The Dreyfus Affair (41 page)

The Review Commission, asked to decide whether Dreyfus should be allowed to appeal against his conviction or not, met on 21 September 1898, but failed to agree. Brisson persuaded a majority of his colleagues in the Council of Ministers to allow the appeal to proceed all the same. The Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé, was particularly keen to remove this divisive issue from the political arena by placing it
sub judice
because of the confrontation with Britain over Fashoda. The motion was carried by six votes to four: General Chanoine abstained.

The move enraged the nationalists. Against a background of industrial unrest, rumours circulated of an impending coup led by Generals de Pellieux or Zurlinden. The diplomatic defeat of France in its face-off with Britain over Fashoda fuelled the nationalist hysteria. Brisson and his government were perceived to be weak and, before a mob of protesters outside the National Assembly on 25 October, General Chanoine resigned. This precipitated a collapse of Brisson’s government: a vote of confidence was lost by 286 votes to 254. However, the permission to allow an appeal could not be rescinded. On 27 October, two days after the fall of the government, proceedings opened at the Cour de Cassation
– France’s highest appeal court – with a request by the
rapporteur
,
*
Alphonse Bard, that the judges should ‘bring the truth to light’: ‘Removed from every other consideration than that of justice, invulnerable to any suggestion, insensitive to threats and to outrage, you have before you a great task. You will appreciate what it requires and you will do what your conscience dictates.’
8

On 29 October, after two days of deliberation, the presiding judge of the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation, Judge Louis Loew, declared the request by Lucie Dreyfus ‘admissible in its present form’. The appeal would be heard.

2: Sub Judice

Three Ministers of War had resigned, and now a government had fallen, as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. A new government was formed by Charles Dupuy, the Opportunist republican who had been Prime Minister at the time of Dreyfus’s conviction. He was in a better position than most to know the truth or falsity of many of the stories circulated by the anti-Dreyfusards – for example, that Dreyfus had confessed his guilt to Captain Lebrun-Renault. However, for all the courage he had shown five years before when the anarchist Vaillant had thrown a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, he was aware that there was something more explosive and potentially destructive in the Dreyfus Affair. To placate the Dreyfusards he chose a Protestant civilian, Charles de Freycinet, as Minister of War, while to reassure the right he appointed as Minister of Justice Georges Lebret, a professor of law from Caen in Normandy, who was approved of by Drumont and
La Libre Parole
for his anti-Dreyfusard views.

The sympathies of the new ministers were of less significance now that Dreyfus’s appeal was being heard by the judges of the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation. What the anti-Dreyfusard officers had always feared had come to pass: the case had been transferred from a military to a civilian jurisdiction; and the tears of the old Attorney General Jean-Pierre Manau and the elevated language of the
rapporteur
Alphonse Barr revealed where their sympathies lay. There was a barrage of abusive rhetoric from the anti-Dreyfusard press. The presiding judge, Louis Loew, who was a Protestant from Alsace, was called ‘the Jew Lévy’ by Henri Rochefort in
L’Intransigeant
. Rochefort said that the judges had been bought by the syndicate like ‘bar girls’, and that they should have their eyelids cut off by ‘a duly trained torturer’, and

large spiders of the most poisonous variety placed on their eyes to gnaw away the pupils and crystalline lenses until there were nothing left in the cavities now devoid of sight. Then, all the hideous blind men would be brought to a pillory erected before the Palais de Justice in which the crime was committed and a sign would be placed on their chests: ‘This is how France punishes traitors who try to sell her to the enemy!’
9

Less fantastical anti-Dreyfusards, such as the Catholic convert from Judaism Arthur Meyer, the editor of
Le Gaulois
, also wrote that the judges had been bought and were out to undermine the army ‘out of hatred for the sabre’. Once they had destroyed France’s defences, they would retire from the fray with ‘their fortunes made’. Even ‘so comparatively sagacious and so generous a man as Albert de Mun’, wrote Denis Brogan, ‘saw in the agitation for reopening the Dreyfus case merely a conspiracy to make the French soldier distrust his officers, to cast doubts and suspicions on his leaders’.
10
Each side saw the case of Dreyfus as a proxy for a more momentous struggle: for science, progress, liberty, democracy and above all justice for the Dreyfusards; for the anti-Dreyfusards, the survival of France as an ordered, wholesome, moral, Catholic nation, secure against its Protestant enemies across the Channel and the Rhine, imbued with a true fraternity that acknowledged spiritual truths and transcendental values, not subject to plunder and manipulation by an anonymous and self-interested plutocracy.

