The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘I knew one day I would be attacked by the Jews and notably by the Dreyfuses,’ Picquart now wrote to Louis Havet, a professor of Classics at the Collège de France who, with his wife Olympe, was a close friend of both Picquart and the Dreyfus family. At issue was not simply the choice between saving Dreyfus from a third court martial and fighting à l’outrance for justice, but also the extent to which Dreyfus’s suffering had been because he was a Jew. Lazare’s experience of the Dreyfus Affair had led him to abandon his belief in the progressive assimilation of Jews in European societies in favour of the idea, now espoused by his friend Theodor Herzl, of a separate state in Palestine for the Jews. The anarchist was now also a Zionist: his anarchism antagonised social conservatives such as Georges Picquart, and his Zionism provoked most French Jews who had no wish to move from fin-de-siècle France to an obscure and inhospitable province of the Turkish Empire. Both Alfred Dreyfus and Joseph Reinach considered Zionism ‘an anachronism’ in modern society, Reinach describing it as ‘a trap set by anti-Semites for naive or unreflective minds’.11

  Many Dreyfusards were antagonised by the way in which Bernard Lazare portrayed the Dreyfus Affair as the persecution of a Jew by gentiles rather than as a straightforward struggle for justice and legality. Labori insisted that ‘the Jewish question is far from having played the principal role’ in the Affair. Scheurer-Kestner, too, before his death, had been been keen to distance himself from the Jewish syndicate and considered it wrong to reduce the Affair to a case of ethnic hatred.12 Now, the gentile Dreyfusards (Labori, Picquart, Clemenceau) saw what they perceived as the cowardice of the Dreyfus family – their decision to ‘save their own skins’ rather than pursue the common good – as a Jewish trait: ‘here is where the pusillanimity of the Jews has brought us’, wrote Picquart to Havet. ‘We have done enough for Dreyfus.’13

  Picquart, who had sacrificed his career, lost many of his friends and spent a year in prison, now felt let down. The reflex anti-Semitism evident in his remarks to Captain Tassin at Dreyfus’s degradation (see p. 115 above), but which he had sought to suppress, now resurfaced. He alienated the Dreyfusard salonnière, the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, with his anti-Semitic remarks and took to reading La Libre Parole. ‘If Drumont hadn’t got in first,’ said Clemenceau, ‘what a splendid anti-Semitic newspaper Picquart and I could have run!’14

  While in Paris, Dreyfus was lionised in the Dreyfusard salons. ‘How do you do, Captain,’ Geneviève Straus said upon receiving him in her house. ‘I’ve been hearing such a lot about you.’ Later she was heard to remark, ‘What a pity we can’t choose someone else for our innocent’ – words which Marcel Proust put in the mouth of the Duchesse de Guermantes in À la recherche du temps perdu.15 Dreyfus was no Kossuth or Garibaldi, and many were as disappointed by his dreary manner in the drawing rooms as they had been in court. ‘They wanted him to show off, to indulge in theatrical poses and speeches, to beat the big drum,’ wrote Arthur Ranc in the Radical, ‘in a word, to behave like a second rate actor,’ or, as ‘a woman once replied, with a little acid on her tongue, “to be an Esterhazy”’.16 He became a rich source of witticisms: Léon Daudet claimed that Dreyfus had complained, ‘I’ve never had a moment’s peace since I left Devil’s Island,’ and had stopped the arguments going on around him by saying, ‘Shut up, all of you, or I’ll confess.’17

  Lucie Dreyfus took no pleasure in these social occasions and, when Dreyfus went to the soirées of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti on a Thursday, he went on his own.18 Ruth Harris writes that Lucie, having been so strong while Alfred was on Devil’s Island, was now ‘broken’ by the failure to secure a complete rehabilitation for her husband but considers that somehow this reflected well on him: ‘it was the measure of the man that, when he returned, he created a space in which she could finally collapse’.19 From the tenor of the letters she had written to Alfred while he was on Devil’s Island, one gets the sense that Lucie, in her anxiety and distress, had somewhat idealised her marriage to him, forgetting his ‘mercurial moods’, closed nature and ‘relentless perfectionism’.20

