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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Mme Arman de Caillavet’s Sunday salon on the Avenue Hoche where Anatole France was the permanent star was the Revisionist center. Clemenceau, Briand, Reinach, Jaurès and Lucien Herr were regulars. Mme Arman wanted only writers and politicians and snubbed the nobility except for Mme de Noailles, who was a Dreyfusard and would appear “like an Oriental princess descending from her palanquin … to set ablaze the torrent of her words by the fire of her glance.” Anatole France’s books lay on all the tables and the Master himself stood in the midst of a crowd coming and going and gathering around him while he discoursed on a chosen theme, interrupting himself to greet arriving guests, bowing to left and right, introducing one to another, bending to kiss the hand of a pale feline figure wrapped in chinchilla, and keeping up the flow of his talk on the poetry of Racine, the paradox of Robespierre or the epigrams of Rabelais.

  The Affair superseded Rabelais. At Mme Aubernon’s, where guests of both camps were still invited, discussions that touched upon it immediately became impassioned. “This petition of the so-called ‘Intellectuals’ is preposterous and impertinent,” declared Ferdinand Brunetière, editor of the magisterial Revue des Deux Mondes. “They have coined the name to exalt themselves above others as if writers, scientists and professors were better than anyone else.… What right have they to meddle in a matter of military justice?” Victor Brochard, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne, replied heatedly, “Justice is based not on courts but on law.… To convict a man on evidence not shown to him is not only illegal; it is judicial murder.… Today it is not the Generals or Rochefort or the brawlers of La Libre Parole or Esterhazy or your Duc d’Orléans who represent the French conscience. It is we, the intellectuals.”

  Headquarters of the Right was the salon of Mme de Loynes on the Avenue des Champs Elysées, where Jules Lemaître reigned. After an initial career as a demi-mondaine she had married the elderly Comte de Loynes, become a recognized power in the making of Academicians and, in the course of time, governess, mother, sister and presumably mistress to Lemaître, although some unkind gossip said their friendship was platonic. Her guests met at dinner on Fridays in a room furnished in plush with a nude marble Minerva on the mantel and what Boni de Castellane described as a “shoddy” Meissonier on the wall. Lemaître, the celebrated drama critic of the Journal des Débats, was an immensely prolix writer who could turn his hand to plays, poetry, short stories, critical essays, biographies and assorted speeches, political pieces, opinion and polemics. His works, when ultimately collected, filled fifty volumes. Though essentially dilettante in spirit, he had saved the French theatre in a famous cry of alarm in the Revue des Deux Mondes from being inundated by the heavy waves rolling in from the north—Ibsen, Hauptmann, Sudermann and Strindberg—and had duly entered the portals of the Academy. The fruits of democracy and manhood suffrage he found disillusioning. “The Republic cured me of the Republic,” he wrote; “life had already cured me of romanticism.” Disenchanted as well with “literary games,” he craved the role of a man of action, the restorative of a cause that not merely fluttered the pages of reviews but moved live men to passion. With ceremony and cheers in Mme de Loynes’ dining room he was named president of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, organized by the Nationalists to unite the intellectuals of the Right against the “enemies of la patrie.” Its Committee included among others de Vogüé, Barrès, Forain, Mistral the poet of the Provençal revival, Vincent d’Indy the composer and Carolus Duran the painter. The Ligue de la Patrie attracted 15,000 to its first meeting and gained 30,000 members in the first month. Lemaître was chosen president in order to have an Academician equal to Anatole France, but, given to mockery and grumbling, he lacked the spirit of a leader and after five minutes of argument, if he failed to impose his views, would drop out of the discussion.

  As vice-president, the gentle poet François Coppée was no more effective. More or less bludgeoned by his friends into accepting the post, he was wrapped in nostalgia for the past and wrote verse romances about the humble of earlier times. When asked by an English friend, “Que faites vous, Maître, dans cette galère?” (“What are you doing in with that bunch?”), he replied, “To tell you the truth, I am not quite sure.” He was able to explain, however, a vague feeling that the religion and patriotism which had made France great were vanishing and unless revived would disappear in the rising tide of materialism.

