The new republic looked as though it would last even less time than the First Republic of 1792, which had been overthrown by Napoleon twelve years later, or the Second which met the same fate at the hands of his nephew in 1851 after only three years. The Third Republic had many enemies, from the Communards on the left to royalists on the right, and few friends. As Gustave Flaubert said, ‘I defend the poor Republic but I don’t believe in it.’19 Indeed, at times even republican politicians seemed not to believe in it as they jockeyed for office – between 1871 and 1914 France had fifty different ministries – and, far too often, appeared to be interested only in what they could make from what the public took to calling the Whore or the Republic of Cronies. In 1887, the son-in-law of the President was discovered to be selling honours, even the Légion d’Honneur; for a time, ‘vieux décoré’ was an insult. In 1891–2 the Panama Canal Company collapsed, carrying away with it millions of francs and the reputations of the great de Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel, builder of the famous tower, as well as those of scores of deputies, senators, and ministers. When President Faure died in the arms of his mistress it was at least a different sort of scandal. Not surprisingly there were those in France who looked for a hero, a man on horseback, to gallop up and turn the whole sordid lot out of government. Yet even those men were failures, from Marshal MacMahon, who as President tried to bring back the monarchy (at least, said a cartoon, ‘the horse looks intelligent’) to the unfortunate Boulanger.
By far the most damaging scandal of all for the Third Republic was the Dreyfus affair, which was at once very simple in its central issue – had Captain Alfred Dreyfus, of the army’s general staff, been rightly or wrongly convicted of passing French military secrets to the Germans? – and very complicated in its details with forgeries, lies, honest and dishonest army officers, and alternative suspects. Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted with trumped-up evidence, showed extraordinary stoicism and fortitude in the face of public disgrace and a savage punishment while the military authorities, particularly those in the general staff, and the government showed, to put it mildly, a marked unwillingness to investigate the increasingly threadbare case against him. Indeed, certain members of the general staff took steps to create new materials which could be used against Dreyfus only to find, as in the Watergate scandal many years later in the United States, that an attempt to conceal the initial crimes led them deeper and deeper into the morass of criminal conspiracy.
The affair had been simmering on for some time before it burst into the open in 1898. Dreyfus had been hastily convicted at a court martial, and dispatched to the French penal colony on Devil’s Island in the Atlantic off the coast of South America in 1894. His family and the handful of supporters who were convinced of his innocence agitated to have the verdict reopened. They were aided by the fact that the passing of French secrets to the Germans continued, and encouraged to hope when Colonel Georges Picquart, who was put in charge of investigating this second traitor, concluded that the espionage had been the work all along of the dissolute Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy and that the army’s proceedings against Dreyfus were a miscarriage of justice. Faced with this unwelcome result, the military authorities and their supporters in the government took the view that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the Dreyfus conviction, the army could not afford to have its prestige and reputation undermined. So Picquart’s reward for his work was to be sent off to Tunisia, where the army may well have hoped that he would rot, and, when he refused to recant, to be dismissed, arrested and charged on grounds which turned out to be as flimsy as those in the Dreyfus case.
In January 1898, as the affair was already stirring public interest, Esterhazy was tried before a court martial and acquitted. Two days later the great writer Emile Zola published his famous letter, ‘J’Accuse’, addressed to the President of the Republic, Faure of amorous fame, in which he laid out the facts of the case and accused the military and the government of a shameful cover-up. He also accused Dreyfus’s opponents of using the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew to stir up anti-Semitism, and of undermining the republic and its liberties. And this, he said, at a time when France was preparing for the great Paris Exposition, which would crown a century of truth and freedom. As he defiantly pointed out in his letter, Zola expected to be charged with libel and the government, with some misgivings, obliged. He was tried and sentenced for insulting the army but fled to England before he could be incarcerated.
