The Proud Tower (33 page)

French anti-Semitism, like its virulent appearances elsewhere in history, required the juncture of an instigator with circumstance. The instigator in this case was the previously unknown Edouard Drumont, who in the wake of the collapse of the Union Générale wrote a two-volume book,
La France Juive
, published in 1886 to instant success. It was a polemic compounded of Rothschilds and ritual murder, not a philosophical treatise like Gobineau’s earlier
Essay in Racial Inequality
, which had its greatest appeal across the Rhine where the inhabitants were engaged in constructing a theory of a master race. Drumont’s central theme was the evil power of Jewish finance. The book was widely read and reprinted and its author, a hearty, red-faced, thick-bodied man with a bushy black beard, thrived. In 1889 in association with the Marquis de Morès he founded the National Anti-Semitic League to fight “the clandestine and merciless conspiracy” of Jewish finance which “jeopardizes daily the welfare, honor and security of France.” At its first big public meeting the Duc d’Uzès, the Duc de Luynes, Prince Poniatowski, the Comte de Breteuil and other members of the aristocracy felt gratified at finding themselves seated next to real workmen from the butcher shops and slaughterhouses who in turn were delighted to find themselves sharing their opinions with noblemen.

After the success of the book and the League, Drumont’s next step was inevitably a newspaper. In 1892 he founded
La Libre Parole
, just at the time when the anger of bilked investors in the Panama loan fell upon its two leading promoters, Cornelius Herz and the Baron de Reinach, both Jews. Drumont’s paper in foaming philippics and raging pursuit of the evildoers, became a power. It undertook at the same time a campaign to drive Jewish officers out of the Army as a result of which two of them fought duels with Drumont and the Marquis de Morès. The Marquis went to the unusual length of killing his opponent and was charged with foul play but acquitted in court.

When Dreyfus was condemned,
La Libre Parole
explained his motive to the public: revenge for slights received and the desire of his race for the ruin of France. “
A mort! A mort les juifs!
” the crowd howled outside the railings of the parade ground where the ceremony of his degradation took place.

The cry was heard by the Paris correspondent of the Vienna
Neue Freie Presse
, Theodor Herzl, who was standing amongst the crowd. “Where?” he wrote later. “In France. In republican, modern, civilised France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The shock clarified old problems in his mind. He went home and wrote
Der Judenstaat
, whose first sentence established its aim, “restoration of the Jewish state,” and within eighteen months he organized, out of the most disorganized and fractional community in the world, the first Zionist Congress of two hundred delegates from fifteen countries. Dreyfus gave the impulse to a new factor in world affairs which had waited for eighteen hundred years.

The first Dreyfusard was Bernard Lazare, a left-wing intellectual and journalist who edited a little review called
Political and Literary Conversations
while he earned a living on the staff of the Catholic and Conservative
Echo de Paris.
An Anarchist in politics, a Symbolist in literature, and a Jew, he wore bifocals over shortsighted eyes whose gaze, said his friend Péguy, “was lit by a flame fifty centuries old.” Suspecting the verdict from the start, he had learned from the commandant of the prison that Dreyfus, far from having confessed, had never ceased to declare his innocence. With the help of Mathieu Dreyfus, who was convinced of his brother’s innocence, and after a prolonged search for evidence, hampered by silence, obfuscation and closed doors, Lazare finally brought out a pamphlet entitled,
A
Judicial Error; the Truth About the Dreyfus Case.
Although three thousand copies had been distributed to ministers, deputies, editors, journalists, and other opinion-makers, it had been ignored. Lazare’s and Mathieu Dreyfus’ visits to men of influence succeeded no better. “They bore us with their Jew,” said Clemenceau. Comte Albert de Mun, the eminent Catholic social reformer, refused to see them and the Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, was cold. The Socialist paper,
La Petite République
, reviewing Lazare’s pamphlet, reached the required Marxist conclusion that “strikers are unjustly condemned every day without having committed treason and deserve our sympathies more than Dreyfus.” Socialists could see no cause for concern in the Affair. Under the conditions of class war, the misfortunes of a bourgeois were a matter of indifference to them. Their traditions were anti-militarist, and Dreyfus, besides being a bourgeois, was an Army officer. Miscarriage of justice as applied to a member of the ruling class was a twist they were more likely to appreciate than deplore.

