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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  His words defined the chasm, and his position on one side of it was inevitable. It led him in the Affair to embrace the brigands and fight on the terms established by Drumont. It was he who introduced the “Syndicate” into the first debate on the Affair in the Chamber. “What is this mysterious occult power,” he demanded, looking directly at Reinach, “that is strong enough to disrupt the entire country as it has for the last two weeks and to throw doubt and suspicion on the leaders of our Army who”—here he stopped as if choked by his strength of feeling—“who may one day have to lead the country against the enemy. This is not a question of politics. Here we are neither friends nor opponents of the Government; here there are only Frenchmen anxious to preserve their most precious possession … the honor of the Army!”

  His proud manner and thrilling voice brought the deputies to their feet in transports of applause. Reinach felt the entire Chamber swept by an overmastering emotion and incapable of individual reflection. “I felt on my head the hatred of three hundred hypnotized listeners. I crossed my arms; one word, one movement would have transformed this frenzy into fury. How struggle against a whirlwind?” Jaurès was silent and many of the Left were applauding from “the enthusiasm born of fear.” Imperiously de Mun demanded from the Government an unequivocal statement confirming Dreyfus’ guilt. The Minister of War, General Billot, obeyed, declaring “solemnly and sincerely, as a soldier and leader of the Army, I believe Dreyfus to be guilty.” The Premier followed with an appeal to all good Frenchmen, in the interests of the country and the Army, to support the Government “struggling with such difficulties and harassed by such furious passions.” The passions were at once expressed in a duel between Reinach and Alexandre Millerand, a Socialist, who in unprecedented support for the Government by one of his party, denounced the Dreyfusard accusations of the Army as “disloyal.”

  Other members of the nobility besides de Mun also served as deputies, but always as royalists in opposition. None took any share in the actual business of governing under the Republic. Among them was the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, representing the older nobility ante-dating the Empire, whose money came from Pommeroy champagne and Singer sewing machines and who, as president of the Jockey Club, was the acknowledged leader of the gratin, or “crust,” of French Society. Others were the Marquis de Breteuil, representing a district in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his friend the Comte de Greffulhe, whose yellow beard and air of combined rage and majesty caused him to resemble the king in a pack of cards. Possessor of one of the largest fortunes in France and a wife who was the most beautiful woman in Society, he and she served as Marcel Proust’s models for the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. Another deputy was Count Boni de Castellane, the dandy and arbiter of taste of his circle. Tall and slim, with pink skin, blue eyes and small neat golden moustache, he had married the dour American heiress Anna Gould, and with her dowry built a marble mansion furnished with precious antiques to exhibit the perfection that taste endowed by money could reach. At the party to celebrate its opening a footman in a scarlet cloak was stationed at the curve of the staircase, and when the Grand Duke Vladimir asked, “Who is that Cardinal over there?” the host replied, “Oh, he is only there to make an agreeable effect of color against the marble.” Count Boni’s assessment of the Affair was that the Jews “in their insensate desire to save a co-religionist” were arrogantly interfering with judicial process and simultaneously, or alternatively, were making Dreyfus “the pretext for a campaign against the Army which doubtless originated in Berlin.” In either case they were “insupportable to me.” This on the whole represented the view of the gratin, who in the words of a notable apostate among them, the Marquis de Galliffet, “continue to understand nothing.”

  Some among them had literary or other distinctions. Comte Robert de Montesquiou, aesthete extraordinary, lavished on himself silks of lavender and gold, wrote elaborately symbolist poems and epitomized decadence to both Proust and Huysmans in their characters, the Baron de Charlus and des Esseintes. Montesquiou was what Oscar Wilde would have liked to have been if he had had more money, less talent and no humor. The Prince de Sagan, another notorious pederast who wore a perpetually fresh boutonniere and a perfectly waxed moustache, vied with his nephew, Count Boni, as the high priest of elegance and fought a duel with Abel Hermant, in whose satirical novels of the life of the rich and libertine he considered himself libelled. The Comtesse Anna de Noailles wrote poetry and glided through her lovely rooms in long white floating garments like “the ghost of something too beautiful to be real.” At her parties everything was required to focus on her. She did not trouble much about her guests, “merely smiled upon them when they arrived and softly sighed when she saw them going away.” The Comte de Vogüé, novelist and Academician, influenced the course of French literature by his studies of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevski which brought the great Russians to French attention.

