The Dreyfus Affair (25 page)

Lazare now joined the lawyer Maître Demange, the two prison governors, Forzinetti and Patin, and the Protestant doctor from Le Havre, Dr Gilbert, in the ranks of the Dreyfusards. Lazare also recruited, in August 1896, Joseph Reinach, Deputy for the Basse-Alpes in the National Assembly, whose brother Salomon, an eminent archaeologist, was a friend from his days in the École Normale Supérieure of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the son-in-law of Lucie Dreyfus’s aunt Eugénie. They were the sons of a German banker, Hermann-Joseph Reinach, and nephews of the notorious Baron Jacques de Reinach of the Panama Canal scandal. Joseph was also the baron’s son-in-law: he had fallen in love with an English girl, but family pressure prevented him from taking a gentile wife and so he had married his cousin.

The Reinachs were immensely rich and academically brilliant. Salomon was a curator of the Musée des Antiquités and a member of the Institut de France, and the youngest brother Théodore was also a member of the Institut and a professor of Ancient Greek history at the Collège de France. Joseph had served as private secretary to Léon Gambetta, taking over as editor of Gambetta’s
La République Française
, and although his political career had faltered because of the Panama Canal scandal, he retained strong links among the Opportunist republicans.

Joseph Reinach and his brothers exemplified the opportunities open to Jews in the Third Republic. As Ruth Harris puts it, they ‘epitomized a particular kind of Republican social ascent’. Their father had left Germany to live in France and take French nationality precisely because of the equality guaranteed by the Republic. As a young man, thanks to his father’s fortune, Joseph ‘lived like a princeling’
30
in a large house in Paris with liveried servants and private secretaries. He pursued women ‘in plunging necklines’, wrote Léon Daudet, ‘with the gallantries of a satisfied gorilla’.
31
Inevitably, because he was a rich Jew of German extraction, and the nephew of a corrupt uncle, he was vilified by Drumont as the principal agent of the Jewish syndicate. For this reason, Reinach wanted a gentile to front the campaign for a review, but subsequently he became one of the most prominent and fearless Dreyfusards, writing polemics, fighting duels and writing a seven-volume history of the Affair.

Bernard Lazare, thanks to the funds provided by Mathieu and possibly Reinach, was now free to turn down other journalistic assignments and devote all his time and energy to a polemical essay exposing the
prima facie
miscarriage of justice – the lack of conclusive proof against Dreyfus, the naked partiality of the examining magistrate, d’Ormescheville, and the procedural irregularities of the court martial itself. He was a talented writer – precise but also impassioned – and the early drafts of his pamphlet were considered too intemperate by Mathieu and Demange. Demange felt it would be impolitic to provoke with abusive rhetoric the very people whose help they would need. He still believed that discreet lobbying was the most effective way to help Alfred. Lazare felt frustrated, ‘waiting in a state of impatience, feverish to enter into action’.
32
The press had lost interest in Alfred Dreyfus but not in the Jews. In May 1895, it was proposed in the National Assembly that Jews be resettled in the interior of France, ‘where treason is less dangerous’. Alfred Naquet spoke in the debate to denounce the proposal, but as the Jew who had pushed through the law permitting divorce he was howled down by the deputies on the right.

This fracas provoked a denunciation of anti-Semitism by France’s most successful novelist, Émile Zola. His defence of the Jews, in an article entitled ‘Pour les Juifs’, was doubled-edged:

the Jews have their faults, their vices: they are accused of being a nation in the nation, of being . . . a kind of international sect without real homeland; above all, of carrying in their blood a need for lucre, a love for money, a prodigious intelligence for business which, in less than a century, has led to the accumulation of enormous fortunes in their hands. But these separatist Jews, so poorly absorbed into the nation, overly avid, obsessed with the conquest of gold, are in fact the creation of Christians, the work of our eighteen hundred years of imbecilic persecution. They have been restricted to deplorable neighbourhoods, like lepers; why be surprised, then, that in the prison of their ghetto, they have tightened their family bonds!
33

