The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  The ‘deputy who is to ask questions about Dreyfus’ was a reference to André Castelin, Deputy for the Aisne, who had announced his intention of putting questions about Dreyfus to Billot in the Chamber of Deputies; the undercover policeman Guénée believed Castelin, though ostensibly anti-Dreyfus, to be on a retainer from the Dreyfus family. Billot could now feel confident in confirming the soundness of Dreyfus’s conviction because on 2 January 1897 Gonse and Boisdeffre showed him a photograph of the forged letter that they said had reached Henry by Mme Bastian’s ‘ordinary way’. Gonse and Boisdeffre had seen the original of Henry’s forgery, the Minister only a photograph; and because the photograph was not altogether clear, Gribelin, the archivist, made a copy of the original in his own hand which was authenticated by the signatures of Gonse, Henry, Lauth and Gribelin himself. Though Picquart had not yet left for Châlons, and was still nominally in charge of the Statistical Section, it was thought best by the Minister to keep him in the dark.

  This was not only because Picquart might have realised that the timing of this new proof of Dreyfus’s guilt was rather too convenient to be plausible, but also because Picquart was suspected of being the source of leaks to the Dreyfusard camp – first of the existence of the secret dossier revealed in the article in L’Éclair (something that was in fact widely known); and then of the far more detailed revelations that appeared in a pamphlet that on 7 and 8 November had been sent to every member of the National Assembly, all journalists of note and other figures in public life.

  This was Une Erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus by Bernard Lazare. At last, after eighteen months of preparation, Lazare had been let off the leash by Mathieu Dreyfus and Edgar Demange. The article in L’Éclair had already provided Lucie with a reason to petition the Chamber of Deputies for a review of her husband’s case; but now Lazare presented in great detail, and in a tone shorn of bombast and abuse, the reasons why the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus should be deemed unsound. It printed the text of the bordereau in full and revealed that among the papers in the secret dossier shown to the judges but not to the defence was the letter mentioning ‘the scoundrel D.’ – with no evidence to suggest that the letter D stood for Dreyfus. Three thousand copies of the pamphlet were secretly printed in Brussels and sent to France in plain envelopes. Picquart, who on the brink of his departure conducted a hasty investigation, learned that it had cost the Dreyfus family 25,000 francs. However, its impact on public opinion was minimal: only two newspapers, Le Temps and Les Débats, mentioned its publication and discussed its contents. In the rest of the press, it was ignored.

  Its greatest impact was on Gonse. The fact that Picquart had discovered only the cost of Lazare’s pamphlet, not the source of the leaks, increased his suspicions that Picquart himself was that source. Worse was to come. Only two days after the publication of Lazare’s pamphlet, a photograph of the bordereau appeared in Le Matin. Picquart confounded Gonse’s suspicions by first denying that he had a photograph of the bordereau in his files, then admitting that he had been mistaken. The fear was that others would recognise the handwriting of the bordereau as being that of Esterhazy. Mathieu Dreyfus had the photograph from Le Matin copied on to posters flanked by photographs of letters written by his brother, demonstrating the difference between the two hands: the posters were put up on boards all over Paris.

  The plan of the High Command to bury any doubts anyone might have about Esterhazy by sending Picquart into exile was put into effect too late. Unknown to Gonse and Billot, Picquart had been intercepting Esterhazy’s correspondence with Maurice Weil which, though it revealed nothing treasonous, informed Picquart of Esterhazy’s mercurial personality, and his links with Drumont and La Libre Parole. Billot, when he learned of this, was outraged, partly because he was afraid Weil might say something to compromise Billot’s friend, General Saussier. On 12 November 1896, Billot learned that Weil had received an anonymous letter warning him that André Castelin, the Deputy for the Aisne, was going to name him and Esterhazy as accomplices of Dreyfus. It was signed ‘Commandant Pierre’. The fear now was that Weil would warn Esterhazy who, seeing his handwriting on posters all over Paris, would do something foolish – flee abroad, confess, kill himself – implicit admissions of guilt that would establish the innocence of Dreyfus and therefore discredit the army High Command.

