The Dreyfus Affair (13 page)

The Hadamards were, then, socially superior to the Dreyfus family in a number of ways. The Dreyfuses were rich but the Hadamards were richer, and while the Dreyfuses were provincials with no roots in the metropolis, the Hadamards were part of the Jewish elite with fine apartments in Paris or the suburbs and country houses within easy reach: the Hadamards an apartment on the rue de Châteaudun and a country house at Chatou; the Lévy-Bruhls ‘one of the finest houses in the Parc des Ibis on the avenue des Courses at Le Vésinet’. The Hadamards were friends of the Chief Rabbi, Zadoc Kahn; unlike the Dreyfuses, ‘the family’s private culture was still marked by Jewish practice, no matter how attenuated’.
24

What made Alfred Dreyfus a suitable
parti
for the Hadamards’ eldest daughter was his standing as an officer in the French Army. Certainly, ‘his family were more than respectable’ and came ‘from the same Jewish Mosello-Alsatian background’; he was vouched for by their nephew Paul; he seemed ‘serious and responsible’ and ‘his wealth and his career assured the future of their daughter’.
25
But it was the career that singled him out and made him particularly attractive to Lucie. ‘She was a merchant’s daughter, and she . . . loved him for his uniform and his sword.’
26
Dreyfus was given the green light and, upon returning to Bourges, courted Lucie by correspondence.

The courtship was successful. Alfred Dreyfus and Lucie Hadamard were married on 21 April 1890. The religious ceremony was performed in the Jewish synagogue on the rue de la Victoire by Zadoc Kahn, the Chief Rabbi, and was followed by a reception in the Hadamards’ apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. They then left for a honeymoon in Italy, staying on Lake Como and in Florence. They returned via Basel in Switzerland, and then Mulhouse, so that Lucie could meet members of her husband’s family who had not been able to attend the wedding.

When they returned to Paris, Alfred and Lucie moved into an apartment at 24, rue François 1er in the 8th arrondissement. It was an area ‘that had attracted significant numbers of affluent Jews whose families had first settled in central and eastern districts’
27
but was also a short walk from Les Invalides. A rich man before his marriage, Alfred Dreyfus was now richer still. Lucie’s dowry had included ‘a trousseau of linen, lace, jewelry, and furniture valued at 20,000 francs; interest at 3 per cent on a sum of more than 35,000 francs; and more than 160,000 francs in cash – all of which, under the Code Napoleon, had been transferred to her husband’s name on the day of their wedding’.
28
Lucie could expect an inheritance of more than 500,000 francs while Alfred himself had ‘a permanent facility of several hundred thousand francs’.
29

This prosperity enabled Alfred to stable two horses which he rode in the Bois de Boulogne. He ‘ordered specially tailored uniforms and indulged his taste for chocolates and small cigars’.
30
He and Lucie moved from the rue François 1er to a grander apartment at 6, avenue du Trocadéro in the 16th arrondissement, where Alfred supervised the construction of a wine cellar. On 5 April 1891, Lucie gave birth to a son, Pierre, and soon became pregnant again. After the birth of her second child, a daughter, Jeanne, on 22 February 1893, Lucie was unwell for some time and, while Alfred was anxious and dutiful as a husband, he continued with his extramarital affairs. Vincent Duclert judges that ‘Lucie loved Alfred deeply. Alfred loved her probably rather less, but he admired what she represented and the family into which he had married.’
31

There was an element of Jekyll and Hyde in Alfred’s behaviour in the years between his marriage and his arrest. He would return home from his office for a quiet dinner with Lucie, prepared by their Alsatian cook, Mlle Hassler, and then go out to the theatre or a concert or visit his parents-in-law for a rubber of bridge. In summer he would spend the weekends at Houlgate in Normandy where his family were on holiday, but during the week revert to his ‘bachelor life’. Even when he was with Lucie, he was subject to ‘mercurial moods, the abrupt shift from lighthearted discussions to an obsession with work, and a relentless perfectionism that made him appear selfish and insensitive’.
32
He acknowledged that he found it difficult to ‘open up’ and agreed ‘that Lucie had a right to know more about the man to whom she was entrusting her life’, but he had good reason to keep some things from her and was temperamentally incapable of breaking his ‘disastrous habit’ of taking everything seriously. He did not have much of a sense of humour.

