The Dreyfus Affair (53 page)

What could the Catholic Church do in the face of this persecution? In 1901, Pope Leo XIII was ninety-one years old. With a government in Paris led by a Freemason and dominated by Freemasons, all that he had foreseen in his encyclical
Humanus Genus
had come to pass. He had held out an olive branch to the French republicans but they had rejected it: his policy of
ralliement
had failed. Leo died in 1903. His successor, Giuseppe Melchiore Sarto, the son of a village postman and a seamstress, took the name Pius in honour of the two popes, Pius VI and VII, who had been bullied and mistreated by Napoleon. If they had stood up to the military genius and Emperor of the French, Pius X was unlikely to retreat before the little doctor from the Tarn.

Disputes between the French government and the Vatican on a number of matters led to a diplomatic rupture and to the disestablishment of the Catholic Church in France. There was no formal denunciation of the Concordat, but a motion was passed in the Chamber of Deputies on 10 February 1905 declaring that ‘the attitude of the Vatican’ had rendered the separation of Church and state inevitable; and on 11 December 1905 the Separation Law was passed and published in the
Journal Officiel
.

For Charles Péguy, the fact that the struggle of the Dreyfusards should lead to this ‘Combes demagogy’ was a catastrophic perversion of the movement’s ideals. ‘The Dreyfusards who became Combists were already inflated with pride, and did evil.’
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Certainly, the Church itself was partly to blame for its defeat by the French secularists. ‘It was not the arguments that it lacks but charity. All the reasons, all the systems, all the pseudoscientific arguments weigh for nothing in the scales against an ounce of charity.’
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However, the Catholic Church had survived worse bouts of persecution before, and in some ways the persecution by the Combes government had a salutary outcome. Denis Brogan describes the effect as ‘bracing’.
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The disciples of Compte and Michelet, who had assumed that the Catholic faith itself would wither and die, were to be disappointed. In the world of letters there was a Catholic renaissance with authors such as Charles Péguy, Ferdinand Brunetière, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget, Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac, and philosophers and theologians such as Lucien Laberthonnière, Maurice Blondel, Louis Duchesne, Henri Brémond, Jacques Maritain and Ernest Psichari.

Some, certainly, remained anti-Semitic. ‘I am an anti-Semite,’ wrote Huysmans, ‘because I am convinced that it is the Jews who have turned France into a sad country, agitated by the lowest passions, the sad country without God that we now see.’
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But others, such as Péguy, Claudel, Bernanos or Mauriac, abhorred anti-Semitism; and the anti-Semitism of the Assumptionists that had contaminated, by association, the shrine at Lourdes and the message of Bernadette Soubirous was wholly absent in the cult of another Catholic girl, Thérèse Martin, a Carmelite nun, who died of consumption at Lisieux at the age of twenty-four in 1897. Her
Story of a Soul
, published posthumously, revealed a spirituality far removed from the polemics of Action Française or diplomatic disputes over the disestablishment of the Church. She was, as Ruth Harris writes, ‘no anti-Semite, despite having grown up in an ultra-Catholic and right-wing family’.
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Canonised by Pope Pius XI in 1925, Thérèse became ‘the most widely loved Catholic intercessor of modern times’.

4: The Case Reopened

In a debate in the Chamber of Deputies on 6 April 1903, almost four years after Alfred Dreyfus had been pardoned by President Loubet, the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès ascended the podium to reintroduce the question of his unjust conviction. Taking up the whole session of 6 April, and speaking for two hours on the following day, he yet again presented the overwhelming proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and the guilt of those who had conspired to thwart his rehabilitation. Throughout his address he was heckled by nationalist deputies, but he rose above the insults and interruptions, demonstrating once again his oratorical powers and his ability to rouse the passions of his followers with lofty appeals to justice and truth and ‘accusations against the Church’.
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Jaurès demanded that the case be reopened; his motion was opposed by that most zealous of anti-Dreyfusards, the former Minister of War Godefroy Cavaignac. Dying of liver cancer, and taking his certainty of Dreyfus’s guilt to the grave, Cavaignac’s eloquence might not equal that of Jaurès but his assurance gave a morbid force to what he said. ‘Our conscience is worth every bit as much as yours . . . You are not judges. You are not here as servants of the truth but as the slaves of your passions . . . Your project is to cause chaos and repudiation of the nation.’ Insults were traded between the two sides. Cavaignac called Jaurès a coward; Jaurès said that Cavaignac filled him with contempt.