  On 18 November, Jean-Baptiste Billot mounted the podium of the National Assembly to answer the questions that had been put by André Castelin. In the event, the questions were anodyne and Billot had no need to reveal the existence of the new evidence that established the guilt of Dreyfus beyond any doubt. Castelin’s complaints were not about a possible miscarriage of justice but about the activities of the Dreyfusards. He wanted Lazare to be prosecuted and measures to be taken against ‘the civilian accomplices’ of the traitor Dreyfus. Billot reassured him that there was no question of reopening the matter of Dreyfus’s conviction: ‘That matter was brought to trial, and no one has the right to question the results.’21

  3: Picquart in Exile

  When Georges Picquart left Paris in mid-November 1896 to reorganise the intelligence networks in eastern France, he remained notionally chief of the Statistical Section and on good terms with both General Gonse, his immediate superior, and Henry who, in his absence and under Gonse’s supervision, took on the day-to-day running of the department. Picquart was aware that on the question of Esterhazy and Dreyfus he had been at cross-purposes with Gonse and Boisdeffre, and that the first loyalties of his subordinates were not to him, but he was as yet unaware of the enmity he inspired. His loyalty to the army was paramount: he had not told anyone outside the service of his suspicions and misgivings. He had, however, from the start of his tenure as commander of the Statistical Section, consulted a childhood friend from Strasbourg, Louis Leblois – formerly a magistrate and now a lawyer practising in Paris – on the legality of certain aspects of his work that had not troubled his predecessor, Sandherr.22

  What Picquart in his innocence did not yet realise was that Henry, with his propensity to ingratiate himself with his superiors either by anticipating their instructions or by obeying what was merely conveyed with a nod and a wink, was already at work with the help of his colleagues at setting him up as a covert accomplice of the Dreyfusards. Gribelin had learned from a journalist on Le Matin that the paper had obtained a photograph of the bordereau from an official and let it be thought that the official was Picquart (in fact it was one of the handwriting experts, Pierre Teyssonières). Letters addressed to Picquart were opened and read and one, a strange note in Spanish from a former soldier who now worked as private secretary to the Comtesse de Comminges, whose salon Picquart frequented, was presented as a coded message from the Dreyfusards, and embellished with a second and more compromising letter forged by Henry.

  The letters were shown to Billot and successfully persuaded him that Picquart should not be allowed to return to Paris. Thus on Christmas Eve 1896, Picquart was told by Gonse that the mission he had undertaken to reorganise the intelligence service in eastern France was to be extended to the French North African possessions. He was to go forthwith to Marseille and on 29 December take ship for the port of Philippeville on the north-eastern coast of Algeria.

  General Gonse sent his greetings to Picquart for the New Year of 1897, wishing him ‘good health on your splendid trip’ and signing his name ‘affectionately yours’. He assured Picquart that the army would meet all his expenses and care for the horse he had left behind in Paris. Picquart responded in the same tone but, since it was clear that his mission was merely a pretext to keep him out of France, he sent in a request to be returned to regular duty – a request which was refused. It was not until March that Picquart was given permission to return to Paris, and then only for a few days. It was time enough for him to see that his position was more perilous than he had realised; and upon his return to his base in Sousse, on the eastern coast of Tunisia, he added a codicil to his will in which he described how he h
ad uncovered the guilt of Esterhazy and the innocence of Dreyfus. He left instructions that, in the event of his death, the sealed envelope containing this codicil was to be delivered into the hands of the President of the Republic.

  In May, in a curt note to Henry, Picquart castigated him for ‘the lies and mysteries’ used to hide the fact that he had effectively been relieved of his functions. The mask of affability was now dropped by Henry, who in his reply turned the tables on Picquart, accusing him of irregularities and falsifications. ‘As to the word “lies” . . . our inquiry has not yet been able to determine where, how, and to whom the word should be applied.’ On 10 June, Picquart wrote again to Henry protesting ‘in the most formal manner [against] the insinuations . . . and the manner in which the facts are presented’. Knowing of Henry’s contacts in the criminal underworld, and the skills of the Statistical Section when it came to disinformation and dirty tricks, Picquart became alarmed and eleven days later, on leave in Paris, went to see his friend, the lawyer Louis Leblois, and told him what he had discovered about Esterhazy and Dreyfus.23

