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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The Socialist leaders, sending out notices by pneumatique, called an emergency meeting of their several groups to organize a united front in face of the peril, and such seemed the urgency of the moment that they succeeded in forming a joint, if temporary, Committee of Vigilance. Following proper revolutionary procedure, it decided to hold meetings every night and call upon the people for mass demonstrations. Clashes with the Rightist leagues, riots, even civil war loomed. In awful anxiety the Dreyfusard League for the Rights of Man called upon all Republicans to disdain fracas in the streets, but Jaurès saw Socialist opportunity: “Paris is trembling with resolve … the proletariat is organizing.” Warned, however, by Guesde that to provoke an outbreak would be playing the game of the Generals, who were believed to be waiting for a riot to seize power, the Committee of Vigilance had second thoughts. Socialists would provoke nothing, it announced. “Revolutionary groups are ready to act or abstain, according to the circumstances.”

  So certain were the royalists of “the day” that André Buffet, chef de cabinet for the Duc d’Orléans, telegraphed the Pretender that his presence in nearby Brussels on October 24 was “indispensable.” The Duke, who was hunting in Bohemia, replied, “Should I come at once or can I wait here? Urgent business.” Adamant, Buffet wired back, “Approach frontier necessary,” but the Duke, better advised, stayed away.

  The day came, crowds surrounded the Chamber, filled the Place de la Concorde and nearby streets, slogans were shouted, red flags waved. “It seemed like the eve either of a new Commune or of a coup by a dictator.” The atmosphere was threatening: troops and police were everywhere. The day passed, however, and the Republic still stood, for the Right lacked that necessary chemical of a coup—a leader. It had its small, if loud, fanatics; but to upset the established government in a democratic country requires either foreign help or the stuff of a dictator. As Clemenceau had harshly said when Boulanger shot himself on the grave of his mistress, inside the “Man on Horseback” was only “the soul of a second lieutenant.”

  Events rushed on. On October 29 the Cour de Cassation announced it would accept the case and begin its inquiry, VICTOIRE! proclaimed l’Aurore in the same type as J’ACCUSE! Revisionists hailed the decision as re-establishing civil power over the military. Then the Court demanded the Secret File. The Minister of War refused and resigned. The Government fell. For the next seven months the Court became the focus of the battle. From this point on, the Right was on the defensive and the Affair entered its period of greatest frenzy. The Court was excoriated by the Nationalist press as the “sanctuary of treason,” a “branch of the synagogue,” the “lair of Judas,” a “combination of Bourse and brothel.” The judges were variously “hirelings of Germany,” “valets of the synagogue” and “rogues in ermine.” Pressures of all kinds were exerted, both sides were accused of corrupting the judges, and the Nationalists succeeded in forcing the case out of the Criminal Chamber, which was considered too favorable, to the united Court of three chambers, which was considered more susceptible to pressure.

  A Dreyfusard tempest raged at the same time over Picquart. To keep him from testifying before the Cour de Cassation the Army had transferred him to Cherche Midi preliminary to a court-martial. The League for the Rights of Man organized public protest meetings every night, in the provincial cities as well as in Paris. Jaurès’ name and prestige drew 30,000 to a meeting in Marseilles. He, Duclaux the scientist, Anatole France, Octave Mirbeau and Sebastian Faure were the favorite speakers. Workers and bourgeois, students and professors, working women and Society women crowded the halls and overflowed onto the sidewalks, applauded the famous orators and marched together to shout “Vive Picquart!” under the prison walls of Cherche Midi. Signatures for a protest on Picquart came in this time not by hundreds but by thousands, including thirty-four members of the Institut de France, a measure, as Reinach said, of the distance covered by truth on the march. Among the new names were Sarah Bernhardt and Hervé de Kerohant, editor of Soleil, formerly against Revision, who signed the protest as “Patriot, Royalist, Christian.” The historian and Academician Ernest Lavisse felt strongly enough to act, and as his gesture of personal protest, resigned his chair at St-Cyr.

  Even the Anarchists, hitherto resolutely contemptuous and indifferent, were swept into the cause. Formerly they had denounced the Dreyfus “parade,” in the words of their newspaper, Le Père Peinard, as a “bunch of dirty types” led by Clemenceau and by “the old exploiter Scheurer-Kestner, the toad Yves Guyot [editor of Le Siècle], the hideous Reinach, three malefactors who helped to concoct the lois scélérates.” Now, however, when their bourgeois enemies cried out the sufferings of the two martyred prisoners of Devil’s Island and Cherche Midi, the Anarchists did the same for their own martyrs sent to forced labour in French Guiana. With a new interest in these cases the League for the Rights of Man succeeded in obtaining pardons for five of them.

