The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  Gabriel Monod had taught Bernard Lazare; Lazare was a friend of Léon Blum and Charles Péguy. Péguy, then a Socialist, was a militant Dreyfusard – ‘the military leader’ of a ‘little army of Justice and Truth’ formed by the students from the École Normale who congregated in a bookshop, the Librairie Bellas, that Péguy had bought with his wife’s dowry. Léon Blum spent most mornings there. The little army would protect Dreyfusard professors from attacks by anti-Semitic gangs. They were heady days for the young, feeling themselves to be the protagonists of righteousness in these great events – a defining moment, as Péguy was to say, in the histories of France, of Christianity and of Israel.7

  Moving in a rather different milieu, Marcel Proust was also an active Dreyfusard. His father, Adrien Proust, a distinguished doctor, originally from Illiers in Normandy, had considered the Catholic priesthood before turning to medicine. At one time chef de clinique at the Charité Hospital in Paris, he had been admitted to the Légion d’Honneur for his pioneering work on the spread of cholera.

  In 1870, Adrien Proust had married Jeanne Weil, the Jewish daughter of a rich stockbroker – at twenty-one, fifteen years younger than her husband. Her family came originally from Metz in Lorraine. Marcel was thus half-Jewish, something he felt ashamed of, like his homosexuality. In the view of his biographer George D. Painter, Proust sought ‘to palliate the guilt of his Jewish blood’ and ‘his awakening perversion’ by assiduous social climbing.8 Thanks to his father’s high reputation and the money that came from the Weils, Marcel was raised in a privileged haut-bourgeois circle; he used to play with Antoinette and Lucie Faure, the daughters of the future President, in the gardens on the Champs-Élysées. However, as a young man his ambition was to be received in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and by December 1893, the year before Dreyfus’s court martial, Proust had gained an entrée into the salons of the Princesse de Wagram and her sister, the Duchesse de Gramont. Both these ladies were born Rothschilds, which meant that Proust had not yet reached the top because ‘it was felt that their husbands had been declassed by marrying outside the nobility into non-Aryan money’.9

  Some of France’s most illustrious aristocrats had restored the fortune of their houses by marrying Jewish or American heiresses. ‘It is interesting to note’, wrote Proust’s friend Boni de Castellane, ‘that the great wealth of some Americans gives them a particular allure . . .’10 De Castellane himself married an American, Anna Gould. Édouard Drumont, in La France juive, raged against the rich Jews who had bought the ancestral estates of the French nobility, and also against those French aristocrats who had ‘tainted’ their blood by marrying Jewish heiresses. Jules Guérin complained that the arrogant aristocrats ousted from their chateaux by the Revolution of 1789 had merely been replaced by ‘our Jewish financiers and their friends, new seigneurs, insolent and without pity’.11

  Anti-Semitism among the aristocracy itself had been exacerbated by their financial losses with the collapse of the Union Générale, and the first major anti-Semitic rally in France, in January 1880, was held at the Jockey Club. However, nothing was clear-cut. Boni de Castellane, ostensibly anti-Semitic, mixed socially with the Rothschilds and was keen to get the half-Jewish Sarah Bernhardt to dine with him. The editor of the main society newspaper, Le Gaulois, Arthur Meyer, was a Jewish convert to Catholicism married to a Turenne. The Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James was a Viennese Jew with the maiden name of Gutman: she ‘was said to keep a secret weapon in her desk: a list of all the Jewish marriages in the noble families of Europe’.12 In fact they were published in the Almanach de Gotha and were widely known.

  There were French Jews who preferred not to be identified as such. Both Proust and his mother sought to avoid a hotel in Évian filled with Jews, and did not want to be counted among them;13 but when Marcel came to champion Dreyfus his Jewish connections could be neither concealed nor denied. ‘What’s the good old syndicate doing now, eh?’ he was asked by the Prince de Polignac. Polignac was a friend of Charles Haas, the model for Swann in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; but he did not, like Swann, ‘turn from those friends who became anti-Dreyfusards’. Proust’s friend Marie Finlay also adopted the anti-Dreyfus cause, despite her Jewish parentage, ‘in the name of good taste’.14

  Proust’s Dreyfusism was nurtured in the salon of Mme Straus, the daughter of Fromental Halévy and widow of the composer Georges Bizet: half Spanish through her mother, she was said to be the model for Carmen. Unlike the fickle Carmen, however, Geneviève Straus was ‘notoriously’ faithful to her second husband, the Rothschilds’ lawyer Émile Straus, who happily spent his money on the entertainment of the writers, painters and politicians who came to her salon.

