The Dreyfus Affair (12 page)

Vincent Duclert takes the view that Dreyfus’s infatuations with these
femmes galantes
were not consummated – were mere
amitiés amoureuses
: ‘After the serious illness of his wife, following the birth of their second child, he returned in part to a bachelor life. He was constantly drawn to beautiful women in whose company he experienced an amorous pleasure [
un plaisir amoureux
].’ He takes Dreyfus at his word in stating that he ‘did not cross the gap between this and consummated adultery’, although it seems unlikely that Dreyfus would plan to install Suzanne Cron in a villa simply for tea and sympathy. Be that as it may, by the middle of October 1894, Dreyfus seemed to have mastered his dangerous weakness for beautiful
femmes galantes
and the risk of scandal receded. The future did indeed seem bright for this captain in the artillery, still only thirty-five years old.

Dreyfus’s rapid rise in the military hierarchy was particularly noteworthy because his background was so different from that of most officers in the French Army. Born on 9 October 1859, he was the youngest of seven children of the textile manufacturer Raphaël Dreyfus and his wife Rachel. For the first ten years of his life he had lived with his parents in Mulhouse – first in a small apartment on the rue du Sauvage, later in a large house on the rue de la Sinne, the move reflecting the rapid rise in the fortunes of the family following Raphaël’s commercial success. Alfred had three sisters and three brothers and ‘as the youngest-born, he was especially petted by his parents and elder brothers and sisters’.
4
Because of his mother’s ill-health, his eldest sister Henriette played a maternal role. Among his siblings, Alfred was particularly close to his brother Mathieu – as open and easy-going as Alfred was reserved and retiring.

The improvement in the family’s material circumstances was only part of a metamorphosis that had taken place as a result of Jewish emancipation following the French Revolution. Raphaël’s first language was German, and his French had at times been ridiculed by French-speaking brokers at the cotton exchange because of his use of German words and his thick Alsatian accent.
5
However, by the late 1850s Raphaël had given up some of the practices of orthodox Judaism, had dropped the Germanic spelling of his name, Dreÿfuss, and had adopted a French wardrobe and way of life. Photographs show him clean-shaven with short side-whiskers – a striking contrast to the ‘long, full beards of his forefathers’.
6
His children were bilingual but even Alfred, who had received a French education, ‘spoke French with a distinctly German accent’.
7

Mulhouse, formerly Mülhausen, was a predominantly Protestant city that, until the French Revolution, had been a free city within the Swiss Confederation and often a place of refuge for Jews fleeing from the intermittent pogroms in Alsace. A sense of solidarity between the two oppressed minorities led the Protestant industrial oligarchy to open up, ‘if only part way’, to Jewish entrepreneurs. The town’s synagogue was designed by a Protestant architect. ‘Not one Catholic enterprise would be established in Mulhouse in the nineteenth century.’
8
Catholicism was the religion of the mainly German workers who manned the looms. These workers had gone on strike in 1870; the
fabricantocratie
had called in a regiment of cavalry to restore order. ‘These social protests exacerbated religious antagonism between the Protestants and Catholics.’
9
It was during these disturbances that Jean Sandherr, the father of the chief of the Statistical Section in 1894, had ‘marched through Mulhouse shouting “Down with the Prussians of the Interior!” which in local parlance meant “Down with Protestants and Jews”’.
10
The Dreyfus family had kept off the streets and remained behind the closed doors of their apartment.

France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war was a catastrophe for the Dreyfuses and had a traumatic but formative effect on the young Alfred. ‘Do you remember my telling you’, Alfred would later write to his wife Lucie, ‘how, more than ten years ago, at Mulhouse, in the month of September, I heard a German military band go marching past our house, celebrating the victory of Sedan? My grief was so overwhelming that I swore to devote all my strength and intelligence to the service of my country . . .’
11
The Dreyfuses were ardent French patriots, but France for them was not so much a tribe with a Christian heritage or a territory studded with the monuments of its Christian past as a nation that had repudiated sectarianism and superstition to guarantee for all its citizens the Rights of Man.