  Some on the Right could no longer keep their heads turned from the truth. Mme de Greffulhe, goddess of the gratin, becoming secretly convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, wrote to the Kaiser asking to visit him to ascertain if the Germans really had employed Dreyfus as a spy. The only answer she received was a large basket of orchids. Proust chronicles the change in his character, the Prince de Guermantes, who confesses to Swann that after Colonel Henry’s suicide he has begun to read Le Siècle and l’Aurore secretly every day. He and his wife, unknown to each other, have asked the Abbé to say a mass for Dreyfus and his family, and discovered to each other’s astonishment that the Abbé too believes him innocent. Meeting the maid on the staircase carrying breakfast to the Princesse and concealing something under the napkin, the Prince discovers it to be l’Aurore.

  Below the trapped obstinacy of the Generals, some in the Army were deeply troubled. “Just among ourselves with no outsiders present,” an officer said to Galliffet while riding in a train, “we are not as anti-Revisionist as people think. On the contrary we too would like to see the light and see the culprits punished so that if wrongs have been committed the Army will not bear the responsibility.” He felt that if Picquart were tried and convicted public opinion would turn against the Army.

  The Army’s cup of bitterness was filled when in the same week that the Cour de Cassation began its inquiry the order was given withdrawing Colonel Marchand from Fashoda. Jaurès lashed at the imperialist adventure as a crime of capitalism which had frivolously imperiled peace without preparing for the consequence of challenging England. As if his already strong intuitive perceptions had been sharpened by the Affair, he wrote with foreboding, “Peace has been left to the whim of chance. But if war breaks out it will be vast and terrible. For the first time it will be universal, sucking in all the continents. Capitalism has widened the field of battle and the entire planet will turn red with the blood of countless men. No more terrible accusation can be made against this social system.” In his time it was still possible to suppose the fault lay in the system, not humanity.

  The Affair continued in its frenzy. When Reinach wrote a series of articles in Le Siècle accusing Colonel Henry of having had a “personal interest” in ruining Dreyfus, Drumont persuaded Mme Henry to sue him for libel and opened a public subscription in her behalf which became the rallying point for Nationalists of every degree. A banner reading “For the Widow and Orphan of Colonel Henry against the Jew Reinach” was stretched across the windows of the offices of La Libre Parole on the Boulevard Montmartre and lit up at night. Within a month fifteen thousand persons had contributed 130,000 francs. Their names and comments provided a history of the Right—of that or any time. Five hundred francs, the top sum, was subscribed by the Countess Odon de Montesquiou, née Bibesco, and thirty sous by a lieutenant “poor in money but rich in hate.” There were all varieties of hate, chiefly for Jews, expressed in suggestions for skinning, branding, boiling in oil, burning with vitriol, emasculation and other forms of foul or physical punishment. There was hate for foreigners and intellectuals and even a “500-year-old
hate for England” but there were many who gave their francs out of love or pity for the widow and child. An abbé contributed for “defence of eternal law against Judaeo-Christian deceit,” a music professor for “Frenchmen against foreigners,” a civil servant “who wants God in the schools,” an anonymous donor “ruined by a Jew after six months of marriage,” a workingman as “the victim of the anarchist capitalists Jaurès and Reinach.” There were innumerable “true patriots” and one “Frenchman sick at heart.” There were Vive!’s for Drumont, Rochefort, Déroulède, Guérin, Esterhazy, the Duc d’Orléans, l’Empereur, le Roi, the Heroes of Austerlitz and Jeanne d’Arc. Reinach was the chief target; Dreyfus received hardly a mention. General Mercier subscribed a hundred francs without comment; the poet Paul Valéry three francs “not without reflection.”

  Suddenly and strangely on top of all the excitement, the President of France, Félix Faure, died. The public sensed something unexplained and the truth in fact was too embarrassing to be told. Proud of his amatory prowess, President Faure died in the performance thereof in a ground-floor room of the Elysée. An aura of something hushed up was added to the atmosphere already charged with aggression and suspicion.

