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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  At the trial, it was General Mercier who authorized submission of the Secret File and its withholding from the defence—the act that made the trial illegal. Fully recognizing the decisive nature of what he had done, Mercier lived up to it during the next two years, through all the mounting evidence of forgeries and false conviction, with increasingly arrogant and positive assertions of Dreyfus’ guilt. Once Dreyfus had been convicted on false evidence, any reopening of the case would reveal the Ministry of War, the General Staff and himself as dishonored; in short, as a colleague said, if in a retrial “Captain Dreyfus is acquitted, it is General Mercier who becomes the traitor.” Through every reinvestigation and taking of testimony, the trial of Esterhazy, the trial of Zola, the inquiry of the Court of Appeals, the final trial at Rennes, he beat back the forces of Revision and held the citadel of the false verdict. Angular, haughty, icy-faced, never wavering in self-control even when the whole structure he had built was tottering, he reminded an observer of the character in Dante’s Inferno who looked around him with disdain, “as if he held Hell in great contempt.”

  All the strength, except truth, was on his side. Each time the Dreyfusards brought forward new evidence which they were certain this time must force a retrial, it was quashed, suppressed, thrown out or matched with new fabrications by the Army, supported by the Government, by all the bien-pensants or right-thinking communicants of the Church, and by the screams and thunders of four-fifths of the press. It was the press which created the Affair and made truce impossible.

  Variegated, virulent, turbulent, literary, inventive, personal, conscienceless and often vicious, the daily newspapers of Paris were the liveliest and most important element in public life. The dailies numbered between twenty-five and thirty-five at a given time. They represented every conceivable shade of opinion, calling themselves Republican, Conservative, Catholic, Socialist, Nationalist, Bonapartist, Legitimist, Independent, absolutely Independent, Conservative-Catholic, Conservative-Monarchist, Republican-Liberal, Republican-Socialist, Republican-Independent, Republican-Progressist, Republican-Radical-Socialist. Some were morning, some evening, some had illustrated supplements. Of four to six pages, they covered, besides the usual political and foreign affairs, news of the haut monde, of le turf, of fashions, of theatre and opera, concerts and art, the salons and the Academy. All the most admired writers, among them Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Maurice Barrès, Marcel Prévost, contributed columns and critiques and their novels ran serially across the bottom of the front page. Editors on important issues contributed signed editorials of passionate invective. The press was daily wine, meat and bread to Paris. Major careers and a thousand minor ones were made in journalism. Everyone from Academicians to starving Anarchists made a supplementary living from it. Prominent politicians when out of office turned to journalism for a platform and an income.

  Newspapers could be founded overnight by anyone with energy, financial support and a set of opinions to plead. Writing talent was hardly a special requirement, because everyone in the politico-literary world of Paris could write—and did, instantly, speedily, voluminously. Columns of opinion, criticism, controversy, poured out like water. Le Temps, Olympian and responsible, led all the rest. Its outsize pages were read by everyone in public life, its reviews decided the fate of a play, its editorials on foreign affairs written by André Tardieu were of such influence that the German Foreign Minister, Von Bülow, remarked, “There are three Great Powers in Europe—and M. Tardieu.” Only Le Temps in its eminence remained above the battle, although inclining gradually toward Revision. Figaro, following it in importance, proved vulnerable. Its editor, Fernand de Rodays, after hearing Dreyfus cry out his innocence on the occasion of his military degradation, believed him. Three years later he published the first evidence against Esterhazy as well as Zola’s first articles. Although he was a father and father-in-law of officers, his enraged colleagues of the Nationalist press denounced him as a traducer of the Army and organized a campaign to cancel subscriptions to Figaro. The management succumbed and De Rodays was ousted, an affair of such moment that Paris gossip said he had been paid 400,000 francs to support Dreyfus and the management 500,000 to get rid of him.

