The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  To enlist the support of the army, a general of some standing would have to be brought onside. The first candidate was General de Pellieux who, since holding the inquiry into Esterhazy, had become Esterhazy’s champion and an implacable anti-Dreyfusard. Pellieux gave vague assurances. The funeral took place on 23 February 1899 starting with a Requiem Mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Learning that the cavalcade accompanying the catafalque would end at the Place de la Nation, Déroulède summoned his supporters by posters and petits bleus to gather to intercept the column of soldiers at the Place de la Bastille. At his side were his deputy, Marcel Habert, and the right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras. When the troops approached, however, they were led not by General de Pellieux but by General Roget – formerly chief of the Fourth Bureau of the General Staff, subsequently Cavaignac’s chef de cabinet, and a convinced anti-Dreyfusard, but not privy to the plans for a coup. Pellieux, it turned out, had lost his nerve and persuaded General Zurlinden, still Military Governor of Paris, to replace him with General Roget.

  Déroulède tried to make the best of this unexpected turn of events. The number of supporters who had gathered at the Place de la Bastille was smaller than he had hoped for, but many more lined the route to the Élysée. Déroulède therefore stepped forward and took hold of the bridle of General Roget’s horse. ‘Follow us, General! Take pity on the nation! Save France and the Republic! To the Élysée!’ Roget refused. Trying to shake off the importunate Déroulède, he pointed his sabre towards the Boulevard Diderot which led to the barracks. Déroulède would not give up. He ran beside the General’s horse and, when the column reached the gates to the Reuilly barracks, once again took hold of the bridle and repeated his plea. Roget ignored him. Clinging to the horse’s reins, Déroulède and Habert were dragged through the gates of the barracks while Guérin, Maurras and his other supporters remained outside.

  Déroulède now harangued both General Roget and his junior officers, chastising them for betraying their own cause: ‘You are no longer soldiers, you are parliamentarians!’ Roget tried to get his uninvited guests to leave. They refused. At midnight, the police commissioner Armand Cochefert arrived at the barracks and arrested Déroulède and Habert – the same Cochefert who had taken part in the interrogation and arrest of Alfred Dreyfus in October 1894, telling him that ‘the evidence is overwhelming’ (see p. 87 above). He took his prisoners back to the central police station where, to Déroulède’s disgust, they were merely charged with riotous trespass. He persuaded Cochefert to insert in the charge-sheet that he ‘had gone to the Place de la Nation to persuade soldiers to overthrow the Republic’.57 On 29 May 1899, Déroulède and Habert were put on trial for sedition. After a cursory deliberation by the jury, they were acquitted and Déroulède was carried from the Palais de Justice on the shoulders of his cheering supporters.

  4: Review

  On the same day as Déroulède and Habert were set free, the Combined Chambers of the Cour de Cassation assembled in the grande-chambre of the Palais de Justice to consider their verdict on the case of Alfred Dreyfus. The building was suitably grandiose for this gathering of fifty judges in their splendid robes. It had been built on the site of the palace of the saintly King of France, Louis IX; the only part that survived was the exquisite Sainte-Chapelle, built by the King to house a most precious relic that he had purchased from the Byzantine Emperor in the thirteenth century, Christ’s Crown of Thorns. The relic had disappeared at the time of the Revolution of 1789 and the chapel was now dwarfed by the grandiose monument to the high ideal of that Revolution – the Palais de Justice.

  Maurice Paléologue, who claimed descent from the emperors of Byzantium, describes the grande-chambre as ‘sumptuously decorated in the glittering Roman palazzo style; there are too many accessories, too many mouldings, too much foliage, too many garlands, too many allegorical scenes. Among all this richness all the charm of the clear harmonies of Paul Baudry’s glorious ceiling, The Apotheosis of Law, is lost.’58

  Paléologue had been called twice to give evidence before the Combined Chambers. As representative of the Foreign Office, he was asked about the crucial telegram of 2 November 1894 from the Italian military attaché, Alessandro Panizzardi, to his superiors in Rome (see p. 98 above). Document No. 44 in the Dreyfus file was the first version of the telegram which implicated Dreyfus: ‘Captain Dreyfus has been arrested . . . I have taken all precautions.’ Paléologue attested before the court that both his conscience and his instructions from his superiors obliged him to say that this document ‘is not just a wrong translation; it is a falsification’.59 This had caused consternation in the court: among the fifty judges there were passionate anti-Dreyfusards who believed that anyone who gave evidence in Dreyfus’s favour was, as the nationalist press termed Paléologue, a traitor, liar, forger and German spy.

