The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  There was ‘a definite social cachet in contributing to the cause’.39 The pre-revolutionary aristocracy was strongly represented with seven dukes and duchesses, two princes, fifty marquises and over two hundred counts, viscounts and barons, among them Comte Albert de Mun who sent in fifty francs ‘to defend our beloved army’. The Duc d’Orléans, on the other hand, made a contribution, ‘not actually under his own name, but yet transparently’; there was a measure of opportunism in this because ‘some of the Orléans princes knew, through their relations with Queen Victoria, that the Kaiser had told his grandmother that Dreyfus was innocent’.40 So too the Empress Eugénie, living in exile in Britain, which may be why the Bonapartists were largely absent from the subscription list.

  There were a large number of doctors and lawyers: analysts of the list have suggested that the competition of Jews within these professions had fostered anti-Semitism, just as perceived exploitation by Jewish employers accounts for contributions from ‘three embroiderers from Bains-les-Bains, Vosges, who in working for a Jew make 14 sous in 15 hours’. There were many women among the subscribers, and a strain of sexual phobia is discernible in some comments that accompanied their contributions: ‘a working woman seduced and deceived by her Jewish boss’ and ‘a man of Roubaix who wants to contribute his modest share to snatch a French woman out of the hands of a Jew’.41

  Mme Henry, ‘veiled in mourning, epitomizing pure and fragile womanhood’,42 became an icon for the anti-Dreyfusards to match the Dreyfusards’ Lucie: one a real widow, the other a grass widow who had worn black since her husband’s incarceration. The many thousands of letters of support that Lucie received from well-wishers provide a snapshot of Dreyfusards comparable to the list of contributors to the ‘Henry monument’. Here too there were Catholics and aristocrats, but there were often personal reasons for acting contrary to type. Monseigneur de Schad, the Private Chamberlain to Pope Leo XIII, was a German; Lady Stanley, the wife of the explorer, was English; Père Hyacinthe was a defrocked priest married to an Englishwoman; Prince Albert of Monaco, who sent a message to Lucie inviting her and her husband to his chateau at Marchais in Champagne after ‘the holy work of justice was done’,43 was married to Alice Heine, the daughter of a German-Jewish financier, widow of Duc Armand de Richelieu and distant cousin of the poet Heinrich Heine.44 Prince Albert rewarded the first Dreyfusard from outside the Dreyfus family, Major Forzinetti, by giving him a job in the government of Monaco.45

  This is not to suggest that all the Dreyfusards had ulterior motives for supporting the case for a review, but it is notable how tribal loyalties affected judgements on both sides of the divide. As the Affair progressed, one finds fewer and fewer atypical partisans in either camp. Abbé Pichot was a Dreyfusard – one of ‘the rare priests who had the courage to take up the defence of justice and truth’;46 the Abbé Brugerette was another; and the Abbé Augustin Serres a third. The Catholic historian Paul Viollet, Professor of Law at the École des Chartes, initially joined the League of the Rights of Man but, finding it too anti-clerical, resigned and founded a Comité Catholique pour la Défense du Droit – a Catholic Committee for the Defence of the Law. However, the anti-Dreyfusard press did not want to let their readers know that there were Catholic Dreyfusards any more than the anti-clerical Dreyfusards. ‘By this reciprocal reticence,’ writes Pierre Miquel, ‘they were often unknown and underestimated.’47

  The most notable exception to this rule that tribal loyalties affected the judgement of Frenchmen and women during the Dreyfus Affair was Georges Picquart. Though clearly not a devout Catholic, as his adulterous liaison with Pauline Monnier makes evident, he came from a Catholic family in Alsace and had in him all the reflex anti-Semitism of his fellow Alsatian and predecessor as chief of the Statistical Section, Colonel Jean Sandherr. Captain Tassin had put about the remarks made by Picquart during Dreyfus’s degradation about him evaluating the gold braid as it was torn from his uniform and ‘For goodness sake, there isn’t a Jew who doesn’t have a convict in the family!’ But such reflex anti-Semitism is found in many of the Dreyfusards – in Zola, Jaurès, Scheurer-Kestner, Loew – and like them, faced with the obscene and murderous abuse of Jews triggered by the Dreyfus Affair, Picquart had reflected on his own prejudices and tried to suppress them. During his stay in prison, he took up the study of art and, in a letter to a friend, wrote that he had ‘ignored the fact that Rembrandt was Jewish and saw for what they are – these stupid prejudices’.48

