The Dreyfus Affair (17 page)

The defendant, Alfred Dreyfus, was escorted into the court. He saluted the judges. When he gave his age as thirty-five, André Bataille, covering the trial for
Le Figaro
, was incredulous: he seemed more like fifty. Brisset, the prosecutor, opened the proceedings by asking that, in the interests of national security, the court martial be held
in camera
.
Demange protested, but he was overruled: the judges agreed to a closed session. The public gallery was cleared. Only the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine, and Commandant Georges Picquart, appointed as their official observer by the War Ministry and General Staff, were permitted to remain.

Alfred Dreyfus was called to the witness stand; he gave evidence in the same monotonous tone that had consistently been remarked upon throughout his career. His answers were clear and precise. There were no histrionics, no displays of emotion. This cerebral man with his faith in reason was confident that a dispassionate demonstration of the facts would be enough to establish his innocence.

It was only when the court started to hear the testimony of some of Dreyfus’s superiors – Gonse, Fabre, d’Aboville and, above all, Commandant du Paty de Clam that it became evident that common sense might not prevail. Du Paty claimed that Dreyfus had given himself away when writing to his dictation in the office of General de Boisdeffre on 15 October: realising that the words he was writing were those of the
bordereau
,
he had started to tremble. Demange, in cross-examination, pointed to the paper in question and showed that there was no change whatsoever in the handwriting. That was only to be expected, du Paty replied. Dreyfus, aware that he was under suspicion, had mastered his emotions. ‘I wanted to see if he had been warned; questioned closely by me, he
should
have trembled. But he did not tremble, so he was pretending, he was warned. An innocent individual who had been brought there with nothing to hide would have trembled at the accusation, would have made a movement of some kind.’
39

Commandant Picquart, the official observer from the War Ministry, was ‘embarrassed’ by du Paty’s line of argument and it did not seem to convince the judges. At this stage in the trial, Picquart thought that Dreyfus would be acquitted, and so did the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine. The lack of a clear motive was a grave weakness in the prosecution’s case. Du Paty scraped the barrel in suggesting that money paid by a German insurance company after a fire in one of the Dreyfus family’s factories was a covert reward for treason.
40
No reference was made in the prosecution’s submission to Dreyfus’s religion or race: ‘the prosecution did not try to bolster it by aspersions [
sic
] about Dreyfus’s racial or religious background, by asserting that Jews were naturally treacherous’.
41
But Dreyfus was nonetheless plausible in the role in which he had been cast. Lépine, who was a civilian and an experienced witness of many trials, found that the manner in which Dreyfus protested his innocence was unconvincing. ‘His voice was atonal, lazy, his face white . . . Nothing in his attitude was of a kind to evoke sympathy, despite the tragic situation in which he found himself . . . Occasionally, in the course of the debates, his face twitched convulsively; sometimes a tremor came over it, but there was no expression of indignation, no
cri de coeur
, no expression of feeling . . .’
42
Picquart, too, thought that Dreyfus should have risen to the occasion and defended himself ‘in the style of the times’. The clerk of the court, Vallecalle, was later to say: ‘in his place, I would have yelled my head off’.
43

Commandant Picquart reported daily on the progress of the trial to General Mercier and Colonel Sandherr; Sandherr was also kept informed by Henry and Lauth, ‘who shuttled between the court room and the Ministry of War’.
44
All became worried by the prospect of an acquittal. It was time for a dramatic intervention. Henry, who was a friend of one of the judges, Commandant Gallet, sent him a note asking to be recalled to give further evidence.

Henry, the officer who had risen from the ranks, with the Légion d’Honneur pinned on his breast, returned to the witness stand. With his bluff manner he came across as the kind of honest trooper who could be relied upon to call a spade a spade. He now told the court that in his earlier testimony he had withheld evidence because of its sensitivity, but now he felt he must tell all. In February of that year, ‘an honourable person’ had warned the Statistical Section that an officer in the Second Bureau was selling secrets to the Germans. He had repeated his warning in June. Henry was referring to Val Carlos, the agent in the Spanish Embassy, but he then went far beyond what Val Carlos had said. Pointing at Dreyfus, Henry said in a loud, portentous voice: ‘And that is the man!’

Furious, Dreyfus leaped to his feet and demanded to know the name of this ‘honourable’ man. Demange, equally indignant, insisted that the informant be summoned as a witness. What was his name? Slapping his head, Henry said: ‘When an officer has a secret like that in his head, he keeps it even from his cap!’

‘Do you affirm, on your honour,’ Colonel Maurel, the President of the court, asked Henry, ‘that the treasonous officer was Captain Dreyfus?’

Pointing now at the crucifix on the wall, Henry said solemnly: ‘I swear to it.’

The character witnesses now called in favour of Dreyfus did not undo the impression left by Henry’s testimony. The Chief Rabbi of Paris, also called Dreyfus and speaking in a Yiddish accent, told the court that it was inconceivable that Alfred would betray his country. The philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a physician named Vaucaire and Arthur Amson, a prominent industrialist, said the same but were not the kind of people to impress the military judges. Character witnesses from the army had been hard to find: Dreyfus now paid the price for his aloofness in the officers’ mess. At first Mathieu had found only one officer, Commandant Clément, willing to testify in his brother’s favour. Subsequently, ‘after much prodding by the family’, four other officers agreed to submit depositions describing Dreyfus as a ‘good and loyal soldier’.
45

Dreyfus himself would later make excuses for the failure of his comrades to come forward to defend him. Told by General Gonse that he was guilty, and that there was proof of his guilt, it was impossible for them to believe otherwise. ‘From that time on,’ he was later told by a colleague at the École de Guerre, ‘we forgot all your qualities, all the friendly relations we had had with you, and concentrated only on searching in our memories for any fact that might corroborate the certainty of your guilt. All was grist to that same mill.’
46

The criminologist Bertillon took the stand to testify that, in his opinion, Dreyfus had written the
bordereau
. Certainly, there were small but clear differences between samples of Dreyfus’s handwriting and the handwriting of the
bordereau
noted by the graphologists Gobert and Pelletier, but these showed only that Dreyfus had tried to disguise his own handwriting. It was an ‘auto-forgery’. He had traced letters used by his brother and his wife. A spy who knew he was under suspicion would hardly write spontaneously in his own hand.