By this point the affair had developed into a major political crisis and French society was dividing into Dreyfus supporters, the Dreyfusards, and opponents, the Anti-Dreyfusards. Radicals, liberals, republicans, anti-clericals (often overlapping categories) tended to fall into the first camp with royalists, conservatives, anti-Semites, supporters of the Church and the army, into the second. But it was never as clear-cut as that: families, friends, professions, all were divided by the affair. ‘This five years’ war was fought out in the newspapers’, wrote Thomas Barclay, the British journalist and businessman, ‘in the law courts, in the music-halls, in the churches, and even in the public thoroughfares.’20 One family dinner ended in court when a son-in-law, who was an Anti-Dreyfusard, slapped his mother-in-law who was for Dreyfus. His wife sued for divorce. Among artists, Pissarro and Monet were Dreyfusard, Degas and Cézanne Anti. The editorial board of a cycling journal split and the Anti-Dreyfusards left to set up their own journal, devoted to the car. In February 1899 Paul Déroulède, a right-wing firebrand and notorious Anti-Dreyfusard, tried to carry out a coup against the Dreyfusard Emile Loubet, who had just been elected as President to succeed Faure. Déroulède was a much better agitator than leader and the attempt fell flat. That summer, though, Loubet had his hat smashed in by the cane of an Anti-Dreyfusard at the horse races at Auteuil.21
Although moderates on both sides were increasingly concerned about the future of the republic, it proved difficult to wind the affair down. In 1899 Picquart was released from jail and Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to face a second court martial. It was a measure of the passions surrounding the affair that when Dreyfus’s lawyer was shot in the back by an attacker (who was never caught) passers-by in the conservative town of Rennes refused to help him. Dreyfusards for their part spoke darkly of a right-wing plot. Although this time the judges split, Dreyfus was again found guilty with extenuating circumstances. The verdict and the resulting pardon by Loubet were too much for his opponents and not enough for his supporters. Dreyfus demanded a retrial, which he finally obtained in 1906. The Court of Appeal annulled the verdict and Dreyfus was reinstated in the army, as was Picquart. While the latter died in a hunting accident in January 1914, Dreyfus, who had retired from the army, re-enlisted and fought in the Great War. He died in 1935.
The Third Republic, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, survived the affair. It was more stable than it sometimes appeared and it also benefited from an unwillingness on the part of most French, no matter how deeply divided they were, to risk another civil conflict. And there was more continuity than it might at first seem. Although governments came and went with great frequency the same names popped up again and again. When Georges Clemenceau, the ferocious radical politician and journalist who himself held office several times before and during the war, was accused of making a profession of bringing down governments, he replied: ‘I have overthrown only one. They are all the same.’22 The civil servants also provided continuity. Indeed, they gained considerable autonomy and influence as governments came and went.
At the Quai d’Orsay, the home of the Foreign Ministry, and among French diplomats stationed abroad, the prevailing attitude was one of contempt for the politicians and a reluctance to take direction from them. With some exceptions, Foreign Ministers were not interested in foreign affairs or in office long enough to acquire an understanding of them. The French parliament, preoccupied as its members were by the search for office or by political combat, provided little sustained oversight.23 The commission responsible for foreign and colonial affairs
was ineffectual and lackadaisical. It could ask for documents from the Quai d’Orsay or to see the minister but could do nothing when, as often happened, it was refused. The politician (and leading Dreyfusard) Joseph Reinach complained to the British ambassador: ‘Its forty-four members gossip a lot; they recount confidential information to their wives, to their mistresses, to their intimate friends, who, themselves, also gossip.’24 The French press generally had more information and influence than the French parliament. Since almost half the Foreign Ministers under the Third Republic had been journalists themselves at one time or another they understood well how useful or dangerous the press could be.