  The blackmail of the Nationalist press, wrote Zola, who suffered its extremes, afflicted France like a “shameful disease which nobody has the courage to cure.” The mischief-makers were the privately supported organs of special interests or of individual editors who were likely to be men either of rabid principles or none at all. There was Ernest Judet of Le Petit Journal, who led the campaign to smear Clemenceau with the mud of Panama and who, when Clemenceau became Premier in 1906, barricaded his villa at Neuilly as if to defend it against a siege. Devoured by a perpetual terror of Freemasons, Judet carried a loaded revolver and a leaded cane weighing twelve pounds. There was the old royalist, Paul de Cassagnac, who started the fashion in journalism for abuse and insult, and attacked everyone and everything from habit regardless of consistency. There was Arthur Meyer, a converted Jew, son of a tailor, grandson of a rabbi, an ardent Boulangist and royalist who was editor of LeGaulois, which specialized in the doings of the haut monde. It was the paper read by the world of the “Guermantes.” Meyer’s wholehearted adoption of that world’s opinions and prejudices took a certain courage or a thick skin, for he was no Charles Swann who melted into his surroundings, but in appearance resembled the anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews. He nevertheless had married into the Faubourg—a dowerless daughter of the Comte de Turenne—was accepted into the circle of the Duchesse d’Uzès, became friend, adviser and confidant of the late Pretender, the Comte de Paris, and set masculine style by the cut of his morning coat and the fold of his cravats.

  Henri, Comte de Rochefort, of l’Intransigeant, was the kind of journalist whose capacity for mischief is unfettered by doctrine: the more unsettled his convictions, the more brilliant and scathing his pen. A constitutional “anti” described by a friend as “a reactionary without knowing it,” a bright-eyed cynic and “aristo” with a pointed white beard and an exuberant laugh, Rochefort combined in his person almost every tendency, no matter how opposite, of the Third Republic. His Adventures of My Life filled five volumes. He had been everything from an antagonist of Napoleon III to an associate of General Boulanger and his daily column was the delight of the most impressionable and excitable portion of the public.

  Approached by the early Dreyfusards on the theory that he would relish a challenge to prove innocent a condemned man whom everyone believed guilty, Rochefort had been cordial, but was dissuaded from the adventure by his manager, Ernest Vaughan, on the ground that public opinion would not stand for disrespect of the Army. Rochefort found the other side just as exciting and when Vaughan meanwhile changed his mind, they quarreled, with the historic result that Vaughan departed to found his own paper, l’Aurore, and to provide an organ for the Dreyfusards which they had hitherto lacked. Rochefort retaliated with the most mischief-making story of the Affair. He informed his readers that a letter from the Kaiser to Dreyfus existed which the President of the Republic had been forced by threat of war to return to the German Ambassador, Count Münster, but not before it had previously been photographed. L’Intransigeant could say with “absolute certainty” on the authority of a high military personage that this was the “secret document” on which Dreyfus had been convicted.

  So befuddled was the public mind by the fumes of mystification and intrigue rising from the Affair that the story was widely believed. It haunted efforts for Revision at every turn. It added fuel to the argument that Revision meant war. What acted on public opinion in the Affair was never what happened but what the Nationalist press and whispered rumor said happened. Intervention by Count Münster had indeed taken place for the purpose of officially denying any contact with Dreyfus but the view the public had of this incident was of a virtual ultimatum. The generals, whose thinking for good reason was dominated by the problem of Germany, used this as their excuse for not reopening the verdict and ar
gued it so convincingly they convinced themselves. General Mercier testified he had sat up until midnight with the President and Premier after the interview with Count Münster waiting “to learn if war or peace would be the issue.” General Boisdeffre, Chief of General Staff, angrily said to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, when she argued the innocence of Dreyfus, “How can you say such a thing to me who has seen and held in his hands Dreyfus’ own letters to the German Emperor?” Furious, the renowned hostess shouted, “If you have seen such letters they can only be apocryphal. You cannot make me believe in such a thing.” Whereupon Boisdeffre strode out of the room in a rage and the Princess, letting out a sigh of relief, exclaimed, “Quel animal, ce général!”