  Upon his return, after what Alfred had been through, it was never going to be possible to go back to the status quo ante, particularly if that status quo ante had not been as Lucie remembered it. The confident, masterful man who had left his home in October 1894 was now physically enfeebled and psychologically scarred. Yet some traits in his character had not changed, one being his enjoyment of the company of other women. ‘Lucie knew that side of her husband’s character well,’ wrote Michael Burns. She had ‘been forced to deal with the lingering habits of his bachelorhood’.21 His close friendship with the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, and the pleasure he took in escaping from the family circle to attend her Thursday-evening receptions, no doubt fulfilled the need met by the company of femmes galantes in the early years of his marriage.

  Although Dreyfus remained preoccupied with his case, and was determined to pursue a final rehabilitation, he was remarkably detached and dispassionate in his analysis of what he had endured. He was uncomfortable in the role of martyr: ‘I hate all this moaning about my suffering,’ he told Julien Benda. ‘I like to talk about my case objectively.’ The interview with Jules Huret conducted while he travelled across France from Rennes to Carpentras, and subsequently published in Le Figaro, showed how objective he could be. When asked by Huret why he had aroused such antipathy in the General Staff, he did not ascribe it wholly to anti-Semitism. ‘I believe the cause is fairly complex,’ he told Huret.

  First, and above all, they thought I was guilty. It is unimaginable that anyone would lightly make such a mistake. Then, there was a latent anti-Semitism; and my character may have played a role. Yes, I was a little brusque – with my superior officers, that is, because I always showed the greatest respect for my inferiors . . . I didn’t lick any boots, and always retained in respect to my chiefs a frankness and independence. If a plan or a project seemed to me to be ill conceived, I did not stop myself from saying so rather than going along with things as others did when it was a superior officer who was speaking or in charge. I know that that was not popular with the General Staff.

  It was not, then, because he was Jewish but because, like Picquart, he was an officer who thought for himself.

  Colonel Bertin-Mourot said something very true in relation to Colonel Picquart: ‘One felt that this officer did not march behind his chiefs.’ That is the whole of their psychology and their morality. Fall in behind the leaders. Ah! If it was during a war or during manoeuvres, so be it. But when it was a matter of honour and of duty, should one really march behind someone else? Doesn’t a man have a conscience of his own?22

  It was therefore not anti-Semitism as such that had made Dreyfus unpopular with the General Staff but the reactionary mind-set in the army, a mind-set no doubt formed by a ‘clerical’ formation – the dogmatic and hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church. Dreyfus was not such a reactionary – he was a progressive – but he remained, as he had always been, instinctively conservative. ‘Had he not been Dreyfus,’ asked Léon Blum, ‘would he have been a Dreyfusard?’23

  Dreyfus’s unwillingness to be presented as a ‘victim’24 or a Jewish scapegoat led to him distancing himself from Bernard Lazare. Lazare’s understanding of what was at the heart of the Dreyfus Affair differed from that of both sides in the acrimonious dispute among the other Dreyfusards. To Lazare, Dreyfus had suffered because he was a Jew, and the campaign for his rehabilitation was simply a part of a world-wide struggle for the emancipation of the Jews. Lazare had been welcomed at the first Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1897, and was both a friend and travelling companion of Theodor Herzl; but his anarchist ideals led him to denounce Herzl and the Zionist Action Committee as ‘bourgeois in your thoughts, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas, bourgeois in your conception of society’.

  In 1900 and again in 1902 Lazare visited Jewish communities in Romania and upon his return described their pitiful condition in Clemenceau’s L’
Aurore. However, in 1903 he was diagnosed with colon cancer and, following an unsuccessful operation, died on 1 September in Nîmes, the town where he had been born thirty-eight years before. Mathieu attended his funeral but not Alfred. Charles Péguy, who would claim that ‘during the last years, during this past period of his life, I was his only friend’, wrote bitterly in his memoir of the Dreyfus Affair, Notre jeunesse, of the way Lazare – ‘a saint’ – had been treated ‘immediately after the resolution and apparent triumph, the false triumph of the Dreyfus Affair. The failure to appreciate, the ignorance, even, the solitude, the forgetting, the contempt in which one let him fall, or made him fall, or let him perish. In which one let him die.’