  The real energy and leadership of the League was supplied by Barrès, Drumont, Rochefort and Déroulède, leader of the older Ligue des Patriotes. At policy sessions Drumont would laugh uproariously and say, “Those fellows will be the death of me.” Rochefort, who listened only to himself, would say impatiently after a long discussion, “Yes, yes, it’s sickening—what canaille!” and then tell some anecdote that enchanted Coppée. “Each one of us is serious individually,” Lemaître confessed to Mme de Loynes, “but together we become frivolous.”

  Yet they felt the cause was deadly serious. Behind all the disputes over the bordereau and petit bleu, wrote Léon Daudet, “could be heard the tramp of the barbarian legions.” Dreyfusism was the foreigner at the gates. It was revolution. It was Jews, Freemasons, freethinkers, Protestants, Anarchists, Internationalists. Everyone saw in it his own enemy. Barrès saw everything that was “un-French”; Arthur Meyer saw “an alliance of Anarchism and Dreyfusism” of which “twice monstrous cult” the two priests were Anatole France and Octave Mirbeau. Brunetière saw “individualism … the great malady of our time … the Superman of Nietzsche, the Anarchist, the culte de moi.”

  The strong man of the Radical Government which took office after the elections of May, 1898, was its Minister of War, Godefroy Cavaignac, a civilian. He was a man of rigid Republican righteousness, a “sea-green incorruptible,” who regarded himself as the chastiser of parliamentary corruption. He had initiated the Panama inquiry and loathed Clemenceau. As Minister of War for a six months’ tenure in 1895, he had accepted the honesty of the Secret File and firmly believed Dreyfus guilty. The outgoing Premier, Méline, had attempted to deal with the case by denying that any case existed after the rendering of a verdict, but Cavaignac decided to face the issue squarely. He reinvestigated the documents and convinced himself that although Esterhazy was involved, the Dreyfus verdict had been just. He thereupon ordered the arrest of both Esterhazy and Picquart and went to the Chamber determined to bury Revision for good. Grim and commanding, he told the members that Esterhazy had been wrongfully acquitted and would be dealt with as an accomplice but that “I am completely certain of Dreyfus’ guilt.” He went back over the entire history of the case, rebuilt the structure which the Dreyfusards had bit by bit proved false and in final proof cited Dreyfus’ supposed confession and the Panizzardi letter which Méline, who had been Premier until two weeks ago and was sitting in the audience, knew from the Italians was a forgery. When Cavaignac finished the Chamber was on its feet cheering. He had lifted the terrible burden and they voted 545–0 (with nineteen abstentions including the silent Méline) for a national affichage, or “posting,” of his speech outside every town hall in France. “Now the odious case is buried,” said de Vogüé that night at his club. “Now Dreyfus is nailed to his rock until he dies!”

  For the Dreyfusards it was an unbelievable blow, an “atrocious moment.” A journalist came hot from the Chamber to bring the news to Lucien Herr, who was in his study with Léon Blum. They were struck mute; tears were close to the surface; they sat immobilized by consternation and despair. Suddenly the doorbell rang and Jaurès burst in, brushed aside the gesture of his friends inviting him to mourn and berated them in a tone of triumph. “What, you too?… Don’t you understand that now, now for the first time we are certain of victory? Méline was invulnerable because he said nothing. Cavaignac talks, so he will be beaten.… Now Cavaignac has named the documents and I, yes I, tell you they are false, they feel false, they smell false. They are forgeries.… I am certain of it and will prove it. The forgers have come out of their holes; we’ll have them by
the throat. Forget your funeral faces. Do as I do; rejoice.”

  Jaurès went out and wrote Les Preuves (The Proofs), a series of articles beginning that week in the Socialist paper, La Petite République, which stunned its readers and marked the first collaboration of Socialism with a cause of the bourgeois world. Through the Affair the bridge of class enmity was crossed.

