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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  For ten minutes next day they stood hurling “Vive la Commune! A bas les fusilleurs! A bas l’assassin!” at the new ministers. The object of it all, General the Marquis de Galliffet, Prince de Martigues, nearly seventy, with red-bronze face and bright eyes, looked mockingly on the scene, half-gratified, half-disgusted. He had fought in the Crimea, Italy, Mexico, Algeria and at Sedan, where he had led his regiment into the last cavalry charge with the reply to his commanding officer, “As often as you like, Sir, as long as one of us is left.” Impressed by the great Gambetta’s patriotism and fighting spirit, Galliffet became and remained a loyal Republican and openly despised Boulanger. The eyes in his highly colored face were sunk on either side of a nose like the beak of a bird of prey, but his figure was vigorous and young and he still wore “the same air that had made his fortune, as of a bandit chief who feared nothing or a grand seigneur who cared for nothing.” Despite a silver-plated stomach and a limp from old wounds, he played tennis in the Tuileries Gardens and his love affairs, recounted with sparkle and ribaldry, were the delight of the Bixio. He told how Mme de Castiglione showed him her nude portrait by Baudry, and when he asked if she was really as beautiful as that, she disrobed and posed on the sofa. “The picture was better,” Galliffet concluded. He was called the sabreur de la parole because he told stories “as if he were charging at the head of his squadron.” Devoted to the fighting efficiency of the Army and to Picquart who had served under his command, he had become a Revisionist. For this sin he was cut at the Jockey, and after he became a Minister, resigned from the Cercle de l’Union, less because of his own opinions than because of “imbecile” members who got themselves arrested at Auteuil; as he said, “It’s not possible to belong to a club if one has to arrest the members; it’s not sociable.” Caustic and eccentric, proud of having nothing to live on but his pension after having once been rich, he possessed “courage, effrontery, intelligence, contempt for death and thirst for life.”

  He needed all these to become Minister of War at the peak of the Affair. Confronting the taunts of the Guesde extremists in the Chamber, he suddenly stood up and barked, “L’assassin, présent!” The din became general. Nationalists, Radicals, Center, were shouting insults and shaking fists. Millerand, a lawyer like Waldeck, with gray hair en brosse, a lorgnon, a neat black moustache and a precise, aggressive manner, was wilting. His moustache trembled and he looked “like a huge cat caught in a downpour.” Galliffet was observed taking down names and explained later, “I thought I’d better invite those chaps to dinner.” Waldeck, trying to speak, stood at the tribune for an hour without being heard for more than ten minutes. He fought desperately and succeeded in establishing the Government by a majority of twenty-six.

  Galliffet joined it “without illusions,” he wrote to Princess Radziwill, because of its promise to pacify France, “if that is still possible. The Rightist papers beg me to do another Boulanger and those of the Left want me to cut off the heads of all the Generals who displease them. The public is an idiot. If I touch a guilty general I am accused of massacring the Army; if I abstain I am accused of treason. What a dilemma. Pity me.” Actually, although he found Loubet “too bourgeois,” he was pleased to be a Minister and was very “gay and amusing” at the next meeting of the Bixio. He told a lively story of a rather large but lovely lady of forty-five who visited him at his office to propose a little deal involving 20,000 horses to be bought for the Army. There would be a million in it for him. “A million,” he said to her. “That’s not much considering the twenty-five million I got from the Syndicate as everyone knows. Go to see Waldeck. He is jealous of me because he only got seventeen million.”