  Péguy was particularly harsh in his judgement of Dreyfus himself. ‘He did not die for himself, but a number died for him . . . He did not suffer ruin in his own cause . . . But many were ruined for him. Many sacrificed for him their career, their bread, even their life, the bread of their wives and children . . . The greatest of them all, Bernard Lazare who lived for him, died for him, died thinking of him.’25 However, Péguy was writing some years after the event when subsequent political developments and a change of heart had perhaps coloured his judgement of the man who had inspired a whole generation to do great things. ‘Our Dreyfusism was a religion,’ wrote Péguy,26 but in 1905 the Socialist poet had espoused an older faith with different martyrs. He had been received into the Catholic Church.

  3: Retribution

  ‘The physical conspiracy has vanished,’ said the Prime Minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau after the conviction and sentencing of Jules Guérin and Paul Déroulède, ‘but the moral conspiracy remains.’27 The reactionary, anti-republican and therefore seditious influence of the Catholic Church should now be extirpated from the nation once and for all. French Catholics would now pay the price for backing the losing side in the Dreyfus Affair.

  Waldeck-Rousseau’s target was not the institutional Church – the bishops and curés who, under the Concordat, were salaried officials of the state – but the religious orders (congrégations) that were outside the control of the bishops and answered only to the Pope in Rome. These, he believed, endangered the Republic on two counts. The first was their political activism – surreptitious on the part of the Jesuits, but flagrant in the case of the Assumptionists during the election of 1898. The second was the more pervasive and therefore more insidious influence they exercised through their highly successful schools.

  The government lost no time in mounting its attack. On 22 January 1900, less than two weeks after the conviction of Guérin and Déroulède, twelve members of the Assumptionist Order were arraigned before the Correctional Tribunal in Paris – priests in soutanes standing in the dock normally occupied by thieves and prostitutes. The charge was sedition or, more precisely, breaking a law passed under the First Empire prohibiting unauthorised associations of more than twenty people. But the substance of the indictment was that the order had used the vast funds collected for charitable purposes to interfere in elections and indoctrinate the young with reactionary, undemocratic and anti-republican opinions. ‘The court case’, wrote Ruth Harris, ‘enabled the government to trot out the most elaborate fantasies of clerical subversion and financial corruption.’28

  The trial ended in a conviction. The Assumptionist Order was judged to have broken the Law on Associations and was dissolved. Its newspaper, La Croix, was saved by transferring its ownership to a Catholic industrialist, Paul Féron-Vrau; but the Assumptionist priests were dispersed, many moving abroad, others remaining in France, permitted only to live in pairs and so without the support of a communal life. ‘Lonely, sometimes ill and impoverished, they often died before their time or carried on in a state of disorientated discouragement.’29 The Assumptionists had greatly underestimated the power of their enemies, and had counted too much on the power or just the willingness to protect them of the Pope, and perhaps also of God.

  The Law on Associations, successfully used against the Assumptionist Order, was one which governments in the Third Republic had in the past applied selectively and at their discretion. Masonic Lodges were exempt: when Jules Guérin was prosecuted for failing to register his Anti-Semitic League he simply changed its name to Grand Occident of France.30 The rights of workers to form trades unions had been granted by Waldeck-Rousseau when he served in the cabinet of Jules Ferry back in 1884.31 Now, in 1901, he proposed legislation that would specifically target the religious orders. As Dreyfus would later recognise, with a certain measure of satisfaction, his Affair had prepared public opinion for this move.32 The perception now among republicans was that the Catholic religious orders had, by their support of criminals on the General Staff and their supposed sympathy with Guérin and Déroulède, forfeited their rights to freedom of action.