The Dreyfus affair did nevertheless leave lasting damage. The old divisions in French society were reinforced and fed by new grievances. If many on the right were confirmed in their contempt for republican and liberal values, on the left the hostility to tradition, to religion and to the military was likewise strengthened. Radicals used the affair to bring the army, which they viewed unfairly as nothing more than a repository of conservatism and a home for unreconstructed aristocrats, under control. Officers suspected of not having the correct republican outlook were purged and promotions, particularly at the highest levels, increasingly came to depend on the right sort of political credentials and connections. The consequence was to damage morale and further lower the prestige of the army. Respectable families by and large did not want their sons going into the army. In the decade before the Great War the number and the quality of applicants for the officer corps went down sharply. In 1907 Adolphe Messimy, a future Minister of War who was at that time a leading radical critic of the army, said in parliament that all officers seemed to need was a good primary education. Certainly the army did little to improve on this. Its curriculum for its officers, even at the elite staff level, was patchy, out of date, and incoherent. Too often, moreover, conformity was rewarded and talent passed over. On the eve of the Great War, the French army was poorly led, overly bureaucratic and unwelcoming to new ideas and techniques. ‘Democracies are uneasy,’ wrote General Emile Zurlinden, among the more principled of those who had tried and failed to resolve the Dreyfus affair. ‘They have a tendency to suspect men to whom talent and circumstances draw attention, not because they do not recognize their qualities and services but because they tremble for the republic.’25
The Dreyfus affair also had international ramifications. Both sides had supporters who believed that the affair was part of a larger international conspiracy. One prominent nationalist reflected the suspicions on the right when he said that ‘a gang of free-masons, Jews and foreigners are trying, by discrediting the army, to hand over our country to the English and the Germans’.26 Anti-clerical Dreyfusards, by contrast, saw the hand of the Pope at work, particularly through the Jesuits. Outside France the affair had a particularly unfortunate effect on British opinion at a time when relations between France and Britain were already very tense thanks to the Fashoda incident and then the Boer War which started in 1899, shortly after the unsatisfactory result of Dreyfus’s new trial. The British were generally Dreyfusards and by and large saw the affair as fresh evidence, if any were needed, for the unreliability and moral turpitude of the French. In Hyde Park, 50,000 people attended a rally to show their support for Dreyfus. Queen Victoria sent her Lord Chief Justice to Rennes to observe the court proceedings and complained to Salisbury about the ‘monstrous, horrible sentence against the poor martyr Dreyfus’. She cancelled her annual holiday to France in protest and many of her subjects followed suit. Businesses seriously considered boycotting the Paris Exposition of 1900.27 ‘At least one can say for the Germans’, the head of the Paris Municipal Council told Barclay, ‘they are des ennemis francs. They don’t conceal that they want to swallow us up as soon as they dare. With them we know where we are. But with the English, nobody knows where he is. They are not even unconsciously hypocritical and perfidious. They deliberately lead you on with promises and sweet words, and after they have shoved you over the precipice turn their eyes to Heaven, thank God they are a moral people and pray for your soul!’28
As the new century started France was in a vulnerable state both at home and abroad. Its relations with Britain were abysmal, correct but cool with Germany, and strained with Spain, Italy and Austria-Hungary, all of which were rivals in the Mediterranean. Yet France had managed to break out of the quarantine in which Bismarck had placed it and make one, very important, alliance, with Russia. It was an unlikely friendship between the republic with its revolutionary past and the autocratic power in the east. It was also an important stage on the road which led Europe to the Great War. Although it was conceived by both France and Russia as a defensive alliance, it looked, as such alliances often do, quite different from another perspective. Since Poland had not yet been reconstituted on the map of Europe, Germans could, and often did, see their country as encircled with a hostile power on each of its eastern and western borders. From the Franco-Russian alliance much would follow, not least Germany’s drawing closer to Austria-Hungary as the one sure ally it could count on to keep it from being further encircled.
Even Bismarck might not have been able to keep France isolated indefinitely but the failure in 1890 of his successors to keep Germany’s Reinsurance Treaty with Russia opened a door which the French were quick to go through. Russia offered an exit from isolation and its geography meant that in any future conflict with France, Germany would have to look eastwards over its shoulder. More, Russia held what France lacked – huge manpower. The demographic nightmare that the French faced, and were to face again in the 1920s and 1930s, was that their population was static while Germany’s was growing. By 1914, there were 60 million Germans to 39 million French. In an age when armies relied more on quantity than quality, that meant more potential soldiers for Germany.