  In the election of a new president, held in the midst of hysterical battle over jurisdiction of the Court, Emile Loubet, President of the Senate, a steady, simple Republican and product of peasant stock, won over the Conservative Méline. As Premier at the time of the Panama scandal, Loubet was despised by the Nationalists. They called his election an “insult to France,” a “challenge to the Army,” a “victory for Jewish treason.” Their hired mobs sent to hoot his progress from the Gare St-Lazare to the Elysée raised such a clamor that even the band playing the “Marseillaise” could not be heard. “The Republic will not founder in my hands,” said Loubet calmly. “They know it and it maddens them.”

  The Right in a state of ungovernable excitement was prepared to make it founder. “In a week we will have driven Loubet from the Presidency,” boasted Jules Lemaître. The state funeral of Faure was fixed on as the occasion for a coup d’état. The Army must be persuaded to save the country. The “Leaguers” thought they could do it by a cry, a gesture, an occasion, and did not concern themselves with serious organization. Their plan was to intercept the military escort of the cortege while it was returning from the cemetery to its barracks in the Place de la Nation, and lead it to seize the Elysée. Déroulède joined by Guérin led a band of two hundred patriots into the streets, caught hold of the bridle of General Roget, commander of the escort, shouting, “To the Elysée, General! Follow us, General, follow us! To the Place Bastille! To the Hotel de Ville! To the Elysée! Friends await us. I beg you, General, save France, establish a Republic of the people, kick out the parlementaires!” The General kept his head and kept moving, the crowd, ignorant but willing, shouted, “Save France! Vive l’Armée!”, the troops sweeping Déroulède and his followers with them, marched on to the barracks and entered. Déroulède, throwing open his coat to reveal his deputy’s scarf, emblem of parliamentary immunity, was nevertheless carted off to the police station to be indicted for insurrection and provide at his trial one more cause for combative passions. The fiasco did nothing to daunt the expectations of the Right. In the following month the Anti-Semitic League received 56,000 francs from the Duc d’Orléans and 100,000 from Boni de Castellane.

  Hardly had breath been drawn when the verdict that all France was awaiting was announced by the Cour de Cassation. Forty-six judges in scarlet and ermine declared for Revision. A cruiser was sent to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for retrial. Zola returned from England with an article which l’Aurore headlined in the now familiar type, JUSTICE! He saw all factional and party lines now dissipated in one great division separating France into two camps: the forces of reaction and the past against the forces of justice and the future. This was the logical order of battle to complete the task of 1789. With the unquenchable optimism of their age the Dreyfusards hailed the Court’s decision as the herald of social justice for the century about to be born. A great burden of shame seemed lifted and replaced by pride in France. “What other country,” wrote a correspondent of Le Temps at The Hague where the Peace Conference was assembled, “has had the privilege of making the world’s heart beat faster as we have for the last three years?” Revision meant not only the triumph of justice but of “the liberty of mankind.” Others beside Frenchmen felt this universality. William James, traveling in Europe, wrote as he saw daylight breaking through the Affair, “It may be one of those moral crises that become starting points and high water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and new faces behind them.”

  The Nationalists were flung into paroxysms of wrath. Caran d’Ache drew a cartoon showing Dreyfus with a smirk and Reinach with a whip ordering, “Come here, Marianne.” On the facing page he drew Zola emerging from a toilet bowl holding a toy Dreyfus, with the caption, “Truth Rising from Its Well.”

  Fury at the Court’s decision was vented the next day on the head of President Loubet when he attended the races at Auteuil. It was the Sunday of le Grand Steeple, the most fashionable event of the season. When the President’s carriage drove up to the grandstand, groups of well-dressed gentlemen wearing in their buttonholes the white carnation of the royalists and the blue cornflower of the anti-Semites, and brandishing their canes, shouted in pounding rhythm, “Dé-mis-sion! [resign] Pa-na-ma! Dé-mis-sion! Pa-na-ma!” Through the howls and threats Loubet took his seat. Suddenly a tall man with a blond moustache, wearing a white carnation and white cravat, later identified as the Baron Fernand de Christiani, detached himself from the group, dashed up the steps two at a time and struck the President on the head with a heavy cane. Ladies screamed. A sudden silence of general stupor followed, then an uproar as the assailant’s companions rushed to rescue him from the guards. As some were arrested others converged on the police in yelling groups, striking with their canes. The scene was “un charivari infernal.” General Zurlinden, Governor of Paris, telephoned for reinforcements of three cavalry detachments. Loubet, though shaken, apologized for the disturbance to Countess Tornielli, the Italian Ambassadress, in the seat beside him. “It was a place of honor,” she replied.