Each side had its bogeymen. For the anti-Dreyfusards, it was the syndicate – the secretive, transnational network of world Jewry with its allies, or stooges, the Protestants and Freemasons. For the Dreyfusards it was the Catholic Church, in particular the Society of Jesus with its sinister and secretive power exercised through the confessional and its schools; its members taking oaths of blind obedience to their General in Rome – the ‘black pope’ – and the Pope himself. Unlike the amorphous nature of the Jewish syndicate, here was an enemy for all to see – subversives in black soutanes who despite the patriotic rhetoric of their pupils, the Postards
*
and Saint-Cyrians, owed their first obedience to an Italian and taught that the end justified any means so long as it was
ad maiorem Dei gloria
, for the greater glory of God.

As Michael Burleigh has pointed out, the creation of these bogeymen was exacerbated as a convenience by the popular press in which cartoonists could reduce ‘complex issues to crude and sometimes vicious stereotypes, for it was far easier to depict a freemason or a Jew than a liberal, or a Jesuit rather than a moderate lay Catholic’.
11
The term ‘Jesuitical’ proliferates in the anti-clerical and Dreyfusard invective – in the speeches of Clemenceau and Jaurès – particularly in relation to the French officer corps and the army’s High Command. Dupuy, in his first speech as Prime Minister to the National Assembly, referred to ‘clerical influences’ within the army. For the Reinachs, wrote Ruth Harris, their ‘Franco-Judaism was inseparable from their anti-clericalism’. Joseph Reinach in a letter to his brother rebukes him for being ‘more dirty-minded than the Catholic priests who screw chickens and goats’.
12

The particular
bête noire
of the anti-Dreyfusards was the Jesuit Père Stanislas du Lac de Fugères. Joseph Reinach claimed he was ‘astir in every intrigue’.
13
This suave and intelligent priest came from a family of the lesser French nobility that traced its pedigree back to the thirteenth century. Though born in Paris, he had served his novitiate in the Jesuit house at Issenheim in Alsace. In October 1871, at the age of thirty-six, he had succeeded Père Léon Ducoudray, who had been shot by the Communards, as rector of the École Sainte-Geneviève on the rue des Postes where pupils were coached for the entry exams for Saint-Cyr. When the Jesuits were expelled from France by the government of Jules Ferry in 1880, he had founded a school in Canterbury in England.

Joseph Reinach’s contention that the Jesuits in general, and Père du Lac in particular, directed the anti-Dreyfusard campaign as part of a wider plan to foster a
coup d’état
and replace the anti-clerical Republic with a pro-Catholic authoritarian regime is found in a number of commentaries on the Affair. Hannah Arendt in
The Origins of Totalitarianism
wrote that ‘the Jesuits were not prepared to tolerate the existence of officers immune to the influence of the Confessional’
14
and had a ‘coup d’état policy’ that they ‘and certain anti-Semites were trying to introduce with the help of the army’.
15
One contemporary historian, Robert Tombs, regards the charge that ‘the Jesuits through their influence over Catholic army officers were running the anti-Dreyfus plot in order to destroy the Republic’ a ‘more plausible accusation’ than some of the wilder charges against the order;
16
another, Ralph Gibson, calls the idea ‘demonstrably a total delusion’.
17
None of the Dreyfusard conspiracy theories explain why the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine, or Commissaire Armand Cochefert, should have been susceptible to the influence of Jesuits.

