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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  “Paris palpitated,” wrote an English visitor, and he felt a lust for blood in the air. Mobs broke the windows of Zola’s house and of the offices of l’Aurore. Shops closed, foreigners departed. A wave of anti-Semitic riots organized by Drumont’s lieutenant, Jules Guérin, erupted in Le Havre, Orléans, Nancy, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles and smaller towns, and reached a peak in Algiers where the looting and sack of the Jewish quarter lasted for four days, with many beaten and in some cases killed. In Paris an employment office opened where toughs were hired at five francs a day or two francs for an evening to shout, “Down with the Jews! Long live the Army! Spit on Zola!” When Zola left the court on one occasion, in company with Reinach, the crowd flew at them, yelling, “Drown the traitors! Death to the Jews!” and they had to be rescued by police. Thereafter, mounted police escorted Zola’s carriage to and from the court every day, and were sometimes forced to charge the screaming mob threatening to assault it. Zola’s friend Desmoulins, acting as bodyguard, carried a revolver.

  In the Court, despite obstructions and jeers, truth was advancing. Neither Labori, young and vehement, of whom it was said, “He is not an intellect, he is a temperament,” nor Clemenceau, hard, merciless, invincible in debate, could be bullied or silenced. The jury was rumored to be inclining toward acquittal. General Boisdeffre, taking the stand, warned, “If the nation does not have confidence in its Army chiefs … then they are ready to transfer to others their heavy task. You have only to say the word.” It was a threat of collective resignation by the General Staff if the jury acquitted. Boisdeffre made it plain: Zola or us. This was the issue, not the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, which the jury had to decide. Its members came mostly from the petty bourgeoisie: a tanner, a market gardener, a wine-dealer, a clerk, a landlord and two workmen. With implied threat La Libre Parole published their names and business addresses and letters from readers warning of vengeance if the “Italian” were acquitted.

  In his closing speech, Zola, constantly interrupted by boos and hissing, swore by his forty years of labour and forty volumes of French literature that Dreyfus was innocent. He had acted to save his country from “the grip of lies and injustice” and though he were condemned, “France will one day thank me for having helped to save her honour.” Clemenceau concluded, “Your task, gentlemen of the jury, is to pronounce a verdict less upon us than upon yourselves. We are appearing before you. You will appear before history.”

  Zola was condemned by a vote of 7–5 and the wonder was that five jurors had the courage to vote for acquittal. Outside, the Place Dauphine was black with people screaming in triumph. “Listen to them, listen to them!” said Zola as he was preparing to leave. “They sound as if they were waiting for someone to throw them meat.” Clemenceau told a friend that in case of acquittal he was “quite certain not a single Dreyfusard in the court or corridors would have escaped with his life.” Zola received the maximum penalty, a year’s imprisonment and a fine of three thousand francs and on rejection of an appeal was persuaded by the insistence of his friends to escape to England. He should have been sent “to join his friend Dreyfus on Devil’s Island” was Henry Adams’ comment, “with as much more French rot as the island would hold, including most of the press, the greater part of the theatre, all the stockbrokers and a Rothschild or two for example.” The sentiments were his own, not paid for like those of the Paris mob which they so accurately reflected.

  The trial was a tornado that whirled all the vocal elements of society into its vortex. “Every conscience is troubled,” wrote Le Petit Parisien. “No one reasons any more; no discussion is possible; everyone has taken up a fixed position.” Families divided and even servants. In the most famous of the Caran d’Ache cartoons the father of a large family at dinner commands, “No one is to speak of it!” The next panel shows a wild melee of overturned table, knives and forks flying and chairs used as weapons, under the title, “They spoke of it!”