  In Loubet’s top hat the Republic itself had been assaulted and the public was startled and indignant. Telegrams from committees and municipal councils all over France poured in expressing a loyalty deeper than might have been supposed from the experience of the last years. Loubet announced that as an invited guest he intended to appear at next Sunday’s races at Longchamps. Forewarned, the leagues and newspapers of both sides called for demonstrations and assembled their battalions. The Government took extraordinary precautions. Thirty squadrons of cavalry and a brigade of infantry in battle dress were lined up along the route from the Elysée to Longchamps, while at the racecourse itself dragoons of the Garde Républicaine armed with rifles were stationed at every ten yards around the course and at every betting window. Mounted police guarded the lawn. More than 100,000 people turned out along the route and at the racecourse, many wearing the red rose boutonniere of the Left. Again the threat of the Right brought out the workers, less, perhaps, to defend the bourgeois state than to defy the representatives of the ruling class. The presence of more than six thousand guardians of the law prevented a major outbreak, but throughout the day demonstrators clashed, private riots and melees erupted, cries and counter-cries resounded, hundreds were arrested, reporters and police as well as demonstrators were injured. As the crowds flowed back to Paris in the evening the turbulence swept through the cafés; “Vive la République!” met “Vive l’Armée!” Bottles and glasses, carafes and trays were hurled, tables and chairs became weapons, police charged; anger, broken heads and national animosities mounted. Even outside Paris, in a pension in Brest where officers and professors boarded, “these young men equally animated by love of France” could no longer talk to or understand each other without coming to the point of a duel. It was time, urged Le Te
mps, for a “truce of God.”

  But it was not to be had. When again the Government fell in the week after Longchamps, the fears and difficulties to be faced in office were now so great that for eight days no one could form a Government. In the vacuum the man who came forward with intent to “liquidate” the Affair was able to impose conditions that would otherwise have been unacceptable. He was René Waldeck-Rousseau, fifty-three, the leading lawyer of Paris and a polished orator, known as the “Pericles of the Republic.” A Catholic from Britanny, wealthy and wellborn, he was impressive in manner and British in appearance, with cropped hair and moustache, a taste for hunting and fishing, a talent for watercolors and impeccable clothes. Rochefort called him Waldeck le pommadé because he was so well groomed. Admired by the Radicals and approved by the Center, he represented the juste milieu.

  With the retrial of Dreyfus ahead, the Affair was moving toward climax. To retain office under the terrible buffeting he could expect, Waldeck deliberately chose to form a Government which, by being equally obnoxious to both sides, would cancel the blows of either. He selected a Socialist, Millerand, as Minister of Commerce and a military hero, the Marquis de Galliffet, “butcher” of the Commune, as Minister of War. The tumult in press and parliament that greeted this remarkable expedient was unequalled. “Pure madness … absolute lunacy … monstrous … infamous!” came from both sides. The appointment of Millerand not only infuriated the Right; his acceptance created a scandal and a schism in his own party and in the Socialist International of major proportions and historic significance. Acceptance of office in a capitalist Government was a betrayal comparable to that of Judas. Profoundly saddened, Jaurès begged Millerand to shun the offer, but Waldeck had knowingly selected a man to whom the lure of office was strong. The Socialists now had to face the choice whether or not to support the Waldeck Government when it came to the Chamber for a vote of confidence. If the Government lost, the prospect was chaos. Jaurès was persuaded by Lucien Herr’s argument: “What a triumph for Socialism that the Republic cannot be saved without calling on the party of the proletariat!” The Guesde faction, however, clung to the class struggle. Socialists, stated Guesde, “enter Parliament as though we were in an enemy State only in order to fight the enemy class.” Jaurès warned that if Socialsm persisted in this attitude it would sink to the level of “sterile and intransigent anarchism,” but he did not prevail. The Union Socialiste broke apart; twenty-five of the parliamentary members agreed to support the Government; seventeen refused. Guesde enchanted his group with the exciting suggestion that it should greet the new Government’s appearance in the Chamber with cries of “Vive la Commune!” but, so as not to find themselves allied with the Right, abstain when it came to a vote.