Mercier would make other interventions in the course of the trial, contradicting the evidence of the former President of the Republic, Jean Casimir-Perier ‘with cold, poisonous – and cruel – impertinence’ on the question of whether France and Germany were close to war on the night of 6 January 1895. But from Dreyfus himself there would be no further outbursts: he was beyond outrage. Paléologue found ‘nothing sadder’ than the spectacle of Dreyfus’s ‘old friends, or rather his old comrades, for even in the days of his prosperity he never had a friend’, giving evidence against him, twisting what he had once said, or questions he had put to them, into evidence of treasonous intent. Dreyfus’s passivity was baffling.
If he were to leap from his chair and protest, the members of the court would be grateful to him. But no, he remains seated, phlegmatic or slightly contemptuous. He is the Jew, accustomed for so many centuries not to rise in protest against outrage. However, two or three times he raised his head, with a strange smile, as if he was saying to himself: ‘Insult me! Humiliate me! What does it matter? Is not my cause that of justice and reason? Am I not at this moment the representative of the race which had the signal privilege of announcing the reign of justice in the world? What contempt all these goyim inspire me with.’ Is not this the specific characteristic of Israel through the ages? An immense pride under the mask of humility?43
On Thursday, 7 September, General Mercier made a final ‘moving’ statement; he was the last witness to be heard. Colonel Jouaust then announced that the hearing of evidence was now concluded, at which point the hundred or so officers in the court rose as one man and marched out of the salle des fêtes in good order, ‘with machine-like precision, with measured step and holding their heads erect, as if they were on manoeuvres’.44 The prosecutor, Major Carrière, then made his closing speech. It was a fiasco – described by the correspondent for Le Figaro, Jules Cornély, as ‘more or less incomprehensible drivel’45 and by Paléologue as ‘twaddle’. ‘The twaddle that he inflicted on us for an hour and a half was so absurd, so flabby, so disjointed, so flat and incoherent, that at least twenty times the shorthand-writers, having hopelessly lost the thread, put down their pens in despair.’ When the court rose, General Chamoin telephoned General Galliffet,* the Minister of War, to say that an acquittal was certain.
Then it was the turn of the defence. The differences between Labori and Demange remained, and each had his supporters in the Dreyfusard high command. Picquart and Georges Clemenceau wanted Labori to take the lead and denounce the conspiracy by Mercier and the General Staff. Joseph Reinach and Bernard Lazare wanted Labori to step back; so too did Victor Basch and Jean Jaurès. It was for Mathieu to decide, and he dithered, as conflicting advice came from all directions. Demange thought his colleague should take part in the final peroration, but in the end Labori himself decided that he would remain silent. ‘If I speak,’ he told Mathieu, ‘and if, as I no longer doubt, your poor brother is convicted, they will say that it is my fault, that everything would have been saved without me. I shall remain silent.’46
Demange started to speak in defence of his client, Alfred Dreyfus, at 7.35 on the morning of Friday, 8 September. His peroration lasted for five hours. All agreed that he spoke well – ‘a fine speech’, judged Paléologue, ‘with no gratuitous eloquence but solid, clear, prudent, moderate, imbued with common sense, and pity’. Lord Russell, too, thought the speech ‘clear, sensible, well constructed’. However, Demange’s strategy remained that of showing great respect for the army and going no further than demonstrating that there was a reasonable doubt. ‘I am sure that doubt will at least have entered your minds,’ he said to the judges, ‘and doubt is enough for you to acquit Dreyfus.’
Had doubt entered their minds? Paléologue, who in the course of the trial had got to know the seven judges, was pessimistic about an acquittal. The presiding judge, Colonel Jouaust, with his ‘hard, martial and intelligent face’, had shown a marked antagonism towards Dreyfus from the beginning. Brogniart, his deputy, and Bréon had confided in Paléologue at the start of the trial the unfavourable impression made on them by the accused. Paléologue had observed the difficulty faced by the judges in their effort ‘to demilitarise their minds’. He was sure the effort would be too great for Commandant Merle who had taken part in the court’s proceedings ‘as he would a review, his head erect, his eyes looking straight to the front and empty. He is not a judge, but a sabre.’ The devout Bréon looked to a higher authority: ‘Every morning and every night the major spends a long time in prayer, praying to God to reveal to him whether Dreyfus is guilty or not.’47 Profillet and Parfait were thought to favour a conviction, Beauvais to be undecided.