  The influence of such society women on French politics was considerable in disseminating information and organising networks. It was in Mme Straus’s salon in October 1897 that Joseph Reinach first declared that Dreyfus was innocent, and under his influence ‘it became the G.H.Q. of Dreyfusism’ where her son Jacques Bizet, her Halévy nephews and Marcel Proust organised the first petition of the intellectuals that was published in L’Aurore.15

  When Dr Adrien Proust learned that his two sons, Marcel and Robert, had come out as Dreyfusards he refused to speak to them for a week.16 He would not sign his son’s petition: he was an example of an upright man with no trace of anti-Semitic sentiment who accepted the judgement on the question of Dreyfus’s guilt by those he felt were in a position to know. He was a personal friend of many of the members of Méline’s government, particularly of the Foreign Minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, who had used his influence to get Marcel a job at the Mazarine Library.

  Hanotaux, it will be recalled, had advised against prosecuting Dreyfus in November 1894, not because he thought Dreyfus innocent, but because he feared the diplomatic consequences should it become known that documents had been stolen from the German Embassy. Along with other members of the Council of Ministers at the time, he was aware of the haste with which General Mercier had proceeded against Dreyfus, but this did not lead him to cast doubt on the res judicata in 1898. The only former minister to do so was Ludovic Trarieux, Minister of Justice at the time. Appalled by the anti-Semitic demonstrations at the Palais de Justice during Zola’s trial, he decided to form an association to protect the rights of individual citizens. On 20 February 1898, Trarieux invited a number of lawyers and academics to his home for the first meeting of this League of the Rights of Man (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme). Though open to men and women of all religions and political persuasions, the reference in its name to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man was unlikely to attract those who saw that Declaration as the source of the evils that came with the French Revolution. Its initial membership of around 800 grew, by September 1899, to 12,000: it was organised into ‘sections’, ‘a term that evoked the radical activism of the Parisian sans culottes during the Revolution’.17

  To counter the influence of the League of the Rights of Man, the poet, playwright and veteran politician of the right, Paul Déroulède, revived an association he had formed back in 1882 with Félix Faure, the League of Patriots (Ligue des Patriotes). Its original aim was to stiffen the resolve of the French to recover the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but when Déroulède had backed General Boulanger, he had lost the support of many of its republican members, and the League was dissolved by the government in 1889.

  Now, nine years later, Déroulède sought to revive it, and exploit the political turbulence caused by the Dreyfus Affair to promote his ideas for constitutional reform – an executive presidency on the American model rather than a parliamentary democracy of the kind established in France and Britain. He had a considerable following: he was liked for his open nature and admired for his patriotic poems. The revived League of Patriots recruited 18,000 members, 10,000 of them in Paris.

  Numerically, then, at their inception, the two leagues – one Dreyfusard, the other anti-Dreyfusard – were mismatched; and there was an even grea
ter disparity when it came to the press. L’Aurore, despite the momentary boost to its circulation with the publication of ‘J’accuse’, sold around 200,000 copies each day as against 500,000 copies of Édouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole and one and a half million of Ernest Judet’s anti-Dreyfusard Petit Journal. On top of that, there was the enormous circulation of the Assumptionists’ La Croix which, unlike the Parisian titles, reached deep into rural France with its many regional editions.

