The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  * This has also been ascribed to Roosevelt. It is not certain to whom the credit belongs.

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  “Give Me Combat!”

  FRANCE : 1894–99

  4

  “Give Me Combat!”

  “THE PERMANENT glamour of France” was a phrase used by an Englishman of the nineties, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, secretary to the Duke of Devonshire. He felt that every child of Western civilization owed a debt to the country from which “came the impulse that dissolved the old world in agony and gave life and passion to the present.” For two years, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1899, the agony of that old dissolution returned. Rent by a moral passion that reopened past wounds, broke apart society and consumed thought, energy and honor, France plunged into one of the great commotions of history.

  During those “two interminable years” of struggle to secure the retrial of a single individual unjustly convicted, “life was as if suspended,” wrote Léon Blum, a future premier, then in his twenties. It was as if, in those “years of tumult, of veritable civil war … everything converged upon a single question and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships everything was interrupted, turned upside down, reclassified.… The Dreyfus Affair was a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.”

  It “would have divided the angels themselves,” wrote the Comte de Vogüé, on the opposite side from Blum. “Above the base motives and animal passions, the finest souls in France flung themselves at each other with an equal nobility of sentiments exasperated by their fearful conflict.”

  The protagonists felt a grandeur in the storm that battered them. Decadence was exorcised in the violence of their feelings and they felt conscious again of “high principles and inexhaustible energies.” Hate, evil and fear encompassed them as well as courage and sacrifice. Their combat was epic and its issue was the life of the Republic. Each side fought for an idea, its idea of France: one the France of Counter-Revolution, the other the France of 1789; one for its last chance to arrest progressive social tendencies and restore the old values; the other to cleanse the honor of the Republic and preserve it from the clutches of reaction. The Revisionists, who fought for retrial, saw France as the fount of liberty, the country of light, the teacher of reason, the codifier of law, and to them the knowledge that she could have perpetrated a wrong and connived at a miscarriage of justice was insufferable. They fought for Justice. Those on the other side claimed to fight in the name of Patrie for the preservation of the Army as the shield and protector of the nation and of the Church as the guide and instructor of its soul. They assembled under the name of Nationalists and in their ranks sincere men were partners of demagogues and succumbed to methods that were reckless and brutal and terms that were foul, so that the world watched in wonder and scorn and the name of France suffered. Locked in mutual ferocity and final commitment the contenders could not disengage, although their struggle was splitting the country and fostering opportunity for the enemy at their frontiers, which every day the enemy measured.

  “We were heroes,” proclaimed Charles Péguy, who transmuted and exalted the political movements of his day in mystical terms inherited from Joan of Arc. In 1910 he wrote, “The Dreyfus Affair can only be explained by the need for heroism which periodically seizes this people, this race—seizes a whole generation of us. The same is true of those other great ordeals: wars.… When a great war or great revolution breaks out it is because a great people, a great race needs to break out, because it has had enough, particularly enough of peace. It always means that a great mass feels and experiences a violent need, a mysterious need for a great movement,… a sudden need for glory, for war, for history, which causes an explosion, an eruption …” If the values and forces Péguy saw in the Affair were large, it was because they were those of that time and that experience. The Affair made men feel larger than life.

  The casus belli was condemnation of a Jewish army officer for treason in behalf of Germany; the object of the battle was on the one hand to prevent, on the other to obtain, a reopening of the case. Because it was weak, the Government employed all its weight on the side of its would-be destroyers to brace and support the original verdict. It was not the stable, respected, solidly embedded government enjoyed by the English, but insecure, thinly rooted in public confidence, flouted and on the defensive. Twice since 1789 the Republic had gone down under resurgent monarchy. Emerging as the Third Republic after 1871, France had revived, prospered, acquired an Empire. She nourished the arts, gloried in the most cultivated capital, and raised, on the hundredth anniversary of the Revolution, the tallest structure in the world, the daring, incredible Tower that soared above the Seine, a signal flag of her vitality and genius.

  Always, however, in political life the nation was at odds with itself, galled from within by the unreconciled, unsubdued adherents of the ancien régime and Second Empire, oppressed from without by the superior strength of Germany and the sense of unfinished war between them, hankering for revanche without the means to achieve it. In 1889 discontent with the Republic came to a head in the attempted coup d’état of General Boulanger supported by all the elements of Counter-Revolution who made up the collective Right—the Church, the two hundred families of business and finance, the displaced aristocracy, the royalists and the followers and sympathizers of these groups. Boulanger’s attempt ended in fiasco memorable for the remark of the Premier, Charles Floquet, “At your age, General, Napoleon was dead.” Nevertheless his attempt shook the Republic and stirred up both the expectations and the frustrations of the Right.