  These were the outstanding members. The bulk of the other one thousand or so who made up the gratin were chiefly distinguished, as one of them said, by “the certitude of a superiority that existed despite appearances to the contrary.” Comte Aimery de La Rochefoucauld was noted for “the almost fossil rigidity of his aristocratic prejudices.” Disgusted at improper protocol in a certain household, he said to a friend of his own level, “Let us walk home together and talk about rank.” Of the Duc de Luynes he remarked that his family were “mere nobodies in the year 1000.” Of the same breed was the Duc d’Uzès, whose ancestor, when the King expressed surprise that none of his family had ever been Marshal of France, replied, “Sire, we were always killed in battle too soon.”

  The gratin were not hospitable; some families however wealthy “never offered so much as a glass of lemonade to their friends.” The men considered themselves the only ones of their sex who knew how to dress or make love and exchanged tributes from the famous courtesans. They took their orders from the ranking members of their class and were ardently Anglophile in manners and customs. The Greffulhes and Breteuils were intimates of the Prince of Wales, le betting was the custom at Longchamps, le Derby was held at Chantilly, le steeplechase at Auteuil and an unwanted member was black-boulé at the Jockey Club. Charles Haas, the original of Swann, had “Mr” engraved on his calling cards.

  At the château of the Duc de Luynes at Dampierre, an English visitor found a veneer of modernity in the automobiles, the billiard room, the London clothes of the men and the chatter of women, “but under this thin glaze a deadness of the Dead Sea. All the books are safe under lock and key in the library outside the house. In the house there is no book, no newspaper, no writing paper and only one pen.” Two sisters—the Duchesses de Luynes and de Brissac—and their friend, the Comtesse de Vogüé, all on the point of becoming mothers, were “splendid creatures,” very easy to get on with if one talked of nothing but sport. The host was Lord Chamberlain to the current Pretender. Their kind “are children, arrested in intelligence, who hate Jews, Americans, the present, the past two centuries, the Government, the future and the fine arts.”

  Under the law of the Republic all Pretenders to the throne lived in exile. Bonapartist hopes were lodged in Prince Victor Napoleon, grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, while legitimist allegiance went to a grandson of Louis-Philippe, the Comte de Paris, of whom Thiers said, “From a distance he looks like a Prussian, from close up like an imbecile.” On his death in 1894 he was succeeded by his son, the Duc d’Orléans, a hare-brained young man who in 1890 had dashingly appeared in France with declared intent to “share the French soldier’s gamelle [mess],” that is, to do his military service. Being equally celebrated for his romance with the prima donna, Nellie Melba, he was irreverently known thereafter as “Gamelba,” a name coined by Rochefort. Before the Affair, his cause seemed moribund; but in the Affair the royalists found a new rallying point, new hope and excitement and in the anti-Semites, new partners and energy. Anti-Semitism became the fashion, although with certain unwanted effects on Society, for parvenus were able to force th
eir way in by virtue of the degree of warmth with which they espoused the new cause. “All this Dreyfus business is destroying society,” complained the Baron de Charlus, and the Duchesse de Guermantes found it “perfectly intolerable” that all the people one had spent one’s life trying to avoid now had to be accepted just because they boycotted Jewish tradesmen and had “Down with Jews” printed on their parasols.

  Important neither in government nor in culture, the gratin were important only in providing the background, motive, stimulus and financial backing to reaction. In the Affair the only serious leader to emerge from their class was de Mun. It was he who forced the Government to prosecute Zola for libel of the Army in his public letter, J’Accuse, and thus brought on the trial which made the case a national, no longer containable, issue. Had the Government had its way it would have taken no action, for discussion and testimony and above all cross-examination were to be avoided. But led by de Mun, the Right in its wrath demanded revenge and his authority exercised a spell. When no one from the Ministry of War was present in the Chamber to reply to Zola’s attack, de Mun demanded that the session be suspended until the Minister of War could be summoned so that nothing should take precedence over defence of the Army’s honor. A deputy suggested that the matter could wait while other business continued. “The Army cannot wait!” de Mun declared haughtily. Obediently the deputies filed out until the Minister arrived and afterward, swept up in a passionate oration by de Mun, voted to proceed against Zola.