  Organizing their efforts the Dreyfusards formed the League for the Rights of Man, which sponsored protest meetings and sent lecturers around the country. They drew up a petition for Revision which made the schism in society visible and inescapable. Called the “Protest of the Intellectuals,” it began appearing day by day in l’Aurore with successive signatures. It cut jagged divisions between those who signed and those who refused. The organizers were Marcel Proust and his brother Robert (whose father refused to speak to them for a week in consequence), Elie Halévy and his brother Daniel and their cousin Jacques Bizet, son of the composer, all in their late twenties. Almost the first signature they obtained was their greatest coup: that of “the ultimate flower of Latin genius” and leader of Academicians, Anatole France. “He got out of bed to see us, in his slippers with a head cold,” wrote Halévy. “ ‘Show it to me,’ he said, ‘I’ll sign, I’ll sign anything. I am revolted.’ ” He was a rationalist, revolted by unreason. A cynic and a satirist of human folly, he had sympathy neither for crusades nor for Dreyfus as an individual who, he perceptively suggested, was “the same type as the officers who condemned him; in their shoes he would have condemned himself.” But he hated the crowd and out of contradictory spirit was usually to be found against the Government.

  He wrote prose clear as a running brook. He had lived in the home and adorned the salon of his mistress, Mme Arman de Caillavet, since 1889, when, after a final quarrel with his wife, he walked out in dressing gown and slippers, carrying on a tray, quill pen, inkstand and current MS, and proceeded down the street to a hotel, sent for his clothes and never went home. Mme Arman exercised over him the tyranny of devotion and when he was lazy locked him up to make him write. His series of novels about the current day centering around M. Bergeret had been appearing serially in the violently right-wing Echo de Paris since 1895 and continued to appear there through the Affair, in ironic commentary on the print around them. France’s signature enchanted the Revisionists and astonished both sides. He was “altogether one of us”; he should have never sided with “them,” lamented Léon Daudet.

  On its first appearance the Protest of the Intellectuals had 104 signers and within a month 3,000, among them André Gide, Charles Péguy, Elisée Reclus, Gabriel Monod, scholars, poets, philosophers, doctors, professors and one painter, Claude Monet, from sympathy with Clemenceau. The only political action of Monet’s life, his signature caused a quarrel with Degas and they did not speak again for years. Now almost blind, Degas used to have La Libre Parole read to him each morning, and regarded with contempt the arrivistes of the Republican era. “In my time,” he said disdainfully, “one did not arrive.”

  Artists and musicians, though on the whole politically indifferent, tended if anything toward the Nationalist camp. Debussy sat with Léon Daudet’s circle at the Café Weber in the Rue Royale. Puvis de Chavannes was another Nationalist sympathizer.

  Professors and teachers from the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale, the Faculty of Medicine, the secondary schools and provincial universities, signed; many were opposed, many refrained for fear of reprisals. “If I sign,” said a school principal to Clemenceau, “that ass Rambaud [the Minister of Education] will send me to rot in the depths of Brittany.” The distinguished scientist Emile Duclaux, successor to Pasteur, signed immediately, saying that if they were afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth would never be reached except by accident. Following his lead, scientists entered the Affair and some suffered for it. Professor Grimaux of the Polytechnic, who both signed and testified at Zola’s trial, was removed from the chair of chemistry. Heated arguments arose as to whether such great masters as Hugo, Renan, Taine or Pasteur would or would not have signed. Pupils and teachers were at odds, students divided, committees were formed for and against, especially in the provinces where the faculties were under Catholic influence.

  Like an ice floe cracking, the intellectual world split over the Protest, and as the Affair progressed, the two halves spread wider and wider apart. Former friends passed each other in silence and any words they might
have said “would never have carried across the worlds that lay between them.” When Pierre Louÿs, author of Aphrodite, took the opposite side from his friend Léon Blum, without further communication they never saw each other again. When the Protest was being circulated, three journalist friends of Léon Daudet tried to persuade him, appealing for three hours over lunch to “my patriotism, my intelligence, my heart.” Before the Affair he had dined at the home of the Laboris, where Madame sang the songs of Schumann and no evening could have been more delightful; “he robust and eloquent, she full of talent, charm and good will.” He was welcome too in the charming house on the Pont-de-l’Arche of Octave Mirbeau, who owned Van Gogh’s “Field of Iris” and where Madame welcomed one with “affectionate and sumptuous hospitality” and the cuisine was incomparable “from the butter to the wine, from the cooking oil to the soup.” After the Affair the word “Nationalist” was to Mirbeau a synonym for “assassin,” and Democracy was to Daudet “the poisoned terrain.” Soon after Zola’s trial Daudet was writing weekly diatribes of unexampled ferocity for La Libre Parole and Le Gaulois.

