The Dreyfus Affair (38 page)

The German government in Berlin was in two minds about the Dreyfus Affair because, in a very real sense, the left hand of the government – the German Foreign Office – had not known what the right – the General Staff’s intelligence service – had been up to. From the very start, Graf Münster von Derneburg, the German Ambassador, assured by Schwartzkoppen that he was not involved in espionage of any kind, had repeatedly and indignantly rebutted the charges made in the French press that the
bordereau
had come from the German Embassy. It was now clear to Münster that he had been deceived.

The theft of documents from the German Embassy by agents of French intelligence was now an open secret, but Henry, with the tacit encouragement of Gonse and Boisdeffre, now went beyond the genuine
bordereau
and Henry’s forged letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen to draw the Kaiser himself into the Dreyfus Affair. An adjutant of General de Boisdeffre, Major Pauffin de Saint-Morel, briefed Henri Rochefort, the former Communard who had escaped from the penal colony in New Caledonia and was now editor of the right-wing
L’Intransigeant
, that Dreyfus had been named in a letter written by the Kaiser. On 13 December 1897, Rochefort published a story entitled ‘The Truth about the Traitor’. In it he asserted that Dreyfus, realising that anti-Semitic prejudice would thwart his ambitions in the French Army, had written to Kaiser Wilhelm to ask him if he could transfer his allegiance to him and enter the German Army with the same rank. The Kaiser had replied to Dreyfus through the German Embassy in Paris accepting his offer of a switched allegiance, but asking him to remain ‘as an officer on a special mission in France’. The Kaiser had promised that in the event of war he would ‘at once assume his proper rank in the German army’. Dreyfus had accepted this condition ‘and his treason then began, and continued up to the day of the arrest of the traitor’.
21
The French, Rochefort asserted, had photographs of the letters from the Kaiser to the German Ambassador – in one of which Alfred Dreyfus is mentioned by name. The originals had been returned to Münster von Derneburg after the Ambassador, learning of the theft, had threatened a diplomatic rupture between Germany and France.

This story of a letter mentioning Dreyfus, annotated by the Kaiser himself, was one of Henry’s inventions: he had mentioned it to Maurice Paléologue who, knowing that it was out of the question that the Kaiser would communicate with a spy, realised that such a letter, if it existed, must have been forged. This was the moment when Paléologue, a mild anti-Semite, changed his mind about the guilt of Dreyfus.

However, the letter’s existence was accepted in anti-Dreyfusard circles. The anti-Dreyfusard Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, the daughter of Jérôme, Napoleon’s brother, a
salonnière
during both the Second Empire and the Third Republic, told her fellow
salonnière
Geneviève Straus – a convinced anti-Dreyfusard – that she should know that ‘there is irrefutable evidence’ against Dreyfus. ‘I have it from General de Boisdeffre himself that the General Staff has managed to lay its hands on some letters written to Dreyfus by the Kaiser; and there is no doubt about their authenticity.’
22

Paradoxically, the only expression of sympathy for the position taken by the French General Staff and its Statistical Section came from their opposite numbers in Berlin. ‘I feel convinced that the French Government has no choice but to hold out to the very last against any rehearing of the case,’ Major Dame of the Nachrichtenbureau wrote to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. ‘They will be made absolute fools of if the truth comes to light.’ ‘One would be very glad’, he added, ‘to see poor Dreyfus rehabilitated . . . But if the whole thing comes to public knowledge it will become difficult for the Government to prevent the Press and public from attacking the Embassy.’
23

Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, now back in Germany as Colonel of the 2nd Kaiser Franz Ferdinand Regiment of the Grenadier Guards, protested later in life that he too would like to have seen Dreyfus rehabilitated. ‘My situation became extraordinarily painful,’ he wrote.

