The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  The next morning, Cuignet reported his discovery to General Roget, Cavaignac’s chef de cabinet. In daylight, the forgery was less apparent, but, with curtains drawn and the letter held up to the light, Roget was forced to acknowledge that Cuignet was right. The two officers took the letter to the Minister, Cavaignac. He too had to accept the evidence of forgery. His thoughts and feelings at that moment are not on record but can be imagined. Cavaignac’s absolute certainty that Dreyfus was guilty had come up against the fact that a critical piece of evidence that had been used to convince him had been fabricated by someone in the Statistical Section. Should he, like General Gonse when told about the petit bleu by Picquart, tell Cuignet and Roget to ignore this inconvenient discovery?

  Countering this temptation was Cavaignac’s self-image as a man of unimpeachable integrity. To cover up a crime, whatever the motives of the criminal, and however justifiable it might seem in terms of raison d’état, went against everything Cavaignac had stood for since the time of the Panama Canal scandal. Should he sacrifice this reputation because of the imbecile antics of the Statistical Section, and no doubt some senior officers in the General Staff?

  Cavaignac pondered these questions over the next two weeks. Roget and Cuignet were ordered to keep what had transpired to themselves. When the time came, it would be Cavaignac who would inform the Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues of Cuignet’s discovery. On 15 August Cavaignac went to Mâcon in Burgundy with the Minister of Justice, Ferdinand Sarrien: he said nothing about the forgery to Sarrien. Eight days later he was in Le Mans, in the north-west of France, and made speeches, as he had done in Mâcon, professing his love and admiration for the army.1

  Back in Paris, while Cavaignac was on his tour of the provinces, Charles Esterhazy was summoned before a board convened by the Military Governor of Paris, General Émile Zurlinden, at Cavaignac’s request, to judge whether Esterhazy should remain an officer in the army. Esterhazy was not prepared to go down without a fight: on 23 August he persuaded Drumont to publish an article in La Libre Parole suggesting that Cavaignac’s vendetta against Esterhazy was at the behest of the Jewish syndicate which, when it had disposed of Esterhazy, would move on to bring down du Paty de Clam, Lauth, Henry, Boisdeffre and General Mercier himself. To discharge Esterhazy would be to betray the army.

  Esterhazy defended himself aggressively before the board. He claimed that he had turned down an offer from the syndicate of 600,000 francs to admit to being the author of the bordereau; and that the ‘dirty tricks’ he had played to thwart Picquart had been the idea of Commandant du Paty de Clam, acting in the name of the General Staff. Called as a witness, du Paty found it difficult to deny this: Esterhazy had kept a compromising letter in his handwriting. Esterhazy threatened to say more and so the board, while it recommended discharging Esterhazy for ‘habitual misconduct’, acquitted him of having done anything dishonourable. General Zurlinden suggested to Cavaignac that he extend ‘a certain indulgence towards Commandant Esterhazy’, not because Esterhazy merited it, but because the inquiry had turned up ‘grave revelations about the role of certain officers in the Army General Staff’ in the Esterhazy affair. Cavaignac ignored this tacit warning that Esterhazy, if pushed too hard, might spill more beans: he at once signed the order for Esterhazy’s discharge from the army. But it no doubt brought home to him the high probability that news of the forgery would eventually leak out, and that it could only enhance his reputation for honesty and integrity if he were to be the one who made it known.

  There could be no real doubt about whom the forger could be. On 30 August Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse were summoned to the War Office to attend the questioning by the Minister of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert Joseph Henry. Before the interrogation began, Boisdeffre was shown the evidence of forgery by Cavaignac and appeared astonished. At 2.30 p.m. Henry appeared, accompanied by Gonse. Colonel Roget took the minutes of the meeting but the questioning was undertaken by Cavaignac himself. He pointed out the different coloured lines in the Panizzardi letter and asked Henry for an explanation. Henry blustered. Cavaignac persisted. ‘Given the facts, no explanation would be as serious as an inadequate one. When and how did you reassemble this document?’ At first Henry denied that he had fabricated anything, but little by little Cavaignac’s persistent questioning wore him down. He admitted that he had ‘arranged a few sentences’.

