The Dreyfus Affair (8 page)

To Drumont and his friends, this leak to the press confirmed the view that ‘in Semitic eyes, probity and honour are meaningless'.
27
However, the culprit was thought to be, not Ernest Crémieu-Foa, but André Crémieu-Foa's second, Captain Armand Mayer, and it was therefore Mayer who was called out by Drumont's second, the Marquis de Morès.

 

Antoine Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès and de Montemaggiore, was the eldest son of the Duc de Vallombrosa. He was an elegant, swashbuckling figure with an arrogant tilt to his head and a fine, twirled moustache. At the military academy of Saint-Cyr, his fellow students had included the future Marshal Pétain and Blessed Charles de Foucauld, who later became a Trappist monk and was murdered by Bedouin in the Sahara. Morès was married to an American heiress, Medora von Hoffman, and with her dowry had bought large tracts of land in North Dakota. He had founded a town called Medora after his wife, and built an abattoir and meat-packing plant connected by a spur to the Northern Pacific Railway. His plan was to deliver dressed carcasses packed in ice to the major cities on the east coast, thereby cutting out the Chicago stockyards and the middlemen of the Chicago beef trust. The plan failed. The hold of the Chicago meat trust could not be broken: Morès believed it was dominated by Jews.

Morès returned to France and entered politics on an anti-republican, anti-Semitic ticket. As with Drumont, there was a measure of populism, even socialism, in his stance: he called for an alliance between France's ancient aristocracy and the French people against a republic dominated by the Jews. Teaming up with Drumont and writing for
La Libre Parole
, he accused Jewish butchers of selling rotten meat to the French Army's garrison at Verdun, a claim which made him popular among the workers in Paris's meat markets: they formed a small private army, ‘the friends of de Morès', with a uniform of cowboy shirts and Stetson hats.

The duel between the Marquis de Morès and Captain Armand Mayer was fought with swords on 23 June 1892 on the Île de la Grande Jatte on the Seine west of Paris. Mayer, a professor at the École Polytechnique, gave lessons in fencing: the assailants were considered evenly matched. Mayer attacked Morès, who parried his thrust but, as Mayer continued his lunge, Morès's épée penetrated Mayer's body, went through his lung and was stopped only by his spinal column. The duel was stopped. The two men shook hands. Mayer was taken to a hospital but died at five in the evening.

Captain Armand Mayer's death provoked feelings of horror and revulsion throughout France. More than 20,000 people attended his funeral: the Chief Rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, gave the address. The Minister of War, Charles de Freycinet, stated in the Chamber of Deputies that ‘the army must not make any distinction between Jews, Protestants and Catholics. Such a division in the army is a crime against the nation.'
28
Morès was charged with homicide. He retained a prominent lawyer, Maître Edgar Demange, to defend him: Demange had acted for him before when, in 1890, Morès had been charged with riot and inciting mutiny among French troops. In that case, Morès had been found guilty and sentenced to three months' imprisonment; but when it came to the killing of Captain Mayer, the jury decided that the fight had been fair and Morès was acquitted.

‘We are only at the beginning of a civil war,' Morès wrote in
L'Écho de Paris
after his acquittal. He now joined forces with those trying to unseat Georges Clemenceau in the 1893 election during which much muck was raked up by either side. Some of the mud thrown at Morès by Clemenceau was not easily brushed off. It turned out that Morès, to pay off a gambling debt which he could not at the time settle from his own resources, had borrowed money from the Jewish fixer of the Panama Canal Company, Cornelius Herz.

After this humiliation, Morès thought it best to leave France. His plan was to travel across the Sahara from Tunisia to Sudan to open up a trade route that would bypass the British-controlled Suez Canal, enlist nomadic tribes under the tricolour and form an alliance against the British with the Mahdi. Morès's expedition had no official backing, but he proceeded all the same. He sailed to Gabes on the coast of Tunisia from where his caravan set off south towards Sudan. Four days into his journey, he was murdered by his Tuareg guides – ‘robbed, stripped, his body mutilated, and all but one of his servants slaughtered'.
29
Many believed, among them his wife Medora, that this was not a case of mere banditry but was a judicial assassination instigated by ministers in the republican government in Paris.

André Crémieu-Foa also died in Africa. Feeling himself dishonoured by the whole imbroglio that had led to the death of his friend Armand Mayer, he requested a transfer to Dahomey. There he was injured during an engagement with hostile natives and later died of his wounds.

Among the letters of condolence received by his grieving mother in Paris was one from the man who had served as a second in her son's duel with Drumont, the Comte Marie-Charles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy. Esterhazy had encouraged the younger Crémieu-Foa, Ernest, to send an account of the duel to the Dalziel news agency – the ‘dishonourable' act that had precipitated the duel between Morès and Armand Mayer – but that was not held against him by Mme Crémieu-Foa. ‘I have the supreme consolation', she wrote back to Esterhazy,

 

that my beloved son André has died as a soldier. The war in Dahomey is finished: seventeen officers died, two of them Jews! That is our response to the attacks of
La Libre Parole 
. . . There will be a memorial service on Thursday in the Jewish synagogue for these brave young men who died in the service of their country. It would make me happy to see you there among our friends – you who remained true amidst all these sorrows, you who are among those courageous men who, like me, put honour before life itself.
30

 

The death of André Crémieu-Foa and another Jewish officer in the service of their country did not make a headline in
La Libre Parole
. The death of Armand Mayer had discredited the anti-Semites and put Drumont and his friends on the defensive. The circulation of
La Libre Parole
started to decline: the paper was in need of a dramatic new outrage like the Panama scandal.