Zola was not yet a Dreyfusard, and his intervention in defence of France’s Jews may have seemed to some problematic. Like Lazare, he did not appear to dispute the anti-Semitic stereotype but merely blamed it on the eighteen hundred years of ‘imbecilic persecution’. Stereotypical Jews crop up as characters in his novels, such as the Jewish bankers Steiner in
Nana
(1880) and Gunderman in
L’Argent
(1891). In
L’Argent
, Zola describes a group of brokers trading in the shares of defunct companies as ‘an unclean Jewry’ with ‘fat, shining faces, withered profiles like those of voracious birds, an extraordinary assemblage of typical noses . . .’ The Jewish debt-collector Busch in the same novel is quite as odious as Fagin in Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
. In
La Débâcle
(1892), Zola describes ‘a whole crowd of low, preying Jews’ pillaging the bodies of dead soldiers after the Battle of Sedan.

At this stage, however, Zola was not speaking out against a miscarriage of justice but simply deploring a return of ‘the savage war of species against species’. Drumont responded in
La Libre Parole
, accusing Zola of championing the Jews to win support for his candidacy for the Académie Française and get some publicity at a time when the sales of his novels were in decline. It was certainly the case, as Ruth Harris has pointed out, that ‘his star had already passed its zenith by the early 1890s’,
34
and, since he was not a man to eschew self-promotion, there may have been something behind Drumont’s charge: more than twenty years before he had told Edmond de Goncourt that ‘his greatest pleasure, his greatest satisfaction, consisted in feeling the power and influence that he exerted over Paris through the medium of his prose’.
35
However, the immediate result of the polemic between Zola and Drumont was to give the thwarted Lazare a pretext to enter into the fray. In a number of articles published in
Le Voltaire
in May and June of 1896, he declared war on Drumont, warning him that the Jewish worm had turned. The Jews ‘have had enough of anti-Semitism; they are tired of the insults, the slander, the lies . . . and no longer satisfied with defending themselves, they would attack you; and you are not invulnerable, neither you nor your friends’.

Lazare was as good as his word: it was a case of ‘pistols at dawn’. Drumont, the passionate duellist, fired a shot at Lazare and Lazare fired a shot at Drumont. Both missed their target. Honour was satisfied. They would fight on with their pens.

3: The Cook Detective Agency

While Bernard Lazare was engaged in this polemic over anti-Semitism, but was restrained by Mathieu Dreyfus on the advice of Edgar Demange from extending that polemic into the question of Alfred’s wrongful conviction, Mathieu set up a complex and expensive operation to discover who it was who had committed the crime attributed to his brother. Still kept under surveillance because suspected of complicity in Alfred’s crime, and also – rightly – of devoting all his time and money to secure his brother’s release, Mathieu was aware that any French citizen would regard it as a patriotic duty to report any approach he might make to the police. He therefore sought assistance abroad. On 15 April 1896, Mathieu and his American brother-in-law, Sam Wimpheimer, shook off the plain-clothes policemen who were following them and made for the Gare Saint-Lazare. There they took the boat-train to London via Dieppe and Newhaven.

In London, with Wimpheimer acting as an interpreter, he engaged the services of the Cook Detective Agency. It was agreed that two of their operatives would move to Paris. A young Oxford-educated ‘perfect gentleman’ who spoke fluent French and German would attempt to get to know diplomats from the German Embassy; the other, ‘an intelligent and clever woman with a respectable air’, would move to Paris and befriend the English wife of one of the security personnel at the German Embassy who was thought to have contacts with French intelligence. She would be set up in a furnished flat in the same building as her compatriot, purporting to be in Paris to further her daughter’s education. The considerable cost of this operation was paid for by Mathieu from funds provided by the Dreyfus and Hadamard families.
36