Under the provisions of the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt, residents of Alsace and Lorraine were given the choice of remaining as subjects of the Kaiser or retaining their French citizenship and going into exile. Raphaël Dreyfus, though his mother tongue was German and his mills were now in Germany, did not hesitate in choosing to remain a citizen of France. He was, as his grandson Pierre would later describe him, one of ‘those Alsatian patriots who preferred exile to German domination’.
12
Raphaël therefore moved with his wife and younger children to Basel in Switzerland, only forty kilometres from Mulhouse, and left his eldest son Jacques in Mulhouse to run the factory. This meant that Jacques, who had fought in the Alsatian Legion throughout the Franco-Prussian war, was obliged to adopt German nationality. Raphaël and Rachel’s eldest daughter Henriette now married a textile manufacturer, Joseph Valabrègue, and went to live with him in Carpentras, the capital of the former Papal State of the Comtat Venaissin
in the south of France. Jacques, too, was married soon after the family’s dispersal, to Louise Wimpheimer, the daughter of an industrialist from Philadelphia in the United States. Alfred, now thirteen, was sent as a boarder to an elite private school in Paris, the Collège Chaptal.

Although this abrupt removal of a boy of this age from a doting family to the cold corridors of a boarding school was common in England, it was not in France and may have contributed to an Anglo-Saxon reserve in the young Alfred – what the French call
le flegme anglais
.
Even before leaving home, ‘his sisters had noted his reserve . . . when visitors called at the home . . . Later that shyness bordering on timidity became a reserved, highly controlled manner that at times came across as arrogance. He had difficulty “opening up”.’
13
However, he excelled at his studies and it quickly became clear to his teachers, to his family and to Dreyfus himself that he could legitimately aspire to enter one of France’s elite
Grandes
é
coles
. Alfred had in mind the École Polytechnique, established at the time of the Revolution, and a military academy under Napoleon I, and now once again France’s leading educational institution for scientists and engineers.

The École Polytechnique was the portal through which Dreyfus hoped to enter the officer corps of the French Army. The other acknowledged route was the military academy of Saint-Cyr, but, though ‘Jews were not formally excluded [from the academy] . . . the prevailing conservatism and above all the methods of recruitment in reality prevented them from getting in. The preparations for the entry exams were in the hands of religious establishments, especially those run by the Jesuits, in particular the famous school on the rue des Postes in Versailles.’
14
The École Polytechnique, by contrast, was republican in spirit – combining ‘perfectly the republican ideology with intellectual ideology to combat the obscurantist forces of the
ancien régime
and the Church’.
15

Competition for a place was intense and, after gaining his baccalaureate at the Collège Chaptal, Dreyfus spent two years preparing for the entrance exams to the École Polytechnique at the École Saint-Barbe where the fees were 4,000 francs a year. He was intellectually able, hard working and good at exams. The results of the entrance exam taken in 1878 placed Dreyfus 182nd out of 236. He graduated two years later from the École Polytechnique, 128th out of 235. He was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant, and enrolled in the army’s school of artillery at Fontainebleau.

Over the next ten years, Dreyfus applied the talents he possessed to furthering his career. He became an expert horseman and was deemed ‘extremely qualified’ to teach horsemanship to squadrons in Paris.
16
He was assiduous in performing his duties and even went beyond what was expected of him, seeking out difficult work and demonstrating his newly acquired scientific knowledge and his quick understanding. Some of his studies on financial resources and mobilisation in time of war were praised by his superiors but provoked jealousy in his peers. He had unconventional views on military matters, which he defended vigorously, even vehemently, in debate with senior officers. These were qualities that appealed to the modernisers in the High Command but not to the traditionalists. To apply terms that might have been used by the English equivalent of the Saint-Cyrians, Dreyfus was ‘pushy’, he ‘tried too hard’ and was ‘too clever by half’.

Dreyfus saw no active service; he never served abroad. He was appreciated by his superiors for his ‘very lively intelligence’ and ‘excellent memory’ and was only marked down in routine appraisals for his awkward manner and monotonous voice. This sometimes came across as arrogance: Dreyfus did not suffer fools gladly and felt ‘he had little in common with his garrison colleagues’ in Paris or Le Mans.
17
He was also set apart from his fellow officers by a private income of 20,000 francs a year – ten times the basic salary for a lieutenant at that time. Two-thirds of French officers had no private income.

