The Dreyfus Affair (2 page)

The First of the three Estates was chosen by the nobility, the Second by the clergy and the Third by the commons. Voting for the delegates took place in January. The novelty of an election meant a high turn-out and a surge of political debate in cafés, clubs and Masonic Lodges. Pamphleteers discussed and disseminated the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, the French Encyclopaedists and the English philosopher John Locke. All condemned the concept of royal absolutism, but none at this stage envisaged a nation without a king.
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After much wrangling, it was agreed that the Third Estate, since it represented 96 per cent of the population, should have double the representation of the first two: there were 610 members as against 291 for the First Estate, the nobility, and 300 for the Second, the clergy.

The first session of the Estates General was opened by the King at Versailles on 2 May 1789. On 17 June, after a number of disputes over its authority, the Third Estate declared itself a ‘National Assembly’ and was joined by some radical aristocrats and a majority of the clergy. Locked out of their usual meeting place by orders of the King, the members of the new Assembly retreated to an indoor tennis-court and took an oath never to disperse until they had established a democratic constitution. They then went to work to draw up such a constitution under the presidency of the Archbishop of Vienne.

The rejection of royal authority by the new National Assembly was supported by a mob of angry Parisians. On 14 July, a crowd of 60,000 seized 28,000 muskets from the military hospital, the Invalides, and then marched on the Bastille, a large, fourteenth-century fortress where prisoners were held on the whim of the King. At the time there were only seven inmates – four forgers, an Irish lunatic and an incestuous aristocrat imprisoned at the request of his family. However, the Bastille symbolised the despotic powers of the King. It fell to the mob with casualties on both sides. ‘Is this a rebellion?’ asked King Louis when told of the fall of the Bastille. ‘No, sire,’ replied the Duc de la Rochefoucault-Liancourt, who had given him the news, ‘it is a revolution.’

There had been revolutions before. In 1649 the English had executed their king, Charles I, and in 1688 replaced his son, James II, with monarchs more to their liking – James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. More recently the British colonists in North America had broken their ties with their king, George III, and had established a republic. However, these revolutions were essentially conservative – a change of personnel at the top of a ruling class. None had the profound, far-reaching and long-lasting consequences of the French Revolution.

Rather, as the historian Michael Burleigh has pointed out, the French Revolution – that ‘singular accomplishment of moralising lawyers, renegade priests and hack journalists’
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– was the ‘distant progeny’ of an earlier upheaval in European history, the Protestant Reformation. ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’
– Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – took the place of ‘sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia’
–
salvation by scripture, faith and grace alone –
as a slogan for undoing the existing order. What transpired in France in the last decade of the eighteenth century would influence the course of European history well into the twentieth
century and affect in particular those who became embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair – the Jews, the Germans and the Catholic Church.

2: The Liberation of the Jews

On 21 September 1791, the French National Assembly voted to remove all the existing discriminatory laws affecting Jews and admit ‘those who took the civic oath and committed themselves to fulfil those duties imposed by the constitution’ to full citizenship with the same rights as anyone else. It was a momentous change because for 1,200 years France had been a Catholic nation in which men and women from the different regions of France ‘felt united and distinguished by their overwhelming Catholicism, even though the majority of them had still to learn how to speak or write the French language’.
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Protestants, at first tolerated under King Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes, had been either driven into exile or obliged to convert to Catholicism when that Edict was revoked by King Louis XIV in 1685. Jews had been expelled from France in the Middle Ages; the only substantial communities at the time of the Revolution were in Alsace, annexed by France as recently as the seventeenth century. These communities had existed in and around the River Rhine since the time of the Roman Empire. ‘After the conquest of Judah by Pompey,’ we are told by Max Dimont, ‘Jews and Romans became inseparable. Behind the Roman armies carrying the Imperial Eagles marched the Jews carrying the banners of free enterprise.’
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Trier, from which the name Dreyfus is derived, was the largest Roman city north of the Alps.

It would be more than fifty years before any other European nation would follow suit in extending full civil rights to Jews, and the new law was not passed without dissenting voices. Jean-François Rebel, a deputy from Alsace, begged the Assembly to consider the views of his gentile constituents, that ‘numerous, industrious and honest class . . . ground down by cruel hordes of Africans who have infested my region’.
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He warned that the Alsatian Jews had no desire to assimilate and, with their distinctive dress, dietary laws and Germanic dialect, would constitute ‘a nation of aliens within France’. There were also rabbinical misgivings because ‘implicit in return for this emancipation was a commitment to assimilation, the abandonment of the idea of a “Jewish Nation”’.
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However, the overwhelming reaction of Jews living in France was one of joy. After centuries of oppression and discrimination, Jews were to enjoy the same liberty, equality and fraternity as the rest of mankind. When the French revolutionary armies threw back those of Prussians, Austrians and émigré French aristocrats and crossed the Rhine, they were welcomed by Jews. ‘Jews even composed messianic hymns in honour of their liberators.’
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Full civic equality meant that Jews in France could attend schools and universities, and enter the professions, on an equal footing with any other citizen. They could also take advantage of the transformation of France in the course of the nineteenth century from a largely agricultural to a money economy. ‘Economic changes’, wrote Abram Sacher, ‘were more crucial in winning political equality for Jews than all the glittering generality about the rights of man and the sanctity of the human personality.’
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Jews emerged from the ghettos into a world in the midst of an industrial revolution that opened unimagined opportunities for social and material progress. Well equipped by their experience and connections, many Jews entered into commercial and financial enterprises and distinguished themselves.
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In France, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a doubling of industrial production, a tripling of foreign trade, a fivefold increase in the use of steam power, a sixfold increase in the railways; and among the bankers and entrepreneurs who made huge fortunes ‘there was a disproportionate number of “outsiders” – notably men of Protestant or Jewish origin’,
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a number from families with affiliates in other nations such the Rothschilds (Germany and Britain) and the Ephrussis (Austria and Russia).

