The Dreyfus Affair (16 page)

A final and what appeared to be conclusive piece of evidence of Dreyfus’s guilt came in the form of a telegram sent by Alessandro Panizzardi of the Italian Embassy to his superiors in Rome on 2 November 1894. This was intercepted by the Post Office and sent to the Bureau du Chiffre at the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay for decryption. There it became apparent that Panizzardi was using a new key for the code. On 6 November, a provisional decrypted version of the telegram was sent to Sandherr which seemed to confirm the guilt of Dreyfus: ‘Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The War Minister has proof of his relations with Germany. I have taken all precautions.’

Sandherr was delighted. However, four days later, on 10 November, the codebreakers at the Quai d’Orsay tried a new key to decipher the telegram and this gave a different meaning to the telegram – one which suggested that Panizzardi knew nothing about Dreyfus: ‘If Captain Dreyfus has had no relations with you, it would be advisable to instruct the Ambassador to publish an official denial to avoid comments in the Press.’
25

To prove to Sandherr that the new version was the more accurate, the army’s liaison officer with the Quai d’Orsay, Captain Pierre Matton, had a double agent working in the Italian Embassy slip a message with recognisable names to Panizzardi who encrypted the message and sent it to Rome. The intercepted message was duly delivered to the codebreakers at the Quai d’Orsay who were unaware of Matton’s experiment: the message was deciphered and demonstrated conclusively that the new key was correct.
26

This did not suit Sandherr or those now working on the secret dossier in the Statistical Section, and the version of the telegram that went into the file read: ‘Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The War Minister has proof of his relations with Germany. I have taken all precautions.’ All were now convinced that the traitor had to be convicted and the end justified any means. Commandant Henry led the team that trawled through the fragments of information in the files of the Statistical Section to see if something could be found that would link the
bordereau
to Dreyfus. There was, first of all, the letter from Schwartzkoppen to Panizzardi dating from the spring: ‘Attached are 12 master plans of Nice which that scoundrel D. gave me in the hope of restoring relations.’ This filching of master plans had been going on for some time, and so the ‘D’ was unlikely to refer to Dreyfus: moreover, as Sandherr’s drunken deputy, Commandant Cordier – Father Josué – had pointed out, it was unlikely that the military attachés would refer to an agent by the initial of his real name. But it was not impossible, and certainly could be made to seem likely to the judges at a court martial. There was also a letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen dating from February 1894 which opened ‘My dear Bugger’, and contained a request for Schwartzkoppen ‘to broach this question with your friend’ – which could be taken to be a reference to Dreyfus.

This was still not enough to convince the judges of a court martial of Dreyfus’s guilt. Attention now turned to the reports that Guénée had written earlier in the year on the information provided by his agent in the Spanish Embassy, Val Carlos. Could something be done with these? A couple of sentences, purporting to record the words of Val Carlos, were inserted into these reports: ‘it emerges from my last conversation with Captain von Süsskind that the German attachés have in the offices of the General Staff an officer who is informing them admirably well’. And: ‘Someone in the Ministry of War . . . has tipped off the German military attachés . . . That is further proof that you have one or several wolves in your sheep-pen . . .’
27

Knowing just how feeble these scraps were as evidence against Dreyfus, the prosecution decided that they would not be shown to the defence but presented to the judges alone. Du Paty was recruited to write a ‘commentary’ on this additional information, explaining how they established the guilt of the accused. If the judges themselves had misgivings about the legality of what was being done, ‘national security’ would be invoked as a justification. Even in a court martial held
in camera
, the secret service could not be expected to reveal either its methods or its sources.
*

3: The Court Martial

Alfred Dreyfus, still held in the Cherche-Midi prison, was confident that he would soon be released. On 29 October, du Paty had finally shown him a photograph of the
bordereau
. ‘Do you recognize this letter as being in your handwriting?’ he had asked. Dreyfus immediately felt ‘a sense of deliverance’. The handwriting, though similar, was clearly not his.
28