That afternoon, at three o’clock, Carrière, the prosecutor, responded to Demange in a short speech prepared by his assistant, Jules Auffray. ‘The law does not ask jurors to account for the ways in which they have reached their beliefs,’ he told the judges. ‘It does not prescribe rules to which they are obliged to submit their sense of the sufficiency of evidence. It asks them only one question, which comprises the full measure of their duty: are you convinced?’
Demange begged Labori to have the final word, but Labori refused. An exhausted Demange therefore made a final plea in favour of Dreyfus: ‘I know . . . that men of the loyalty and rectitude of these military judges will never raise to the level of proof mere possibilities and presumptions . . . Consequently, my last word is the one I have uttered before all of you. I have confidence in you because you are soldiers.’ Dreyfus was asked by Jouaust if he had anything to add.
Pale, patently upset, Dreyfus managed only a few words in a hoarse voice. ‘I am innocent . . . The honour of the name my children bear . . . Your loyalty . . .’ He fell back on his chair, sweat pouring down his face.
‘Is that all you have to say?’ asked Jouaust.
‘Yes, mon colonel.’
At 3.15 p.m., the judges withdrew to consider their verdict. While waiting, Maurice Paléologue and General Chamoin walked up and down in a small courtyard smoking cigarettes, as Commandant Carrière tried to keep them amused by telling ‘inept jokes’. At 4.45 a bell rang to signal that the session was due to resume. Paléologue and Chamoin took their seats behind the judges. The auditorium quickly filled with silent spectators. A line of gendarmes had been stationed in front of the platform, and soldiers at the entrance to the hall. The chair in which Alfred Dreyfus had sat throughout the long court martial remained empty: the Military Code stipulated that the accused should not be present when the verdict was given. The judges filed in, ‘all horribly pale’. Choking as he pronounced his first words, Colonel Jouaust declared, ‘In the name of the French people! The court martial, by a majority of five votes to two, declares: Yes, the prisoner is guilty. By a majority, there are attenuating circumstances. As a result of this, the court sentences Alfred Dreyfus to ten years’ detention.’
4: Pardon
Alfred Dreyfus, under guard in a small room, was told of his second conviction by Fernand Labori. ‘You tell him,’ Demange said to Labori. ‘I can’t bring myself to do it.’ ‘Two votes for you,’ Labori told Dreyfus, ‘plus attenuating circumstances. It is a conviction but you won’t return to Devil’s Island, I can promise you that.’
Dreyfus showed no emotion. ‘Take care of my wife and my children,’ he said to Labori.
The same impassive expression remained on his face when, in the corridor outside the room where he had been held, the clerk of the court, Coupois, formally read the sentence. Dreyfus stood, motionless, at attention, then he marched back to his cell in the military prison.
The two votes for an acquittal had been cast by the presiding judge, Colonel Jouaust, and the devout Catholic, Commandant de Bréon. It was no doubt they who had persuaded a majority to mention ‘attenuating circumstances’ which justified the sentence of ten years’ imprisonment rather a return to Devil’s Island. But, as was quickly realised, the concept of ‘attenuating circumstances’ was absurd: if Dreyfus was guilty, he was an out-
and-out traitor and merited no mercy.
The tight control of his emotions that Alfred Dreyfus had shown upon hearing of his second conviction was not sustained. When Mathieu visited him the following day, he found him ‘ravaged by suffering’ – his mouth set in a grimace, his features convulsed. He shuddered at the mention of a second degradation: ‘I will never tolerate a new condemnation. I will not put on my uniform again. They will have to drag me out. They will have to take me there by force.’48 The brothers agreed that he should appeal. Henri Mornard drew up the papers which Alfred Dreyfus signed on 9 September 1899.
