information had led to a sleepless night, but said that he wanted the opinion of General Gonse before making a decision.

  Gonse was on sick leave at Cormeilles-en-Parisis. This ‘nullity made man’11 was certainly aware of Picquart’s low opinion of him, shown by the way in which Picquart had gone over his head to Boisdeffre. The ‘climate of mutual mistrust that existed between the two men complicated things from the outset’,12 with Picquart’s disdain for those he regarded as h
is intellectual inferiors coming up against Gonse’s skills at ‘administrative infighting’.13 During a two-hour briefing by Picquart, Gonse, like Boisdeffre, did not react to what he had been told, saying only at one point: ‘So we must have been wrong.’ And then, when the briefing on the two cases – those of Esterhazy and of Dreyfus – was completed: ‘Keep them separate.’

  Neither Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre nor the Minister Billot had yet decided what line they should take on Picquart’s revelations: their positions ‘were not yet set’. If Picquart had shown some tact, the historian Marcel Thomas believes, he might have coaxed them into accepting that there had been a miscarriage of justice. But ‘diplomacy had always been . . . the weakest quality of this stubborn Alsatian’.14 Moreover, inadvertently, Mathieu Dreyfus had made Picquart’s task more difficult by planting the story of his brother’s escape. On the same day as Picquart briefed Gonse in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, the story appeared in the Daily Chronicle and was picked up by the French press. Reassured by the Governor of French Guiana, the government issued a denial; but Dreyfus was back in the news, and on 8 September Figaro published an account of the pitiable condition of the prisoner on Devil’s Island which in turn provoked a rejoinder in La Libre Parole which declared that, quite to the contrary, Dreyfus was living ‘like a brute. He could read, but prefers to eat. He guzzles, he eats, and he drinks . . .’ Dreyfus remained a political hot potato.

  On 10 September, an article appeared in L’Éclair which for the first time brought into the public domain the existence of the secret dossier. It purported to be an attack on those who were insisting upon the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, and in so doing suggested that it might be appropriate to ‘reveal on what irrefutable grounds the court martial based its decision to brand as a traitor to the country the man who seems to be benefiting excessively from an inexplicable sense of pity and a feeling of doubt which seems more generous than perspicacious’. Four days later, a second article revealed unambiguously that an incriminating letter ‘was not included in the official dossier and that it was only in secret, in the deliberation room, out of the presence of the accused, that it was transmitted to the judges of the court martial’.15

  It never became clear who leaked this information to L’Éclair. The existence of the secret dossier was well known, but the list of its contents, if not wholly accurate, was sufficiently detailed to suggest an insider. Picquart believed that Dreyfus’s supporters were behind the article and, in a letter to General Gonse enclosing a copy of the article, warned him of the danger of their being ‘overwhelmed, locked into an inextricable position’, if they did not act at once to arrest Esterhazy and rehabilitate Dreyfus. But Gonse prevaricated. He urged caution and calm. No irrevocable decisions should be taken. With Boisdeffre’s permission, Picquart went over the head of Gonse to Billot, the Minister of War.

  At first Billot seemed open to Picquart’s line of thought; but at a second meeting, after Billot had talked with Boisdeffre, his attitude had changed. He talked of ‘military solidarity’ and said that Picquart’s discoveries were ‘military secrets’ that could not be shared with other members of the government. Picquart returned to Gonse in an attempt to persuade him either to arrest Esterhazy or at the very least to entrap him. Gonse refused. ‘What does it matter to you if that Jew stays on Devil’s Island?’

  ‘But since he’s innocent . . .’ said Picquart.

  ‘So what?’ said Gonse. ‘That is not something that should enter into our calculations. If you keep quiet, no one will know.’

  ‘What you’re saying is vile. I don’t know what I will do, but of one thing I am certain – I will not take this secret to the grave.’*

  2: The Fall of Picquart

  Both Gonse and Picquart had lost their tempers. The following day the two men met in calmer frames of mind. Picquart proposed sending a telegram, purporting to come from Schwartzkoppen, summoning Esterhazy to a secret meeting. Gonse demurred. Billot, on Boisdeffre’s advice, rejected the idea: ‘as chief of the Army, I have no right to subject a high officer to such a thing’. Clearly, the horror at the thought of a treasonous officer which had possessed the Minister of War and the two men at the apex of the army High Command upon the discovery of the bordereau was not felt upon the discovery of the petit bleu. No one at this stage doubted its authenticity, but it was, after all, no more than ‘an unsigned communication in an unknown or disguised hand, with an unclear meaning and of uncertain provenance’ which, if produced as evidence in court, would lead to protests from the Germans; and the fact that Esterhazy, who on the whole was held in high regard by his superiors, had shown an unusual curiosity about artillery proved nothing.