  Picquart let it be known, however, that his belief in the innocence of Dreyfus had nothing to do with Dreyfus being a Jew. In exonerating Dreyfus and exposing Esterhazy, he was merely doing his duty. ‘I don’t understand why I am being exalted by some and insulted by others,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I did nothing but my duty.’49 This distancing of himself from the Dreyfusards which he had kept up for so long after discovering the petit bleu could not be sustained. He had become the hero of the Dreyfusards and the bête noire of the anti-Dreyfusards, particularly his fellow officers in the French Army. ‘Dreyfus is not an object of hatred among army officers,’ wrote Maurice Paléologue. ‘They talk about him with stern coldness or contempt, but without anger, and sometimes even pity. But the mere mention of the name of Picquart rouses them; they hate, loathe and execrate the renegade to the point of fury.’50

  General de Pellieux put out disinformation to the effect that Picquart was a neurotic who indulged in hypnotism, occultism and spiritualism; and rumours of his homosexuality were revived. Several right-wing papers described Picquart’s female characteristics, his ‘smooth, almost feminine manner’. At the second Zola trial, Esterhazy shouted at Picquart ‘Have you no shame?’ in a high-pitched, woman’s voice. The prolific novelist Gyp (Sibylle Aimée Marie Antoinette Gabrielle de Riquetti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville), who, when summoned as a witness, gave her profession as ‘Anti-Semite’, wrote a roman-à-clef in which Picquart is portrayed as a man with a ‘complicated’ love life. Dreyfusard women write passionate love letters to their imprisoned hero, but their love provokes only indifference from the ‘deranged and unhealthy’ officer, whose desires are ‘the most rascally and repugnant of all’.51 This image of an effeminate decadent was compounded by stories in the press, such as that in Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant on 16 March 1899, describing how Picquart received up to forty visitors every day in his cell in the Cherche-Midi prison – ‘ecstatic fifty-something-year-old demi-vierges’ who brought him embroidered slippers, pâtés, sausages, pastries, fine wines and jam.

  The attempts to portray Picquart as homosexual suggest that the General Staff, if they were indeed informed of his affair with Pauline Monnier by Père du Lac, thought that information would be less damaging and so kept it to themselves. Though it was still widely believed that Picquart had been bought by the syndicate, they hoped to convict him on the two specific charges of forging the petit bleu and conveying official secrets to his lawyer Leblois. On 24 November 1898, the Military Governor of Paris, General Zurlinden, ordered the court martial to take place on 12 December.

  On 28 November, the socialist Alexandre Millerand, converted by Henry’s suicide to the Dreyfusard cause, proposed a motion in the Chamber of Deputies to order a postponement of Picquart’s court martial. Raymond Poincaré, the Minister of Finance at the time of Dreyfus’s conviction who had hitherto said nothing about the review, rose to speak. ‘The time has come’, he said, ‘when to remain silent would be an act of cowardice.’ He called upon his friends Barthou, Leygues and Dupuy, who had been Prime Minister at the time, to accept that, if it was possible that a miscarriage of justice had taken place when they were in power in 1894, then they were under ‘an imperious obligation’ not to do anything to prevent it being discovered and redressed. It was a cautious double-negative that followed years of silence.

  Why, Poincaré was asked, had he waited until now to speak up in favour of review? His answer was plausible and straightforward. At the time he had been told it was the bordereau that prov
ed the guilt of Dreyfus. There was no mention of a secret dossier or a confession. Now the adventitious introduction into the polemic of new evidence suggested that the original conviction may have been unsound. ‘I am well aware that today, in breaking my silence, I am exposing myself to attacks, insults and slander. That does not matter to me. I am happy to have taken the opportunity in speaking from this podium of doing what my conscience dictates.’