But the ripples of doubt started by Lazare spread and the Dreyfusard movement was launched. It caught up Lucien Herr, librarian of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, heart of the academic world. Here the keenest students in the country were prepared by the most learned professors for careers as the future teachers of France. Herr was a believer in Socialism, a friend and preceptor of the student world. During the summer vacation of 1897 he used to ride over every afternoon to discuss ideas with his young friend, Léon Blum. One day he said point-blank, “Do you know that Dreyfus is innocent?” It took Blum a moment to place the name; then he remembered the officer convicted of treason. He was startled, having like most of the public accepted the report of Dreyfus’ confession as the official version. Herr’s influence was pervasive. “He directed our conscience and our thought,” wrote Blum. “He perceived truth so completely that he could communicate it without effort.”

Elsewhere men who had been collaborators of Gambetta in the founding of the Third Republic, and to whom the principles for which it stood were sacred, stirred and felt uneasy. Two especially became active: Senator Ranc, a leading Radical and a member of the first Government of the Republic, and the younger Joseph Reinach, who in his twenties had been Gambetta’s chief secretary. As the nephew and son-in-law of the venal Baron de Reinach of Panama ill-fame, he had cause for extra sensitivity, although it was less Jewish sympathies than concern for French justice that moved him. They found their champion in a man universally respected, Senator Scheurer-Kestner, Vice-President of the Senate, a founder of the Republic and onetime editor of Gambetta’s paper
La République Française.

As a native of Alsace who after 1871 had chosen to live in France, he had been appointed Senator for life and was regarded as the embodiment of the lost province. A dignified gentleman of substance, old family and quiet elegance, he represented the aristocracy of the Republic. When a reporter from
La Libre Parole
came to interview him and sat himself down in an armchair, “the Duc de Saint-Simon himself,” it was said, “could not have been more scandalized” than Scheurer-Kestner, who was outraged at anyone from such a paper entering his house. When he learned that the Army had suppressed evidence showing the man on Devil’s Island to be innocent and Esterhazy to be the real author of the document used to convict him, he was horrified.

This evidence had been discovered by an Army officer, Colonel Picquart, who had been appointed new chief of the Counter-Espionage Bureau some months after Dreyfus’ conviction. When he presented his findings to the Chief and Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse, he met a wall of refusal either to prosecute Esterhazy or release Dreyfus. When Picquart insisted, Gonse asked him why he made such a point of bringing Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island.

“But, General, he is innocent!” Picquart replied. He was told that this was “unimportant,” the case could not be reopened, General Mercier was involved, and the evidence against Esterhazy was not definitive. When Picquart suggested that matters would be worse if the Dreyfus family, known to be investigating, turned up the truth, Gonse replied, “If you say nothing no one will know.”

Picquart stared at him. “That is abominable, General. I will not carry this secret to my grave,” he said, and left the room. Trained as a soldier, as loyal and obedient to the service as any other officer, with no ax to grind, no personal motive, nothing to gain in public notoriety as was to move later actors in the Affair, Picquart acted then and thereafter, at certain risk to his career, from purely abstract respect for justice. He was, if anything, anti-Semitic, and on one occasion, when asked to take Reinach, who was a reserve officer, on his staff during maneuvers, had objected, saying, “I can’t stand the Jew.” For Dreyfus he cared no more than for Reinach. It was the fact that the Army could knowingly condone punishment of an innocent man that he could not stomach. When he would not desist in his pressure he was transferred to an infantry regiment in Tunisia. Subject to Army discipline he could make no public disclosures, but he contrived a brief return to Paris on leave during which he disclosed the facts to a friend who was a lawyer, and left a sealed report to be given in the event of his death to the President of France. Subsequently, when his disclosure became known, he was recalled, arrested, tried and convicted of misconduct, discharged from the Army, later rearrested and imprisoned for a year.

Meanwhile his information had been given by his lawyer to Scheurer-Kestner, a personal friend, who instantly spoke out, asserting Dreyfus’ innocence to fellow Senators and demanding a judicial review. He bore down upon the Government, harassed the Ministers of War and Justice, repeatedly interviewed the Premier and President. They stalled, put him off and promised “inquiries.” National elections were due in May, 1898, only eight months off. A retrial would raise a howl by the mischief-making press and involve a public inquiry into Army affairs that, once started, could lead anywhere, with undesirable effects both on Russia, with whom France had recently concluded a military alliance, and on Germany. These matters of state, foreign and domestic, outweighed a question of justice for a solitary man on a distant rock; besides, to men who want to stay in office, the nature of justice is not so clear as to those outside. The ministers allowed themselves to be persuaded by the General Staff, on the strength of Major Henry’s forged letter, which they had no reason to suspect, that Dreyfus must be guilty after all and Esterhazy probably an accomplice, or some other sort of unfortunate complication not justifying the terrible disturbance of a retrial.