  On 27 April 1899, Paléologue had been recalled to the court to have the original telegram decrypted in the presence of Captain Cuignet, now an energetic opponent of review, and of General Eugène Chamoin, an impartial observer sent by the Minister of War. The telegram was deciphered and proved that the text Paléologue had shown to the court was correct and Document No. 44 a forgery. General Chamoin signed the report which established this with ‘a good grace’; Cuignet also signed, ‘quivering with rage’.60

  A few days later, at a dinner with the Romanian Minister, Grégoire Ghika, Maurice Paléologue found himself sitting next to Hermance de Weede, the wife of the Counsellor of the Netherlands Legation. Paléologue, who was himself conducting an affair that was to last a lifetime with the actress Julia Bartet, took a certain pleasure in discussing the Dreyfus Affair with this woman who had been Schwartzkoppen’s mistress: Paléologue had seen the file of more than eighty of their love letters. He told her that he still had doubts about the innocence of Dreyfus; Hermance de Weede was indignant but admitted that her husband, too, had the same doubts. Paléologue was tempted to point out that she had been in a better position than either of the two diplomats to ‘extract from Schwartzkoppen the truth about the Dreyfus case’.

  On Saturday, 3 June, after four days of intense and sometimes acrimonious disputation, the fifty judges of the Combined Chambers gathered to deliver their judgment. The Cour de Cassation could not declare Dreyfus innocent or guilty; it had the power, as its name suggests, to ‘break’ (or quash) a verdict but not to reverse it. It could have ruled that he had no case to answer; but such a judgment was not what Dreyfus or his family or his supporters wanted. They were determined that he should be exonerated by his fellow officers in a second court martial. Lucie Dreyfus’s lawyer, Maître Henri Mornard, made this clear to the court: it was for ‘military judges’ to admit the error ‘with joy in their hearts’. He looked forward to that moment when ‘the blessed dawn of the day will allow the great light of concord and truth to shine over the nation’.

  Mathieu Dreyfus, Bernard Lazare, Jean Jaurès, Georges Clemenceau and Louis Leblois were among the lawyers, journalists and politicians packed into the ornate grande-chambre to hear the verdict. This was not like the snakepit of the National Assembly with its seedy politicians: here they were in the Holy of Holies of the secular Republic committed to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And just as the army had its glittering gold-braided uniforms, and the Church its dazzling vestments, so these fifty high priests of the Republic, with the Cour de Cassation’s chief presiding judge Charles Mazeau as their primate, had their ermine-edged robes in scarlet and black, and black hats to match the képis and mitres.

  In solemn tones, Mazeau now went through the evidence against Dreyfus. It had been established to his satisfaction that the supposed confession had not taken place and that the bordereau, ‘the principal basis for the accusation and the conviction of Dreyfus’, ‘was not written by Dreyfus but by Esterhazy’. This judgment in no way impugned the honour of the army which, ‘thank God, transcends these proceedings which cannot affect it, and does not require to defend its honour that an innocent convict be kept on Devil’s Isla
nd’. It was not for the court to pronounce Dreyfus innocent; it merely had to rule that ‘a new element had emerged’ which might lead to a different verdict.

  Mazeau now read out the court’s conclusion. The verdict against Alfred Dreyfus delivered on 22 December 1894 was rescinded and annulled. The accused was ordered to appear before a second court martial in the city of Rennes which would decide solely whether or not Dreyfus was guilty of having entered into correspondence with a foreign power or one of its agents in order to assist it in hostilities against France; and whether he had assisted its ability to do so by procuring the notes and documents mentioned in the bordereau.

  For Mathieu Dreyfus, this was a moment of unalloyed triumph. So too for Lucie who, though not present at the hearing, was immediately informed of the court’s decision. Their battle was won. What was clear to a majority of France’s best legal minds would be equally clear to seven officers conducting a court martial and through them the army and all honest Frenchmen and women. Who could doubt the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus after this decision, and when, on the very day that the judgment was given, Le Matin published an interview with Charles Esterhazy in which he admitted that he had written the bordereau? ‘Yes, I wrote the bordereau, at the request of my superior and friend, Colonel Sandherr.’ It was the explanation that he had tried to put to du Paty de Clam but had been cut short. He went further: Generals de Boisdeffre, Gonse and Billot had all known that the bordereau had been written by him.