Cavaignac’s objections were ignored. The Combes government, acting in concert with its staunch Socialist supporter Jaurès, had already decided to accede to his request. ‘The government is eager to facilitate the search for the truth in this matter,’ the Minister of War, General Louis André, announced to the Chamber, ‘and agrees to proceed with an administrative investigation.’ Quite what was meant by this was unclear, but Dreyfus did not wait for the politicians to decide. He immediately applied for a review based on the emergence of new evidence in his case. Combes then charged General André with making a ‘personal investigation’ into the case: the Dreyfus file was taken out and dusted down, and an examination of the evidence started all over again.

General André’s investigation was conducted by a Captain Targe, who claimed an open mind. To find his way through the voluminous and often obscure documentation, Targe enlisted the help of its original author, the archivist from the Statistical Section, Félix Gribelin. Gribelin had been as complicit as any in the conspiracy against Dreyfus, had venerated Henry and had not changed his mind about Dreyfus’s guilt; but he was astute enough to see that the wind was now blowing in a new direction. He co-operated with Targe. ‘He had become truthful with age,’ Joseph Reinach would write, ‘as one becomes obese or bald.’
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With Gribelin’s help, Targe quickly uncovered the numerous forgeries undertaken by Henry to incriminate both Dreyfus and Picquart. Here was the new evidence required to reopen the case. On 19 October 1903, General André presented his report based on the findings of Captain Targe to the Prime Minister, Émile Combes. On 27 November, the cabinet referred the request to the Review Commission, and on 24 December the Commission accepted the grounds for a review with no dissenting vote. The next day, while the clericalists celebrated the birth of Christ, the Minister of Justice referred the judgment made at Rennes to the Cour de Cassation.

Nine years had passed since Dreyfus’s first conviction, and a number of the legal officers involved in the Affair had either died or retired. The presiding judge of the Criminal Chamber was now Jean-Antoine Chambareaud and the public prosecutor Manuel Baudouin – a man with a distinguished legal pedigree and one of the few Frenchmen who had not yet decided whether he thought Dreyfus innocent or guilty.

Examination of the evidence convinced Baudouin that Dreyfus had been convicted by the judges at the Rennes court martial on charges ‘not one of which appears to resist scrutiny’ and on the basis of documents ‘which, after the conviction, were acknowledged to be forged’. His report was presented to the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation in January 1904; public hearings of the request opened on 3 March. The Criminal Chamber accepted the petition and its re-examination of the evidence began on 7 March, continuing until 19 November.

All the protagonists were summoned once again to give evidence and all the old files were reopened; even Mme Bastian made an appearance, and the love letters between Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen and Hermance de Weede were brought back into court. Like a play in repertory at the end of a long run, the same players recited the same lines but many lacked conviction. General Mercier, now that his bluff had been called on the annotated
bordereau
, fell back on the preposterous ‘proof’ of the expert witness Bertillon that the
bordereau
had been written by Dreyfus in a forged hand. General Billot was now forgetful; General Roget trimmed his views; Captain Lauth distanced himself from his deceased friend, Colonel Henry; while General Gonse struck Dreyfus as ‘pitiful, a luckless wretch crushed beneath the weight of all the infamies he had committed’.
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Only Captain Cuignet, a recent convert to anti-Dreyfusism, and Commandant du Paty de Clam, who had been one from the start, expressed their views with any conviction – though the former, Cuignet, could not conceal his rancour and the latter, du Paty, appeared mentally unstable. Even Maurice Weil was called before the court and harshly questioned by Baudouin, but he bridled at being treated as a suspect and gave nothing away.

