The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two

by Piers Paul Read

  Georges Picquart, having been restored to the army with the rank of brigadier-general, was made Minister of War by Georges Clemenceau in October 1906. The bitterness both had felt at Dreyfus’s acceptance of a pardon had forged a personal bond between Clemenceau and Picquart that led to this political alliance. No doubt had Picquart never become involved with Dreyfus he might have risen on his own merits to become Chief of the General Staff; but it was the politicisation of the Affair that had brought him this position of Minister of War. The anti-Dreyfusard elements in the army had fought a rearguard action against him: General de Pellieux put about rumours picked up from his contacts on La Libre Parole that Picquart went in for spiritualism and hypnotism and that his morals were ‘bad, very bad’. The charges were taken sufficiently seriously for Picquart to be placed under surveillance by the police. Clemenceau, as Minister of the Interior, had read their reports; Waldeck-Rousseau, then Prime Minister, had thrown them into the waste-paper basket.6

  Insinuations that Picquart was homosexual were disproved by Picquart’s increasingly open liaison with Pauline Romazzotti, who had finally divorced her husband, Monnier, and was now Picquart’s regular companion. She and Picquart would stay with Eugène and Hélène Naville at their villa at Coligny on Lake Léman where they would be seen walking hand in hand. ‘He preferred not to define more formally the more intimate nature of their relationship,’ wrote Christian Vigouroux, but Pauline accompanied him on his travels and acted as hostess at the receptions he gave as Minister of War.

  Charles Esterhazy remained in England. It was said that he received secret subventions from sympathisers in France, but ostensibly he earned his living as a journalist – the profession for which he was best suited and which he had, in a sense, practised while pretending to be a spy. He had made some money selling his story to English newspapers, and wrote for them under the name Fitzgerald. He set up house in the small town of Harpenden in Hertfordshire, forty-eight kilometres north of London, as Count Jean-Marie de Voilemont and, when he died in 1923, was buried in the graveyard of the parish church. Édouard Drumont was put up for a place in the French Academy in 1909 but lost to Marcel Prévost, author of the mildly pornographic The Demi-Vierges. Drumont died in 1917. Père Stanislas du Lac spent his last years organising the Syndicat de l’Aiguille, a self-help association for poor seamstresses and dressmakers, the midinettes. He died in 1909.

  The divisions and enmities in French society that had been exposed by the Dreyfus Affair were laid aside during the First World War. The religious orders were permitted to return to France and a union sacrée – sacred union – was formed to fight the war against Germany for which the French Army had been bracing itself for so many years. Its cause was absurd – a dispute between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Slav nationalists. However, the interlocking alliances, in particular that between France and Russia so carefully negotiated in its military permutations by General de Boisdeffre, pitched the armies of France and Germany against one another in a line of blood and mud stretching from the plains of Picardy to the Vosges.

  Under pressure of war, political prejudices had to be abandoned. Many of the officers promoted for their political correctness during the Affaire des Fiches were sacked and more competent Catholics put in their place. Fourteen of the nineteen senior officers whose courage and competence in the field won them promotion in late 1914 had previously been victims of Masonic detraction.7 The union sacrée brought about a spirit of ecumenical reconciliation. A painting by a Jewish artist showed a rabbi, Abraham Bloch, wearing a Red Cross armband and holding up a crucifix for a dying Catholic soldier shortly before he expired in the arms of a Jesuit.8

  Death made no distinction between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Mathieu Dreyfus, Joseph Reinach and Berthe Henry all lost sons in the first days of the war. Charles Péguy was killed on 4 September 1914 at the start of the Battle of the Marne. Colonel du Paty de Clam, readmitted to the army, was wounded twice, was cited for giving ‘the most beautiful examples of courage and authority’9 and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. Deemed unfit for further active service, he enlisted as a private in a unit commanded by his son. He was again wounded, this time fatally, and died in Versailles on 3 September 1916; on his death certificate it stated that he had ‘died for France’.

  Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen had married Luise Gräfin von Wedel in 1902, who subsequently gave birth to two daughters. He retired from the army with the rank of general in the autumn of 1908 and went to live on an estate he had bought at Polkwitz in the Altmark. At the outbreak of war he returned to the colours and was given command of the 233rd Infantry Brigade, which saw heavy action on the heights of Loretto. In October 1916, he took command of the 202nd Infantry Division on the eastern front. He contracted pneumonia and was taken to the Elisabeth Hospital in Berlin. His condition deteriorated. In a delirium, with his wife sitting at his bedside, Schwartzkoppen suddenly sat up and said, as if giving evidence in court: ‘Frenchmen, listen to me! Dreyfus is innocent! There is no evidence whatsoever against him!’ His wife took down what he had said. On 8 January 1917, Schwartzkoppen died from acute inflammation of the kidneys and heart failure.10

  Georges Picquart died six months before the outbreak of the First World War on 19 January 1914, as the result of a riding accident. A proposal by the Minister of War in the Chamber of Deputies that funds should be voted for a state funeral met with angry opposition on the nationalist benches.11 Picquart had not seen Alfred Dreyfus since the ceremony at the École Militaire eight years before. Jean Jaurès, the Socialist champion of Dreyfus, was assassinated on 31 July 1914 in a Parisian café by a twenty-nine-year-old nationalist, Raoul, enraged by Jaurès’s attempts to persuade both French and Germans to come out on strike to prevent a war. Georges Clemenceau, by contrast, built on his reputation as ‘the tiger’ gained in smashing the trades unions to become a vigorous supporter of the war, serving as Prime Minister from November 1917, leading France to victory and imposing crushing terms on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles, among them the return to French sovereignty of Alsace and Lorraine.

  During the last months of the war, to demonstrate his ruthlessness, Clemenceau prosecuted the former Prime Minister, Joseph Caillaux, for treason. Caillaux was defended by the now bent and aged Maître Edgar Demange, who died at his desk, ‘very old and very poor’, on 10 February 1925. Fernand Labori had pleaded for Caillaux’s wife, who had shot the editor of Le Figaro, and secured her acquittal; he himself died of natural causes on 14 March 1917.

  Mathieu Dreyfus, after devoting six years of his life to his brother’s rehabilitation, returned to manage the family’s factories in Mulhouse. No definitive calculation was ever made of what it had cost to save Dreyfus, but the disbursements by Mathieu and Joseph Reinach on legal fees, sweeteners for journalists, travel expenses, fees for experts and private detectives ‘far exceeded one million francs’.12 Émile, the son of Mathieu and Suzanne, died from wounds received in the trenches in October 1915. Their daugher Marguerite married Adolphe Reinach, the son of Joseph Reinach, who was killed on the front in 1917. After the war, Mathieu and Suzanne moved to Paris to help care for their grandchildren. Mathieu died in October 1930, Suzanne in 1964.

  Alfred outlived his elder brother by five years. As a reservist, he was mobilised in 1914, stationed first as an artillery officer in Paris, then attached to the 168th Division which took part in the battles of the Chemin des Dames and Verdun. In September 1918, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the reserve and in July 1919 raised to the rank of an officer in the Légion d’Honneur.

  In the years following the war, he continued assembling and annotating the dossier on his Affair. Now living with Lucie in a flat on the rue des Renaudes, he spent his days at his desk, going through his papers, sticking stamps into albums and smoking a pipe. He still suffered from nightmares, hearing in his dreams the cries of loathing at his degradation and feeling the torments on Devil’s Island – the heat, the fever, the double shack
les, the spider-crabs. He took long walks for the sake of his health – his grandson remembered him ‘fragile, stooped, nervous, walking rapidly, his large pocketwatch always within reach’.13

  Alfred and Lucie’s son Pierre married Marie Baur and they had four children, a son and three daughters. Their daughter Jeanne married Pierre Paul Lévy and had two sons and two daughters. The grandchildren were brought to visit their grandparents. Alfred was impatient if they were unpunctual but was affectionate and never burdened them with painful reminiscences. ‘I have a quite precise memory of my grandfather,’ wrote Jean-Louis Lévy, ‘but I must say first of all that Alfred Dreyfus never said a word about the Affair to his grandchildren, and not a word about his suffering.’14 Dreyfus died peacefully, surrounded by his family, at five in the afternoon on 11 July 1935.