On 21 December, the prosecutor Brisset summed up the case against Dreyfus that followed closely the indictment prepared by d’Ormescheville. The next day, Demange made his final plea for the defence. In a three-hour oration he demonstrated that none of the evidence against Dreyfus amounted to proof. He dismissed the stories of Dreyfus’s love affairs as worthless gossip and ridiculed du Paty’s suggestion that Dreyfus’s knowledge of foreign languages, excellent memory and curiosity about military matters meant he was a spy. Equally absurd was du Paty’s inverted logic – that the failure to find any incriminating evidence in Dreyfus’s flat proved that it had been either hidden or destroyed, and that the absence of any change in Dreyfus’s handwriting when taking dictation showed the sangfroid
of a traitor
.
And the prosecution had failed to come up with a credible motive. Why would an officer with substantial private means who was well known for his patriotism, and whose career in the army had been a remarkable success, sell military secrets to the Germans?

However, Demange told the judges, these were all matters of secondary importance. At the heart of the case was the torn scrap of paper filched from the waste-paper basket of the German military attaché – the
bordereau
–
and there was no proof that it had been written by Dreyfus
.
First, as to its substance: no evidence had been presented to establish that Dreyfus had seen documents relating to the hydraulic brake on the new cannon or that he had had access to confidential information on the deployment of ‘covering troops’; and no officer from the First Bureau had been found to say that Dreyfus could have obtained confidential information on artillery formations or plans for the invasion of Madagascar. No superior officer had given evidence that Dreyfus had asked to see the artillery manual of 1894, let alone asked to take it away for study. As for the final phrase, ‘I am off on manoeuvres,’ at no point when serving as an intern on the General Staff had Dreyfus taken part in manoeuvres.

And finally the handwriting of the
bordereau
:
Demange ridiculed Demange’s theory of an auto-forgery, and insisted to the judges that difference of opinion among the expert graphologists on the question of the handwriting meant that at the very least there was a reasonable doubt, and if there was a reasonable doubt Captain Dreyfus must be acquitted.

Dreyfus himself was pleased with his counsel’s closing speech. ‘Maître Demange, in his eloquent address, refuted the expert reports, demonstrated all the contradictions and asked how it could have erected a charge of this kind without supplying any motive. An acquittal seemed certain.’
47
Lépine, having seen Demange act for the anarchists, had a high opinion of his skills as an advocate and judged his closing speech ‘very fine’, but thought he laid too much emphasis on the
bordereau
and seemed to rein in his eloquence for fear it would alienate the military judges. In a civilian court, his strategy would have been correct: the
bordereau
was at the heart of the case against Dreyfus and, had he been addressing civilian judges trained in the law, he would only have had to establish that there was a reasonable doubt and the case would have collapsed. But the judges were soldiers, not lawyers, and it went against the grain of their military training to doubt the judgement of their superiors on the General Staff.

Demange himself realised that the protocols found in civilian courts had not been adhered to by the military: he had observed the comings and goings of du Paty, Sandherr, Lauth and Picquart and the exchanges these officers had had with the prosecutor, Commandant Brisset, the witnesses and even the judges.
48
What he could not know was that, when the judges retired to consider their verdict, they took with them a sealed envelope that Commandant du Paty de Clam had handed to the President of the court, Colonel Maurel, asking him to consider its contents in the name of the Minister of War. Maurel broke the seal and the seven judges now saw the different pieces of evidence compiled by the Statistical Section with du Paty’s commentary, showing how they corroborated the evidence against Dreyfus. None of the judges appeared to appreciate that it was illegal to submit evidence not seen by the defence.

The manner in which this secret dossier was shown to the judges, and the forgeries it contained, were the first unambiguous acts of injustice against Alfred Dreyfus and were almost certainly unnecessary. Colonel Maurel later admitted that he looked at only one of the items and it did not affect his decision. The letter mentioning ‘the scoundrel D’ made some impression on another of the judges, Captain Martin Freystaetter, but together with his colleagues on the bench his mind was already made up. After deliberating for over an hour, the judges returned to the court and pronounced their verdict. With no dissenting vote, Dreyfus was found guilty. He was sentenced to military degradation and deportation for life to a penal colony where he was to be held in a fortified enclosure. He was also ordered to pay the costs of the trial of 1,615 francs and 70 centimes.

When the verdict reached in the closed courtroom was announced to the wider world, it was received with universal approbation. Maurice Paléologue noted in his diary on Sunday, 23 December 1894: ‘There is only one note in the comments on the verdict this morning throughout the whole of the Paris press, from the extreme right to the extreme left, from the clerical and monarchist journals to the organs of the most extreme socialism: approval, relief, satisfaction, joy – a triumphant, vindictive, ferocious joy.’
49
La
Libre Parole
announced the verdict with the words: ‘Out of France with the Jews. France for the French.’ But the left was as exultant as the right, and Mercier was their hero. The Socialists in the National Assembly themselves thanked the Minister of War for having resisted the enormous pressure from shady politicians and the barons of finance to secure an acquittal.
L’Intransigeant
predicted that Mercier would never be forgiven by ‘the cowardly government . . . for refusing to cover up the affair’.