The continuing restrictions imposed upon Jews in the Austrian Empire or the United Kingdom of Great Britain did not mean that Jews in those nations were without influence. At the Congress of Vienna, held after the defeat of Napoleon, the question of Jewish emancipation was supported by the ministers of Protestant Prussia, Wilhelm von Humbolt and Karl-August von Hardenberg, and also by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. During the negotiations Castlereagh received a letter on the matter from the head of the London branch of the Rothschild family, with a covering note from the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool ‘assuring him that “Mr. Rothschild has been a very useful friend” and adding, by way of postcript: “I don’t know what we should have done without him last year”’.
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Prince Metternich, and many other members of the Austrian aristocracy, were also intimately involved with the Rothschilds. Salomon von Rothschild had been ennobled as Baron Rothschild and many of the grand aristocratic families banked with the Rothschilds, among them Metternich’s relatives, the Zichys and the Esterhazys. Metternich’s third wife, Melanie Zichy-Farrari, was a close friend of Salomon’s sisters-in-law, Betty Rothschild in Paris and Adelheid Rothschild in Naples. Salomon’s brothers served as honorary Austrian consuls in Frankfurt, London and Paris.

It was this power exerted over governments by bankers such as the Rothschilds that gave rise to the idea of a secretive supranational Jewish lobby known at the time of the Dreyfus Affair as the ‘syndicate’. In France its influence was thought to have been responsible for the release of Jews in Damascus who had been charged with the ritual murder of a Capucin friar in 1840. The investigation had been conducted by the French Consul in Damascus, the Comte de Ratti-Menton. ‘It is with real distress’, he wrote in a dispatch to Paris, ‘that, bit by bit, I have had to discard my scepticism in the face of the evidence.’
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After torture by the Ottoman authorities, the suspects confessed. However, when the news reached western Europe, a radical Jewish deputy in Paris, Adolphe Crémieux, and a leading member of the Jewish community in London, Sir Moses Montefiore, lobbied for their release. A subscription was raised to send these two eminent representatives of their respective communities to Cairo: Nathaniel Rothschild in London contributed £1,000.

The French government led by Adolphe
Thiers backed the French Consul but the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, took up the cause of the Damascus Jews. Based on his premise that ‘Britain has no permanent friends, only permanent interests’, Palmerston sought to counter the influence that was exercised by Russia as protector of the Orthodox and by France as protector of the Catholic communities in the Ottoman Empire by championing the Jews living in the Middle East. Diplomatic pressure was put on the Ottoman Vizier in Cairo, Muhammed Ali, who, when he saw British gunboats off the coast at Alexandria, ordered that the Damascus Jews be set free.

In the course of the controversy over the Damascus Jews, the Talmud had been scrutinised by European scholars and, while nothing was found that called for ritual murder, certain passages ‘damaging to the good name of the Jewish people’ came to light such as that in which the enlightened codifier of the Talmud, Maimonides, ruled that ‘it is forbidden to save a Kuti
*
when he is near death; for example, if you were to see that one of them has fallen into the sea, you should not pull him out’.
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In Britain, most newspapers followed the government line that the charges of ritual murder against the Damascus Jews were vile calumnies; however,
The Times
declared itself to be open-minded on the Damascus Affair, and some of the readers’ letters showed that the government’s judgement was not necessarily accepted by the public at large. ‘I, and I firmly believe, nine-tenths of my fellow-countrymen’, wrote one reader, ‘share the perception of the enormous guilt of the Jews of Damascus, brought home to them by proofs which, had they been before an English tribunal, would long ere have sealed their fate.’
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‘Anti-Semites,’ wrote Albert S. Lindemann, ‘and even some Europeans who were not particularly hostile to Jews, saw in the Damascus Affair evidence of a central contradiction in the ideal of Jewish emancipation. A Jewish nation remained Jews; no matter in which country they lived and in spite of their protestations of modern-style patriotism, they still held the interest of their Jewish brethren to be higher than those of their adopted country.’
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This was felt most acutely in France, humiliated and discredited throughout the Middle East. It also revealed the limitations to the power of their elected representatives. When objections were raised to the appointment of the Comte de Ratti-Menton as French consul in Canton, his cousin, Vicomtesse Vadresse de Sur, wrote pleading that this new posting should be allowed to proceed. With a proper appreciation of where power now lay, she wrote not to France’s Prime Minister or Foreign Minister but to Baron James de Rothschild who replied magnanimously that he would not veto the appointment. ‘My sentiments never permit me to hit a man when he is down.’
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3: The Catholic Church

At the time of the French Revolution, it was not Jewish bankers who were perceived to own a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth but the Catholic Church. Endowments by the devout over the centuries had made Catholic dioceses and monastic foundations substantial landowners: the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris owned land equivalent to two arrondissements of Paris.
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Moreover, bishoprics, abbacies and other ecclesiastical posts had become sinecures for the aristocracy. The future statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, forced to become a priest by his family because he had a club foot, secured an income of 18,000 livres a year as the absentee abbot of Saint-Denis in Rheims even before he was ordained a priest and, at the age of thirty-five, was consecrated bishop of the wealthy diocese of Autun. The young François-René de Chateaubriand obtained an income of 200,000 livres a year as a notional Knight of Malta. Many of the ordinary parish priests were poor, and ‘the incomes of the 135 bishops varied from ten thousand livres per annum to two hundred thousand’, but only ‘One bishop in 1789 was from a bourgeois background; the rest were aristocrats, 65 per cent of them from families whose nobility emerged in illustrious mists before the year 1400.’
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