  What was truth and what people persuaded themselves was truth became hopelessly blurred. The German Government’s several denials of any knowledge of Dreyfus were ignored on the ground that Berlin would not know the names of spies its agents dealt with. On the other hand, the Nationalist papers pictured Germany as affronted to the point of threatening war by France’s condemnation of Dreyfus in the face of its denials. Any willingness to consider Revision was denounced as cowardly submission to German pressure—and proof of the power of the “Syndicate.”

  A creation of the anti-Semitic press, the “Syndicate” represented the Right’s idea of evil. It was supposed to be a subterranean fellowship of the Jews, a black and sinister conspiracy whose forces were mobilized to reverse the conviction of Dreyfus and to substitute a Christian as the traitor in his place. Any development in the case unfavorable to the Nationalists could be ascribed to the “Syndicate.” Any prominent or respected person who proclaimed himself in favor of Revision was in the pay of the “Syndicate.” Evidence of the Army’s forgeries was itself forged by the “Syndicate.” The Nationalists said it had spent ten million francs since 1895 for corrupting judges and handwriting experts, suborning journalists and ministers. They said its funds supplied by the great Jewish bankers were deposited in the vault of an international bank in Berlin. They said its German adviser was Pastor Günther, the Kaiser’s personal chaplain. Its aim was to break down the nation’s faith in the Army, reveal its military secrets and, when defenceless, open its gates to the enemy. It was personified by the cartoonists as a fat Jewish-featured figure in rings and watch chains wearing an expression of triumphant malevolence, standing with one foot on the neck of a prostrate Marianne. As the animus of the Affair grew, the “Syndicate” swelled in Nationalist eyes into a monstrous league not only of Jews but of Freemasons, Socialists, foreigners and all other evilly disposed persons. It was said to be drawing on funds from all France’s enemies, who were using Dreyfus as an excuse to discredit the Army and divide the nation. The humiliation suffered at Fashoda at the hands of England was seen as engineered by the “Syndicate.” The “Syndicate” was everywhere; it embodied the hates and fears of the Right. It was the Enemy.

  The sudden and malign bloom of anti-Semitism in France was part of a wider outbreak. As a social and political force anti-Semitism emerged in the late Nineteenth Century out of other expanding forces which were building tensions between classes and among nations. Industrialization, imperialism, the growth of cities, the decline of the countryside, the power of money and the power of machines, the clenched fist of the working class, the red flag of Socialism, the wane of the aristocracy, all these forces and factors were churning like the bowels of a volcano about to erupt. “Something very great—ancient, cosmopolitan, feudal, agrarian Europe,” as a contemporary said, was dying and in the process creating conflicts, fears and newfound strengths that needed outlet.

  A classic outlet was anti-Semitism. As scapegoat to draw off discontent from the governing class, it appeared in Germany under Bismarck in the seventies and in Russia in the eighties. The pogroms of 1881 and the subsequent disabling May Laws awoke in Jews a recognition of Mazzini’s dictum, “Without a country you are the bastards of humanity.” Anti-Semitism served equally as scapegoat for the propertied class, and its virulence at this time reflected a profound unease under a sense of impending breakup of the old order. Old values were giving way. Anarchist assaults, Socialist agitation, the growing self-consciousness of labour were threatening position and property, and nothing so generates hostility as a threat to possessions. In the West the new antipathy afflicted cultivated men like Balfour’s secretary, George Wyndham, and Theodore Roosevelt’s particular friend, the English diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice. Henry Adams expressed it rabidly and incessantly: he lived only in the wish to see the end of “infernal Jewry” and all “gold-bugs”; “we are in the hands of Jews who do what they please with our values”; “I read with interest France juive, Libre Parole and all”; “I pass the day reading Drumont’s anti-Semitic ravings.”