  2: The Good Name of France Abroad

  Jules Méline had said that his government would preserve France’s good name abroad: the opposite turned out to be the case. The verdict on Zola, and the anti-Semitic riots which followed, shocked the world. In Belgium there was dismay, in the United States outrage. In Victorian Britain, Zola would not have been the nation’s first choice as a champion of liberty: his novels dealt with sex with a frankness unimaginable in those of Dickens, Hardy or Trollope – or, for that matter, in those of Turgenev or Tolstoy – and so he was not, in the eyes of The Times, ‘a novelist whom one would allow one’s wife or servant to read’.18 Nevertheless, his conviction was considered a disgrace. ‘Zola’s true crime has been in daring to rise to defend the truth and civil liberty,’ said The Times. ‘For that courageous defence of the primordial rights of the citizen, he will be honoured wherever men have souls that are free.’19

  London’s Daily Mail took the same line: ‘France is disappearing from the list of civilised nations.’ The British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Monson, though not yet convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, wrote in his dispatches to London of ‘discreditable proceedings’, a ‘diabolical conspiracy’ involving senior officers and ‘a very great probability that justice has not been done’.20 Even in Russia, where anti-Semitism was quite as powerful and prevalent as it was in France, the verdict on Zola received a bad press.

  The German government in Berlin was in two minds about the Dreyfus Affair because, in a very real sense, the left hand of the government – the German Foreign Office – had not known what the right – the General Staff’s intelligence service – had been up to. From the very start, Graf Münster von Derneburg, the German Ambassador, assured by Schwartzkoppen that he was not involved in espionage of any kind, had repeatedly and indignantly rebutted the charges made in the French press that the bordereau had come from the German Embassy. It was now clear to Münster that he had been deceived.

  The theft of documents from the German Embassy by agents of French intelligence was now an open secret, but Henry, with the tacit encouragement of Gonse and Boisdeffre, now went beyond the genuine bordereau and Henry’s forged letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen to draw the Kaiser himself into the Dreyfus Affair. An adjutant of General de Boisdeffre, Major Pauffin de Saint-Morel, briefed Henri Rochefort, the former Communard who had escaped from the penal colony in New Caledonia and was now editor of the right-wing L’Intransigeant, that Dreyfus had been named in a letter written by the Kaiser. On 13 December 1897, Rochefort published a story entitled ‘The Truth about the Traitor’. In it he asserted that Dreyfus, realising that anti-Semitic prejudice would thwart his ambitions in the French Army, had written to Kaiser Wilhelm to ask him if he could transfer his allegiance to him and enter the German Army with the same rank. The Kaiser had replied to Dreyfus through the German Embassy in Paris accepting his offer of a switched allegiance, but asking him to remain ‘as an officer on a special mission in France’. The Kaiser had promised that in the event of war he would ‘at once assume his proper rank in the German army’. Dreyfus had accepted this condition ‘and his treason then began, and continued up to the day of the arrest of the traitor’.21 The French, Rochefort asserted, had photographs of the letters from the Kaiser to the German Ambassador – in one of which Alfred Dreyfus is mentioned by name. The originals had been returned to Münster von Derneburg after the Ambassador, learning of the theft, had threatened a diplomatic rupture between Germany and France.

  This story of a letter mentioning Dreyfus, annotated by the Kaiser himself, was one of Henry’s inventions: he had mentioned it to Maurice Paléologue who, knowing that it was out of the question that the Kaiser would communicate with a spy, realised that such a letter, if it existed, must have been forged. This was the moment when Paléologue, a mild anti-Semite, changed his mind about the guilt of Dreyfus.

  However, the letter’s existence was accepted in anti-Dreyfusard circles. The anti-Dreyfusard Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, the daughter of Jérôme, Napoleon’s brother, a salonnière during both the Second Empire and the Third Republic, told her fellow salonnière Geneviève Straus – a convinced anti-Dreyfusard – that she should know that ‘there is irrefutable evidence’ against Dreyfus. ‘I have it from General de Boisdeffre himself that the General Staff has managed to lay its hands on some letters written to Dreyfus by the Kaiser; and there is no doubt about their authenticity.’22