  Maurice Barrès, the brilliant novelist who combined literature with a political career, was another whom his friends expected to be a Revisionist. Léon Blum asked for his signature feeling perfectly certain of him, but Barrès said he wanted to think it over and when he wrote it was to refuse. Though professing friendship and respect for Zola he said he felt doubtful and in his doubt chose “the instinct of patriotism.” Within months he was to find the mystic answer in terms of blood and soil; to explain Zola as a “denaturalized Venetian” and the Jews on the same principle: that they “have no country as we understand it. For us our country is the earth of our ancestors, the land of our dead. For them it is the place of their best interest.” Becoming the intellectual leader of the Nationalists, Barrès supplied them with words to pre-empt patriotism for the Right.

  A new recruit, small but wickedly effective, in the form of a four-page weekly of caricatures called Psst!, was brought out by Forain and Caran d’Ache, who composed it sitting together at a table in the Café Weber. Caran d’Ache drew comic strips of inspired simplification. Forain was an artist whose sharp views of Parisian society were incisive and brilliant in black and white, although his oils evoked Degas’ deadly comment, “He paints with his hands in my pockets.” His cover design of a Prussian officer standing behind a dark and cynical figure representing the Syndicate and manipulating in front of its face the mask of Zola, compressed in one picture all the elements of the Affair as the Nationalists saw it. Reinach, the favored target of Psst!, was usually pictured as an orangutang in a top hat with heavily Jewish features going repeatedly to Berlin to confer with spike-helmeted Prussians. Scheurer-Kestner and other Revisionists appear as hook-nosed Jews in bankers’ fur-collared coats, paying out German funds, using the Army képi for a football or picking weeds from the grave of Ravachol as a “bouquet for Zola.” Throughout appears a stalwart wooden soldier, standing straight and brave, unwincing among the villains, forever valiant—the Army. The Intellectual is a lanky figure with oversized head, the star of David on his brow and carrying a pen bigger than his body, who registers his “disgust with everything French.” The only variation in subject is the occasional appearance of “Oncle Sam” as the “New Gargantua” making a meal of Spain, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippines.

  The Affair pervaded life at all hours and places. Going to a new dentist, Léon Blum found a young man with the manner and bearing of a cavalry officer who suddenly said as his patient sat down, “All the same, they will not dare touch Picquart!” Gaston Paris, the scholarly medievalist and Academician, concluded an erudite article on Philip the Good with a stirring invocation to justice which at once categorized him. Paul Stapfer, doyen of the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux, was suspended because in a funeral oration for a colleague he made a discreet allusion to the Revisionist opinions of the deceased. A tempest blew up in the Légion d’Honneur when it “suspended” Zola and succeeded in angering both the military members who had demanded his ouster and those members who were his partisans. Anatole France and others removed the red ribbon from their coats. At the cafés. Nationalists and Revisionists sat at different tables on opposite sides of the terraces. Whole villages took sides. A resident of Samois, fourteen miles from Paris, said everyone in his village was Dreyfusard while at Francoville, three or four miles away, everyone almost without exception was anti-Dreyfusard.

  In February, 1898, at the Dîner Bixio, a dining club of the elect who met for the pleasure of each other’s conversation, the Affair found everyone “troubled and grieved”; in March the Marquis de Galliffet said he would not go out or visit on account of it; in May conversation turned for a while to the question, “Did the Americans blow up the Maine themselves?” otherwise talk was only of the Affair; in November everyone was depressed: “I cannot remember a dinner so black,” wrote one member in his diary.