Dreyfus was now permitted to communicate with his wife Lucie, and Lucie to inform others of the catastrophe that had befallen Alfred. She immediately wired her brother-in-law, Mathieu Dreyfus, in Mulhouse; he took the night train to Paris, arriving on the morning of 1 November. Two years older than Alfred, he was not just a fond brother but his closest friend. It had never occurred to Mathieu, when he saw the newspaper headlines proclaiming the arrest of a Jewish officer on charges of espionage, that the officer might be his brother. As he would later explain, ‘I was brought up with him, I lived with him in the greatest intimacy; he has no thoughts hidden from me. Nothing in his life or his character indicates the possibility of such a crime.’
29

Although close, the two brothers were very different in a number of ways. Where Alfred was awkward and abrupt, Mathieu was suave, charming, witty, sensitive, good-natured. Alfred was balding; Mathieu was tall with blond hair and blue eyes. Alfred’s voice was monotonous and metallic, Mathieu’s ‘pleasant and sonorous’. Alfred’s manner was gauche, Mathieu’s elegant, aristocratic, debonair. It was said that ‘the textile manufacturer had the strong bearing of a distinguished military officer, while the career soldier with the pince-nez had the pallid distracted look of a reserved and serious scholar’.
30

Mathieu was intelligent and shared Alfred’s intellectual curiosity. He too had thought of a military career but he had failed to get into the École Polytechnique from Sainte-Barbe and so had returned to Mulhouse, where he ran the family’s factories with his brothers Jacques and Léon. Out of the office, he pursued his interest in literature and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the Enlightenment: he had a bust of Voltaire on his mantel.
31
He had married the daughter of an Alsatian industrialist, Suzanne Schwob. Her uncle Adrien Schwob was the mayor of Héricort, and the wedding was celebrated in a garden of his estate – a civil ceremony that was not followed by a second service in the synagogue. Schwob was a Freemason, and it was probably through him, or possibly through fellow industrialists Paul Jeanmarie or Rudolph Koechlin, that Mathieu had been admitted to a Lodge. He was a member of the Mulhousian
fabricantocratie
and would go hunting with his fellow industrialists in the forests around Mulhouse.
32

As soon as he arrived in Paris, Mathieu Dreyfus set to work to expose the absurdity of the charges brought against his brother. The only contact that Lucie had had with the prosecuting authorities was Commandant du Paty de Clam, and Mathieu at once sent his nephew Paul, the eighteen-year-old son of his brother Jacques who was in Paris at the time, to the offices of the General Staff to request an interview. Paul was received by du Paty. ‘I have searched for the truth,’ the monocled officer told the young man. ‘Your uncle is guilty. He is a wretch, a two-faced monster leading a double life – normal and correct with his wife, secretive and mysterious with loose women.’ He then raved about his own marriage and the death of his wife, spoke of the ‘indignity’ of treason against women, and said that a man who betrayed his wife was quite capable of betraying his country. The young Paul Dreyfus left in tears.
33

That afternoon, du Paty called on Lucie and Mathieu Dreyfus at the apartment at 6, avenue du Trocadéro accompanied by the archivist from the Statistical Section, Félix Gribelin. ‘The charges are devastating,’ he told Mathieu. ‘There is not one chance in a thousand that your brother is innocent. Moreover, he has already half confessed to me.’ He repeated what he had said to Paul. ‘Your brother was leading a double life. He was seeing women. He is a monster, a two-faced monster. He had a hole right here.’ Du Paty pointed to his forehead.

Mathieu asked if he could see his brother and confront him with these charges. ‘Put the witnesses that you need in the same room behind doors, or in a next-door room; conceal them in such a way that my brother believes that he is alone with me. I swear to you that I will ask him “Alfred, did you do it? Tell me whether you are guilty or not.” If he says yes, I will hand him a gun with which to kill himself.’