  Six weeks later, on August 8, 1899, the retrial of Dreyfus by a new court-martial was scheduled to open in the garrison town of Rennes, a Catholic and aristocratic corner of traditionally Counter-Revolutionary Brittany. France quivered in expectation; as each week passed bringing the moment closer, the tension grew. The world’s eyes were turned on Rennes. All the important foreign newspapers sent their star correspondents. Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice of England, came as an observer. All the leading figures in the Affair, hundreds of French journalists and important political, social and literary figures crammed the town. The Secret File was brought from Paris in an iron box on an artillery caisson. No one anywhere talked of anything but the coming verdict. Acquittal would mean for the Dreyfusards vindication at last; for the Nationalists it would be lethal; an unimaginable blow not to be permitted. As if on order they returned to the theme of the first blackmail: Dreyfus or the Army. “A choice is to be made,” wrote Barrès in the Journal; Rennes, he said, was the Rubicon. “If Dreyfus is innocent then seven Ministers of War are guilty and the last more than the first,” echoed Meyer in Le Gaulois. General Mercier, leaving for Rennes to appear as a witness, issued his Order of the Day: “Dreyfus will be condemned once more. For in this affair someone is certainly guilty and the guilty one is either him or me. As it is certainly not me, it is Dreyfus.… Dreyfus is a traitor and I shall prove it.”

  At six o’clock on the morning of August 8 the Court convened with an audience of six hundred persons in the hall of the lycée, the only room in Rennes large enough to accommodate them. In the front row, next to former President Casimir-Périer, sat Mercier, his yellow lined face as expressionless as ever, and nearby, the widow of Colonel Henry in her long black mourning veil. Dignitaries, officers in uniform, ladies in light summer dresses and more than four hundred journalists filled the rows behind. Colonel Jouaust, presiding officer of the seven military judges, called out in a voice hoarse under the pressure of the moment, “Bring in the accused.”

  At once every chattering voice was stilled, every mouth closed, people seemed to hold their breath as with one movement every head in the audience turned toward a small door in the wall on the right. Every gaze fastened on it with a kind of shrinking awe as if fearful to look upon a ghost. For the accused was a ghost, whom no one in the room had laid eyes on for almost five years, whom no one there beyond his family, lawyers and original accusers had ever seen at all. For five years he had been present in all their minds, not as a man but as an idea; now he was going to walk through the door and they would look on Lazarus. A minute passed, then another while the waiting people were gripped in silence, an agonized silence, “such a silence as never before could have overtaken a crowd.”

  The door opened, two guards were seen; between them came forward a thin, worn, desiccated figure, a strange shred of humanity, seeming neither young nor old, with a shrunken face and dried-out skin, and a body looking almost hollowed out but holding itself erect as if not to falter in the last few yards between the door and the witness box. Only the pince-nez familiar from the pictures had not suffered. A movement of “horror and pity” passed through the watchers, and the look bent on him by Picquart whose life he had changed beyond repair was so intense it could be felt by the people in between. Others present whose careers he had changed or broken—Clemenceau, Cavaignac—saw him for the first time.

  For four and a half years Dreyfus had hardly spoken or heard a spoken word. Illness, fever, tropical sun, periods of chains and brutality when the frenzy in France was reflected by his gaolers, had enfeebled him. He could barely speak and only slowly understand what was spoken to him. Mounting the three steps to the tribune he staggered momentarily, straightened himself, saluted with impenetrable face, raised his gloved hand to take the oath, removed his hat, revealed the hair turned prematurely white. He remained a statue. He knew nothing of the Affair, the battle of the press, the duels and petitions, riots, street mobs, Leagues, trials, libel suits, appeals, coups d’état; nothing of Scheurer-Kestner, Reinach, the arrest of Picquart, the trial of Zola, the court-martial of Esterhazy, the suicide of Colonel Henry, the attack on the person of the President of France. During the trial, the impression he made on many was unfavorable. Rigidly determined to allow nothing to show that would appeal to pity, he antagonized many who came prepared t
o pity. G. A. Henty who came like most of the English, believing him to have been framed, left voicing doubts. “The man looked and spoke like a spy … and if he isn’t a spy I’ll be damned if he oughtn’t to be one.” Henty spoke for the last romantics who expected abstract concepts like Justice to be unequivocal and people who behaved oddly to be spies.