  The union sacrée – the truce between left and right – did not survive the end of the First World War. The polarities became more extreme with further scandals such as the Stavisky Affair leading to riots, and militants on both wings growing impatient with parliamentary democracy and testing their strength in the streets. When, in June 1940, German armies once again attacked France through Belgium, the French Army could not hold them. It was a replay of 1870 with Hitler playing the role of Bismarck. To save the nation in its hour of need, the politicians turned to a marshal of France, Henri Pétain, the former classmate of the Marquis de Morès at Saint-Cyr. Only eighty deputies, Léon Blum among them, voted against giving Pétain full powers to negotiate an armistice and govern France.

  France was saved from polonisation – the fate of Poland, placed under a gauleiter by Hitler and its population enslaved: half the country remained unoccupied until 1942, ruled by Pétain and his appointed Prime Ministers from the spa town of Vichy in the Auvergne. The right was now in power. The slogan of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ was replaced by ‘Work, Family, Nation’. The government quickly passed laws that discriminated against Jews: a statute of 3 October 1940 excluded Jews, defined on religious and racial grounds, from all political positions, from posts in the governmental and judicial administration, the armed services and the media and from French schools and universities.15 The exclusion was later extended to banking, finance, advertising and real-estate; the law passed by Adolphe Crémieux giving French citizenship to Algerian Jews was repealed.

  Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, judged that French anti-Semitism was not ‘an active historical factor in the final catastrophe’ that overwhelmed European Jews during the Second World War; however, the Vichy government was undoubtedly complicit in the implementation of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. The legal definition of who was a Jew applied by the Vichy government cast a wider net than that of the Nazis, and the administrative structures of the French state were used to round up Jews living in France and intern them in Drancy prior to their deportation. Vichy may have successfully opposed the German demand that Jews wear a yellow star, but its opposition to the deportation of French Jews to the extermination camps was ineffective: ‘6,000 of the 65,000 deported from France to the death camps were French citizens.’16

  Alfred and Lucie’s son, Pierre Dreyfus, spent the first two years following the defeat of France hiding in Marseille and the villages behind the city. His wife Marie had relatives in the United States, and it was decided that because of his status as the son of Alfred Dreyfus, and the work he had done for Jewish groups, Pierre and his family should be granted visas.17 He left France for America in 1943. His sister Jeanne and her husband Pierre Lévy remained in Toulouse. Their daughter Madeleine, aged twenty-two, joined the Resistance, was arrested in Toulouse by French police and deported via Drancy to Auschwitz where she was killed.

  In March 1941, the Vichy government set up a Commissariat Général to administer Jewish affairs in France. Its first director was Xavier Vallat; the second Louis Darquier; the third Charles du Paty de Clam, the son of Commandant Ferdinand du Paty de Clam. Among the tasks of the Commissariat was the sequestration of funds and property belonging to Jews. Twenty thousand francs was taken from a bank account held by Lucie Dreyfus.18 Lucie lived with her daughter Jeanne in Toulouse until the Germans moved into the unoccupied zone in November 1942. She then went to her younger sister Alice in Valence, adopted Alice’s married name, Duteil, and was hidden for the rest of the war by a community of retired nuns in a convent in Valence;19 only the Mother Superior knew who she was.20 At the Liberation, Lucie left the convent and returned to her flat in Paris where she died on 14 December 1945.

  The Taking of the Bastille by Jean-Pierre Houel. The storming of the Bastille by 60,000 Parisians on 14 July 1789 liberated four forgers, an Irish lunatic and an incestuous aristocrat. However, the Bastille symbolised the arbitrary powers of the absolute monarch and this was the first act of defiance against King Louis XVI.