  Poincaré was an experienced advocate; he had made his fortune representing the armaments industry in the courts, and his ‘confessional’ tone was staged to reclaim the moral high ground for the centrist republicans. In this he was backed by his former colleague and fellow lawyer Louis Barthou. Millerand’s motion was lost by 338 to 83; the Chamber was still overwhelmingly anti-Dreyfusard. But in the Senate another lawyer and republican heavyweight, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, proposed a change to the law that would permit the Cour de Cassation to suspend Picquart’s court martial.

  Waldeck-Rousseau had been in at the very start of the Dreyfus Affair when Mathieu had asked him in 1894 to defend his brother. Political considerations had led him to decline (see pp. 102–3 above); he had recommended his friend Edgar Demange, and most certainly knew from Demange of the irregularity of the proceedings that sent Alfred Dreyfus to Devil’s Island. Had he suffered from a bad conscience like Poincaré? Or had considerations of political advantage changed? His motion was defeated but only by the deciding vote of the President of the Senate. Half the senators had been persuaded by the sagacious Waldeck-Rousseau, not only by the eloquence of the most able lawyer of his generation, but by the fact that this most cautious and reserved of politicians had chosen this moment to come off the fence.

  In the event, the failure of the motions in both houses of the National Assembly was circumvented by a legal manoeuvre. On 8 December 1898, after a submission by Picquart’s lawyers, the Cour de Cassation called for the dossier to be retrieved for its perusal from the military prosecutors, which effectively postponed the court martial sine die. This, to the anti-Dreyfusards, was a further proof that the judiciary were in the pay of the syndicate. In fact, as Jean-Louis Bredin, himself a lawyer, wrote in his book The Affair, ‘most of the Court’s judges had behind them a long past devoted to the study of legal theory and practice. The juridical spirit had formed them.’ Most were by disposition conservative, a number anti-Semitic. However, the great majority were committed to the secular republic. At the time of Jules Ferry’s anti-clerical laws in the early 1880s, some 200 Catholic magistrates had resigned, and in 1897 the republican government had dismissed 609 sitting magistrates deemed to have Bonapartist, royalist or clericalist sympathies; a further 300 magistrates had resigned in protest. This purge, ‘as brutal as it was arbitrary . . . showed little respect for judicial independence’.52

  As a result, many of the judges, even if predisposed to reject a review on the grounds of res judicata, were also trying to make out which way the wind was blowing and were prepared to become Dreyfusards if the government changed its mind. Most kept their opinions to themselves; however, Judge Loew, like the Attorney General Manau and the rapporteur Alphonse Bard, made no secret of the fact that he favoured a review, while Judge Sevestre, who had family links with the army, was among those who were against it. However, a decisive intervention by the anti-Dreyfusards came from a judge in the Civil Chamber of the Cour de Cassation, Judge Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire. He claimed that when Colonel Picquart had been summoned from prison to give evidence to the court’s Criminal Chamber, he had been held in his office for want of space anywhere else in the Palais de Justice; and while he was there the rapporteur Bard had chatted to Picquart in the most friendly manner, addressing him as ‘My dear Picquart’, asking for his view on the statements of other witnesses, and saying ‘Take a look at Gonse’s testimony. I think we’ve got him.’ Bard had even arranged for Picquart to receive a hot drink.

  Beaurepaire’s disclosures were picked up by the nationalist press and quickly became an affair of state. On 8 January 1899, in protest at the government’s failure to deal satisfactorily with his charges of partiality, Beaurepaire resigned as presiding judge of the Civil Chamber. He was replaced by Judge Alexis Ballot-Beaupré, but the Minister of Justice Georges Lebret also instructed the presiding judge of the Cour de Cassation, Charles Mazeau, to supervise Judge Loew, and choose his own rapporteur to inquire into the charges brought by Beaurepaire. The inquiry concluded that there were no grounds for suspecting any of the judges of the Criminal Chamber of any wrongdoing, but that the charges had undermined the public’s confidence in the court’s impartiality and therefore the case should now be heard by the Combined Chambers of the Cour de Cassation – the Criminal and Civil Chambers, and the Chambre des Requêtes. The government accepted this recommendation, and on 28 January introduced legislation transferring the competence of the Criminal Chamber to the Combined Chambers.