  A hard core of sceptics remained on the far right, but this extra-parliamentary opposition was paying out the rope with which to hang itself. The decision of the Combined Chambers enraged them: the judges had ‘bled the cash boxes of the syndicate dry’. The acquittal of Déroulède and Habert led them to think that the public were behind them: Barrès talked of civil war.61 President Loubet, at the races at Auteuil, was hissed and booed by the haut monde and finally attacked by the young Baron Fernand Chevreau de Christiani, the President’s top hat being knocked off his head by the baron’s cane. A fight broke out between the racegoers and the police; most of the fifty men arrested wore white carnations in their buttonholes and had titles dating from the ancien régime.

  Fifty was a paltry number, however, when compared with the 100,000 who turned out to demonstrate in favour of the Republic and acclaim President Loubet, or even when compared with the majority of deputies who voted to have the verdict of the Combined Chambers on the Dreyfus Affair posted in all the communes of France, thereby effacing the shame of the forgeries embedded in Cavaignac’s proclamation. This shift of opinion in the Chamber doomed the dithering Dupuy. He was voted out of office. Poincaré, Loubet’s first choice to succeed him, failed to form a government; Loubet’s next choice, the inscrutable Waldeck-Rousseau, succeeded. Both President and Prime Minister were now Dreyfusards: it had become a necessary qualification for their jobs.

  On 6 June 1899 all charges against Georges Picquart and Louis Leblois were dismissed; after 384 days in prison, Picquart was set free. Hundreds came to lionise him; thousands sent telegrams to congratulate him. Ludovic Trarieux, the former Minister of Justice and founder of the League of the Rights of Man, held a dinner to celebrate the great event. A motion was carried by the League acclaiming the achievements of ‘Dreyfus’s champions – Picquart, Scheurer-Kestner and Zola’. But what of the first Dreyfusards? In an article in L’Aurore, Bernard Lazare protested that they had been forgotten: the lawyer Edgar Demange, the prison Governor Ferdinand Forzinetti, Picquart’s lawyer Louis Leblois and, of course, Lazare himself. He had been asked by Mathieu Dreyfus to keep a low profile because he was ‘too committed, too Jewish’, too proud of being a Jew.62 Even at this, their moment of triumph, fissures had started to appear in the Dreyfusard camp.

  * An official appointed by the court to look into a case.

  * Graduates of the Jesuit school in Paris on the rue des Postes.

  * Maurras had just returned from the Olympic Games in Athens, which may be why he used categories such as ‘plebeian’ and ‘métèque’.

  * Marguerite Steinheil went on to have affairs with a number of famous men. She was charged with perjury, married an English peer and died in Hove in 1954.

  14

  Rennes

  1: The Return from Devil’s Island

  On 5 June 1899, at 12.30 p.m., the chief warder on Devil’s Island entered the hut in which Alfred Dreyfus had been living for more than four years and handed him a note. It stated that the verdict imposed on him on 22 December 1894 had been annulled, and that he was to be retried by a court martial to be held in Rennes. Dreyfus was no longer a convict but a prisoner on remand. He was to be allowed to wear the uniform of an officer in the French Army with the rank of captain. The military guard was to be withdrawn and replaced by civilian gendarmes. A cruiser of the French navy, the Sfax, had been dispatched to bring the prisoner back to France.

  ‘My joy was boundless, unutterable. At last, I was escaping from the rack to which I had been bound for five years . . .’1 Dreyfus records this in his memoirs with a certain sadness because, as he later realised, he was under a misapprehension. He assumed that the annulment of the verdict meant that he had been proclaimed innocent. ‘I thought everything was going to be terminated speedily; that there was no further question of anything but a mere formality.’ It had taken seven months for his appeal to be heard, first by the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation, then by the Combined Chambers, and only in the last of those seven months had some scraps of information about his own case got through to him – the existence of Esterhazy, Henry’s forgery and suicide, Zola’s intervention and Picquart’s travails. The ‘grand struggle undertaken by a few great minds, full of the love of truth, was utterly unknown to me’.