When Dreyfus gave evidence on 22 June 1904, he made as poor an impression as he had done at every court appearance since his first court martial in 1894. Maître Mornard had prepared the court for his client’s inability to meet the expectations of others when playing his role. ‘His spirit, described as haughty and imperious . . . is in fact that of a shy man fighting his own timidity; I know what lies behind this allegedly unfeeling heart that has suffered so cruelly in obeying a self-imposed rule not to show its suffering.’ Dreyfus himself complained of how unjust it was to judge by appearances: ‘I believe in reason, I believed that reason in such matters, in which the heart’s emotions can never contribute any explanation, any attenuation, was supposed to be the judges’ sole guide.’
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As in the judiciary, there had been a change of personnel in the General Staff. A report it now submitted at the request of the judges of the Criminal Chamber, drawn up by a number of senior officers including the commandant of the École de Guerre, demonstrated that the
bordereau
exonerated rather than incriminated Dreyfus. The phrase ‘the way in which it performs’ relating to the hydraulic brake on the 120mm cannon would have been ‘utterly abnormal’ coming from a trained artillery officer; and
Proposal for a Firing Manual
was not a confidential document: the claim that it was ‘extremely difficult to get hold of’ must have been inserted by Esterhazy to enhance his value in the eyes of Schwartzkoppen.

The conclusion of a second report requested by the court from three leading academics on Bertillon’s expertise was that ‘the absurdity of his system is self-evident’. The
bordereau
was not a careful forgery; it had been written spontaneously by a ‘fluent hand’. On 19 November, 1904, the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation forwarded the case to the Combined Chambers in accordance with the law of dispossession that had been passed five years before. The presiding judge of the Combined Chambers, Alexis Ballot-Beaupré, appointed as
rapporteur
Judge Clément Moras. The full rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus seemed imminent. But then the political situation changed and a final judgment was delayed.

5: L’Affaire des Fiches

On 17 January 1905, Émile Combes resigned as Prime Minister, compromised by another scandal,
L’Affaire des Fiches
– the card-index affair. This was a covert system that had been set up by the Minister of War, General André, to purge the army officer corps of its ‘Jesuits’ – those officers who, republicans believed, owed their positions to the old-boy network established in the Jesuit school on the rue des Postes and later at Saint-Cyr. Despite the fact that General Mercier had been a staunch republican, and that there was a larger proportion of Jewish officers in the officer corps than in the population at large, it remained a republican
idée fixe
that the influence of these aristocratic Catholic officers meant that ‘a good Republican, above all a good Republican who was also a Jew or a Protestant, had little chance of rising in the army’.
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How was General André to change this state of affairs? High-ranking promotions were now in the hands of the Minister, but lower down the scale they remained the prerogative of the promotion boards which were themselves composed of just the kind of clericalist officers that André abhorred. Of course, the boards, too, could be abolished and all promotions reserved for the Minister, but how could he hope to know the political and religious sympathies of so many men?

The solution was to seek information from outside the army – from civilian officials such as the departmental prefects or republican activists on the ground. General André delegated this task to his personal adjutant, Captain Mollin, who was the son-in-law of the great Dreyfusard author Anatole France. Mollin, like André, was a Freemason, a member of a notably political and anti-Catholic Lodge, the Grand Orient, with its headquarters on the rue Cadet in Paris. Here was a ready-made network of informers and a building where the information could be assembled and, in the person of the secretary of the Grand Orient, Narcisse-Amédée Vadecard and his assistant, Jean Bidegain, a staff to co-ordinate and collate the research.

The information, as it came in, was entered on cards or
fiches
. These would be marked either ‘Corinth’ or ‘Carthage’ – the Corinthians being the sheep who should be promoted and the Carthaginians the goats who should be held back. An officer reported to be ‘perfect in all respects; excellent opinions’ would be marked as a Corinthian; another who, ‘though a good officer, well reported on, takes no part in politics’ would nonetheless be designated a Carthaginian because he went ‘to Mass with his family’ and sent his six children to Catholic schools. A bachelor officer who went to Mass was by definition of a reactionary disposition. Officers loyal to the republican ideals were encouraged to report on the opinions voiced by their colleagues in the mess.