In Paris, the Prime Minister, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, also planned to appeal on behalf of the government on the grounds that the court martial had gone beyond its terms of reference in considering questions, such as Dreyfus’s alleged confession, which had already been dealt with by the Combined Chambers of the Cour de Cassation. His Minister of War, General Galliffet, urged caution: the government should take care not to create a polarity – ‘on one side the entire Army, a majority of the French, and all the agitators; on the other, the cabinet, the Dreyfusards, and the international community’.49
The international community mattered more than Galliffet supposed, and upon hearing the verdict Waldeck-Rousseau consulted not just his Minister of War and the President of the Republic, but also the Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé. The news of Dreyfus’s second conviction had produced ‘absolute amazement’ abroad, followed by an outburst of extreme indignation.50 There were demonstrations in Milan, Naples, Trieste, London and New York. The Germans were baffled: even the ultra-Catholic Popular Gazette of Cologne asked if the French had gone mad. The correspondent of Le Figaro in London wrote that the news of the verdict ‘produced a profound stupefaction, followed at once by expressions of indignation from everyone that went beyond anything one could imagine. Never have I witnessed such an outburst of anger against our country. I do not approve of them, I merely report faithfully what I have seen and heard in journalistic circles as in the street.’51
The court martial had been followed closely, particularly in Britain and the United States, and there had been consternation at the way it had been conducted with witnesses not so much giving evidence as expressing their opinions and making emotive speeches. What a contrast to the strict rules of evidence found in the courts of the Anglo-Saxon nations.* This criticism of the French judicial system became criticism of French society and civilisation as such.52 British public opinion blamed the whole French nation for the iniquities of the army’s High Command, and bundled it with every other evil perpetrated throughout French history – the massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day and of aristocrats during the Terror, and the aggressive wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon. The heroes of the Dreyfus Affair – Picquart, Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, Demange – were perceived as exceptions that proved the rule. The fact that Dreyfus was a Jew was irrelevant: ‘Dreyfus is, to the untainted conscience of humanity, no Semite,’ editorialised The Times, ‘but a human being.’53 Queen Victoria referred to him as ‘the poor martyr Dreyfus’.54
It was clear that the anti-Dreyfusards were also anti-British: Commandant de Bréon’s anti-Dreyfusard cousin Colonel de Villebois-Mareuil would not be the only French volunteer to fight for the Boers. Should a coup of the kind planned by Déroulède succeed, France’s policy towards Britain would change for the worse. ‘I heard from a good source’, the Dowager Empress of Germany wrote to her mother, Queen Victoria, on 22 August, in the middle of the Rennes court martial, ‘that the French talk seriously of having a war with England in 1900.’55 Waldeck-Rousseau’s government was deemed more pro-British than most, but the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Monson, had reported to the Foreign Office a few days before, on 14 August, that ‘anything is possible’ because a foreign quarrel would divert attention from France’s ‘internal discord and disgrace’.56
Many in Britain blamed the Dreyfus Affair on the Catholic Church. In The Times, both editorial comment and readers’ letters ascribed a moral responsibility to the Pope in Rome, the Roman Curia and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vaughan. As in France, religious and tribal loyalties affected people’s judgement. The Catholic periodical the Tablet condemned the hypocrisy of the British press ‘in cases in which religious or national passions are involved’ and ascribed the Affair not to ‘religion or nationality’ but to the mistakes made by amateur judges.
The report by Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, to Queen Victoria took a similar line. He told her that Dreyfus’s second conviction was a result of mistakes made by inexperienced military judges under a system found ‘in all countries of Europe in which the Roman Civil Law . . . prevails’. Passions had been inflamed by self-interested politicians such as Clemenceau and Jaurès, and the foreign, particularly the British, press. The French had rallied to defend the honour of their army and had been influenced by the views of its High Command. This was not a symptom, as had been suggested, of ‘a general decadence of moral tone and sense’. Certainly, anti-Semitism had played a role, but Jews were unpopular in most countries where they resided, ‘assuredly not on religious, but on racial and social grounds’.57 The Dreyfus Affair was certainly not the fault of the Catholic Church, ‘the religion of the mass of the people of France which is also the religion of a not unimportant section of her Majesty’s subjects at home and in her empire abroad’. Lord Russell of Killowen was an Irish Catholic.