I was now faced with the question of whether I should come forward with an explanation of the lamentable and terrible mistake and so secure the liberation of the innocent man who had been condemned. If I had been able to do as I wanted to, I should certainly have taken that step! But on reflection I came to the conclusion that I would not interfere in the matter, since as matters now stood, I should not have been believed; and also, since from considerations of diplomacy, such a step would have been inexpedient.
24

Schwartzkoppen insisted that he was ordered to say nothing about the Dreyfus Affair; however, there were other reasons for lying low. Graf Münster was clearly fond of him, and it would be painful for him to discover how thoroughly he had been deceived by his military attaché. And there was Schwartzkoppen’s reputation as a competent officer: how would it look if he admitted that he had thrown top-secret and highly compromising documents – the
bordereau
and the
petit bleu
– into his waste-paper basket?

Pressure was to build up on Schwartzkoppen as the Affair progressed in the course of 1899, but at least he was no longer in Paris. This was not the case with his friend Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché, who had been dragged into the frame by mention in
L’Éclair
of the ‘Canaille de D.’ letter used as evidence against Dreyfus in his court martial. In bad French and an illegible hand, Panizzardi wrote to Schwartzkoppen complaining that his name had been brought into the affair by Esterhazy – something he considered outrageous ‘considering that I have done nothing to him and did not even know him’. Panizzardi said he knew ‘
for certain
’ that his letters to Schwartzkoppen had been stolen from Schwartzkoppen’s flat in the rue de Lille by the porter’s wife, and

are being made use of to condemn an innocent man, and all because these papers were not burnt. There is no knowing how it will all end . . . I have had plenty of hard work in sticking up for you, but that was my duty as a friend. But it must not be assumed that they know nothing here in Paris. The Scheurer-Kestner syndicate has passed round information in every direction, and many people now know all about what went on between you and E. But as they are eager to see the condemnation of Dreyfus confirmed, they all say nothing.
25

Throughout these letters from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen, there is a mix of the misery of an abandoned lover and plaintive rebuke at being left to carry the can. To prevent their being opened by the French, Panizzardi’s letters were posted in Turin; and Schwartzkoppen’s replies have not survived. But it is clear from Panizzardi’s further letters that Schwartzkoppen had rebuked him in turn. ‘You know well’, wrote Panizzardi, ‘that if anything upsets me I am very free in my language, and you must bear in mind that what I have told you and what is being said here about me cannot be exactly pleasant for me . . .’

Panizzardi reported to Schwartzkoppen that ‘the Syndicate’ were attempting to blackmail him. He had been visited by

two people who had declared that they had knowledge that I had in my possession all the receipts for the money that E. received from you; they then demanded that I should produce all these documents, or else they would start a campaign against me in the Press! I showed these two persons the door and threatened to set the public prosecutor on to them for blackmailing. You see that I am being allowed no peace, and they are trying to take advantage of my friendship with you to get further information.
26

It is clear from Panizzardi’s letters to Schwartzkoppen that the German and Italian governments understood quite well what was going on in Paris. The main objective of the German and Italian diplomatic missions was to avoid being contaminated by the seedy business of espionage. ‘My relations with your Embassy had become intolerable,’ wrote Panizzardi. ‘Every time the Ambassador saw me he always asked me one and the same question, whether you had had any relations with E. . . . I always declared that I had no knowledge of it, and in the end I put long distances between my visits, in order to evade these questions.’

The Italian Ambassador, the Conte Giuseppe Tornielli, who, like Graf Münster von Derneburg, had been kept in the dark about the secret activities of his military attaché, had belatedly learned some of the facts and made contact with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner to impress upon him that the initial ‘D’ in the letter to Panizzardi from Schwartzkoppen used as evidence against Dreyfus could not refer to Dreyfus because Panizzardi had had no contact with Dreyfus. Nor, of course, had Panizzardi had any contact with Esterhazy, and the Italians objected strongly to being linked to such a ‘scoundrel’ in any way.