‘Never, never,’ said du Paty. ‘One word, a single word, could mean a European war.’
34

It was now clear to Mathieu that Commandant du Paty de Clam was not susceptible to a reasoned argument: he felt he was talking to a lunatic and was appalled that his brother’s fate lay in this man’s hands.
35
The court martial would go ahead and his brother would need the very best legal representation. Who would take the brief? Lucie’s cousin, the philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, knew one of France’s pre-eminent lawyers, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. A native of Nantes, Waldeck-Rousseau had impeccable republican credentials: his father René had played a role in the revolution of 1848. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1876, he promoted reforms to France’s judicial system and the legal recognition of trades unions. Despite coming from a Catholic family, he had supported the laicisation of primary education enforced by Jules Ferry in 1881–2, and had voted in favour of military service for seminarians, Sunday working and divorce.

In 1889, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau had given up politics to devote his time to the practice of law. Big money was being made at the Paris bar by lawyer-politicians such as
E
ugène Étienne, Georges Leygues, Louis Barthou and Raymond Poincaré (Poincaré represented the Schneider-Creusot armaments industry).
36
The year before the arrest of Dreyfus, Waldeck-Rousseau had successfully defended Gustav Eiffel on charges of corruption following the Panama Canal scandal. Lévy-Bruhl arranged a meeting between Mathieu and this eminent lawyer, but after considering the brief for a couple of days, Waldeck-Rousseau turned it down. He claimed that he no longer took on criminal cases – but, had that been the case, he would not have agreed to look at the brief in the first place. The true reason was that he was about to return to politics, standing for the Senate in the staunchly Catholic department of the Loire. A lifelong proponent of liberty and equality before the law, he nonetheless sensed the political risks involved in defending a Jewish officer accused of treason. His advice to Mathieu was to approach another eminent lawyer who had no involvement in politics and specialised in criminal law, Edgar Demange.

Edgar Demange, at the age of fifty-three, was at the summit of a successful career. Having won a national debating contest as a young man, he had made his name by taking on sensational cases, successfully defending Prince Pierre Bonaparte – the son of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, charged with the murder of a twenty-two-year-old journalist, Victor Noir – and some of the anarchists arraigned after a bomb was thrown into the Chamber of Deputies. It was Demange who had secured the acquittal of the Marquis de Morès after his duel with Captain Armand Mayer. Of particular value in the case of Dreyfus were Demange’s religious beliefs and links to the army: he was a devout Catholic, the son of an army officer and married to the daughter of a general.

At first, Demange proved to be as reluctant as Waldeck-Rousseau to take the case. However, Mathieu persisted and Demange agreed to consider the brief when, after d’Ormescheville had completed his inquiries, he could study the papers. The report was submitted to General Saussier on 3 December. The next day Demange was permitted to visit Alfred Dreyfus in the Cherche-Midi prison and there he told him bluntly that if, after studying the papers that he was to receive later that day, he felt that Dreyfus was guilty, he would not take the case. He warned both Alfred and Mathieu of the risk they ran in accepting these terms. ‘If my conscience prevents me from defending your brother, my refusal will become known . . . I will be your brother’s first judge.’
37
Confident that he would find no credible evidence, the two brothers asked him to go ahead.

Demange read d’Ormescheville’s dossier overnight and on 5 December summoned Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus to his chambers. He told them that he had studied the indictment and that, in his view, Alfred Dreyfus had no case to answer. The only evidence against him was a single unsigned, undated document which might or might not be in his handwriting – a matter upon which the expert graphologists failed to agree. He told them that he was appalled by ‘the incoherence and hate’ emanating from d’Ormescheville’s report: an examining magistrate should have been impartial. ‘If Captain Dreyfus were not Jewish,’ he concluded, ‘he would not be in prison.’
38

The court martial opened on 19 December 1894, in a small courtroom within the Cherche-Midi military prison. Interested parties such as Mathieu Dreyfus and a large number of journalists jostled to find seats. There were seven judges, presided over by Colonel E. Maurel. None had any particular training in the law. One had been seconded from a cavalry regiment, six from the infantry. None was from a regiment of artillery. The prosecutor was Commandant André Brisset, counsel for the defence Edgar Demange.