The Dreyfus Affair (10 page)

Towards the end of August 1894, Mme Bastian delivered via the ‘ordinary route’ a new consignment of waste-paper from the German Embassy, including the contents of Major von Schwartzkoppen’s waste-paper basket. The archivist, Gribelin, entered the sum of 100 francs paid to ‘Auguste’ on 27 August,
20
but the consignment remained unexamined because on 25 August Major Henry, who was in charge of the
voie ordinaire
, took a month’s leave to hunt in his native Péronne. He did not return to work until 25 September, and it was only some days later that he examined the contents of Schwartzkoppen’s waste-paper basket.

Among the waste-paper he found a note torn into six pieces which, when pieced together, read as follows:

With no news suggesting that you would like to see me, I am sending you, in the meantime, sir, some interesting information:

1. A note on the hydraulic brake on the 120mm cannon and the way in which it performs;

2. A note on covering troops (some modification will be made in the new plan);

3. A note on a modification made to artillery formations;

4. A note relating to Madagascar;

5. The
Proposal for a Firing Manual
for the field artillery (14 March 1894).

This last document is extremely difficult to get hold of, and I can only have use of it for a very few days. The Ministry of War has sent a specific number to the various regiments, and the regiments are responsible for them. Each officer who has one must return it when the manoeuvres are over. If you want to take from it what is of interest and hold it at my disposal afterwards, I will get hold of it . . . This, unless you want me to make a copy
in extenso
and send you the copy.

I am off on manoeuvres.

The note, or
bordereau
, as it came to be called – a term used in banking for a list or memorandum – was unsigned, but its significance was clear. Henry took it at once to his chief, Colonel Sandherr. Sandherr was appalled. The
bordereau
showed not just that there was a traitor providing secrets to the Germans but that he was an officer in the French Army – ‘I am off on manoeuvres.’ Most disquieting was the promise of technical details of French cannon; it indicated that the officer in question served in the artillery. But the other items offered to Schwartzkoppen – the planned deployment of covering troops, the imminent invasion of Madagascar – meant that he must have access to secrets from different
bureaux
available only to a member of the General Staff.

The 532 civil servants and 133 auxiliary employees working for the General Staff could be excluded, but this still left 220 officers seconded from different branches of the service.
21
Knowing that his reputation was on the line, Sandherr immediately ordered Gribelin to look through the archives of the Statistical Section to see if there was something written in handwriting comparable to that of the
bordereau
. Nothing was found.

At the same time Sandherr reported the discovery to his superior in the military hierarchy, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Charles-Arthur Gonse, who in turn told his chief, General Raoul de Boisdeffre. Finally the Minister of War himself, General Mercier, was informed. All agreed that the traitor must be an artillery officer on the General Staff: no other possibility was considered. Mercier ordered a formal investigation. Lists were drawn up and suspects scrutinised, but none was a plausible traitor. Having gone through all the officers attached to the General Staff from the four different
bureaux
, the army chiefs were ‘at the end of their tether’
22
and ready to give up.

On 5 October, the newly appointed second-in-command to the Fourth Bureau, Commandant Albert d’Aboville, turned up at the War Ministry to take up his new duties. On the morning of the 6th his chief, Colonel Pierre-Élie Fabre, showed him a photograph of the
bordereau
. They were joined in Fabre’s office by a Lieutenant-Colonel Boucher of the Third Bureau, and the three men started to speculate about who could have had access to secret information from different departments.

It was d’Aboville who came up with the idea that the traitor might be one of the interns (
stagiaires
) from the artillery: they had all done a stint in the different departments. This reasoning seemed plausible to Fabre. A list was drawn up of all artillery officers serving as interns on the General Staff. Four or five of them were known to Fabre because they had been through the Fourth Bureau in the past year. One stood out for the bad mark Fabre had given him: ‘An unsatisfactory officer, very intelligent and very gifted but pretentious and with an undeveloped character . . . and a manner that would make him unsuited to the Army’s General Staff.’ This officer was Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

D’Aboville had also known Dreyfus: ‘He had a sly character,’ he was to say later, ‘was little liked by his comrades and had an indiscreet curiosity which was noticed by everyone.’ Fabre obtained forms filled in by Dreyfus which provided samples of his handwriting. They were all struck by its similarity to that of the
bordereau
:
the word ‘artillery’ which was in both the
bordereau
and the sample seemed identical. They recalled that Dreyfus had gone on a tour of inspection with members of the General Staff at the end of the month of June, which would explain the reference to leaving ‘on manoeuvres’.

Fabre and d’Aboville now informed General Gonse of what they had discovered, who in turn told General de Boisdeffre of this new development. When Gonse told Sandherr he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, saying: ‘I should have realized.’
23
Sandherr did not know Dreyfus personally but he knew of his family, the Jewish textile manufacturers in his home town of Mulhouse. General Mercier, the Minister of War, was now brought up to date by Boisdeffre with the news that there was a prime suspect, a Jewish officer from Alsace. Mercier would later say that the revelation caused him ‘great distress’, and he also understood that they had to proceed cautiously if the only basis for the singling out of Dreyfus was an opinion on the similarity of the handwriting taken by men with no expertise in graphology.

There was an officer in the judicial division of the General Staff who was known to be an amateur graphologist – Major Ferdinand du Paty de Clam. Du Paty was a cousin of Boisdeffre and therefore someone they could trust. On the evening of 6 October du Paty was summoned by General Gonse and shown the
bordereau
. He was asked to compare the handwriting with some samples of that of a suspect, but was not given the suspect’s name.