The friendship between Panizzardi and Schwartzkoppen was put to the test when an Italian publicist living in Paris, Enrico Casella di Collato, arrived in Berlin at the end of December 1897 with an introduction to Schwartzkoppen from Panizzardi: Panizzardi had written on his visiting card that Casella was a personal friend and ‘a thorough gentleman’. Schwartzkoppen called on Casella on 1 January 1898 at the Kaiserhof Hotel where he was staying. When their conversation turned to the Dreyfus Affair, Casella asked him if he was personally convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. ‘Yes,’ Schwartzkoppen replied, ‘I know that he is not guilty.’ And when asked for his opinion of Esterhazy, Schwartzkoppen said: ‘I believe he’s capable of anything’ (‘Je le crois capable de tout’).

The two men got on well. They dined together at the Kaiserhof on 3 and 5 January, and Schwartzkoppen escorted Casella to the Friedrichstrasse Station when he returned to Paris on 5 January. What neither Schwartzkoppen nor Panizzardi knew at the time was that Enrico Casella had been sent to Berlin by Mathieu Dreyfus. He offered to give evidence at Zola’s trial but his offer was turned down. He then published an account of his conversation with Schwartzkoppen in the
Réforme de Bruxelles
and the
Siècle
in Paris. Panizzardi – instructed by his Ambassador the Conte Tornielli to distance himself from the Dreyfus Affair – blamed Schwartzkoppen for this indiscretion, while Schwartzkoppen felt he had been misled as to the trustworthiness of Casella by Panizzardi’s introducing him as a personal friend and thorough gentleman.

3: Cavaignac

At the time of the general election, held in France in May 1898, there was a brief lull in the agitation surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. Zola had appealed against his conviction and once again Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre faced the danger of allowing the Affair to escape from military jurisdiction. To prepare an examination of the evidence by civilians, General Billot, in his last months in office, instructed his son-in-law, a magistrate, Adolphe Wattine, assisted by a young officer, Captain Louis Cuignet, to assemble all the 365 documents relating to the Dreyfus Affair into one dossier. Their work was supervised by General Gonse, who made sure that genuine documents were mixed with forgeries, and even genuine documents altered to fit in with the narrative put forward by the General Staff.

The wisdom of this ordering of the evidence became clear when, in the course of the proceedings in the Court of Appeal considering Zola’s request, the eighty-year-old Attorney General, Jean-Pierre Manau, made an impassioned speech, insisting that those who called for a review of the case against Dreyfus ‘were neither traitors nor sell-outs, but guardians of the honour of the country’.
27
The judges allowed Zola’s appeal on a technicality: the Minister of War had brought the case against Zola, but the Minister of War had not been defamed. It was for the judges at Esterhazy’s court martial to bring the charges. On 8 April 1898, by a vote of five to two, the officers duly decided to sue Zola, and a second trial was scheduled for after the election.

During the election campaign that spring, the innocence or guilt of Alfred Dreyfus was not an issue because so few of the candidates had championed his cause. The Radical leader, Léon Bourgeois, and the Radical newspaper,
La Dépêche de Toulouse
, both took the line of
res judicata
, and the Socialists declined to become involved in this ‘bourgeois civil war’. Even Jean Jaurès, now a proponent of review, did not mention Dreyfus in his election manifesto, but that did not save him from losing his seat in Carmaux.

The plight of the innocent man languishing on Devil’s Island was not thought on the left to be something that would interest their voters; on the right, on the other hand, anti-Semitic rhetoric went down well. The Assumptionist Order organised support for ‘nationalist’ candidates through
La Croix
,
La Bonne Presse
and Justice-Equality Committees – Comités Justice-Égalité. In the Assumptionist periodicals, caricatures depicted ‘bespectacled, hook-nosed Dreyfusards’ as ‘the cerebral degenerates’ who sustained republicanism and Zola as a fat man obsessed with his own faeces.
28
With or without the help of the Assumptionists, the anti-Dreyfusards did well. Édouard Drumont was elected by a large majority in Algiers; the anti-Dreyfusards Paul Déroulède and Paul de Cassagnac also won seats. However, these conservative gains were mostly at the expense of the Radicals and Socialists and did not affect the final outcome. A majority of moderate republicans in the old chamber was replaced by a similar majority of moderate republicans in the new one.