  ‘Which of the words did you invent?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Who gave you the idea of doing what you did?’

  ‘No one.’

  Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre said nothing.

  ‘My superior officers were very worried,’ Henry went on. ‘I wanted to reassure them, give them some serenity. I told myself: Let’s add a sentence: if we only had definitive proof . . . No one knew about it. I acted solely in the interests of my country.’

  ‘Now, Henry,’ said Cavaignac. ‘I appeal to your honour as a soldier. Tell me the truth.’ In that dry, rasping voice that had so impressed the Chamber of Deputies, the Minister continued with his interrogation. Eventually, the truth emerged which Cavaignac summarised as follows: ‘In 1896, you received an envelope with a letter inside, an insignificant letter; you suppressed the letter and fabricated another one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Colonel Roget took Henry into another room. Boisdeffre, who had said nothing throughout the interrogation, now went to Cavaignac’s desk, took pen and paper, and wrote:

  Monsieur le Ministre. It has just been proved to me that my trust in Colonel Henry, Chief of the Intelligence Service, was not justified. That trust, which was absolute, has led me to be deceived, and declare a document genuine when it was not, and to present it to you as such. As a result of these developments, Monsieur le Ministre, I have the honour of asking you to accept my resignation.

  Cavaignac tried to persuade Boisdeffre to change his mind: he was unable to see, as clearly as the Chief of the General Staff, that the game was up – that, ‘like a sandcastle before a wave, the fragile evidence which the General Staff had taken four years to build’ was about to collapse.2 ‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ said Boisdeffre, ‘but not everyone has sworn before a jury that a document is genuine when it is not . . . When one finds oneself in such a situation, the only thing to do is to leave.’

  The news of the forgery was made public in a terse communiqué issued by the Agence Havas that same day. ‘Today in the office of the Minister of War, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry was acknowledged to be, and acknowledged himself to be, the author of the letter dated October 1896 in which Dreyfus is named. The Minister of War has immediately ordered the arrest of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry, who has been taken to the Fortress of Mont-Valérien.’3

  Henry had had a premonition of disaster when he had broken down in tears before Judge Paul Bertulus and begged him to save the honour of the army. That crisis had passed and he had had good reason to suppose that the revisionists had been thwarted. Revisionist sentiment was still confined, on the whole, to Jewish salonnières and Parisian ‘intellectuals’. Sentiment in rural France, if it was aware of the Dreyfus Affair, was firmly anti-Dreyfusard. In Henry’s home village of Pogny, a commune of 589 citizens, a young man was charged with abuse for calling another ‘a no-good bastard, a liar, a Zola, a Dreyfus’.4 Henry had planned to return to Pogny that August, as he did every year, for the opening of the hunting season.5

  Now – a concession not granted to Alfred Dreyfus in October 1894 – Henry was allowed by his escort, Colonel Ferry, an adjutant from the fortress of Mont-Valérien, to call in on his wife and child in their small flat on the avenue Duquesne and pick up a set of civilian clothes, clean linen and some personal belongings. He told his wife Berthe what had happened, but added that all would be well. ‘My conscience is clear.’ In the coach taking him to Mont-Valérien to the west of Paris he was less sanguine. ‘My poor wife, my poor little boy,’ he said to Colonel Ferry. ‘Everything has collapsed in an instant. I will not be there for the opening of th
e hunt. What will they think?’6 The son of the soil who had risen from the ranks to be the de facto chief of French military intelligence, one-time mayor of Pogny, now faced criminal charges, imprisonment and degradation.

  At the Mont-Valérien fortress he was put in a room in the officers’ wing – the same room in which Colonel Picquart had been confined the previous winter. He was treated courteously, but solitude did not alleviate his agitated condition. On the morning of 31 August, he asked for paper, pen, ink and a bottle of rum. He wrote to General Gonse. ‘General, I have the honour of requesting that you agree to come and see me here. I absolutely must speak to you.’ He sent off the letter but clearly did not expect his request to be met. Drinking the rum from a tumbler, he next he wrote to his wife.