  “A colossus with dirty feet, nevertheless a colossus,” Flaubert had called Zola. Although he was probably the most widely read and best-paid French author of the time, the brutal realism of his novels had aroused the disgust and resentment of many. He dug mercilessly into the base, sordid and corrupt elements of every class in society, from the slums to the Senate. Peasants, prostitutes, miners, bourgeois businessmen, alcoholics, doctors, officers, churchmen and politicians were exposed in gigantic detail. Worse, the supposedly beneficent Nineteenth Century itself was exposed in his picture of the terrible impoverishment brought upon the masses by industrialization. The doors of the Academy never opened to him. His account of 1870 in La Débâcle infuriated the Army and after Germinal he was classed as a champion of the workers against the established order. He was an agnostic who believed in science as the only instrument of social progress. Already, however, a literary reaction against realism and the “bankruptcy of science” was taking place.

  In the year before Dreyfus’ arrest, Zola’s fame had reached its peak upon publication of the final novel in his immense twenty-volume panorama of French life. At a party given by his publisher to celebrate the occasion on the Grand Lac in the Bois de Boulogne, writers, statesmen, ambassadors, actresses and beauties, celebrities of every kind from Poincaré to Yvette Guilbert, were present. Where was he to go from here? The Dreyfus case opened a new road to greatness, but only to a man capable of taking it. It required courage to challenge the State, the training and genius of a great writer to compose J’Accuse, and sympathy with suffering to inspire him to act. Zola had known suffering: In his youth he had spent two unemployed years in the garret of a shabby boardinghouse, often so hungry that he set traps for sparrows on the roof and broiled them on the end of a curtain rod over a candle.

  His first article on the Affair, after summarizing the evidence against Esterhazy—the handwriting, the petit bleu, the Uhlan letters—had asserted, “Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.” When a month later the Army ordered Esterhazy’s court-martial, the Dreyfusards, believing this was a roundabout way of succumbing to Revision, were exuberant. In fact, it was a device for dealing with the Esterhazy problem through a trial whose verdict the Army could control. Esterhazy was acquitted and acclaimed by the mob as the “martyr of the Jews.” The verdict “came upon us like the blow of a bludgeon,” wrote Blum. It was as if Dreyfus had been condemned a second time. The march of truth had, after all, been stopped.

  The only way to force the evidence onto the record was to provoke a civil trial. This was the purpose of Zola’s open letter addressed to the President of France. He conceived it on the day of Esterhazy’s acquittal with deliberate intent to bring himself to trial. He told no one but his wife and did not hesitate. Locking himself in his study, he worked without stopping for twenty-four hours, mastered the intricacies and mysteries of what by now had become one of the most complex puzzles in history and wrote his indictment in four thousand words. He took it over to l’Aurore on the evening of January 12, and it appeared next morning under the title suggested by Ernest Vaughan (or, according to another version, by Clemenceau): J’ACCUSE! Three hundred thousand copies were sold, many to Nationalists who burned them in the streets.

  In separate paragraphs, each beginning “I accuse,” Zola specifically named two Ministers of War, Generals Mercier and Billot, one “as accomplice in one of the greatest iniquities of the century,” and the other of “possessing positive proofs of the innocence of Dreyfus and suppressing them.” He accused the Chiefs of the General Staff, Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse, as accomplices in the same crime, and Colonel du Paty de Clam (he knew nothing about Major Henry) as its “diabolical author.” He accused the War Ministry of conducting an “abominable campaign” in the press to mislead the public and conceal its own misdeeds. He accused the first court-martial of conducting an illegal trial and the Esterhazy court-martial of covering that illegal verdict “on order” as well as of the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty person. The accusations were made in full awareness of the law of libel “to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. Let them bring me to court. Let the inquiry be in broad daylight. I wait.”