  The Tennis Court Oath (1791) by Jacques Louis David. Locked out of their usual meeting place, the delegates of the Third Estate gathered in an indoor tennis court and proclaimed themselves a National Assembly. They were joined by most members of the Fourth Estate, the Catholic clergy.

  Le prêtre refractaire, engraving by Léopold Massard, based on Henri Baron. On 12 July 1790, the National Assembly passed a law demanding an oath of loyalty to a Civil Constitution for the clergy. This entailed the election of priests and bishops and a breach with the Pope in Rome. Here a priest refuses to take the oath. Most of the clergy followed suit which led to a brutal persecution of Catholics.

  Napoléon le Grand rétablit le culte des Israélites, engraving, by François Louis Couché. On 21 September 1791 the National Assembly gave full civil rights to French Jews. Most, like the Dreyfus family, were from Alsace. Napoleon’s conquests extended these rights throughout Europe. Here grateful Jews thank their liberator.

  Maximilien de Robespierre (1791) by Pierre Roch Vigneron. In the place of Catholicism, French revolutionaries such as Robespierre initiated a cult of Reason.

  The Procession of the Goddess of Reason by Louis Blanc, engraved by Meyer-Heine. A woman dressed as the Goddess of Reason is carried through the streets of Paris to the cathedral of Notre Dame, converted into a Temple of Reason.

  The Drowning in the Loire During the Reign of Terror (1793) by H. de la Charlerie. An uprising of Catholics and Royalists against the Revolution in the West of France led to atrocious reprisals. Men and women are drowned off scuttled barges in the River Loire at Nantes. This persecution, ‘tantamount to genocide’, alienated French Catholics from republicanism.

  The German nations united behind the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to wage war against Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III. The French were quickly defeated. Napoleon III was taken prisoner at Sedan. Here he sits looking disconsolate with his captor, Bismarck.

  Under Duress (1871) by Smeeton after Janet Lange. With a knife at her breast France signs the preliminaries of the peace treaty which ceded the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the new German Reich.

  Execution of the Archbishop of Paris (1871). The anti-clerical Communards executed the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Darboy, and fifty Catholic priests. This reinforced the association in the minds of French Catholics of radical republicanism and persecution.

  The citizens of Paris, besieged by the Prussians, refused to accept the armistice negotiated by the government in Versailles and established a Commune. It was brutally repressed by French troops. In a single week in May, between twenty and thirty thousand Communards were killed.

  Jules Ferry, French Prime Minister in 1881. His government, with six Protestant ministers, abolished Catholic primary schools in France. Catholic magistrates who resigned rather than enforce the law were often replaced by Protestants and Jews.

  Édouard Drumont’s La France Juive ( Jewish France), which described France’s Jews as ‘a ruling caste’ and France ‘a conquered nation’, sold over a million copies. Drumont’s newspaper, La Libre Parole, exposed widespread corruption involving Jewish bankers and republican politicians in the Pana
ma Canal Scandal. It campaigned against giving Jews commissions in the French army.

  The Rothschild estate at Ferriéres. Jewish bankers and entrepreneurs amassed great fortunes and bought estates previously owned by the Catholic aristocracy. The increase of power and influence of Jews in France was widely resented.

  This portrait of Baron James de Rothschild, titled ‘Jews Take over the World’, offers a sense of the perceived threat posed by the rise of the Jews. Rothschild was said to be the model for Gunderman in Emile Zola’s novel L’Argent.

  It was widely believed by French Catholics that freemasons worked with Protestants and Jews to undermine Catholicism, France’s established religion. Here the Grand Orient masonic lodge celebrates the anniversary of the 1789 revolution.

  General Saussier. A rotund bon viveur with a Jewish mistress, the wife of Major Maurice Weil. He was subordinate to the Minister of War, General Mercier, only while Mercier held office. A mutual antipathy meant that what one proposed the other rejected.