  The dispute over religious education, however, long pre-dated the Affair and had little as such to do with recent political events. Jules Ferry had secularised primary schools twenty years before but had left French parents free to choose between the state lycées and Catholic colleges for their children’s secondary education. The assumption by the republicans had been that free education in the secular lycées would cause the Catholic colleges to wither away. This had proved false: the number of pupils attending lycées had in fact declined from 56 per cent in 1887 to 51 per cent in 1899, whereas the number attending private schools, most of which were run by the religious orders, had risen from 44 per cent in 1887 to 49 per cent in 1899.33

  To Waldeck-Rousseau it was this fissure in French education which was responsible for the political division in the country. The two systems were teaching different curricula and, above all, different values: they were creating, he said – using the phrase coined by the historian Ernest Lavisse in the 1880s – deux jeunesses, two childhoods, that grew into two hostile camps within one nation.34 New laws prohibited all associations that were not specifically authorised by the state. Henceforward rights enjoyed by Socialists and Freemasons did not apply to monks and nuns. The new law, wrote Denis Brogan, ‘created a new class of Frenchman with fewer rights than any other . . . Those French men or French women who wished to exercise this privilege to live in common for religious motives were only allowed to do so if a special law were passed.’35

  These anti-clerical statutes, designed to silence ‘propagandists for the Counter-Revolution’, were ‘the defining and only significant issue’ during the general election of 1902.36 Economic and fiscal questions such as tariffs and income tax roused no passions; the cement of the left-wing coalition, said the Comte de Mun, was ‘religious war’.37 If Waldeck-Rousseau, the bourgeois republican par excellence, had, as some suggested, promoted anti-clericalism to divert his Socialist allies in the Bloc des Gauches from their more revolutionary demands, he succeeded. Gambetta’s cry, ‘Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi,’ was as effective a rallying cry now as it had been twenty years before.

  The French Catholics, chastened by the Affair, formed a new moderate party, Action Libérale, led by supporters of the ralliement, Jacques Piou and Albert de Mun; candidates were also put forward by the die-hard anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la Patrie Française. The popular vote was close; in the first round of the elections, the right trailed the left by only 200,000 votes, but the second round returned a majority of between eighty and ninety in the Chamber of Deputies for the Bloc des Gauches.38

  If women had had the vote, the result might have been different. However, even without female suffrage, it is a paradox that a majority in a supposedly Catholic country should vote for the anti-clerical parties of the left. Roman Catholicism remained the faith of the majority of the French. There was a curé in every village, and most of the French still used Catholic ceremonies for the rites of passage through life – birth, marriage and death. The philosophical differences between Christianity and the Enlightenment that exercised the intellectuals were of little interest to the peasants in rural France. The explanation lies rather in the fact that, at a time of increasing social disc
ontents, Catholicism was seen as the party of the established social order and therefore the enemy of both the urban and rural poor. ‘The clergy of France has finally convinced everyone who believes in things popular and democratic’, said the Abbé Frémont, ‘that between the Church on the one hand and progress, the Republic and the future on the other, there is no possible relationship but the most deadly hatred.’39

  This deadly hatred of French Catholicism is skilfully depicted in the novels of Octave Mirbeau. The anti-clerical Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir was a Bonapartist; the same class antagonism in Mirbeau’s Sébastien Roch, Abbé Jules and The Diary of a Chambermaid leads to a darker, embittered anarchism. Mirbeau was among the Dreyfusards who met at the Trois Marches during Dreyfus’s second court martial in Rennes. His depiction of Catholicism as the hypocritical ideology of a pretentious bourgeoisie, cold-hearted clergy and arrogant nobility is of more use in the understanding of the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair than Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

  The dichotomy between the Catholic Church’s strict views on sexual morality and a growing eroticisation and permissiveness in French society was another cause of anti-clerical sentiment in the exclusively male electorate. Mirbeau’s portrayal of priests as sex-obsessed hypocrites is almost certainly a distortion: ‘the vast majority of the clergy in the nineteenth century’, wrote Ralph Gibson, ‘were pious and chaste and did their best to get on with their religious duties’.40 However, among these duties was an attempt to enforce chastity through the confessional, and this undoubtedly contributed to the de-Christianisation of France.