Du Paty’s immediate reaction was that the
bordereau
and the samples had been written by the same person. Only now did General Gonse tell him about how the
bordereau
had come into their hands, and that the other samples had been written by Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He asked du Paty to undertake a more detailed examination and gave him the use of the office of a senior officer on the General Staff, General Renouard.

Now that he knew that the suspect was named Dreyfus, was du Paty capable of an impartial analysis, or was he inevitably affected by prejudice against Jews? Had this coloured the judgement of d’Aboville and Fabre? Historians differ on this critical question. Vincent Duclert writes that the officers ‘who took charge at the beginning of October 1894 of the inquiry to identify the traitor were the same officers who, in the Fourth Bureau, had worked to exclude Jews in general and Captain Dreyfus in particular. The chance to exclude him from the General Staff was at hand.’
24
Jacqueline Rose writes that the
bordereau
was ‘wilfully . . . attributed to . . . Dreyfus’.
25
Against this, Albert S. Lindemann wrote in
The Jew Accused
, ‘No evidence has ever emerged of an anti-Semitic plot against Dreyfus by intelligence officers, especially not of a premeditated effort to convict someone they knew from the beginning to be innocent. Alfred Dreyfus was not the victim of a conspiracy of aristocratic officers against a Jewish outsider, as many came to believe at the time and as many historians to this day present the matter.’
26

Robert L. Hoffman concurs that ‘there is insufficient reason to believe prejudice determined the identification of Dreyfus as a suspected spy and traitor’.
27
So too Marcel Thomas, but with a proviso: ‘Certainly, it did not occur to anyone, on 6 October 1894, to consider Dreyfus guilty because he was a Jew, but the fact that he was a Jew meant that they accepted more easily than they might otherwise have done the idea of his culpability.’
28
The distinction was fine but real. The ‘General Staff, as a whole,’ wrote Thomas, ‘disapproved of the campaign against Jewish officers of
La Libre Parole
: these seemed to be in poor taste’; but many were ‘prisoners, often unknowingly, of prejudices they would have been the first to deny’.
29

Du Paty came from a family of lawyers; his grandfather had been President of the Court of Bordeaux – ‘justice seemed to be a family tradition’.
30
However, he thought it unwise to put those ‘who are not Frenchmen of France’ in sensitive military positions.
31
Dreyfus himself came to believe that he had been condemned because he was a Jew, and that du Paty was one of those principally responsible for his misfortunes: ‘The opprobrium of my death will be on Commandant du Paty,’ he wrote at a time when it seemed unlikely that he would survive the tropical fevers he contracted during his incarceration. His son Pierre, writing some years later, judged du Paty ‘not, perhaps, dishonest at heart’ but ‘naive and irresolute’, and a tool of his superiors, Gonse and Boisdeffre, who ‘later did not hesitate to leave him shamelessly in the lurch’.
32

Maurice Paléologue regarded du Paty as something of a Colonel Blimp – ‘pretentious, monocle in eye, well set up, abrupt in speech, and with mechanical gestures’, but by no means straightforward: ‘a disturbing character, with morbid mentality, a shadowy and unhinged imagination, a strange mixture of fanaticism and folly’. He was not the idiot that he was sometimes portrayed as being but ‘intelligent and cultivated’
33
– fluent in German and a lover of German music who went to hear Wagner’s operas at the Bayreuth Festival. Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, who had got to know du Paty while attending manoeuvres at Toulouse in 1892, considered him an ‘attractive and intelligent officer’ who ‘liked to talk to Germans about Germany’. Du Paty and Schwartzkoppen occasionally dined together, and the latter had been a guest at du Paty’s wedding.
34

However, Schwartzkoppen’s assessment of his friend’s character confirms the unsuitability of du Paty for the role to be assigned to him by Gonse and Boisdeffre. He was ‘a man full of enthusiasms and exaggerated notions, a man of the study, with little sense of the realities of life. This mental myopia gave him a quality of impracticality, a touch of the blundering and erratic.’
35
Marcel Thomas talks of a ‘romantic side to him’ and of his ‘too great a confidence in his own intuition’; he was ‘the man least suited in the world to the role in which he was cast by his superiors’.

These judgements were made at a later date. In early October 1894, du Paty’s role was merely that of an amateur graphologist, known and trusted by the senior officers of the General Staff. He conscientiously followed the instructions he had been given, spending the whole of the Sunday on a minute study of the different samples of handwriting, and in the evening of 7 October he delivered a report to his superiors stating that ‘despite certain disparities’ the resemblance was sufficient to justify further investigation.

General Mercier had to take great care. On the one hand, he had already been attacked by
La Libre Parole
for being a ‘republican’ general who protected Jews in the army such as the military doctor Schulmann; on the other, there had been the emphatic declaration in the Chamber of Deputies by the then Minister of War, Charles de Freycinet, after the death of Captain Mayer in his duel with the Marquis de Morès, that there would be zero tolerance of anti-Semitism in the army: a false accusation against a Jewish officer, or even a charge with insufficient evidence, would cause as much trouble on the left as a failure to charge a Jewish traitor would cause trouble on the right.

Mercier’s next step, therefore, was to consult the Military Governor of Paris, General Saussier – the rotund bon viveur with a Jewish mistress, Mme Weil, whose husband was intermittently accused of treason in
La Libre Parole
. Saussier was in some respects a more powerful figure than General Mercier himself; for while Mercier was his superior as Minister of War, he would, should he fall from office, return to a subordinate role as a regional commander: he had no place
de jure
, as did Saussier, on the High Council of War. The two men were chalk and cheese: Mercier dry, curt, authoritarian; Saussier indulgent but diplomatic, realistic and level-headed. These differences had led to a mutual antipathy and the likelihood that what one proposed the other would reject, and vice versa.