What helped to make Russia receptive to the idea of an alliance was that France could provide what it badly needed: capital. The Russian economy was expanding rapidly and it needed more funds than the government could raise within Russia. While German banks had once been the chief source of foreign loans for Russia, they were now increasingly lending within Germany itself, where demand was also growing. London was another possibility for raising loans but the poor state of Russian–British relations meant the British government and British banks were reluctant to lend to a country which might at any moment become an enemy. That left France among the major European powers. Thanks to the thrift of its people, it was awash with capital looking for good investments. In 1888, two years, before the Reinsurance Treaty lapsed, French banks made the first of what were going to be many loans to the Russian government. By 1900 France was by far the biggest foreign investor in Russia (bigger than Britain and Germany combined), fuelling the rapid expansion of Russian industries and infrastructure. In 1914 the railway lines along which Russian armies moved to their frontiers had been largely built with French money. French investors, as they were to discover to their cost when the Bolsheviks took over and cancelled all foreign debts, had a quarter of all their foreign investments in Russia.29
Both sides had to overcome the past: Napoleon burning Moscow in 1812, Tsar Alexander I and his troops marching in triumph through Paris two years later, or the Crimean War. Both had to swallow their suspicions whether Russia’s of French republicanism and anti-clericalism or France’s of tsarist autocracy and orthodoxy. Yet the Russian upper classes admired French styles and often spoke French more easily than they did Russian, and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the French discovered a taste for the great Russian novels and Russian music. More importantly, the Russian Foreign Ministry and its military leaders had grown alarmed by the end of 1880s at the possibility that Britain, considered an unfriendly power, might join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Russia would in that case be as isolated as France. Crucially, for he had the last word, the tsar at the time, Alexander III, was coming around to the idea of a French alliance. He was influenced by his wife, who, as
a member of the Danish royal family, loathed Prussia for defeating her country and taking the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. He also seems to have been deeply affronted by the German decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. A month after the treaty lapsed, Russian generals talked about a possible military agreement to a French general who was attending their annual army manoeuvres.30
The following year France and Russia worked out a secret military agreement in which they agreed to come to each other’s defence if either was attacked by a member of the Triple Alliance. It was an indication of the boldness of the step for both parties that it took another year and a half to get the agreement ratified. And over the next decade there were going to be moments when the Franco-Russian alliance nearly fell to pieces when the interests of the two parties diverged or clashed. In 1898, for example, the French were deeply disappointed when the Russians refused to support them over Fashoda. The alliance in itself did not bring war in 1914 but its existence added to the tensions in Europe.
Although the agreement was a secret one, it was evident to onlookers that there had been a significant shift in Europe’s international relations. In 1891 the tsar gave Russia’s most important decoration to the French President. That summer the French fleet paid a courtesy visit to the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, just west of St Petersburg, and the world saw the extraordinary sight of the tsar standing to attention while the Marseillaise was played, although, as a revolutionary song, it was banned in Russia. Two years later, a Russian fleet called in at Toulon for a return visit. The French crowds shouted ‘Vive la Russie! Vive le Tsar!’ and the visitors were entertained with dinners, receptions, luncheons, toasts, and speeches. ‘There was scarcely a woman in Paris’, reported one journalist, ‘who would not have been ready to forget her duties to satisfy the desire of any of the Russian sailors.’31 The British ambassador was amused at the enthusiasm shown by good republicans for the tsar and his regime but felt that the outpouring of French emotion was understandable: ‘The people of France, like all Celtic nations, are sensitive and morbidly hungry for sympathy and admiration. The German war and its results wounded their vanity to the quick, and though they have borne their humiliation with patience and dignity they do not the less resent it.’32
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