The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  Each side had its bogeymen. For the anti-Dreyfusards, it was the syndicate – the secretive, transnational network of world Jewry with its allies, or stooges, the Protestants and Freemasons. For the Dreyfusards it was the Catholic Church, in particular the Society of Jesus with its sinister and secretive power exercised through the confessional and its schools; its members taking oaths of blind obedience to their General in Rome – the ‘black pope’ – and the Pope himself. Unlike the amorphous nature of the Jewish syndicate, here was an enemy for all to see – subversives in black soutanes who despite the patriotic rhetoric of their pupils, the Postards* and Saint-Cyrians, owed their first obedience to an Italian and taught that the end justified any means so long as it was ad maiorem Dei gloria, for the greater glory of God.

  As Michael Burleigh has pointed out, the creation of these bogeymen was exacerbated as a convenience by the popular press in which cartoonists could reduce ‘complex issues to crude and sometimes vicious stereotypes, for it was far easier to depict a freemason or a Jew than a liberal, or a Jesuit rather than a moderate lay Catholic’.11 The term ‘Jesuitical’ proliferates in the anti-clerical and Dreyfusard invective – in the speeches of Clemenceau and Jaurès – particularly in relation to the French officer corps and the army’s High Command. Dupuy, in his first speech as Prime Minister to the National Assembly, referred to ‘clerical influences’ within the army. For the Reinachs, wrote Ruth Harris, their ‘Franco-Judaism was inseparable from their anti-clericalism’. Joseph Reinach in a letter to his brother rebukes him for being ‘more dirty-minded than the Catholic priests who screw chickens and goats’.12

  The particular bête noire of the anti-Dreyfusards was the Jesuit Père Stanislas du Lac de Fugères. Joseph Reinach claimed he was ‘astir in every intrigue’.13 This suave and intelligent priest came from a family of the lesser French nobility that traced its pedigree back to the thirteenth century. Though born in Paris, he had served his novitiate in the Jesuit house at Issenheim in Alsace. In October 1871, at the age of thirty-six, he had succeeded Père Léon Ducoudray, who had been shot by the Communards, as rector of the École Sainte-Geneviève on the rue des Postes where pupils were coached for the entry exams for Saint-Cyr. When the Jesuits were expelled from France by the government of Jules Ferry in 1880, he had founded a school in Canterbury in England.

  Joseph Reinach’s contention that the Jesuits in general, and Père du Lac in particular, directed the anti-Dreyfusard campaign as part of a wider plan to foster a coup d’état and replace the anti-clerical Republic with a pro-Catholic authoritarian regime is found in a number of commentaries on the Affair. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism wrote that ‘the Jesuits were not prepared to tolerate the existence of officers immune to the influence of the Confessional’14 and had a ‘coup d’état policy’ that they ‘and certain anti-Semites were trying to introduce with the help of the army’.15 One contemporary historian, Robert Tombs, regards the charge that ‘the Jesuits through their influence over Catholic army officers were running the anti-Dreyfus plot in order to destroy the Republic’ a ‘more plausible accusation’ than some of the wilder charges against the order;16 another, Ralph Gibson, calls the idea ‘demonstrably a total delusion’.17 None of the Dreyfusard conspiracy theories explain why the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine, or Commissaire Armand Cochefert, should have been susceptible to the influence of Jesuits.

  Ruth Harris writes of Père du Lac that ‘there is no hard evidence that he was responsible for directing the military cover-up, as the Dreyfusards claim’,18 but she does not enumerate the soft evidence. She tells her readers that Père du Lac was asked by the husband of Picquart’s mistress, Pauline Monnier, to guide her conscience; that ‘she was said to have accused du Lac of breaking the seal of the confessional, though what confidence he broke, if any, has never been determined’; and that, after temporarily breaking with her lover, Mme Monnier rejected du Lac’s spiritual direction and resumed her affair with Picquart. Christian Vigouroux suggests that du Lac told Boisdeffre about Picquart’s adulterous affair, though he concedes that his source ‘is not necessarily an expert on religious matters’.19 Ruth Harris also tells us that it is ‘impossible to know’ whether Père du Lac was the model for the Jesuit schoolteacher in Octave Mirbeau’s novel Sébastien Roch, Père de Kern, who grooms and eventually rapes one of his pupils, but mentions the speculation as an example of how ‘clerical, spiritual and sexual violation became a central theme of Dreyfusards wishing to demonize their opponents’.20