  Leblois, who had hitherto had no doubts whatsoever about the guilt of Dreyfus, was now persuaded of his innocence. He was a new and important recruit to the Dreyfusard cause, but his hands were tied because Picquart, before returning to Tunisia, though giving his friend power of attorney, made him promise not to repeat what he had been told to anyone in the Dreyfusard camp. As Picquart had told Gonse, he did not intend to take what he knew about Dreyfus to the grave should some ‘accident’ befall him while abroad, but he had confided in Leblois not to aid Dreyfus but as a precautionary measure in his own interest. Leblois, in the meetings they had each evening during Picquart’s leave, tried to persuade him to speak out – to ‘go public’ – with what he knew. But Picquart knew that this would mean the end of his career in the army.24 His residual feelings of loyalty to the army – his sense of honour – prevented him from betraying its esprit de corps, even when faced with a self-serving conspiracy to keep an innocent man on Devil’s Island.

  4: The Senator for Life

  General Gonse, unwilling to rely on anything as insubstantial as Picquart’s sense of honour to silence him, persuaded Billot to extend Picquart’s mission from Tunisia to the French possessions in Indo-China. Many thousands of kilometres away, on the other side of the world, with all his communications with Metropolitan France scrutinised by the Statistical Section, Picquart was effectively neutralised and disarmed.

  However, this was not the case with Leblois. His friendship with Picquart went across the tribal divide because, while both were Alsatians from Strasbourg, Picquart came from a Catholic family while Leblois’s family were Protestant. Indeed Leblois was the son of a Protestant pastor and, in the words of Ruth Harris, was inspired by ‘the petite musique huguenote, the soft but persistent melody of conscience’.25 In her view Picquart, raised with the imprint of a hierarchical authoritarian religion, found it hard to disobey his superior officers, while Leblois, who answered only to God, was tormented by the thought that his silence was contributing to the unrelieved suffering of an innocent man.

  Leblois was a member of the Alsace-Lorraine Committee, which held a dinner at Ville-d’Avray just outside Paris in early July 1897. Among those present was the sixty-three-year-old Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, once Deputy for Haut-Rhin in the National Assembly, the last elected representative of the lost province of Alsace, and now Vice-President of the Senate and Senator for Life. He too was a Protestant and part of the republican establishment: he was the brother-in-law of one former Prime Minister, Charles Floquet, and uncle of another, Jules Ferry; and he had been a friend of Gambetta. His nephew, Charles Risler, was the mayor of the 7th arrondissement in Paris where Leblois was his deputy. He had already been approached by Mathieu Dreyfus on the question of Alfred’s rehabilitation but had told him he was convinced of his guilt.

  By now, however, Scheurer-Kestner was not so sure, and over dinner he told Leblois of his doubts. At this point Leblois felt bound by his oath to Picquart not to divulge what he knew; but when, some days later, Charles Risler, Scheurer-Kestner’s nephew, told Leblois of his uncle’s preoccupation with the Dreyfus Affair, Leblois asked his colleague to arrange a meeting with the distinguished Senator, which duly took place on 13 July. After extracting the same promise from Scheurer-Kestner that Picquart had got from him – that everything he said would be in the strictest confidence – Leblois described how Picquart had uncovered the guilt of Esterhazy, the innocence of Dreyfus and the determination of the chiefs of the General Staff to do nothing to remedy this miscarriage of justice.

  Scheurer-Kestner was dumbfounded but, since what he was told confirmed his suspicions, quickly convinced. He drew up a private memorandum in which he outlined the situation as he saw it: at the time of Dreyfus’s conviction, no one doubted his guilt, but now the contrary was the case. The army chiefs knew that Dreyfus was innocent and Esterhazy guilty – the same Esterhazy who ‘was Mayer’s second in his duel with Morès* and he has flaunted it ever since in order to ask all of Jewry for money’. Scheurer-Kestner then went on to say that Esterhazy had an accomplice, Maurice Weil, a commandant in the territorial army, ‘a stockbroker . . . a former horse trader’, whose wife is ‘on excellent terms’ with General Saussier. Scheurer-Kestner next outlined the difficulties of the situation in which he found himself:

  1. M. Picquard [sic] must remain out of it.

  2. The Ministry defended Dreyfus’s conviction in November 1896, while knowing that he was innocent.

  3. Weil’s relations with Saussier.

  4. Any mention of the matter would expose Picquard, since General Gonse would guess at the ‘source’ of the indiscretion.

  Commandant Henry knows everything.26

  Attempts made by Scheurer-Kestner to get both Leblois and, through Leblois, Picquart to release him from his vow of confidentiality failed. The most he could do was let it be known to two friends among his fellow politicians, Arthur Ranc and Joseph Reinach, that he now knew that Dreyfus was innocent; and he authorised Reinach to pass this on to the Dreyfus family. The news of Scheurer-Kestner’s conversion to the Dreyfusard cause spread quickly. When the subject came up at a dinner at the Élysée Palace, Scheurer-Kestner told one of President Faure’s daughters, Lucie, how wretched he felt about the whole business: ‘My heart is heavy, my conscience is racked. It’s a terrible business. Captain Dreyfus is innocent. But don’t say anything to your father because I can’t as yet tell him much. I am not free to do so . . .’27 Lucie Faure at once told her father what Scheurer-Kestner had said. Two days later she wrote to say that he should speak to the President himself as soon as he could.

  The meeting, held on 29 October 1897, was a disaster. Faure had been got at on the question of Dreyfus some time before by his former doctor from Le Havre, Dr Gilbert. Scheurer-Kestner found that his old friend Faure, once so companionable, friendly and high-spirited, had become pompous and self-important – no doubt the result of hobnobbing with kings, emperors and other heads of state. Faure made it clear to Scheurer-Kestner that, in his view, his constitutional position as President of France precluded any intervention in matters such as the Dreyfus Affair. The most that Scheurer-Kestner could get out of him was a promise that he would preserve a ‘benevolent neutrality’.

  The next day Scheurer-Kestner had lunch with another old friend, who did have the power to intervene in the Dreyfus Affair, the Minister of War, Jean-Baptiste Billot. This interview went no better. Billot had been briefed by du Paty de Clam: he quoted from the letter forged by Henry, which had been shown to him by ‘a man of valour’, General Gonse. He reassured Scheurer-Kestner that he was not a pawn of the clericalists: ‘I find myself in a den of Jesuits here . . . The only one who is not a Jesuit is Jean-Baptiste Billot!’ He promised to make further inquiries about Dreyfus’s conviction in return for a promise from Scheurer-Kestner to hold back from any further action for the next two weeks.

  That Billot should have felt it n
ecessary to reassure Scheurer-Kestner that he was not ‘a Jesuit’ reveals how partisan the Dreyfus Affair had already become. Scheurer-Kestner came from a Protestant family, but he was not a Christian: he had lost his faith at the age of twenty-two and his children had not been baptised. He was a sceptical Positivist but openly proclaimed that his old religion, Protestantism, was superior to Catholicism, a religion not of morality and ethics but of blind superstition. Protestants represented progress and were natural republicans, while Catholics were reactionary and naturally authoritarian. He considered that the industrial unrest in Alsace at the time of the Franco-Prussian war was not a revolt against poverty by the Catholic workers but ‘a Jesuit-led attempt to nullify economic and social progress’.28

  Scheurer-Kestner also defended France’s Jews, considering the precepts of Judaism and the Enlightenment to be expressions of the same universal values. It was therefore hardly surprising that, when it became known that he was lobbying in favour of Dreyfus, he came under attack in the nationalist press. La Patrie called him a naive old man who had been ‘duped by scum’. Gaston Méry, in La Libre Parole, identified Scheurer-Kestner as a key figure in the ‘Jew-loving, Huguenot cabal’.29 L’Intransigeant called him ‘the éminence grise of treason’ and ‘slime that had to be washed into the sewer’. The symbol of resistance to Germany was dubbed a ‘Kraut’ and ‘a Prussian’ and ‘a valet of the Germans’.

  Unquestionably affected by this abuse, Scheurer-Kestner nonetheless persisted in his crusade. He went to see the Prime Minister, Jules Méline, but was told by Méline that it was a matter for Billot, the Minister of War. Scheurer-Kestner took Leblois to the War Ministry to see Billot, but Leblois lost his nerve at the last minute and refused to go in. Jean-Baptiste Darlan, the Minister of Justice, whom Scheurer-Kestner went to see on 5 November, said that his office precluded any premature intervention. Scheurer-Kestner’s enormous prestige was being dissipated by the day; his conviction that Dreyfus was innocent had proved insufficient to change anyone’s mind.