Scheurer-Kestner hammered in vain. He thereupon published a letter in
Le Temps
informing the public that documents existed “which demonstrate that the culprit is not Captain Dreyfus,” and demanding a formal inquiry by the Minister of War to “establish the guilt of another.”

At the same time,
Figaro
published letters from Esterhazy to a cast-off mistress, one in facsimile, written during the Boulangist era, which expressed disgust for his own country in startling terms. “If I were told that I would die tomorrow as a Captain of Uhlans sabering Frenchmen, I should be perfectly happy,” he had written, and added a wish to see Paris “under a red sun of battle taken by assault and handed over to be looted by 100,000 drunken soldiers.” These extraordinary effusions of venom and hate for France in the handwriting of the
bordereau
^*
on which Dreyfus’ guilt hung seemed to the Dreyfusards like a miracle. They thought their battle won. But they learned, as Reinach wrote, that “justice does not come down from heaven; it must be conquered.” The journals of the Right immediately denounced the letters as forgeries fabricated by the “Syndicate.” Esterhazy himself, a gambler in debt, a speculator on the Bourse, a fashionable and witty scoundrel, married to the daughter of a marquis, a man of sallow and cadaverous countenance with a crooked nose, a sweeping black Magyar moustache, the “hands of a brigand” and the air, wrote an observer, “of an elegant and treacherous gipsy or a great wild beast, alert and master of itself,” was now transformed by the Nationalist press into a hero and his innocence made an article of faith.

To the same degree, Scheurer-Kestner was vilified and the public encouraged to demonstrate on the day he was to make a statement in the Senate. Tall, upright, pale, with high forehead, white beard and the austere air of a Huguenot of the Sixteenth Century, he walked to the tribune with measured step, as if he were mounting a scaffold. Outside in the foggy winter afternoon, crowds filled the Luxembourg Gardens howling against a man of whom they knew nothing. He read his appeal to reason in a slow heavy voice to antagonistic Senators who punctuated his speech with boos and insulting laughter. His reminder that he was the last deputy of French Alsace, which at any other time would have moved them, was met with cold silence, and, when he finished, hostile looks followed his return to the floor. A month later in the annual re-election for officers of the Senate he was defeated for the vice-presidency, the office he had held for nearly the life of the Republic.

His battle aroused the formidable support of Clemenceau, the government-breaker,
l’homme sinistre
, as the Conservatives called him, fearsome in debate, in opposition, in journalism, in conversation and in duels with pistol or épée. He fought a duel with Paul Déroulède over Panama and with Drumont over the Affair. He was a doctor by training, a drama critic who promoted Ibsen, an old and intimate friend of Claude Monet, whose work, he wrote in 1895, was guiding man’s visual sense “toward a more subtle and penetrating vision of the world.” He commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec to illustrate one of his books and Gabriel Fauré to write music for one of his plays. “Only the artists are on the right path,” he said at the end of his life. “It may be they can give this world some beauty but to give it reason is impossible.”

Out of office and Parliament since Panama, Clemenceau, when persuaded of the facts about Dreyfus by Scheurer-Kestner, saw the shape of a great cause and seized upon it, though not only as a vehicle of political ambition. To Clemenceau the menace of Germany was the dominant fact of political life. “Who”—he demanded, enraged by Esterhazy’s vision of Prussian Uhlans sabering Frenchmen—“who among our leaders has been associated with this man? Who is protecting Esterhazy?… To whom have the lives of French soldiers and the defense of France been surrendered?” After Germany came anti-clericalism. “The French Army is in the hands of the Jesuits.… Here is the root of the entire Dreyfus case.” Every day in
l’Aurore
he cut and thrust at the issues of the Affair, writing 102 articles on it in the next 109 days, and altogether nearly five hundred over the next three years, enough, when collected, to fill five volumes. Through all rang the bell of justice. “There can be no patriotism without justice.… As soon as the right of one individual is violated, the right of everyone is jeopardized.… The true patriots are we who fight to obtain justice and to liberate France from the yoke of gold-braided infallibility.”