  Paradoxically, the only expression of sympathy for the position taken by the French General Staff and its Statistical Section came from their opposite numbers in Berlin. ‘I feel convinced that the French Government has no choice but to hold out to the very last against any rehearing of the case,’ Major Dame of the Nachrichtenbureau wrote to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. ‘They will be made absolute fools of if the truth comes to light.’ ‘One would be very glad’, he added, ‘to see poor Dreyfus rehabilitated . . . But if the whole thing comes to public knowledge it will become difficult for the Government to prevent the Press and public from attacking the Embassy.’23

  Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, now back in Germany as Colonel of the 2nd Kaiser Franz Ferdinand Regiment of the Grenadier Guards, protested later in life that he too would like to have seen Dreyfus rehabilitated. ‘My situation became extraordinarily painful,’ he wrote.

  I was now faced with the question of whether I should come forward with an explanation of the lamentable and terrible mistake and so secure the liberation of the innocent man who had been condemned. If I had been able to do as I wanted to, I should certainly have taken that step! But on reflection I came to the conclusion that I would not interfere in the matter, since as matters now stood, I should not have been believed; and also, since from considerations of diplomacy, such a step would have been inexpedient.24

  Schwartzkoppen insisted that he was ordered to say nothing about the Dreyfus Affair; however, there were other reasons for lying low. Graf Münster was clearly fond of him, and it would be painful for him to discover how thoroughly he had been deceived by his military attaché. And there was Schwartzkoppen’s reputation as a competent officer: how would it look if he admitted that he had thrown top-secret and highly compromising documents – the bordereau and the petit bleu – into his waste-paper basket?

  Pressure was to build up on Schwartzkoppen as the Affair progressed in the course of 1899, but at least he was no longer in Paris. This was not the case with his friend Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché, who had been dragged into the frame by mention in L’Éclair of the ‘Canaille de D.’ letter used as evidence against Dreyfus in his court martial. In bad French and an illegible hand, Panizzardi wrote to Schwartzkoppen complaining that his name had been brought into the affair by Esterhazy – something he considered outrageous ‘considering that I have done nothing to him and did not even know him’. Panizzardi said he knew ‘for certain’ that his letters to Schwartzkoppen had been stolen from Schwartzkoppen’s flat in the rue de Lille by the porter’s wife, and

  are being made use of to condemn an innocent man, and all because these papers were not burnt. There is no knowing how it will all end . . . I have had plenty of hard work in sticking up for you, but that was my duty as a friend. But it must not be assumed that they know nothing here in Paris. The Scheurer-Kestner syndicate has passed round information in every direction, and many people now know all about what went on between you and E. But as they are eager to see the condemnation of Dreyfus confirmed, they all say nothing.25

  Throughout these letters from Panizza
rdi to Schwartzkoppen, there is a mix of the misery of an abandoned lover and plaintive rebuke at being left to carry the can. To prevent their being opened by the French, Panizzardi’s letters were posted in Turin; and Schwartzkoppen’s replies have not survived. But it is clear from Panizzardi’s further letters that Schwartzkoppen had rebuked him in turn. ‘You know well’, wrote Panizzardi, ‘that if anything upsets me I am very free in my language, and you must bear in mind that what I have told you and what is being said here about me cannot be exactly pleasant for me . . .’

  Panizzardi reported to Schwartzkoppen that ‘the Syndicate’ were attempting to blackmail him. He had been visited by

  two people who had declared that they had knowledge that I had in my possession all the receipts for the money that E. received from you; they then demanded that I should produce all these documents, or else they would start a campaign against me in the Press! I showed these two persons the door and threatened to set the public prosecutor on to them for blackmailing. You see that I am being allowed no peace, and they are trying to take advantage of my friendship with you to get further information.26

  It is clear from Panizzardi’s letters to Schwartzkoppen that the German and Italian governments understood quite well what was going on in Paris. The main objective of the German and Italian diplomatic missions was to avoid being contaminated by the seedy business of espionage. ‘My relations with your Embassy had become intolerable,’ wrote Panizzardi. ‘Every time the Ambassador saw me he always asked me one and the same question, whether you had had any relations with E. . . . I always declared that I had no knowledge of it, and in the end I put long distances between my visits, in order to evade these questions.’