  The arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer assigned to the General Staff, which took place in the months October to December, 1894, was not a deliberate plot to frame an innocent man. It was the outcome of a reasonable suspicion acted on by dislike, some circumstantial evidence and instinctive prejudice. Evidence indicated betrayal of military secrets to Germany by some artillery officer on the General Staff. Dreyfus, besides fitting the requirements, was a Jew, the eternal alien: a natural suspect to absorb the stain of treason. As a person he was not liked by his brother officers. Stiff, silent, cold and almost unnaturally correct, he was without friends, opinions or visible feelings, and his officiousness on duty had already attracted unfavorable attention. These characteristics appeared sinister as soon as he came under suspicion. His appearance, the reverse of flamboyant, seemed the perfect cover for a spy. Of medium height and weight, medium brown hair, and medium age, thirty-six, he had a toneless voice, and unremarkable features distinguished only by rimless pince-nez, the fashionable form of eyeglasses in his milieu. His guilt was immediately presumed. When motive and material proof could not be found, the officers who were charged with the inquiry, especially Major Henry and Colonel du Paty de Clam, made up for it by helpful construction and fabrication. Certain that they were dealing with a vile traitor who had sold secrets of military defence to the traditional enemy, they felt justified in supplying whatever was needed to convict him. The dossier they assembled, later to be known as the “Secret File,” was persuasive enough to cause the General Staff chiefs sincerely to believe Dreyfus guilty, but it lacked legal proof. Knowing this, and dealing in a case particularly sensitive because of the involvement of Germany, and fearing the blackmail of the press, the then Minister of War, General Mercier, ordered, and the Government of which he was a member permitted, Captain Dreyfus’ court-martial to be held in camera. When the questions of the five military judges indicated their doubts, the Secret File was submitted to them and withheld from the defence. Convinced by these documents, the judges reached a unanimous verdict of guilty. The death penalty for political crimes having been abolished in 1848, the sentence was life imprisonment. On the prisoner’s refusal to confess and persistence in maintaining his innocence, he was ordered confined to Devil’s Island, one of three prison islands off the coast of South America used for desperate crimi
nals. A barren rock two miles long and five hundred yards wide, it was cleared of all but guards to accommodate Dreyfus alone, in a stone hut under perpetual surveillance. The unanimity of the military court seemed confirmed by a published rumor that Dreyfus had confessed, which, as it passed from journal to journal, acquired the force of an official statement and satisfied the public.

  The next three years were marked by intense efforts both to uncover and to conceal the truth. The long, painful struggle for judicial review, or “Revision,” as it was known, originated in the doubts of a few scattered individuals uneasy about the closed trial, who suspected a miscarriage of justice. They uncovered the illegality of the trial—on the basis of material not having been shown to the defence—and accumulated evidence pointing to the probable true culprit, a raffish and exotic officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy. Their pressures and pryings caused the officers originally responsible for constructing the case against Dreyfus to try to strengthen its weaknesses. Major Henry of the Counter-Espionage Bureau, which by nature dealt in forgery and extra-legal procedures, forged a letter, supposedly from the Italian military attaché, Major Panizzardi, to his German colleague, incriminating Dreyfus after the event, and on this letter, thereafter, the Army’s case hung. Each move in the campaign for Revision set off renewed efforts inside the General Staff to shore up the case and cover past fabrications in the Secret File by new ones. Officers succumbed to the mood of conspirators. There were secret meetings, warnings and black-mailings, clandestine relations between Paty de Clam and Esterhazy, disguises in false beards and dark glasses, and various melodramatic enterprises so deeply entangling the Army in acts it could never explain that by now it could not afford to face a reopening of the case. Anyone agitating for Revision or raising a question of Dreyfus’ lawful conviction became ipso facto the Army’s enemy and by extension the enemy of France.

  The Army was not political, not particularly clerical, not exclusively aristocratic or royalist, not necessarily anti-Semitic. Although many of its officers were all these things, the Army as a body was part of the Republic, not, like the Church, its antagonist. Despite the anti-Republican sentiments of individual officers, it accepted its role as an instrument of the state. The Republic, needing the Army, was working to make it a more serious, professionally trained body than the operatic corps of the Second Empire, which from the Crimea to Sedan plunged into battle with more dash than staff work. As a whole, the officer corps was still dominated by the graduates of St-Cyr who came largely from county families still mentally barricaded against the ideas of the Revolution. Its cult was that of a class distinct from civilians, little concerned with or aware of what was going on in the rest of the nation. It was a club loyal to its membership and cultivating its distinctiveness of which the visible mark was the uniform. Unlike British officers, who never wore uniform off duty, French officers before 1900 never wore anything else. Poorly paid, slowly promoted, drearily garrisoned for long stretches in some provincial town, their recompense was prestige: the honors, immunities and cachet of their caste; in short, the esteem in which they were held.

  The esteem was great. In the eyes of the people the Army was above politics; it was the nation, it was France, it was the greatness of France. It was the Army of Revolution as of Empire, the Army of Valmy in ’92 when Goethe, watching, said, “From this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history.” It was the Army of Marengo, Austerlitz and Wagram, the Grande Armée that Lavisse proudly called “one of the most perfect instruments of war history has ever seen”; the Army of the cuirasse and saber, of the képi and pantalons rouges, of Sebastopol and the Malakoff, of Magenta and Solferino, the Army that had made France the greatest military power in Europe until the rise of Prussia, the Army of tragedy as of glory, the Army of the Last Cartridges at Sedan, of the wild cavalry charge that evoked the German Emperor’s cry, “Oh, les braves gens!” Twenty-five years later, under the never-absent shadow of Germany, the Army was both defender of the nation and instrument of revanche. It was the means of restoring, someday, the national glory. Men lifted their hats when the colonel and the colors at the head of a regiment marched by. In the words of a character whom Anatole France was satirizing—though not misrepresenting—the Army “is all that is left of our glorious past. It consoles us for the present and gives us hope of the future.” The Army was les braves gens.