Ruth Harris writes of Père du Lac that ‘there is no hard evidence that he was responsible for directing the military cover-up, as the Dreyfusards claim’,
18
but she does not enumerate the soft evidence. She tells her readers that Père du Lac was asked by the husband of Picquart’s mistress, Pauline Monnier, to guide her conscience; that ‘she was said to have accused du Lac of breaking the seal of the confessional, though what confidence he broke, if any, has never been determined’; and that, after temporarily breaking with her lover, Mme Monnier rejected du Lac’s spiritual direction and resumed her affair with Picquart. Christian Vigouroux suggests that du Lac told Boisdeffre about Picquart’s adulterous affair, though he concedes that his source ‘is not necessarily an expert on religious matters’.
19
Ruth Harris also tells us that it is ‘impossible to know’ whether Père du Lac was the model for the Jesuit schoolteacher in Octave Mirbeau’s novel
Sébastien Roch
, Père de Kern, who grooms and eventually rapes one of his pupils
,
but mentions the speculation as an example of how ‘clerical, spiritual and sexual violation became a central theme of Dreyfusards wishing to demonize their opponents’.
20

It is likely that some in the Society of Jesus accepted the hypothesis of a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to de-Catholicise France as outlined in
Civiltà Cattolica
in Rome in 1889. The statutes which excluded Jews from the Society opened it to the charge of institutionalised anti-Semitism.
21
There are also connections to be made between Père du Lac and some of the anti-Dreyfusards. He brought Drumont back to the practice of the Catholic faith, and was a friend of the Comte de Mun, who presided over the Administrative Council that ran the École Sainte-Geneviève, and was said to be Boisdeffre’s confessor, though he told Reinach that he knew him ‘only in passing’.
22

In an attempt to link the Jesuits to
La Libre Parole
, the anti-Dreyfusards pointed out not just the pastoral link between du Lac and Drumont but also the fact that a M. Odelin, who had administered the École Sainte-Geneviève for the Jesuits until 1890, had invested money in
La Libre Parole
when it was founded two years later. However, it would seem that Odelin parted company with the Jesuits because of a difference of opinion, and pulled out of
La Libre Parole
for the same reason. Thus the link between the Jesuits and
La Libre Parole
is a tenuous one. It was Père du Lac, after all, who upbraided Jules Guérin for attacking a Jewish convert to Catholicism called Dreyfus (see p. 36 above).

Was Père du Lac an
éminence grise
who, through his influence on Boisdeffre, controlled the army through its General Staff? A Dreyfusard journalist described how ‘in his cell there is a crucifix on the wall and permanently open on the writing table, an annotated copy of the Army List’.
23
During du Lac’s tenure as Rector of the École Sainte-Geneviève between 1872 and 1880, a total of 213 of his pupils won a place at the École Centrale, 328 at the École Polytechnique and 830 at Saint-Cyr. It is likely that a number of these former pupils looked back on their Rector with affection. However, of the 180 officers in the General Staff in 1898, only a dozen had been educated at Jesuit schools,
24
or, by a count provided in a letter to
The Times
by Comte Albert de Mun, ‘nine or ten’. ‘Moreover,’ as de Mun pointed out to the readers of the English newspaper,

these officers are chosen exclusively from among the first twelve in the École Supérieure de Guerre, admission to which school is by competitive examination. I might also reveal . . . that of the officers concerned in the Dreyfus case not one has been brought up by the Jesuits, neither General Mercier any more than General Gonse or General Pellieux, nor Colonel Henry any more than Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam, nor Lieutenant Picquart any more than Commandant Esterhazy.
25

Certainly, General de Boisdeffre had spent two years in the Jesuit school of Vaugirard, in Paris, but he spent eight years at the secular lycée in Alençon from which he gained entry to Saint-Cyr. Neither Billot, Cavaignac, Zurlinden nor Chanoine had been educated by the Jesuits. The only general known to be a devout Catholic was Boisdeffre. ‘I have known General de Boisdeffre for nearly twenty years,’ Maurice Paléologue told the Prime Minister, Charles Dupuy, on 29 December 1898. ‘Henry’s suicide was a terrible blow to him. Since then he has shut himself up in the country, in silence, prayer and poverty. If tomorrow I were told that he had become a Carthusian or a Trappist, I should not be in the least surprised.’
26