  My adored Berthe, I see that I am abandoned by everyone except you, and yet you know in whose interests I acted. My letter is a copy and contains nothing, absolutely nothing, that is forged. It merely confirms what I had learned verbally a few days earlier. I am completely innocent, they know it, and it will become clear to all later on; but right now, I can’t speak. Take good care of our adored little Joseph, and go on loving him, as I love him and as I love you.

  Goodbye, my darling; I hope you will be able to come and see me soon. I embrace you both from the very bottom of my heart.

  It was hot in the cell. Henry drank more rum and started another letter to his wife: ‘My beloved Berthe. I am like a madman; a frightening pain has grasped my brain. I am going for a swim in the Seine . . .’ He put down his pen. The heat was intolerable. Henry took off his outer clothes and lay down on the bed.

  Soon after six that evening, the orderly bringing supper to Henry’s cell received no answer when he knocked on the door. The door was locked. The Lieutenant on duty forced it open and found Henry stretched out on his bed. His body was stiff, the sheets soaked with blood. In Henry’s hand was the razor with which he had cut his throat.

  After his body had been laid out by the doctor on duty at Mont-Valérien, it was placed on a makeshift catafalque in the officers’ mess. Friends and fellow officers came to pay their last respects – among them colleagues from the Statistical Section, including the archivist Félix Gribelin and Henry’s close friend and collaborator Jules Lauth. Later Henry’s corpse was transferred to Pogny for burial. Because he had taken his own life, there were no religious rites. Nonetheless, he was buried in style – a procession of villagers, firemen, a local band and many of his fellow officers following the bier down the village street. The coffin was draped with Henry’s uniform, and his decorations, among them the Légion d’Honneur, were placed on a cushion. His superior officers in the army to which he had devoted his life, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre, were not present among the mourners.

  As a result of Henry’s suicide, many of those who had until then been convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus began to have doubts.7 Among them was the Prime Minister, Henri Brisson. On 3 September he let it be known to Mathieu Dreyfus that the moment had come for Lucie to make a formal request for a review. The request was duly made, but it came up against the inflexible opposition of Cavaignac. For Cavaignac, the Henry forgery and Henry’s suicide changed nothing. The very fact that he, Cavaignac, had exposed the forgery gave him the authority to pursue his plan for the prosecution of leading Dreyfusards. If the government agreed to a review, he would resign.

  Brisson called his bluff. He accepted Cavaignac’s resignation and replaced him as Minister of War with General Émile Zurlinden, the Military Governor of Paris. Zurlinden had held the post before, succeeding General Mercier in January 1895. At first he seemed prepared to go along with the review, but he was persuaded by the officers intimately acquainted with the case – General Roget and Captain Cuignet – that Henry’s forgery had no bearing whatsoever on the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus; the bogus letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen was dated over a year after Dreyfus’s conviction, and so had no bearing on the res judicata; and it had been assembled by Henry only to counteract Picquart’s forgery of the petit bleu. Henry had been guilty of nothing but an excess of zeal. The real criminal was Picquart, and on 4 September Zurlinden announced that Picquart was to be tried by court martial for ‘forgery and traffic in forgeries’.

  On 17 September, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, Brisson refused Zurlinden’s request to put the prosecution of Picquart on the agenda, and instead carried a motion to accept Lucie Dreyfus’s request for a review: the politicians were beginning to distance themselves from the army. Zurlinden promptly resigned and was replaced as Minister of War by General Charles Chanoine, a man with a good military record and known sympathies with the left. But Chanoine proved no less amenable to a review than had Zurlinden. He reappointed Zurlinden as Military Governor of Paris, which meant that the plan to court-martial Picquart could proceed. Faced with the prospect of being removed from the civilian prison of La Santé where he was then held to the military prison, the Cherche-Midi, Picquart made an open statement at a preliminary hearing to the effect that if he, like Henry, was found with his throat cut ‘I would like it to be known . . . that it will have been murder, for a man of my kind would never for an instant consider committing suicide.’

  The Review Commission, asked to decide whether Dreyfus should be allowed to appeal against his conviction or not, met on 21 September 1898, but failed to agree. Brisson persuaded a majority of his colleagues in the Council of Ministers to allow the appeal to proceed all the same. The Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé, was particularly keen to remove this divisive issue from the political arena by placing it sub judice because of the confrontation with Britain over Fashoda. The motion was carried by six votes to four: General Chanoine abstained.