  The opening night of Romain Rolland’s play Les Loups was a battlefield. He had written it in six days to show the world that France was torn by “one of the most redoubtable problems that can engage the human conscience, a dilemma worthy of Corneille: whether to sacrifice country or justice.” The presence of Colonel Picquart in a box and of Colonel du Paty de Clam in the orchestra brought the audience to a peak of excitement. Picquart after his first arrest had just been discharged from the Army, and came to the theatre as the guest of Edmond Rostand, whose Cyrano de Bergerac, produced a few months earlier, had raised him to the height of celebrity. For a decade French theatregoers had languished under the skepticism, symbolism and Ibsenism of the Théâtre Libre. “We needed reassurance, ideals, panache,” wrote a critic, “and then came Cyrano! Our thirst was assuaged.” Cyrano’s spirit was there that night.

  When the character representing Picquart in the play confronted his opponent, the audience exploded before he could be heard. “The whole theatre shook from floor to roof.” The usual Vive!’s and A bas!’s reached a fury in which someone was moved to cry, “A bas la patrie!” and a thirteen-year-old Anarchist in the balcony squealed, “Down with Christianity!” Rolland thought to himself, “My ideas are lost, but no matter, the play doesn’t count. The real spectacle is there in the audience. This is history being acted!”

  The carnage continued next day. Echo de Paris and La Presse dismissed their drama critics, the Collège Stanislas canceled a reception for Mme Rostand, and two papers opened a campaign to boycott Cyrano, whose popularity, however, proved stronger than its author’s association with Picquart. In his diary Rolland wrote, “I would rather have this life of combat than the mortal calm and mournful stupor of these last years. God give me struggle, enemies, howling crowds, all the combat of which I am capable.”

  It was the same sentiment Péguy voiced: boredom with peace. Others shared it. That summer, Senator Ranc recalled, one was constantly expecting some surprise attack. “One day we would be warned not to sleep at home for fear of assault by anti-Semitic gangs, the next for fear of arrest by the police. It was exciting; one felt alive; nothing is so good as a time of action, and combat in the consciousness of a cause.”

  From the day early in the Affair when Joseph Reinach announced to the guests at Mme Emile Straus’s salon that Dreyfus had been wrongfully convicted, the polarization of the salons began. Heretofore they had linked the worlds of fashion and intellect, bridged the sharp political divisions between classes and coteries. They were to France what the country-house party was to England. They were the market-place of ideas, the stock exchange of social and political favors united by one absorbing concern: who would obtain the next seat in the Academy, who would don the dark-green uniform and, watched by the elite of Paris, deliver his eulogy of the defunct Immortal whose place he was taking? Now they began to pull apart into separate units, frustrating the unifying and mixing process that had been their greatest contribution.

  As a rule each salon had its grand homme. Mme Aubernon, doyenne of the hostesses, began
with Dumas fils and finished with D’Annunzio. Mme Emile Straus, on the other hand, the beautiful Geneviève of the liquid black eyes and ardent glance, attracted too many to concentrate on one. Daughter of the composer Halévy and widow of Georges Bizet before she married Straus, leaving disconsolate a train of adorers, she had assembled at her salon the soul and salt of Paris before the ravages of the Affair. Henri Bergson the philosopher, Réjane the actress, Lord Lytton when he was British Ambassador, Professor Pozzi the surgeon, Henri Meilhac, the librettist of Offenbach’s operas, Jules Lemaître, Marcel Prévost, Forain, Proust, and the Princesse Mathilde, who held her own salon on Wednesdays, all came to her Saturday afternoons on the Boulevard Haussmann, bringing still hot the happenings of the Chamber, the Quai d’Orsay, the theatres and the editorial offices. After Reinach’s announcement, Lemaître left, allowing himself from then on to adorn only the right-wing salon of the Comtesse de Loynes. Other separations followed.