  Jaurès himself had been a declared Dreyfusard since before Zola’s trial. Short, stocky, strong, red-faced and jovial, he radiated the joy of battle. With his big head, rough beard and careless clothes finished off by drooping white socks, he looked like the accepted image of a labour leader. He was not, however, of working-class origin but came from the poorer branch of a respectable bourgeois family, and had been a student at the Ecole Normale, where he excelled in Greek and Latin and the humanities and was a friend and classmate of Henri Bergson and his rival for the highest honors. When waiting to testify at Zola’s trial he had paced up and down the corridors with Anatole France reciting Seventeenth Century poetry. In the Chamber when he climbed with heavy, purposeful steps to the tribune and tossed off a glass of red wine before speaking, auditors tensed with expectancy, either worshipful or hostile. He spoke with a “splendid amplitude” in a voice almost too loud which he could easily have lowered and still have been heard in the last rows of any hall but which, as Rolland said, was a sensual pleasure to him when he let it out to the full. He could speak at this pitch for an hour and a half to two hours at a time. Using no notes, he could not be fazed by interruptions which served only to supply him with new inspirations. When heckled he played with his opponent “like a huge cat with a mouse, caressing him, making him jump this way and that,… and then with a sharp blow, flattened him with a final word.”

  He was never a sectarian who put a particular orthodoxy ahead of the ultimate goal, a habit which afflicted the Socialist movement. For Jaurès, who led the Carmaux strike in person, the ultimate aim of working-class power was not a theory but a realizable goal and Socialist unity a necessity for its achievement. Once persuaded of Dreyfus’ innocence by Lucien Herr and others, he believed that Socialism, by abstaining from combat against injustice, would diminish itself. By making the cause of justice its own it would place its mark on the ultimate victory, open to itself a new path to power and cover itself with moral glory. The Affair, as he saw it, could become the catalyst of a united front of the Left which the Socialists should lead.

  His colleagues in the Socialist party shared his enthusiasm not at all. Moderates like Millerand and Viviani did not want to be mixed up in this “obscure and dangerous” business; the extremists led by Jules Guesde, while personally Dreyfusard, opposed party action as an effort diverting working-class strength from a cause not its own. At a caucus of the party after J’Accuse, to decide what action to take if the Right demanded the prosecution of Zola, the moderates squirmed, preferring discretion to valor on the eve of the election. “Why risk our re-election for Zola?” they said. “He is not a Socialist;… he is after all nothing but a bourgeois.” As the factions argued, Guesde in impatient disgust threw open the window with an ostentatious gesture for fresh air and cried, “Zola’s letter is the greatest revolutionary act of the century!” But it was no more than a gesture and he signed the manifesto which declared, “Leave it to the bourgeoisie to tear themselves to bits over patrie, law, justice and other words that will remain empty of meaning as long as capitalist society endures.” The iniquity of the Affair should be used as a weapon with which to beat the bourgeoisie, not as a cause to “mobilize and immobilize the proletariat behind one faction of the bourgeois world.” The Dreyfus case was nothing but a power struggle between two bourgeois factions: on the one hand the clericals and on the other the Jewish capitalists and their friends. Socialists could not support one side against the other without violating the class struggle. “Between de Mun and Reinach,” proclaimed Guesde, “keep your complete freedom.”

  But as de Mun had said, between the two sides there was no room for freedom. “You can hardly imagine how tormented I am!” Jaurès said to Péguy. “Our enemies are nothing—but our friends! They devour me because they are all afraid of not being elected. They pull at the back of my coat to keep me from going to the tribune.” Shaking them off, Jaurès refused to remain silent and did indeed lose his seat in the election of May, 1898, although more because of industrialist opposition in his district than because of the Affair. Turning instead to La Petite République for a platform, as Clemenceau had to l’Aurore, he wrote a daily political column. When he began Les Preuves class hatred was so rooted in Socialist tradition that in order to rally the Left in the fight for justice it was necessary to de-class Dreyfus. “He is no longer an officer nor a bourgeois,” Jaurès wrote. “In his misery he has been skinned of all class character.… He is simply a living witness to the crimes of Authority.… He is nothing less than mankind itself.” He tore into the evidence, took up each one of Cavaignac’s arguments and documents, separated rumor and blackmail, tracked down forgery. The impact of his logic and his strenuous seriousness revived the Dreyfusards. Cavaignac was enraged. At a dinner of the Cabinet he proposed to arrest all the leading Revisionists on a charge of conspiracy against the state and named Mathieu Dreyfus, Bernard Lazare, Ranc, Reinach, Scheurer-Kestner, Picquart, Clemenceau; Zola and others. When one of his colleagues asked sarcastically, Why not the lawyers too, Cavaignac replied, “Of course,” and added Labori and Dreyfus’ lawyer, Demange.