  The Criminal Chamber was only days away from delivering its verdict; the government therefore had to act quickly. The proposed intervention – the executive tampering with the judiciary – was, wrote Bredin, ‘without precedent and in defiance of the law’,53 and, in the view of Maurice Paléologue, was an ‘arbitrary incursion by the political power into the realm of justice’.54 However, a law ‘dispossessing’ the Criminal Chamber of the Dreyfus case was passed by the Chamber of Deputies by 324 votes to 207, with the centrist republicans and two-thirds of the Radicals voting with the right. On 27 January, the debate moved to the Senate, but there too, despite a magisterial speech by Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau opposing the law, it was passed by 155 votes to 125.

  3: Grand Guignol

  On 16 February 1899 – the day on which the debate on the law of dispossession was held in the Senate – the President of France, Félix Faure, held a number of meetings at the Élysée Palace, one with Prince Albert of Monaco, another with Cardinal Richard, the Archbishop of Paris. When the serious business of the day was completed, the President withdrew to his private quarters. Beyond his study was a small boudoir – the salon bleu – where at 5.30 p.m. he received Marguerite Steinheil, the beautiful twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Jewish industrialist in Metz and now the wife of the painter Adolphe Steinheil.

  An hour and a quarter later, the President’s private secretary heard screams coming from the salon bleu. At the secretary’s behest, the locked door was forced open by an officer of the guard to find Faure comatose, his clothes in disarray, and a naked Mme Steinheil caught by his fingers entwined in her hair. The hysterical young woman was freed and, once dressed, was hurried out of the Élysée Palace. The two doctors summoned to attend to the President found that he had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. Mme Faure was informed. A priest arrived from La Madeleine and performed the last rites of the Catholic Church. Faure died a few hours later.*

  Faure’s death was a setback for the anti-Dreyfusards. He had set his mind against a review from the time back in 1895 when his friend Dr Gilbert had raised the question of a possible miscarriage of justice; and had confirmed this stance when another old friend, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, had asked him to intervene in October 1897. Concomitantly, it was an opportunity for the Dreyfusards. Under the constitution of the Third Republic, the President was chosen not by a popular vote but by the deputies and senators in the National Assembly. Some republicans in the centre favoured Jules Méline as the new President; others, supported by the left, put forward the President of the Senate, Émile Loubet. The left liked Loubet because he had ruled in favour of the Carmaux strikers in 1892; to the right, he was a scoundrel who had tried to cover up corruption during the Panama Canal scandal.

  Loubet was elected on the first round of voting with 483 votes against 279 for Méline. Already the nationalist press were claiming that Félix Faure, ‘the great friend of the army’, had been murdered by ‘some Judith or Delilah’ at the behest of the Jews. Now the election of Loubet, a known Dreyfusard and so ‘the elect of the synagogue’, was regarded as ‘an insult to France’, ‘a chal
lenge to the army’ and ‘a victory for Jewish treason’. On his way to the Élysée to pay his respects to his dead predecessor, the sound of the military band playing the ‘Marseillaise’ was drowned out by the boos, whistles and abuse of the crowds lining the route.55

  For the nationalist opponents of the republican regime, the election by a clique of corrupt politicians of the Panamist ‘candidate from Devil’s Island’, and the evidence of popular fury at their choice, convinced them that the time was ripe for a coup d’état. Paul Déroulède alerted the members of his League of Patriots and Jules Guérin mobilised his Anti-Semitic League. The aim of the coup, in Déroulède’s words, was ‘to kick out of France a foreign constitution – just as Joan of Arc had kicked out the English’ and ‘leave it to the people to choose the President of the Republic’.56 While the militant members of the two Leagues were ready for action, and Déroulède felt he could count on the sympathy of the Parisian crowd, it would be the army that would overthrow the rotten Republic at the state funeral of Félix Faure.