Proud Tower

by Barbara Tuchman

  But the ripples of doubt started by Lazare spread and the Dreyfusard movement was launched. It caught up Lucien Herr, librarian of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, heart of the academic world. Here the keenest students in the country were prepared by the most learned professors for careers as the future teachers of France. Herr was a believer in Socialism, a friend and preceptor of the student world. During the summer vacation of 1897 he used to ride over every afternoon to discuss ideas with his young friend, Léon Blum. One day he said point-blank, “Do you know that Dreyfus is innocent?” It took Blum a moment to place the name; then he remembered the officer convicted of treason. He was startled, having like most of the public accepted the report of Dreyfus’ confession as the official version. Herr’s influence was pervasive. “He directed our conscience and our thought,” wrote Blum. “He perceived truth so completely that he could communicate it without effort.”

  Elsewhere men who had been collaborators of Gambetta in the founding of the Third Republic, and to whom the principles for which it stood were sacred, stirred and felt uneasy. Two especially became active: Senator Ranc, a leading Radical and a member of the first Government of the Republic, and the younger Joseph Reinach, who in his twenties had been Gambetta’s chief secretary. As the nephew and son-in-law of the venal Baron de Reinach of Panama ill-fame, he had cause for extra sensitivity, although it was less Jewish sympathies than concern for French justice that moved him. They found their champion in a man universally respected, Senator Scheurer-Kestner, Vice-President of the Senate, a founder of the Republic and onetime editor of Gambetta’s paper La République Française.

  As a native of Alsace who after 1871 had chosen to live in France, he had been appointed Senator for life and was regarded as the embodiment of the lost province. A dignified gentleman of substance, old family and quiet elegance, he represented the aristocracy of the Republic. When a reporter from La Libre Parole came to interview him and sat himself down in an armchair, “the Duc de Saint-Simon himself,” it was said, “could not have been more scandalized” than Scheurer-Kestner, who was outraged at anyone from such a paper entering his house. When he learned that the Army had suppressed evidence showing the man on Devil’s Island to be innocent and Esterhazy to be the real author of the document used to convict him, he was horrified.

  This evidence had been discovered by an Army officer, Colonel Picquart, who had been appointed new chief of the Counter-Espionage Bureau some months after Dreyfus’ conviction. When he presented his findings to the Chief and Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse, he met a wall of refusal either to prosecute Esterhazy or release Dreyfus. When Picquart insisted, Gonse asked him why he made such a point of bringing Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island.

  “But, General, he is innocent!” Picquart replied. He was told that this was “unimportant,” the case could not be reopened, General Mercier was involved, and the evidence against Esterhazy was not definitive. When Picquart suggested that matters would be worse if the Dreyfus family, known to be investigating, turned up the truth, Gonse replied, “If you say nothing no one will know.”

  Picquart stared at him. “That is abominable, General. I will not carry this secret to my grave,” he said, and left the room. Trained as a soldier, as loyal and obedient to the service as any other officer, with no ax to grind, no personal motive, nothing to gain in public notoriety as was to move later actors in the Affair, Picquart acted then and thereafter, at certain risk to his career, from purely abstract respect for justice. He was, if anything, anti-Semitic, and on one occasion, when asked to take Reinach, who was a reserve officer, on his staff during maneuvers, had objected, saying, “I can’t stand the Jew.” For Dreyfus he cared no more than for Reinach. It was the fact that the Army could knowingly condone punishment of an innocent man that he could not stomach. When he would not desist in his pressure he was transferred to an infantry regiment in Tunisia. Subject to Army discipline he could make no public disclosures, but he contrived a brief return to Paris on leave during which he disclosed the facts to a friend who was a lawyer, and left a sealed report to be given in the event of his death to the President of France. Subsequently, when his disclosure became known, he was recalled, arrested, tried and convicted of misconduct, discharged from the Army, later rearrested and imprisoned for a year.

  Meanwhile his information had been given by his lawyer to Scheurer-Kestner, a personal friend, who instantly spoke out, asserting Dreyfus’ innocence to fellow Senators and demanding a judicial review. He bore down upon the Government, harassed the Ministers of War and Justice, repeatedly interviewed the Premier and President. They stalled, put him off and promised “inquiries.” National elections were due in May, 1898, only eight months off. A retrial would raise a howl by the mischief-making press and involve a public inquiry into Army affairs that, once started, could lead anywhere, with undesirable effects both on Russia, with whom France had recently concluded a military alliance, and on Germany. These matters of state, foreign and domestic, outweighed a question of justice for a solitary man on a distant rock; besides, to men who want to stay in office, the nature of justice is not so clear as to those outside. The ministers allowed themselves to be persuaded by the General Staff, on the strength of Major Henry’s forged letter, which they had no reason to suspect, that Dreyfus must be guilty after all and Esterhazy probably an accomplice, or some other sort of unfortunate complication not justifying the terrible disturbance of a retrial.

  Scheurer-Kestner hammered in vain. He thereupon published a letter in Le Temps informing the public that documents existed “which demonstrate that the culprit is not Captain Dreyfus,” and demanding a formal inquiry by the Minister of War to “establish the guilt of another.”