In December 1893, a new government was formed by Jean Casimir-Perier with General Auguste Mercier as Minister of War. Despite a reputation for competence and a distinguished military career, Mercier did not meet with the approval of Drumont and his colleagues on
La Libre Parole
. He was a republican and graduate of the École Polytechnique, not of Saint-Cyr. Though nominally a Catholic, his wife was English and Protestant: Mercier did not go to Mass. He was known to have liberal opinions and thought to be covering up the corruption of a Jewish army doctor, Schulmann, by ordering a second inquiry when the first had condemned him. If Schulmann's conviction is confirmed, thundered
La Libre Parole
, then Mercier would have to resign. ‘That would be the only act in his ministerial career that a good Frenchman could applaud.'
31

However, the case of Schulmann was not enough to rouse the nation or increase the circulation of
La Libre Parole
. Something more dramatic was required, and something more dramatic turned up. At the end of October 1894, an anonymous letter was received by the paper which vindicated all the warnings and forebodings of Drumont and
La Libre Parole
.
On 1 November, under a banner headline, the paper announced the arrest of a Jewish officer on a charge of espionage. ‘Arrested fifteen days ago, he has confessed all and there is ABSOLUTE PROOF that he has sold our secrets to Germany.' It named the Jewish officer: Alfred Dreyfus.

*
Drumont greatly exaggerated the number of Jews living in France.

*
Ten years before, aged sixty-four, he had married his second wife who was aged twenty-one at the time. They had twelve children, the last born when de Lesseps was eighty-four.

*
Centrist republicans, known as ‘Opportunists' because they postponed the radical reforms they supposedly supported until the time was opportune.

*
He later got rid of her by ordering the Prefect of Police to have her followed and, after she was caught with a young lover, threaten her with imprisonment for adultery unless she returned to the United States.

*
Prior to his duel with Clemenceau in 1898, Drumont had fought duels with Arthur Meyer in 1886, André Crémieu-Foa in 1892, Camille Dreyfus in 1893 and Bernard Lazare in 1896. Other duels fought by Jews include those between Catulle Mendès and Paul Foucher; Camille Dreyfus and Henri Rochefort; Joseph Reinach and Paul Déroulède; Henri Bernstein and Léon Daudet; Baron Robert de Rothschild and the Comte de Lubersac; and Armand Mayer and the Marquis de Morès.

Part Two

Alfred Dreyfus

4

Evidence of Treason

1: The Statistical Section

After its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, the French Army had been reorganised along the lines of its German counterpart which had so emphatically demonstrated its superiority in the field. Conscription was introduced and the High Command was divided into four departments, or
bureaux
. Attached to the Second Bureau was a secret unit for intelligence and counter-intelligence with the obfuscating name of
the Section for Statistics and Military Reconnaissance. Its first commander was a Jewish officer, Major Samuel, who set up espionage networks in Berlin and the lost province of Alsace.

It was generally accepted in France that the Treaty of Frankfurt was not the end of the matter so far as Franco-German relations were concerned: sooner or later there would be another war. The Statistical Section’s energies were therefore directed mainly towards Germany rather than other great-power rivals such as Britain, Italy or Russia, and its office in Paris was close to the German Embassy on the rue de Lille. It worked in concert with the Prefect of the Parisian police, and used methods employed by French intelligence since the time of Henri IV – in particular, the interception of correspondence. The intelligence gathered in this way was not limited to military matters but included compromising information on courtiers and statesmen.
*
The post-war Prefect of the Paris Police, Léon Renault, set up a parallel network of informers in France and also agents abroad: a memorandum from the Prefecture dated around 1872 recommended ‘as suitable for future recruitment . . .
les Israélites allemands, presque tous achatables mais tous à surveiller
’
1
– ‘German Jews, almost all venal but all to be watched’. The Paris correspondents of foreign newspapers were particularly suspect, with the Danish journalist Hansen and Blowitz, the Paris correspondent of the London
Times
, ‘international celebrities known as double agents throughout Europe’.
2

French anxiety about espionage increased in the 1880s when it became apparent that, even after the reforms, the French Army remained inferior to that of Germany. A demographic disparity meant a smaller pool for recruits; and despite new plans for rapid mobilisation, a reconfiguration of defensive fortifications in the east and development of new weaponry, doubts remained that France could win a new war with its enemy across the Rhine.

The proposed solution was diplomatic – an alliance with Tsarist Russia – and in 1893 the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, went to St Petersburg to negotiate a treaty of mutual assistance. In the short term, however, this increased rather than diminished French anxieties. Was it not possible that the Germans, realising that the Russian alliance would put them at a disadvantage, would find some excuse for a pre-emptive war before it could become effective?

A sense of responsibility for the security of the nation weighed heavily on the French Army’s High Command. In almost all the other nations of Europe, the army and people were united behind a monarch; Germany in particular was a semi-militarised nation under the Kaiser. France, however, had known many different regimes in the course of the nineteenth century – the First Republic, the Directory, the Consulate, the First Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire and now a Third Republic whose governments came and went, and whose stability, on many occasions, seemed precarious. With no king or emperor at the head of the nation, and presidents who, for fear of a coup, were deliberately chosen for their lack of military stature, officers in the French Army developed the view that ‘they served the French state, not a particular regime’.
3

This was especially true of the Statistical Section. Like other intelligence services the world over, the need for secrecy led to an isolation of its personnel from the rest of the army, and created among them an elitist
esprit de corps
. The Statistical Section came to consider itself to some extent superior to other state institutions, including the government, and felt authorised to subject ministers to surveillance and an assessment of their loyalty to France. There was a file on the civilian Minister of War, Charles de Freycinet; and, when a senior general, Gaudérique Roget, asked the Section to help him get rid of a troublesome mistress, he discovered it already knew all about the affair.
4