  However, it was the thought of reopening the Dreyfus case that led the three men who felt themselves responsible for the security of the state – Boisdeffre, Gonse and Billot – to impede Picquart’s proceedings against Esterhazy. Was this the moment when, like the High Priest Caiaphas, they decided that ‘it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed’?16 History would judge them severely for a decision which left an innocent man rotting on Devil’s Island; and, as Gonse’s outburst to Picquart suggests, it might have been different had Dreyfus not been a Jew. But, as Marcel Thomas points out in his dispassionate account of these events, the three men ‘were neither madmen nor criminals’ and ‘the gravity of what was at stake makes it important to try and understand the motives for their decisions’.17 To them the choice was between injustice and disorder. With the body politic corrupt and enfeebled by social and cultural fissures, the army embodied the unity and integrity of the nation. To make public the fact that the trial of Dreyfus had been fraudulent and its verdict unsound would so discredit the High Command that the army would be fatally weakened. Furthermore, the conviction of Esterhazy would open a new can of worms, because Esterhazy might implicate Weil and Weil the ‘generalissimo’, Saussier.

  ‘There will always be men’, wrote Thomas, ‘who will prefer injustice to disorder. It is here a matter of temperament.’18 Had not Goethe expressed such a preference at the siege of Mainz during the French Revolutionary wars? ‘The position of a Boisdeffre, of a Billot, will always be opportunistic . . . but to make the choice requires a lucid appreciation of what is involved. In this case, Gonse’s decision, warmly approved by his superiors, only managed to create disorder and perpetuate injustice’ and ‘plunge the whole country in a dreadful struggle whose wounds took a long time to heal’.19

  A period of ‘phoney war’ now started between Picquart and his superiors in which Picquart stood alone. None of his subordinates in the Statistical Section would support him because all were implicated in preparing the false evidence against Dreyfus. Moreover, all knew that their future prospects depended more on Gonse and Boisdeffre than they did on Picquart. Henry tried to convey to Picquart the folly of crossing one’s superiors by telling how, when he was in the French North African light infantry, the Zouaves, the son of a colonel serving in the ranks was caught stealing from another soldier. His platoon commander wanted to prosecute him, but the influence of the culprit’s father, the colonel, ensured that it was the officer, not the criminal, who was sacked.20

  Picquart did not take the hint; he proceeded with the investigation of Esterhazy. He was well aware that this annoyed Gonse and Boisdeffre but persisted all the same. Gonse made critical comments to the effect that Picquart’s obsession with Esterhazy was distracting him from his other responsibilities, but, much as they might have liked to, Gonse and Boisdeffre did not dare dismiss Picquart as chief of the Statistical Section: there was no suitable candidate to take his place. Henry, who kept them informed of what Picquart was up to, was still not considered a plausible replacement. However, it was thought possible to remove Picquart from operational control by sending him off on some special mission; and on 27 October 1896 Billot, on Gonse’s advice, signed an order dispatching Picquart to reorganise the intelligence networks on the eastern borders of France. He was gi
ven only two weeks’ notice.

  Picquart was quite aware of what was going on. Before leaving for Châlons, he handed over to General Gonse the fruits of his investigations to date of Esterhazy and to Henry the original of the petit bleu. The secret dossier used to convict Dreyfus was also back in their hands and was studied for any annotations that may have been made by Picquart. François Guénée, the former agent of the Sûreté whose reports on his contacts with the Spanish diplomat, Val Carlos, had been ‘nourished’ to implicate Dreyfus, sent a memo to General Gonse warning him that Picquart had questioned him closely on these reports, and seemed to doubt the inferences in du Paty’s commentary.

  Clearly, should the case against Dreyfus be reopened, some incontrovertible piece of evidence against him had to be found in the dossier of whose existence the Dreyfus family were now aware. On 1 November – the feast of All Saints and a public holiday – Commandant Henry worked at home to manufacture a document that would put the guilt of Dreyfus beyond doubt. He had brought back from the office a short letter from the Italian military attaché, Panizzardi, to his German counterpart (and lover) Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen and an envelope on which was written Schwartzkoppen’s name and address in Panizzardi’s handwriting. ‘My dear friend,’ the letter began. ‘Here is the manual. I paid for you as agreed. Wednesday, eight in the evening, at Larent’s place is fine. I have invited three from my embassy, including one Jew. Don’t miss it. Alexandrine.’

  Henry had also obtained a sheet of the same lined paper used by Panizzardi for his letter. With the help of his wife, and possibly of an expert forger, Henry wrote an extra paragraph in Panizzardi’s hand in the same blue pencil. He cut out the innocuous message from the genuine letter and glued the top with the opening ‘My dear friend’ and the bottom with the signature ‘Alexandrine’ to the forged text. The letter now read: ‘My dear friend. I have read that a deputy is to ask questions about Dreyfus. If someone in Rome asks for new explanations, I will say that I have never had any dealings with the Jew. If someone asks you, say the same for no one must ever know what happened with him. Alexandrine.’