  The move enraged the nationalists. Against a background of industrial unrest, rumours circulated of an impending coup led by Generals de Pellieux or Zurlinden. The diplomatic defeat of France in its face-off with Britain over Fashoda fuelled the nationalist hysteria. Brisson and his government were perceived to be weak and, before a mob of protesters outside the National Assembly on 25 October, General Chanoine resigned. This precipitated a collapse of Brisson’s government: a vote of confidence was lost by 286 votes to 254. However, the permission to allow an appeal could not be rescinded. On 27 October, two days after the fall of the government, proceedings opened at the Cour de Cassation – France’s highest appeal court – with a request by the rapporteur,* Alphonse Bard, that the judges should ‘bring the truth to light’: ‘Removed from every other consideration than that of justice, invulnerable to any suggestion, insensitive to threats and to outrage, you have before you a great task. You will appreciate what it requires and you will do what your conscience dictates.’8

  On 29 October, after two days of deliberation, the presiding judge of the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation, Judge Louis Loew, declared the request by Lucie Dreyfus ‘admissible in its present form’. The appeal would be heard.

  2: Sub Judice

  Three Ministers of War had resigned, and now a government had fallen, as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. A new government was formed by Charles Dupuy, the Opportunist republican who had been Prime Minister at the time of Dreyfus’s conviction. He was in a better position than most to know the truth or falsity of many of the stories circulated by the anti-Dreyfusards – for example, that Dreyfus had confessed his guilt to Captain Lebrun-Renault. However, for all the courage he had shown five years before when the anarchist Vaillant had thrown a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, he was aware that there was something more explosive and potentially destructive in the Dreyfus Affair. To placate the Dreyfusards he chose a Protestant civilian, Charles de Freycinet, as Minister of War, while to reassure the right he appointed as Minister of Justice Georges Lebret, a professor of law from Caen in Normandy, who was approved of by Drumont and La Libre Parole for his anti-Dreyfusard views.

  The sympathies of the new ministers were of less significance now that Dreyfus’s appeal was being heard by the judges of th
e Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation. What the anti-Dreyfusard officers had always feared had come to pass: the case had been transferred from a military to a civilian jurisdiction; and the tears of the old Attorney General Jean-Pierre Manau and the elevated language of the rapporteur Alphonse Barr revealed where their sympathies lay. There was a barrage of abusive rhetoric from the anti-Dreyfusard press. The presiding judge, Louis Loew, who was a Protestant from Alsace, was called ‘the Jew Lévy’ by Henri Rochefort in L’Intransigeant. Rochefort said that the judges had been bought by the syndicate like ‘bar girls’, and that they should have their eyelids cut off by ‘a duly trained torturer’, and

  large spiders of the most poisonous variety placed on their eyes to gnaw away the pupils and crystalline lenses until there were nothing left in the cavities now devoid of sight. Then, all the hideous blind men would be brought to a pillory erected before the Palais de Justice in which the crime was committed and a sign would be placed on their chests: ‘This is how France punishes traitors who try to sell her to the enemy!’9

  Less fantastical anti-Dreyfusards, such as the Catholic convert from Judaism Arthur Meyer, the editor of Le Gaulois, also wrote that the judges had been bought and were out to undermine the army ‘out of hatred for the sabre’. Once they had destroyed France’s defences, they would retire from the fray with ‘their fortunes made’. Even ‘so comparatively sagacious and so generous a man as Albert de Mun’, wrote Denis Brogan, ‘saw in the agitation for reopening the Dreyfus case merely a conspiracy to make the French soldier distrust his officers, to cast doubts and suspicions on his leaders’.10 Each side saw the case of Dreyfus as a proxy for a more momentous struggle: for science, progress, liberty, democracy and above all justice for the Dreyfusards; for the anti-Dreyfusards, the survival of France as an ordered, wholesome, moral, Catholic nation, secure against its Protestant enemies across the Channel and the Rhine, imbued with a true fraternity that acknowledged spiritual truths and transcendental values, not subject to plunder and manipulation by an anonymous and self-interested plutocracy.