  The public was aghast; such charges flung at the military leaders of the nation seemed equivalent to an act of revolt. Many Revisionists felt Zola had gone too far. He had inflamed an already heated situation almost unbearably by frightening and angering the middle classes and increasing their support of the Army and their dislike of the Dreyfusards. Following de Mun’s resolution next day, the Government announced that Zola would be prosecuted. Hatred, filth and insults were spewed on him by the press and in songs sold on the streets. He was viciously caricatured. “Pornographic pig” was polite among the names he was called. Packages of excrement were mailed to him. He was burnt in effigy. Placards were distributed reading, “The answer of all good Frenchmen to Emile Zola: Merde!” Evoking one of the major emotions of the Affair, the attacks denounced him as a “foreigner,” in reference to his Italian father. In fact, Zola had been born in Paris of a French mother and brought up in the home of her parents in Aix-en-Provence.

  The Government’s suit, filed in the name of General Billot as Minister of War, ignored all the accusations relevant to Dreyfus and confined itself to the single charge that the court-martial of Esterhazy had acquitted him “on order.” By this device the presiding judge could exclude any testimony not bearing precisely on that point. In a fiery protest against this procedure, Jaurès thundered in the Chamber at the Government, “You are delivering the Republic to the Jesuit Generals!” at which a Nationalist deputy, the Comte de Bernis, assaulted him physically, causing such an uproar that the military guard was required to restore order.

  J’Accuse drew world attention to the Affair and gave it the proportions of heroic drama. That the French Army could be accused of such crimes and the French author best known to the foreign public be attacked in such terms were equally astounding. The world watched with “stupor and distress,” wrote Björnstjerne Björnson from Norway. When the trial opened, the Dreyfusards were conscious of that audience. “The scene is France; the theatre is the world,” they said. The trial transformed the Affair from the local to the universal.

  The writer of his time who most truly touched the universal, Chekhov, was profoundly stirred by Zola’s intervention. Staying in Nice at the time, he followed the trial in growing excitement, read all the verbatim testimony and wrote home, “We talk here of nothing but Zola and Dreyfus.”
He found the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus tirades of the St. Petersburg New Times, the leading daily which had published most of his own stories, “simply repulsive” and quarreled with its editor, his old and intimate friend.

  Foreign opinion, except as conditioned by feeling about the Jews, saw the issue chiefly as one of Justice and could not understand the obstinate refusal of the French to allow Revision. Foreign hostility itself became a factor in the refusal. “French papers ask why foreign countries take such an interest in the Affair,” wrote Princess Radziwill, “as if a question of justice did not interest the whole world.” It did, but in France the Affair was not only that. It was not a struggle of the Right against the Left, because men like Scheurer-Kestner and Reinach, Clemenceau and Anatole France, were not men of the Left. It was fought in terms of justice and patriotism, but fundamentally it was the struggle of the Right against Reason.

  Zola’s trial opened on February 7, 1898, and lasted sixteen days. The atmosphere at the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cité “smelled of suppressed slaughter,” said a witness. “What passion on people’s faces! What looks of hatred when certain eyes met!” The courtroom was crammed to the window sills with journalists, lawyers, officers in uniform, ladies in furs. Marcel Proust climbed every day to the public gallery, bringing coffee and sandwiches so as not to miss a moment. Outside the windows Drumont’s claque, paid at forty sous a head, hooted and jeered. All the Army officers concerned in the trials and investigations of Dreyfus, Esterhazy and Picquart stood up and swore to the authenticity of the documents, including specifically the Panizzardi letter which was declared to be “positive proof of Dreyfus’ guilt. (The Foreign Minister, already advised by the Italians that it was a forgery, had wanted to call off the trial but the Government had not dared for fear of an Army revolt.) General Mercier, upright, haughty, unmoved, “entrenched in his own infallibility,” affirmed on his honor as a soldier that Dreyfus had been rightfully and legally convicted. Attempts by the defence to cross-examine were met over and over again by the presiding judge with the sharp order, “The question will not be put.” Statements by Zola or by his lawyer, Maître Labori, or by Clemenceau, who, though not a lawyer, was appearing for l’Aurore, were met by inarticulate roars from the packed audience. Zola, appearing nervous and sullen, kept his temper until, tormented beyond endurance, he spat out “Cannibals!”—the word used by Voltaire in the Calas affair. Esterhazy, called to testify, was greeted by the crowd with shouts of “Gloire au victime du Syndicat!” On the steps of the court, Prince Henri d’Orléans, cousin of the Pretender, shook the hand of the author of the Uhlan letters and saluted in him the “French uniform.”