  It is likely that some in the Society of Jesus accepted the hypothesis of a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to de-Catholicise France as outlined in Civiltà Cattolica in Rome in 1889. The statutes which excluded Jews from the Society opened it to the charge of institutionalised anti-Semitism.21 There are also connections to be made between Père du Lac and some of the anti-Dreyfusards. He brought Drumont back to the practice of the Catholic faith, and was a friend of the Comte de Mun, who presided over the Administrative Council that ran the École Sainte-Geneviève, and was said to be Boisdeffre’s confessor, though he told Reinach that he knew him ‘only in passing’.22

  In an attempt to link the Jesuits to La Libre Parole, the anti-Dreyfusards pointed out not just the pastoral link between du Lac and Drumont but also the fact that a M. Odelin, who had administered the École Sainte-Geneviève for the Jesuits until 1890, had invested money in La Libre Parole when it was founded two years later. However, it would seem that Odelin parted company with the Jesuits because of a difference of opinion, and pulled out of La Libre Parole for the same reason. Thus the link between the Jesuits and La Libre Parole is a tenuous one. It was Père du Lac, after all, who upbraided Jules Guérin for attacking a Jewish convert to Catholicism called Dreyfus (see p. 36 above).

  Was Père du Lac an éminence grise who, through his influence on Boisdeffre, controlled the army through its General Staff? A Dreyfusard journalist described how ‘in his cell there is a crucifix on the wall and permanently open on the writing table, an annotated copy of the Army List’.23 During du Lac’s tenure as Rector of the École Sainte-Geneviève between 1872 and 1880, a total of 213 of his pupils won a place at the École Centrale, 328 at the École Polytechnique and 830 at Saint-Cyr. It is likely that a number of these former pupils looked back on their Rector with affection. However, of the 180 officers in the General Staff in 1898, only a dozen had been educated at Jesuit schools,24 or, by a count provided in a letter to The Times by Comte Albert de Mun, ‘nine or ten’. ‘Moreover,’ as de Mun pointed out to the readers of the English newspaper,

  these officers are chosen exclusively from among the first twelve in the École Supérieure de Guerre, admission to which school is by competitive examination. I might also reveal . . . that of the officers concerned in the Dreyfus case not one has been brought up by the Jesuits, neither General Mercier any more than General Gonse or General Pellieux, nor Colonel Henry any more than Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam, nor Lieutenant Picquart any more than Commandant Esterhazy.25

  Certainly, General de Boisdeffre had spent two years in the Jesuit school of Vaugirard, in Paris, but he spent eight years at the secular lycée in Alençon from which he gained entry to Saint-Cyr. Neither Billot, Cavaignac, Zurlinden nor Chanoine had been educated by the Jesuits. The only general known to be a devout Catholic was Boisdeffre. ‘I have known General de Boisdeffre for nearly twenty years,’ Maurice Paléologue told the Prime Minister, Charles Dupuy, on 29 December 1898. ‘Henry’s suicide was a terrible blow to him. Since then he has shut himself up in the country, in silence, prayer and poverty. If tomorrow I were told that he had become a Carthusian or a Trappist, I should not be in the least surprised.’26

  Those unacquainted with the relation of penitent to confessor may find it difficult to accept that General de Boisdeffre had not consulted Père du Lac, his spiritual director, on the question of Dreyfus. But as the editor of the journal of the English Jesuits, the Month, wrote on this point:

  Anyone who will
take the slightest pains to ascertain from his Catholic acquaintances what kind of relations a Catholic public man can have with his priest-friends, or even with his confessor, will learn that such relations do not include subjecting his own judgement to theirs in regard to the matters, secret or otherwise, of his public employment. We can imagine what a Catholic Postmaster General would reply to a priest who should have the impudence, which none could have, to strive through him to direct the administration of the General Post Office. And the same may be said of General de Boisdeffre and Père du Lac. Père du Lac would be the last man in the world to pry into the official secrets of a Commander-in-Chief, and General de Boisdeffre would have been the last to permit such an intrusion – for, let us take this opportunity of saying it, those who know General de Boisdeffre, know him to be a man of conspicuously high and honourable character, and absolutely incapable of the iniquities imputed to him by reckless partisans . . .27

  With hindsight it may be wondered whether this judgement of General de Boisdeffre’s character is sound; but it remains unlikely, though not impossible, that he would have consulted his confessor – whether it be Père du Lac or any other – on matters of state.