This substantial supplement to Dreyfus’s army pay enabled him to avoid the communal life of the barracks and ‘secure the finest lodgings’ wherever he was posted. He made no friends. Was this because he was cold-shouldered by the Saint-Cyrians among his fellow officers? Did they feel that, as a Jew, he did not ‘fit in’? Or was it because Dreyfus preferred to keep himself to himself? There were, after all, many officers who were not Saint-Cyrians but, like Dreyfus, secular-minded graduates of the École Polytechnique: not all of these can have been anti-Semites yet, even among his fellow Polytechniciens, Dreyfus did not make friends. He thought it was ‘absurd to bore oneself with a society of tiresome . . . disagreeable, often spiteful and envious men’.
18
He often ‘took long walks alone’
19
and spent his leave going to see an art exhibition in Amsterdam or visiting relatives at Bar-le-Duc, Carpentras and even German-occupied Alsace – on one occasion obtaining a visa from the German Embassy, on another entering the territory without one.

2: Lucie Hadamard

Dreyfus preferred the company of women to men – no doubt seeking in his liaisons with the
femmes galantes
Mmes Dida, Déry, Bodson and Cron the cosseting he had received in childhood from his affectionate elder sisters. Arthur Meyer, the director of the conservative newspaper
Le Gaulois
, grandson of a rabbi and convert to Catholicism, would later write that Jews were sentimental villains who ‘spend their youth in love with women who are not their race, seduce them, often have children by them, and leave them to wed Jewesses with dowries’.
20
In Marcel Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
, the Jewish Charles Swann marries his mistress Odette de Crécy, but it seems unlikely that Dreyfus contemplated following his example by marrying one of the easy-going women whose company he enjoyed.
*

In this Dreyfus was conforming to the conventions of his class at that time. But it also demonstrates the limits of his concept of assimilation, and his commitment to liberty, equality and fraternity as the pre-eminent ideals of the society in which he lived. Dreyfus was a secularist: he did not believe in the precepts of Judaism, nor did he live in accordance with the law of Moses. Yet there is no evidence that he contemplated looking for a wife from outside the Jewish community
†
any more than he had looked for friends among his gentile comrades-in-arms. The one fellow officer whom Dreyfus did befriend at the École Polytechnique – they used the familiar form
tu
21
– was also Jewish, Paul-David Hadamard, and it was Hadamard who introduced him to his future wife.

On 12 September 1889, Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of captain and was appointed as adjutant to the army’s School of Pyrotechnics in Bourges. He was now thirty-three years old – tall, already balding, wearing pince-nez glasses but with a fine moustache. Earlier that year Paul-David Hadamard had taken Dreyfus to a family gathering at the home of his cousins David and Louise Hadamard. David Hadamard, then in his late fifties, traded in diamonds, a business he had inherited from his father. His wife Louise, née Hatzfeld, was the daughter of an industrialist, director of a steel works in Ars-sur-Moselle, who was a graduate of the École Polytechnique and had served as an officer in the artillery. Although David Hadamard had been born in Paris, his family, like that of his wife, came from the lost provinces of eastern France.

David and Louise Hadamard had five children, among them three daughters, Lucie, Marie and Alice. It was the eldest, Lucie, then aged twenty-five, who caught Alfred’s eye as a possible wife. She was ‘not a stunning beauty’
22
but she was attractive – tall and slim, with broad shoulders, dark eyes and thick black hair ‘parted in the middle and pulled back with a bandeau to control her curls’.
23
She had been brought up in her parents’ country house in Chatou near Paris and educated largely by tutors in the home. Lucie was a talented pianist and music was ‘her first love’, but like the other members of the Hadamard family she esteemed intellectual achievement. Her mother was related to Adolphe Hatzfeld, who had co-authored the seminal
Dictionnaire Général de la Langue Française
; and her father’s sister, Lucie’s aunt Eugénie, was married to David Bruhl whose son-in-law, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, was a distinguished philosopher.