After six months, this expensive exercise had produced no results and Alfred Dreyfus, incarcerated on Devil’s Island, seemed forgotten. The proprietor of Cook’s Detective Agency in London felt that something should be done to revive public interest and put Mathieu in touch with the Paris correspondent of the London
Daily Chronicle
, Clifford Millage. It was agreed that, to bring Alfred back to the attention of the French public, a story should be placed in a British newspaper saying that he had escaped from Devil’s Island. In return for a fee and disbursements down the line, Millage arranged for the story to appear in an obscure provincial paper, the
South Wales Argus
. It was picked up by the French press and caused the desired sensation. The imposture extended to interviews which appeared in
La Libre Parole
with the editor of the
South Wales Argus
and the captain of the SS
Nonpareil
, the ship which had supposedly taken Alfred Dreyfus to freedom.
37
However, while the name of Alfred Dreyfus may have reappeared in the pages of French newspapers, the only concrete result was to alarm officials in the Colonial Office in Paris and the prison administration in French Guiana. It was as a direct result of Mathieu’s well-meant stunt that his brother had the palisade built around his hut and was shackled to his bedstead each night.
38

9

Colonel Picquart

1: The Petit Bleu

In July 1895, Colonel Jean Sandherr resigned as head of the Statistical Section on grounds of ill-health. His deputy, the drunken Cordier, was not thought competent to replace him and Commandant Henry, who had run the department in the absence of his ailing chief, was not considered, as an officer who had risen from the ranks, of sufficient stature to take command. Sandherr was therefore replaced by a fellow Alsatian, Commandant Georges Picquart, who had played a peripheral role in the arrest and trial of Alfred Dreyfus. It was Picquart who had met Dreyfus when he arrived at the War Office to be first questioned and then arrested by Commandant du Paty de Clam on 13 October 1894. He had acted as official observer for the Minister of War and Chief of the General Staff at Dreyfus’s court martial and it was Picquart who, at Dreyfus’s degradation, had observed to a colleague, Captain Tassin, that Dreyfus seemed to be assessing the weight and value of the gold braid in his insignia of rank as it was torn from his uniform.

Picquart, born in Strasbourg in September 1854, came from a family of magistrates, civil servants and soldiers. He had an aptitude for languages, speaking French, German, English, Spanish and Italian fluently, and some Russian.
1
He was handsome, described by Paléologue as ‘tall and slim, with a rather stiff manner, high forehead, eyes rather difficult to catch between his close eyebrows’.
2
He did not suffer fools gladly. The historian Marcel Thomas observed that Picquart ‘had a high opinion of his own judgement and abilities with a contempt for those who disagreed’. He was also somewhat solitary and a man of few words: Joseph Reinach remarked that Picquart was ‘content to be alone once his work was done, and had a horror of vulgarity’.
3
Picquart remained unmarried. He had told his sister Anna in 1883 that he would only marry a wife who was pretty, a talented musician and intellectually stimulating, and had a large enough dowry for him to sustain his present standard of living.
4
Clearly, ten years later, such a woman had yet to be found.

Picquart was a Catholic, coached by the Jesuits in their school on the rue des Postes for entry to the military academy at Saint-Cyr. He had passed out fifth in his year from Saint-Cyr and second from the École de Guerre. He saw action in Africa and the Far East, was decorated with the Légion d’Honneur, promoted to the rank of captain by the age of twenty-four and to the rank of major by the age of thirty-three.
5
His detractors ascribed this rapid promotion to his close relationship in Tonking with General Nismes, also a bachelor: gossip about his possible homosexuality pursued him throughout his career.
6

Upon returning to France Picquart had taught at the École de Guerre, where Alfred Dreyfus had been one of his pupils. He had given him poor marks in topography and, when referring him to another officer, apologised ‘for having given him the Jew Dreyfus’.
7
He accepted the post as head of the Statistical Section with some reluctance, but General de Boisdeffre had insisted and, upon his appointment on 1 July 1895, Picquart was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel – the youngest in the French Army.