  With the exception of the Assumptionists and their Comités Justice-Égalité formed to support nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard candidates in the election of May 1898, there would seem to have been no direct intervention by the institutional Church in the Dreyfus Affair. Anti-Semitism is found in some bishops and a number of priests, but broadly speaking the Catholic bishops took the line that the case of Alfred Dreyfus was a judicial matter in which, by the terms of the Concordat, they were not permitted to intervene: it was a reticence that was to cost the Church dear. Edward H. Flannery, in his The Anguish of the Jews, dismisses Hannah Arendt’s claim that the Jesuits masterminded the anti-Dreyfusard campaign but concurs with her view that the staunchest anti-Dreyfusards were tribal Catholics – ‘Catholics without faith’ – who regarded Catholicism as integral to French identity and saw the Dreyfusard campaign to discredit the army as part of a long-term ‘de-Christianisation’ of society by ‘Talmudic Judaism’.28

  The most significant exponent of this view was Charles Maurras, a writer and journalist from a monarchist family in Provence and the adversary of Gabriel Monod. He had lost his faith in his youth but wrote that ‘the interests of Roman Catholicism and those of France’ were ‘nearly always identical and nowhere contradictory’.29 He regarded French Jews, and more particularly French Protestants, as alien entities within the nation.

  Nationalist writers observe that our Jews, thus naturalized, have not ceased for this reason to form a community of their own, a state quite distinct from the French State: their practice of marrying either among themselves, or with their kind from the North or the South of Europe, accentuates this difference between Jewish society and the rest of French society. A similar complaint . . . has been raised against the Huguenots. Though they were originally of irreproachable French blood, they are intellectual and moral dissidents, and have special affinities with our most redoubtable foreign rivals. It is to be regretted that . . . Protestant society has come to have a mentality quite different from the traditional French mentality; and between the two there has developed, more and more, a state of secret war, not a war of race, or even of religion, but, rather, of culture, of thought and of taste.30

  Jews, but particularly Protestants, were therefore a cultural Fifth Column that sapped the strength of France in its struggle with its ‘redoubtable enemies’, Protestant Germany, Britain and the United States (the US at that moment was wresting Cuba and the Philippines from Catholic Spain). The crime of the Dreyfusards, in Maurras’s view, was to exalt ‘a vague and unrealistic ideal of “Justice” above the concrete conditions within which the human race alone could attain as much justice as possible. It was folly to put justice before the state: there had been states without justice but no justice without the state.’31

  Maurras did not simply reject the claims of Christianity, he thought Jesus of Nazareth ‘essentially a charlatan’32 whose exaltation of the meek and poor over the ‘mighty’ was a ‘recipe for disaster’ at a time of a Darwinian struggle for survival by Europe’s nation states. He applied this Nietzschean ruthlessness to the case of Dreyfus. ‘Was France to be weakened because of some artificial doubts about the guilt of one man?’ It was not surprising that those who sought to discredit the French Army by calling for a review of Dreyfus’s conviction were almost all from the Jewish and Protestant communities, who felt a greater affinity for their co-religionists in other countries than they did for their fellow citizens in France: he referred to them as métèques, a term used in ancient Greece for resident foreigners with limited rights.