  In men of this class the sentiment sprang from hatred of the new power of money (although nothing concerned Adams himself more than money), that is, of new “gold-bug” money deriving from stocks and shares and financial operations, in place of the acceptable form deriving from land and rents. The Jewish problem, explained the Duc d’Orléans during the Affair, was one of economic war. The day was approaching when all persons with attachment to the land and thus to their country would have to defend themselves against “the anonymous and vagabond” fortunes of the Jews, who had gorged themselves on the ruin of the Union Générale with the Government as their accomplice. The Union Générale was a Catholic bank founded with the blessing of Pope Leo XIII with the express purpose of attracting the investments of the faithful. On the advice of their priests, the aristocracy invested in it their capital, and modest Catholic families their savings. When, owing to the superior resources and shrewd maneuvers of its rivals, including the Rothschilds, the Union Générale collapsed in 1882, rich and poor Catholics alike lost their funds. The Jews were blamed. The Jewish “question” began to be discussed in the clerical and royalist papers. Secret plots and malignant powers were attributed to them. All the arguments which the Jew had inspired as the perennial stranger who persisted in retaining his own identity were revived. Jews were not Frenchmen; they were aliens within the French body, probably conspiring against France, certainly against the Church; they were promoters of the anti-clerical movement and enemies of Catholic bien-pensants.

  French anti-Semitism, like its virulent appearances elsewhere in history, required the juncture of an instigator with circumstance. The instigator in this case was the previously unknown Edouard Drumont, who in the wake of the collapse of the Union Générale wrote a two-volume book, La France Juive, published in 1886 to instant success. It was a polemic compounded of Rothschilds and ritual murder, not a philosophical treatise like Gobineau’s earlier Essay in Racial Inequality, which had its greatest appeal across the Rhine where the inhabitants were engaged in constructing a theory of a master race. Drumont’s central theme was the evil power of Jewish finance. The book was widely read and reprinted and its author, a hearty, red-faced, thick-bodied man with a bushy black beard, thrived. In 1889 in association with the Marquis de Morès he founded the National Anti-Semitic League to fight “the clandestine and merciless conspiracy” of Jewish finance which “jeopardizes daily the welfare, honor and security of France.” At its first big public meeting the Duc d’Uzès, the Duc de Luynes, Prince Poniatowski, the Comte de Breteuil and other members of the aristocracy felt gratified at finding themselves seated next to real workmen from the butcher shops and slaughterhouses who in turn were delighted to find themselves sharing their opinions with noblemen.

  After the success of the book and the League, Drumont’s next step was inevitably a newspaper. In 1892 he founded La Libre Parole, just at the time when the anger of bilked investors in the Panama loan fell upon its two leading promoters, Cornelius Herz and the Baron de Reinach, both Jews. Drumont’s paper in foaming philippics and raging pursuit of the evildoers, became a power. It undertook at the same time a campaign to drive Jewish officers out of the Army as a result of which two of them fought duels with Drumont and the Marquis de Morè
s. The Marquis went to the unusual length of killing his opponent and was charged with foul play but acquitted in court.

  When Dreyfus was condemned, La Libre Parole explained his motive to the public: revenge for slights received and the desire of his race for the ruin of France. “A mort! A mort les juifs!” the crowd howled outside the railings of the parade ground where the ceremony of his degradation took place.

  The cry was heard by the Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl, who was standing amongst the crowd. “Where?” he wrote later. “In France. In republican, modern, civilised France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The shock clarified old problems in his mind. He went home and wrote Der Judenstaat, whose first sentence established its aim, “restoration of the Jewish state,” and within eighteen months he organized, out of the most disorganized and fractional community in the world, the first Zionist Congress of two hundred delegates from fifteen countries. Dreyfus gave the impulse to a new factor in world affairs which had waited for eighteen hundred years.