  In the end it was not the impression Dreyfus made that determined the outcome any more than it was he who made the Affair: it was the dilemma Mercier had formulated long ago and it was General Mercier among the hundreds of witnesses who dominated the trial. Cold in authority, haughty in self-assurance, he took full responsibility for the original order withholding the Secret File from the defence, which he said was a “moral” decision. When on the witness stand he refused to answer questions he did not like; when not on the stand he intervened without being asked. When the Secret File was under examination he ordered the public excluded and the Court obeyed him. When questioned on the Army’s suppression of evidence, the cynicism of his answers, Reinach confessed, “was almost admirable,… as if crime might be the source of a kind of beauty.” Mercier “has become hallucinated,” wrote Galliffet. “He thinks France is incarnated in his person … but all the same he is an honorable man.”

  As the weeks of examination and testimony dragged on with the succession of witnesses personally and passionately involved, the contention of lawyers, the disputes of journalists and observers, the heated feelings of the town, suspense as to the verdict became almost insupportable. In Paris rumors of another coup d’état planned for the day Mercier was to testify caused the Government to raid the homes of a hundred suspects and arrest sixty-five in their beds, including Déroulède but missing Guérin, who got away, barricaded himself in a house in the Rue Chabrol with a cache of munitions and fourteen companions, where he held out against a somewhat lackluster police siege for six weeks. “I don’t budge from my office from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. seven days a week, in order to be prepared for anything,” wrote Galliffet.

  On August 14 the too eloquent and aggressive Maître Labori, who “looked like Hercules and pleaded like a boxer,” was shot outside the court, but not killed, by a young man with red hair who ran away shouting, “I’ve just killed the Dreyfus! I’ve just killed the Dreyfus!” The name again had become an abstraction. The attack raised the temperature to the level of madness. Since the assailant had run away with Labori’s briefcase and had not been caught, it seemed to the Dreyfusards a deliberate plot and one more proof that the Nationalists would stop at nothing. They denounced their opponents as “murderers,” a “General Staff of criminals” and swore that “for every one of ours we shall kill one of theirs—Mercier, Cavaignac, Boisdeffre, Barrès.” Wrote Princess Radziwill to Galliffet, “My God, what an end to the century!”

  The end of the trial came on September 9 and all the world gasped at the unbelievable verdict. By a vote of 5–2 Dreyfus was condemned again with “extenuating circumstances” which permitted a sentence of five years, already served, instead of a mandatory life sentence. Since there could obviously be nothing extenuating about treason, the rider was provocative to both sides. It had been devised by the prosecution, which realized that it would be easier to obtain a verdict of guilty if the judges did not have on their consciences the prospect of sending Dreyfus back to Devil’s Island.

  The effect of the verdict was as of some awful disaster. People were stunned. Queen Victoria telegraphed Lord Russell, “The Queen has learned with stupefaction the frightful verdict and hopes the poor martyr will appeal it to the highest judges.” “Iniquitous, cynical, odious, barbarous,” wrote The Times correspondent, bereft of sentence structure. Like an angry Isaiah, Clemenceau demanded, “What remains of the historic tradition that once made us champions of justice for the whole of the earth? A cry will ring out over the world: Where is France? What became of France?” World opinion suddenly became an issue, more acutely because of the coming International Exposition of 1900. At Evian on Lake Geneva, where many of the gratin spent their summer holidays, Proust found the Comtesse de Noailles weeping and crying, “How could they do it? What will the foreigners think of us now?” In the Nationalist camp the same thought was cause for rejoicing. “Since 1870 it is our first victory over the foreigner,” exulted Le Gaulois.