George Bernard Shaw was not a Catholic but he was Irish, and he concurred with his fellow countryman, the Lord Chief Justice; he thought the attacks on the Jesuits were no better than the anti-Semitism of ‘Rochefort & Co.’. The failure of Catholics both in Britain and in the United States to go along with the British establishment’s view of the Dreyfus Affair, wrote Robert Tombs, shows ‘how clearly it was identified with Protestant and Anglo-Saxon ideology’.58 To the French nationalists, it was a replay of the Damascus Affair: the Protestant British would always side with the Jews. Louis Martin’s L’Anglais, est-il un Juif??? (The Englishman, is he a Jew?) was published in France in 1895 and Martin Chagny’s La Sémitique Albion (Semitic Albion) in 1898.59
The government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau might have felt able to shrug off foreign outrage at the verdict delivered at Rennes were it not for the Exposition Universelle due to be held in Paris in 1900. It was a re-run of the Exhibition held eleven years earlier which had seen the opening of the Eiffel Tower – but on a much grander scale. New public buildings to adorn Paris for the Exhibition were nearing completion – the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Orsay; the Pont Alexandre III; the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais; a wine rotunda designed by Gustave Eiffel, La Ruche; an indoor cycling circuit, the Vélodrome d’Hiver; and the first line of the new Paris Métro with a station at the Palais du Trocadéro.
What alarmed Waldeck-Rousseau were the increasing demands of liberal opinion abroad to boycott the Exposition Universelle. Images of the imprisoned Dreyfus appeared in newspapers under the title ‘French Exhibit ’99’. The French correspondent of Le Figaro was told, ‘The Exhibition is finished. It won’t take place.’60 Waldeck-Rousseau was also dismayed by the thought that the divisions in French society caused by the Affair would continue. He looked for a way for the executive branch of government to cut through the Gordian knot which the judicial branch of government had failed to untie. On 11 September, in Le Siècle, Joseph Reinach proposed a solution. Alfred Dreyfus should be pardoned by presidential decree.
Later that day, Reinach held a meeting with Waldeck-Rousseau at the Élysée Palace. The two men were friends and political allies. The Prime Minister warmed to the idea of a pardon. But he foresaw difficulties. President Loubet might balk at doing something that could be seen as an insult to the army. General Galliffet might take the same line. When the idea was put to him, Galliffet did, indeed, point out the dangers inherent in pardoning Dreyfus – of alienating not just the army but many of the deputies and the French voters – but thought it wo
uld be more acceptable if it was combined with a general amnesty for anyone involved in the Affair.
The Socialist Minister Millerand, who was a Dreyfusard but also a lawyer, explained that Dreyfus could not be pardoned unless he withdrew his appeal. This could then be taken as an admission of guilt. That afternoon Millerand chaired a meeting of the Dreyfusard high command in his office on the rue de Lille – Mathieu Dreyfus, Georges Clemenceau, Jean Jaurès and Joseph Reinach. Mathieu at first thought it impossible to ask his brother, who valued honour more than life, to ask to be pardoned for a crime he did not commit. However, he was anxious about Alfred’s state of health and doubted that he would survive further incarceration. ‘Think,’ said Reinach. ‘In a couple of days, if you like, you and he can be far away in some peaceful place: he’ll be with his wife, his children and a measure of happiness . . .’ Clemenceau, on the other hand, argued against a pardon: ‘you are humiliating the Republic before the sabre’. Jaurès, too, was reluctant, but was persuaded that a pardon need not mean an end to the campaign for full rehabilitation of an innocent man.61
The challenge now was to persuade Dreyfus himself to accept the idea of a pardon. Equipped with a promise from Millerand that he would resign from the cabinet if Dreyfus was not pardoned the next day, a statement drawn up by Jaurès stating that the struggle to establish his innocence would continue, and an order signed by General Galliffet that he should be allowed to see the prisoner alone, Mathieu took the night train to Rennes.
At six the following morning, 12 September, the meeting of the two brothers took place in Alfred’s cell. Mathieu laid out the offer: Alfred would be pardoned if he withdrew his appeal. Alfred refused. Although he did not expect his appeal to be successful, he did not want to withdraw it because it would suggest that he accepted the verdict of the court martial. Mathieu persisted. Already in a poor state of health, Alfred might not survive if he returned to prison; free, he could continue to campaign for a review. He said that the idea of a pardon was supported by Reinach and Jaurès. Alfred demurred and finally he himself came up with the most persuasive argument of all for accepting a pardon: ‘I thought of the sufferings of my wife and family, of the children I had not yet seen, and the thought of whom haunted me ever since my return to France.’62 He agreed to withdraw his appeal.
The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two Page 35