3: The École de Guerre

Alfred Dreyfus’s obsession with work came from his ambition to rise in the hierarchy of the French Army and gain entry to its General Staff. What might hitherto have been a pipe dream for the son of a Jewish textile manufacturer with a good brain but no connections among the right people had become a practical proposition after the reforms put through by Charles de Freycinet when Minister of War in 1888.

The École de Guerre, founded in 1880 to replace the École Militaire Supérieure along the lines of the Military Academy in Berlin, admitted its pupils strictly on merit and after the most rigorous of competitive examinations.
33
This gave an advantage to graduates from the École Polytechnique whose intellectual formation was closer to that of the École de Guerre than to that of Saint-Cyr. General de Miribel, as Chief of the General Staff at the time, had pushed through the reforms initiated by Freycinet. To break the system of co-option that favoured aristocratic officers educated at Jesuit schools, he laid down that the top twelve graduates would go on to serve as interns in the four
bureaux
with a view to recruitment to the General Staff (see above, p. 31).

Though enforced less rigorously by Miribel’s successor, General de Boisdeffre, this system was still in force and was the obvious path for Dreyfus to take to the top. While still teaching at the artillery school in Bourges, he had swotted for the entrance examination – ‘a three-day marathon of military tactics, topography, history and German’. He was the only candidate from the artillery school in Bourges to pass. He now entered the École de Guerre, and his success showed that Miribel’s strictly meritocratic criteria for entry were still in force – but it was around this time, in May 1892, that Édouard Drumont embarked upon his campaign in
La Libre Parole
against the presence of Jewish officers in the army which led to the duels between Drumont himself and Crémieu-Foa, with Count Esterhazy as the latter’s second; then that of Armand Mayer – an Alsatian Jew and Polytechnicien – with the Marquis de Morès in which Mayer was killed. Dreyfus did not attend Mayer’s funeral because he was not in Paris, but he was undoubtedly present in spirit among the 20,000 who attended the obsequies presided over by the Hadamards’ friend Zadoc Kahn, the Chief Rabbi.

Having won a place at the École de Guerre, Dreyfus was determined to pass out top in his class. As he studied he was confident that intellectual competence had replaced martial bluster as the qualities required in the leaders of a modern army. Somewhat naively, he ignored the evidence that the French officer corps remained governed by unwritten codes.
34
He was oblivious to the ‘tensions between the modernists and the traditionalists’, and failed to realise that the latter’s position had been strengthened by the replacement of General de Miribel as Chief of the General Staff by General de Boisdeffre.

Dreyfus was abruptly made aware that the rules of the game he had thought abolished were still in force when he received the results for his final exams at the École de Guerre. In the course of his studies, he had been commended by the Commandant, General Lebelin de Dionne, for his mastery of military theory and administrative practice, for his ‘good education, work habits and quick intelligence’, and for his ‘very good conduct and deportment’. His horsemanship and knowledge of German were regarded as outstanding – the only drawbacks being his short-sightedness and his monotonous tone of voice.
35
These minor failings should not, and did not, prevent Dreyfus from scoring high marks in his final examinations, but his overall score was lowered by a zero given by the examiner, General Pierre de Bonnefond, in an area of appraisal called
côte d’amour
– which might be translated as team spirit, or an ability to fit in.