  Strength of feeling everywhere was made plain; the whole world cared. Excitement in Odessa was “simply extraordinary”; there was intense indignation in Berlin, “disgust and horror” in far-off Melbourne, protest meetings in Chicago and suggestions from all quarters for boycott of the Exposition. In Liverpool copies of The Times were bought out in minutes and soon sold at a premium. From Norway the composer Grieg wrote refusing an invitation to conduct his music at the Théâtre Chatelet because of his “indignation at the contempt for justice shown in your country.” The English, riding at the time a wave of anti-French feeling because of Fashoda, were most indignant of all. Hyde Park rang with protest meetings, newspapers denounced the “insult to civilization,” industrial firms and cultural societies urged boycott of the Exposition as a means of bringing pressure on the French Government, travelers were urged to cancel proposed visits, a hotel-keeper in the Lake District evicted a honeymooning French couple and one writer to the editor asserted that even the question of the Transvaal “pales into insignificance before the larger questions of truth and justice.” The Times, however, reminded readers that many Frenchmen had risked “more than life itself” to prevent the defeat of justice and could not be expected to abandon the struggle to redress the wrong of Rennes.

  The fight did in fact go on, but public opinion was worn out. The Affair was one of those situations for which there was no good solution. Waldeck-Rousseau offered Dreyfus a pardon which, despite the fierce objections of Clemenceau, was accepted on grounds of humanity—since Dreyfus could go through no more—and with the proviso that it would not terminate the effort to clear his name. Galliffet issued to the Army an Order of the Day: “The incident is closed.… Forget the past so that you may think only of the future.” Waldeck introduced an Amnesty Bill annulling all pending legal actions connected with the case and angering both sides: the Right because Déroulède was excluded; the Dreyfusards because Picquart, Reinach and others who had suffered injustice or had been sued could not clear themselves. Waldeck was adamant. “The amnesty does not judge, it does not accuse, it does not acquit; it ignores.” Debate nevertheless continued furious and lasted for a year before the bill became law. Animosities did not close over. Positions taken during the Affair hardened and crystallized. Lemaître, who had entered it more for sensation than from conviction, became a rabid royalist; Anatole France moved far to the left.

  The battle shifted from the moral to the political; from Dreyfus to the Dreyfusian Revolution. It remained the same battle but the terms changed. The issue was no longer Justice and Revision but the effort of the Government under Waldeck and his successor, Combes, to curb clericalism and republicanize education and the Army. The fight was waged as fiercely as ever over Waldeck’s Law of Associations directed against the Religious Orders and over the affair of General André and the fiches when it was disclosed that the overzealous Minister of War in 1904 was using reports from Masonic officers on Catholic brother-officers to guide him in matters of promotion. Persistent and unrelenting efforts by Mathieu Dreyfus, Reinach and Jaurès succeeded against all obstacles in achieving a final Revision and a “breaking” of the Rennes verdict by the Cour de Cassation. On July 13, 1906, the eve of Bastille Day, almost twelve years after Dreyfus’ arrest and seven years after Rennes, a bill restoring Dreyfus and Picquart to the Army was carried in the Chamber by 442–32, with de Mun still among the negatives. Dreyfus, decorated with the Légion d’Honneur, was promoted to Major and Picquart to General, the ranks they would have reached by the normal course of events. In 1902 Drumont failed of reelection to the Chamber; La Libre Parole declined and in 1907 was offered for sale with no takers. Zola died in 1902 and at his funeral Anatole France spoke the ju
st and noble epitaph of the man who “for a moment,… was the conscience of mankind.” In 1908 Zola’s ashes were transferred to the Panthéon. In the course of the ceremony a man named Gregori shot at Dreyfus, wounding him in the arm, and was subsequently acquitted in the Assize Court. In 1906 Clemenceau became Premier and named Picquart his Minister of War. Picquart in the seat of Mercier, “that’s something to see!” said Galliffet. “There are some things to console one for not being able to decide to die.”

  Rennes was the climax. After Rennes neither the fight for Justice nor the struggle of the Right against the Republic was over, but the Affair was. While it lasted, France exhibited, as in the Revolution, political man at his most combative. It was a time of excess. Men plunged in up to the hilt of their capacities and beliefs. They held nothing back. On the eve of the new century the Affair revealed what energies and ferocity were at hand to greet it.