  Nevertheless Les Preuves had shaken him. To answer certain of Jaurès’ charges, he ordered yet another examination of the documents, this time by an officer not previously involved in the case. Working at night by the light of a lamp this officer noticed that the writing paper of the crucial Panizzardi letter was gummed together from two halves of the same brand of paper ruled in lines of faintly different colors. Colonel * Henry had used the blank parts of two real letters from Panizzardi to construct his document. The crucial letter was a forgery. Alerted by this find, the investigating officer looked further, was led down dark warrens of discrepancies and dutifully reporting his discoveries, laid ruin in the lap of the Minister of War.

  Cavaignac, conqueror of the Affair, saw the whole of the case he had presented to the Chamber and the country shattered like glass. Its crux was a fraud; the statement on which he had won national acclaim was a fraud. For a man of his principles, to hush up the discovery was impossible; he had to face the tragedy of being wrong. Not being of the Army made it easier. He ordered the arrest of Colonel Henry, who was taken to Cherche Midi where Dreyfus had been lodged. That night, August 31, 1898, Colonel Henry committed suicide with the razor they had left for him.

  Army officers, when they heard the news, were aghast; some wept. It was a stain on the Army’s honor “worse than Sedan,” said one. Léon Blum, vacationing in Zurich, opened the door of his hotel room at 10 P.M. to the porter who brought the news. “I don’t think that ever in my whole life have I felt an equal excitement.… The immense, the infinite joy that rushed through me had its sources in the triumph of reason. The truth had actually won.” This time, at last and for certain, it seemed to the Dreyfusards they had accomplished their task. In a sense they had, for the truth was now disclosed. To impose it was another matter.

  Cavaignac resigned and within two weeks his successor, the sixth Minister of War since Dreyfus’ arrest, also resigned. The Government, surrendering to what was now unavoidable, submitted the case to the Cour de Cassation (literally, “Court of Breaking”), whose task was to decide whether a given verdict should be upheld or broken. The action, taken as mistrust of the Generals, caused another War Minister to resign. Awaiting the Court’s decision whether or not to accept the case, Paris boiled with excitement. If the Court took the case, the Secret File must come under civilian review, which the Army was committed to prevent. In England the sober Spectator thought the logic of the situation must lead to an Army coup d’état. In Paris the royalists and wild men of the Rightist leagues, hoping to
provoke exactly that, spread rumors of a plot, called meetings, sent out their hired bands to shout in the streets. It was Déroulède’s longed-for hour.

  An irrepressible agitator, a poet and a deputy, long-legged and long-nosed like Don Quixote, Déroulède saw windmills to charge in every aspect of the Republic. A veteran of 1870, he had founded his Ligue des Patriotes in 1882 to keep alive the spirit of revanche. It bore the legend “1870–18—–” with the second date left significantly blank and a motto of noble meaninglessness, France Quand Même. Déroulède wrote patriotic verse, loathed the royalists as much as the Republic and had “the political vision of a child.” To foment a crisis he now joined forces with Jules Guérin, active head of the Anti-Semitic League, which was receiving a subsidy from the Duc d’Orléans, who hoped to ride in on the tail of the crisis. Tension grew when a strike of 20,000 construction workers on the site of the Exposition of 1900 caused the Government to bring in troops to occupy the railroad stations and patrol the boulevards. Word spread of a coup planned for the reopening of the Chamber on October 25. Déroulède and Guérin called for a huge protest meeting in front of the Palais Bourbon to demonstrate “confidence in the Army and abhorrence of traitors.”

  The Socialists, or a part of them, suddenly discovered the Republic was worth saving. However dedicated to overthrow of the existing system, they did not want it overthrown by the Right. Besides, they were discovering from their local committees that their neutrality in the Affair was compromising them with some of their constituents. “Because we seem to oppose all forms of bourgeois republicanism,” wrote a party worker from the provinces, “many people take us for the allies of monarchist reactionaries.”