  Maurras had a fertile and flexible mind. Faced with the suicide of Henry, he did not support the idea put forward in some provincial editions of La Croix that he had been murdered by agents of the syndicate to keep him quiet but, quite to the contrary, wrote that Henry had forged the letter from Panizzardi and then taken his own life to save the nation from war. In two articles published in La Gazette de France on 5 and 6 September, Maurras described how this ‘energetic plebeian’* had taken upon himself to counteract Picquart’s forgery of the petit bleu with a forgery of his own. To reveal the real source of his certainty of the guilt of Dreyfus – by implication, the bordereau annotated by Kaiser Wilhelm II – would lead to war. A court martial might lead to damaging disclosures about his superior officers. ‘Our poor half-Protestant upbringing’, wrote Maurras, ‘is incapable of appreciating so much moral and intellectual nobility.’ He went on: ‘Colonel, there is not a drop of your precious blood which does not steam still wherever the heart of the Nation beats . . . Before long from the country’s soil, in Paris, in your little village, there will arise monuments to expiate our cowardice . . . In life as in death, you marched forward. Your unhappy forgery will be counted among the best acts of war.’33

  This idea of Henry as a martyr was taken up by the other anti-Dreyfusard newspapers – La Libre Parole, Le Petit Journal, L’Éclair and of course La Croix, which dropped the idea that Henry had been murdered. It reinvigorated the anti-Dreyfusards who had been demoralised by Henry’s suicide. It led to a surge of sympathy throughout the nation for Henry’s pretty widow, Berthe, and her little son Joseph. Always on the lookout for something to boost circulation, La Libre Parole published an article about the plight of ‘the widow Henry’ by the proto-feminist writer Marie-Anne de Bovet (the Marquise de Bois-Hébert) entitled ‘To Good People’ – ‘Aux braves gens’. In it she revealed the plight of Mme Henry, a woman whose noble husband had been calumniated by Joseph Reinach: Reinach had accused Henry of being Esterhazy’s partner in treason. How could an impoverished widow seek redress for such an insult in the courts? La Libre Parole would open a subscription list to raise money for legal action. It would be a memorial to ‘the brave French officer killed, murdered by Jews . . . However small the contribution, it will be a slap in the obscene face of the ignoble Reinach.’

  The appeal was an astounding success. In the space of a month, 25,000 contributions raised 131,000 francs. A list of subscribers was published in La Libre Parole which allows a dissection of the social forces arraigned against Dreyfus, and the vituperative comments that accompanied some of the contributions gives an insight into the deep loathing found in some circles for Jews. Few contributions came from white-collar workers, domestic servants, industrialists or professionals in the countryside. A high proportion came from manual workers, artisans, students and the liberal professions in the big cities. The largest number of contributors were serving members of the armed forces – 4,500, of whom 3,000 were officers on active service, among them nine colonels and lieutenant-colonels and five generals – one of them General Mercier; and, from the army reserve, thirty generals and fifty-five colonels or lieutenant-colonels.34 Out of 55,000 priests in France, 300 subscribed to the Henry memorial – approximately one-half of 1 per cent.35 No Catholic bish
op sent a contribution, something which disappointed some of their clergy – ‘A poor priest, sickened to realize that no bishop in France has sent in his offering’; and ‘M. . . . heartbroken to see that not a single bishop has participated in the subscription.’36

  Incongruously, there were few contributions from Brittany and the Vendée – the most Catholic French regions and also politically the most royalist and right wing: Stephen Wilson ascribes this to the fact that the population was too backward and illiterate to be susceptible to a press campaign, or that in those areas ‘Jewish minorities were unimportant or unknown’, but it might also be explained by the disapproval by devout Catholics of Henry’s suicide – a mortal sin.

  Some of the subscribers were not Catholic at all: one came from ‘a freethinker who is opposed to Jewish or Protestant clericalism as to any other’, another from ‘a freethinker’ who feared that ‘the Jews will turn us all into church-goers’. Many of the workers and artisans felt that they had been exploited or badly treated by Jewish employers and they expressed the common complaints against the amorality of the money economy: ‘In contrast to honour which is embodied in the army and the family, the Jew is identified with money which is liquid and unstable, and associated with social change, uncertainty and possible disaster’; ‘For France, against the triple alliance of Freemasons, Jews and Protestants . . .’.37 Some of the donations were accompanied by the kind of crude anti-Semitic abuse found in Drumont’s La France juive. Jews were ‘unclean’. One contributor ‘would like to eat some Jew, so that he could defecate it’; another said he would like ‘a bedside rug made with Yid skins so that he could tread on it night and morning’. There was ‘a military doctor . . . who wishes that vivisection were practised on Jews rather than on harmless rabbits’.38