  A squad of gendarmes arrived from Cayenne to replace the military warders, as did civilian clothes and a hat sent by the mayor of Cayenne. While waiting for the Sfax, Dreyfus wrote a note to be telegraphed to his wife: ‘My heart and soul are with you, with my children, with all of you. I leave Friday. I await with immense joy the moment of supreme happiness to hold you in my arms. A thousand kisses.’

  On the evening of Thursday, 8 June, Dreyfus saw the smoke of a steamer on the horizon: it was the Sfax. At seven the next morning, the prison launch came to take him to the cruiser and, after more than four years of solitary confinement on the inhospitable outcrop of rock, he left Devil’s Island. A heavy swell prevented him from making the transfer on to the Sfax. Dreyfus was sea-sick. At ten, the sea was sufficiently calm for the launch to come alongside the warship. Dreyfus was received on deck by the second officer and taken to a cabin of a non-commissioned officer; a metal grating had been placed over the porthole. During the long voyage back to France, Dreyfus was allowed an hour’s exercise on deck in the morning and another in the evening. For the rest of the day, and during the night, he was locked in his cabin. When the ship stopped in the Caribbean, an officer gave him some books and a copy of The Times in which he read that Commandant du Paty de Clam had been arrested and taken to the Cherche-Midi prison. When the Sfax called at the Cape Verde Islands to take on coal, Dreyfus asked to send a telegram to General de Boisdeffre to thank him for all he had done.2

  The Sfax reached France in the early morning of 30 June 1899. That night, in heavy rain and with a gale-force wind, Dreyfus was transferred first into a small dinghy, then into a steam-launch, which took him to the quay at Port-Haliguen on the coast of Brittany. A line of soldiers surrounded the dock. From there, with an escort of three gendarmes, a carriage took him to the railway station at Quiberon; here again, soldiers were posted on the platform. From Quiberon, they took a train to Rennes. After a journey of more than two hours, and another ride in a coach from the station through the streets of Rennes, Dreyfus arrived at the military prison.

  It was six in the morning. Dreyfus was locked in a cell. At nine he was led to an adjacent cell that had been furnished with a table and two chairs. He was told that his wife had arrived to see him. Dreyfu
s was seized by ‘a violent trembling’; ‘my tears flowed, tears which I had not known for so long a time . . .’ Lucie was shown in. ‘It is impossible for words to describe the deep emotion which my wife and I both felt at seeing each other once more. In our meeting were mingled feelings of joy and grief . . .’ Inhibited by the presence of an army lieutenant, they could do little more than look into one another’s eyes, ‘concentrating in this interchange of looks all the strength of our affection and of our determination’.

  Over the following days, Dreyfus received in this furnished cell further visits from Lucie, from Mathieu and from his lawyers, Edgar Demange and Fernand Labori. In his weakened condition, both physical and mental, it took a great effort for Dreyfus to absorb and understand what he was now told. He had always been sure that in the end justice would prevail, but he had had no inkling of what tortuous dramas had culminated in the decision of the Combined Chambers.

  Only now did Dreyfus learn from his brother and his lawyers about the heroes and villains of his Affair: the upright Picquart, the anguished Lazare; of Zola, Trarieux, Mornard, Clemenceau, Jaurès; and of those who had stopped at nothing to keep him on Devil’s Island – the Ministers Billot and Cavaignac, the Generals de Pellieux, Roget, Gonse and – most wounding of all – the man in whom Dreyfus had placed so much faith, de Boisdeffre. ‘My illusions with regard to some of my former chiefs faded away, one by one; my soul was filled with anguish. I was moved with profound pity and sorrow for that Army which I so loved.’3 Dreyfus also learned that the sudden and baffling change in the conditions in which he had been held on Devil’s Island at the beginning of September 1896 – the shackles and the palisade – was a response to the story of his escape that Mathieu had planted in the English papers.

  The new court martial was scheduled to start on 9 August 1899. Dreyfus had little more than a month to study the documentary evidence of the complex conspiracy that had started with the single secret file containing the few forgeries shown by General Mercier to the judges at his first court martial, and now consisted of 1,500 documents in ‘ten boxes of files’4 assembled by Captain Cuignet under the tutelage of General Gonse. He had to read the transcripts of the trial of Zola with General de Boisdeffre’s sworn testimony as to the authenticity of Henry’s forgery, the report prepared for the Cour de Cassation by Maître Mornard, and the record of the hearings of the Court’s Criminal Chamber, and then of its Combined Chambers.