  At the same time, Figaro published letters from Esterhazy to a cast-off mistress, one in facsimile, written during the Boulangist era, which expressed disgust for his own country in startling terms. “If I were told that I would die tomorrow as a Captain of Uhlans sabering Frenchmen, I should be perfectly happy,” he had written, and added a wish to see Paris “under a red sun of battle taken by assault and handed over to be looted by 100,000 drunken soldiers.” These extraordinary effusions of venom and hate for France in the handwriting of the bordereau* on which Dreyfus’ guilt hung seemed to the Dreyfusards like a miracle. They thought their battle won. But they learned, as Reinach wrote, that “justice does not come down from heaven; it must be conquered.” The journals of the Right immediately denounced the letters as forgeries fabricated by the “Syndicate.” Esterhazy himself, a gambler in debt, a speculator on the Bourse, a fashionable and witty scoundrel, married to the daughter of a marquis, a man of sallow and cadaverous countenance with a crooked nose, a sweeping black Magyar moustache, the “hands of a brigand” and the air, wrote an observer, “of an elegant and treacherous gipsy or a great wild beast, alert and master of itself,” was now transformed by the Nationalist press into a hero and his innocence made an article of faith.

  To the same degree, Scheurer-Kestner was vilified and the public encouraged to demonstrate on the day he was to make a statement in the Senate. Tall, upright, pale, with high forehead, white beard and the austere air of a Huguenot of the Sixteenth Century, he walked to the tribune with measured step, as if he were mounting a scaffold. Outside in the foggy winter afternoon, crowds filled the Luxembourg Gardens howling against a man of whom they knew nothing. He read his appeal to reason in a slow heavy voice to antagonistic Senators who punctuated his speech with boos and insulting laughter. His reminder that he was the last deputy of French Alsace, which at any other time would have moved them, was met with cold silence, and, when he finished, hostile looks followed his return to the floor. A month later in the annual re-election for officers of the Senate he was defeated for the vice-presidency, the office he had held for nearly the life of the Republic.

  His battle aroused the formidable support of Clemenceau, the government-breaker, l’homme sinistre, as the Conservatives called hi
m, fearsome in debate, in opposition, in journalism, in conversation and in duels with pistol or épée. He fought a duel with Paul Déroulède over Panama and with Drumont over the Affair. He was a doctor by training, a drama critic who promoted Ibsen, an old and intimate friend of Claude Monet, whose work, he wrote in 1895, was guiding man’s visual sense “toward a more subtle and penetrating vision of the world.” He commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec to illustrate one of his books and Gabriel Fauré to write music for one of his plays. “Only the artists are on the right path,” he said at the end of his life. “It may be they can give this world some beauty but to give it reason is impossible.”

  Out of office and Parliament since Panama, Clemenceau, when persuaded of the facts about Dreyfus by Scheurer-Kestner, saw the shape of a great cause and seized upon it, though not only as a vehicle of political ambition. To Clemenceau the menace of Germany was the dominant fact of political life. “Who”—he demanded, enraged by Esterhazy’s vision of Prussian Uhlans sabering Frenchmen—“who among our leaders has been associated with this man? Who is protecting Esterhazy?… To whom have the lives of French soldiers and the defense of France been surrendered?” After Germany came anti-clericalism. “The French Army is in the hands of the Jesuits.… Here is the root of the entire Dreyfus case.” Every day in l’Aurore he cut and thrust at the issues of the Affair, writing 102 articles on it in the next 109 days, and altogether nearly five hundred over the next three years, enough, when collected, to fill five volumes. Through all rang the bell of justice. “There can be no patriotism without justice.… As soon as the right of one individual is violated, the right of everyone is jeopardized.… The true patriots are we who fight to obtain justice and to liberate France from the yoke of gold-braided infallibility.”

  The Dreyfusard cause, too, had its opportunists. Urbain Gohier, an ex-monarchist who now professed to be a Socialist, lashed at the Army in l’Aurore. Its officers were “generals of debacle,” “Kaiserlicks” who knew nothing but “flight and surrender” and brought no victories except over the French; they were “the cavalry of Sodom” with retinues’ of kept women. “One half of France is slinging invective at the other,” worriedly wrote the French-born Princess Radziwill, née de Castellane, from Berlin. Married to Prince Anton Radziwill, the Prussian member of an international family of Polish origin who “loves to talk English while his brother, a Russian, talks French,” she had dedicated herself to a goal of Franco-German rapprochement. “No one can see how it will finish,” her letter continued, “but it cannot go on like this without real moral danger.”