  In the course of the Affair it became the prisoner of its friends—clericals, royalists, anti-Semites, Nationalists and all the anti-Republican groups who made its honor the rallying cry of their own causes, for their own purposes. Caught in the trap of its early commitment to Dreyfus’ guilt, and of the forgeries and machinations by its officers to establish that guilt, the Army’s honor became synonymous with maintenance of the original verdict. It was a fort to be defended against Revision.

  Resistance to Revision was grounded in the belief that to reopen the trial was to discredit the Army and a discredited Army could not fight Germany. “Revision means War,” proclaimed the royalist Gazette de France and a war fought with a disorganized Army is “la Débâcle,” the name given to the defeat of 1870. How could soldiers go into battle under officers they had been taught to despise? asked the royalist Comte d’Haussonville. Although he thought the idea of an innocent man in prison “intolerable” and the campaign against the Jews “revolting,” nevertheless the Dreyfusard campaign against the Army was worse because it destroyed confidence in the officer corps. It was this fear of what would happen if the Army were weakened by distrust that intimidated the Chamber and turned the populace against Revision. The Army was their guarantee of peace. “France loves peace and prefers glory,” it was said, and this sentiment too was mauled by Revision. By casting doubt on the infallibility of the General Staff Revision was equivalent to sacrilege against la gloire militaire and anyone favoring it was pro-German if not a traitor.

  Mystified by the complexities of documents, facsimiles, trials and the Secret File, the people could not reconcile the idea of forgeries deliberately prepared to convict an innocent man with their idea of the Army which meant parades, uniforms, boots, epaulets, guns and flags. How could officers who rode proudly past on horseback, sword in hand, to the sound of music and drums, be imagined bent over tables in stuffy offices carefully forging handwriting and piecing letters together with scissors and glue? There was nothing brave or military about this, therefore it could only be calumny. The people were patriotic and Republican, believed what they read in the newspapers, loved the Army and hated and feared the “others”—sans-patrie, incendiaries, church-burners, Dreyfusards—who, they were told, were sworn to destroy it. They shouted “Vive l’Armée!” and “Vive la République!” “Down with Dreyfusards!” “Down with the Jews!” “Death to traitors!” “Vive Mercier!” and any other form of incantation that would serve to banish evil and reassure their faith.

  The Army was personified in terms of the Affair by General Auguste Mercier, who as Minister of War in 1894 had originally ordered Dreyfus’ arrest and through the consequence of that act became the idol of the Army’s supporters and the symbol of its cause. At parties of the haut monde, ladies rose to their feet when General Mercier entered the room. Sixty-one, tall, thin, straight and well groomed, he had strongly carved features, a curved nose framed by the sharp upturned points of a “Kaiser” moustache, and expressionless eyes, usually half-closed except when they opened for a cold, direct glance. A veteran of the campaigns in Mexico and at Metz in 1870, he was welcomed by the Staff, on his appointment as War Minister in 1893, as a true soldier who was not a politician. When the Anarchist, Vaillant, had thrown his bomb in the Chamber, Mercier had sat through the smoke and uproar without moving a muscle except to catch a fragment which had bounced off the seat behind him and hand it to the deputy sitting there, saying without expression, “You can have it back.” In character firm, decisive and thoughtful, in manner urbane and reserved, he was invariably polite and never abandoned, as the combat grew vicious, the u
sage Monsieur where others used “sale bête” or “ce salaud” as prefix to the name of a despised opponent.

  In 1894 faced with the existence of treason on his Staff and realizing the legal weakness of the evidence collected against Dreyfus, he had ordered his arrest in the hope of extracting a confession. When this was not forthcoming and while the investigating officers were desperately seeking evidence to strengthen the case, the arrest was leaked to the anti-Semitic paper, La Libre Parole, which asserted that Dreyfus would not be tried because Mercier was in the pay of the Jews. Under the goading of this and other papers, Mercier had summoned the military editor of Figaro and told him what he sincerely believed: that he had had from the beginning “proofs that cried aloud the treason of Dreyfus” and that his “guilt was absolutely certain.” He thereby, before the trial, tied the Army to Dreyfus’ guilt and locked the terms of the Affair into a position that could never be broken. The issue was instantly recognized at the time. “Today one must be either for Mercier or for Dreyfus; I am for Mercier,” said his parliamentary aide, General Riu, to reporters. “If Dreyfus is acquitted, Mercier goes,” wrote the royalist editor, Cassagnac, in l’Autorité, adding, since Mercier was a member of the Government, “If Dreyfus is not guilty then the Government is.” Thereafter every repetition of the choice only hardened the issue.