As a result of this zero, Dreyfus had fallen from third to ninth place in his class – still an astonishing accomplishment, given that the young Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military genius Dreyfus greatly admired, had graduated from the École Militaire forty-second out of fifty-eight; and it was sufficient to gain him an internship on the General Staff. However, Dreyfus was incensed by the zero for
côte d’amour
and many of his biographers have shared his sense of outrage and ascribe it, like Dreyfus, to General de Bonnefond’s expressed dislike of Jews. Ruth Harris asserts that Bonnefond’s ‘outrageous “fixing” of Dreyfus’s exam results showed that prejudice was still rife’.
36
Vincent Duclert states that ‘Captain Dreyfus became the preferred target for those officers who wanted to thwart the modernist means of advancement and were determined to prevent, above all, the entry of Jews into the “Holy of Holies” of the General Staff.’
37

Douglas Johnson, on the other hand, in his
France and the Dreyfus Affair
, writes that ‘it is important not to exaggerate the extent or the power of anti-Semitism in the French army’, and cites the career of Maurice Weil, who ‘retained the protection of powerful allies, not only Saussier, but a number of other generals’.
38
And, as Albert S. Lindemann points out in
The Jew Accused
, there were ‘a surprisingly large number of Jewish officers in the French army (the figure of three hundred was often mentioned by the early 1890s of whom ten were generals)’. He adds that the percentage of Jewish officers was ‘consistently at around 3 per cent from the 1860s to the eve of World War I. With Jews constituting between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent of the total population in those years, that meant an overrepresentation of between thirty and sixty times . . . Many spokesmen for the Jews in France claimed that the military was unusually open and just in its treatment of Jews.’
39
Marcel Proust, who had a Jewish mother, enjoyed his life in the army. ‘It’s curious’, he wrote to a friend later in his life, ‘that you should have regarded the army as a prison, I as a paradise.’
40

The army was one thing: the General Staff another. General de Bonnefond was known to have said that ‘he didn’t want a Jew in the General Staff’, and another Jewish intern, Captain Picard, had also been marked down. Dreyfus therefore filed a complaint with the Commandant of the École de Guerre, General Lebelin de Dionne. His complaint was rejected.
41
That rejection has also been ascribed to a reflex anti-Semitism in Lebelin de Dionne; however, it is a judgement that might have been unaffected by prejudice, given what is known of Dreyfus’s temperament – his view of his fellow officers as ‘tiresome . . . disagreeable, often spiteful and envious men’; his disdain for barracks life and the officers’ mess; his aloof manner, his intellectual arrogance, his inflexibility and undisguised exasperation at the inefficiencies caused by the ‘old spirit’ in the army, contrasting it unfavourably with the professionalism of the German Army.
42
A senior officer must have a rapport with his men and his fellow officers. Intellectual brilliance is not the sole quality, or even the most important quality, by which to judge a candidate’s suitability for high command.

Even after being marked down on
côte d’amour
, Dreyfus still qualified for a place as an intern on the General Staff; and here his progress did not falter until he reached the Fourth Bureau where his immediate superior, Commandant Bertin-Mourot, criticised him for pursuing his own studies at the expense of more mundane duties. Another assessor, Colonel Roget, judged Dreyfus to be ‘a very intelligent officer with many gifts, an impressive memory, a great facility for the assimilation of facts, but without a character that inspires great confidence and who therefore it would be better not to keep on the General Staff after he has completed his studies’.
43
Colonel Fabre, the chief of the Bureau, wrote in his final report that Dreyfus was ‘an incomplete officer, very intelligent and very gifted but undeveloped when it comes to character, awareness and attitude required for a place on the Army General Staff’.
44

As with the zero for
côte d’amour
in the École de Guerre, biographers such as Vincent Duclert believe that this marking down came from the determination of the chiefs of the Fourth Bureau to keep a man who was both a Jew and a moderniser out of the General Staff. However, even these senior officers had to proceed with caution. Since the death of Captain Mayer, and the War Minister de Freycinet’s warning that anti-Semitism in the army would not be tolerated, a career could be jeopardised by an open expression of antipathy towards a Jew. No professional soldier would give a quote or put his name to an article in Drumont’s
La Libre Parole
. There were few open expressions of anti-Semitism, and even those made in private were rare. Even du Paty de Clam thought it ‘severe’ when General Alfred-Louis Delanne, head of the Third Bureau of the General Staff, said ‘No Jews here’. At the time, wrote du Paty, ‘I was imbued with the humanitarian prejudices and had good relations with intelligent Jews who were artists or scholars . . . But there are situations when it is preferable not to have people [in sensitive posts] who are not indisputably Frenchmen from France.’
45