  The danger was more than moral. Germany watched carefully the internal conflict that absorbed all France’s attention. Her periodic denials of dealings with Dreyfus were designed less in the interest of justice than of aggravating French dissension. Happy in the consciousness of innocence, the Kaiser was not reluctant to inform visitors and royal relatives that France had convicted an innocent man. Through the family international of European royalty the word spread. In St. Petersburg in August, 1897, when the case had not yet become the Affair in France, Count Witte, the leading Russian minister, said to a member of a visiting French mission, “I can see only one thing that could cause great trouble in your country. It is this business of a captain condemned three years ago who is innocent”

  The assumption so carelessly taken for granted in St. Petersburg was passionately rejected in the French Chamber in December by a sincere and honorable man of lofty ideals. To Comte Albert de Mun the innocence or guilt of Dreyfus was infused with another meaning; transformed, no less than the bread and wine of the sacrament, into another nature. Belief in Dreyfus’ guilt was belief in God.

  The fusion of these ideas lay in the condition of chronic war between the Church and the Republic. Since the Revolution, the Church had been on the defensive against the purpose of the Republic in the words of Jules Ferry, “to organize mankind without God or King.” The religious orders, furiously resisting the effort of the Republic to displace them from control of education, saw their hope of survival in restoration of the Catholic monarchy. This was what brought the Church in France into position in the Affair. It was the ally of the Army in its own mind as well as in Republican propaganda, which always linked “the Sword and the Censer.” In the Jesuits the Republic saw the militant and aggressive general staff of clericalism who pulled the strings which moved the Dreyfus plot. The Jesuit leader was Father du Lac, confessor of both General Boisdeffre and the Comte de Mun, who were regarded as his mouthpieces.

  To Pope Leo XIII, a realist looking on from outside, it seemed possible the Republic was here to stay. After the collapse of the Boulanger coup he could no longer believe that restoration of the monarchy was a serious possibility. Besides, he needed French support in his struggle with the Italian state. In the Encyclical of 1892 he urged French Catholics to reconcile themselves to the Republic, to support, infiltrate and ultimately capture it, in a policy called the Ralliement. Catholic progressives rallied, others did not and the Left did not trust the policy. “You accept the Republic,” said Léon Bourgeois, leader of the Radicals to a meeting of Ralliés. “Very well. Do you accept the Revolution?” De Mun was one who never had.

  When, in the midst of the Affair, de Mun arrived at the peak of a French career—election to the French Academy—he chose Counter-Revolution as the theme of his address. The Revolution, he proclaimed, was “the cause and origin of all the evils of the century”; it was “the revolt of man against God.” He believed the ancient ideals and ideas were about to “reappear in our time with irresistible evolution” and revive “the social concepts of the Thirteenth Century.” To heal the wounds of social injustice under which the working class suffered and re-Christianize the masses alienated by the Revolution had been the goal of his political career.

  As a young cavalry officer out of St-Cyr, de Mun first became acquainted with the lives and problems of the poor through the charitable work of the Society of St-Vincent de Paul in his garrison town. During the Commune, as an aide to General Galliffet, who commanded the battalion that fired on the insurgent Communards, he saw a dying man brought in on a litter. The guard said he was an “insurgent,” whereupon the man, raising himself up, cried with his last strength, “No, it is you who are the insurgents!” and died. In the force of that cry directed at himself, his uniform, his family, his Church, de Mun had recognized the reason for civil war and vowed himself to heal the cleavage. He blamed the Commune on “the apathy of the bourgeois class and the ferocious hatred for society of the working class.” The responsible ones, he had been told by one of the St. Vincent brothers, were “you, the rich, the great, the happy ones of life who pass by the people without seeing them.” To see and discover them de Mun had worked among the poor. “It is not enough to perceive the wrong and know its cause,” he said. “We must admit ourselves responsible and confess that society has failed in its duty toward the working class.” He determined to enter politics but his candidacy for the Chamber and his activities had been resented in the Army. Forced to choose, he had resigned his commission and broken his sword.

  Yet in the Chamber his love for the Army remained and formed the theme of his most stirring speeches. Delivered with the adoration of a disciple and the fire of a champion, they made him known as le cuirassier mystique. He was the finest orator of his side, “the Jaurès of the Right,” who brought to perfection the carefully taught art of the spoken word. A tall figure of dignified bearing, controlled gestures and exquisite manners, he was incomparable in authority when he rose to his feet. He spoke with force of conviction and conscious architecture of phrase, using his voice like a violin, sonorous and vibrant or muted and trembling, in long harmonious rhythms, sudden broken stops and eloquent perorations. His oratorical duels against two major opponents, Clemenceau and Jaurès, were spectacles of style and drama which audiences attended as they would Sarah Bernhardt playing l’Aiglon.

  Although diehards accused him of being a Socialist and of encoura
ging subversive ideas and disturbing the established order, his essential loyalties were those of his class. He had been a supporter of Boulanger and until 1892 a royalist of sufficient stature to have the Comte de Chambord * as godparent for one of his children. When Leo XIII, however, called for the Ralliement, although most French royalists were stunned and rebellious, de Mun renounced royalist politics—if not sympathies—to become a leader of the Ralliés. Although his aim was social justice, he rejected Socialism as the “negation of the authority of God while we are its affirmation.… Socialism affirms the independence of man and we deny it.… Socialism is logical Revolution and we are Counter-Revolution. There is nothing in common between us and between us there is no place for liberalism.”