The Dreyfus Affair (18 page)

The main criticism was not of the verdict but of the sentence. Under Article 5 of the constitution of the Second Republic, the death penalty had been abolished for political crimes. Treason for the benefit of a foreign power had been classified as a political crime. The right saw sparing Dreyfus the guillotine as yet further proof of the power of the Jews; the left pointed out the disparity between the death sentence passed on mutinous soldiers in the time of war and life imprisonment for a treasonous officer. A law was proposed in the National Assembly to alter this anomaly and make crimes such as Dreyfus’s punishable by death. The Socialist Jean Jaurès spoke in its favour on 24 December 1894, and in an article the following day – Christmas Day – Jaurès’s fellow Socialist, Georges Clemenceau, made the same point. There was a scandalous disproportion between treachery on the one hand, ‘unquantifiable but not punished by death, and a moment of panic in a young soldier punished by instant execution’.
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The number of people who thought that Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly condemned was small; besides his family, there was the Governor of the Cherche-Midi prison, Commandant Forzinetti, persuaded by the distress he had witnessed in his prisoner, and the handwriting experts Gobert and Pelletier, who remained convinced that Dreyfus had not written the
bordereau
. There were also some doubts in high places. The eminent historian Gabriel Monod, lunching with the ailing French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, asked him if he was sure that Dreyfus was guilty. ‘I am not the one who judged him,’ said Hanotaux. ‘Other than that, I have nothing to say.’ But as Monod was leaving, Hanotaux’s secretary, Villox, followed him out into the street, took him by the arm and said: ‘You know, we think that General Mercier has made a great gaffe.’

The Jewish community lay low. The Chief Rabbi of Paris had given Dreyfus a character reference but had admitted to the court that he knew nothing of the legal process that had led to his arraignment. The Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare, a vigorous opponent of anti-Semitism, wrote from Stockholm to his publisher, Pierre-Victor Stock: ‘Ah! If it was just some poor devil, I would immediately worry about him, but Dreyfus and his people are very rich, they say, and they can certainly manage without me, especially if he is innocent.’
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But the grandees of high finance – the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Camondos – had no reason to believe that Dreyfus was innocent, and did not want to give credence to the charges made by Drumont and
La Libre Parole
that they would always weigh in to protect one of their own. The most widespread view was expressed in
Le Figaro
the day after the verdict had been delivered: ‘Now that it is all over, let us speak as little as possible of this sad story.’

At the Ministry of War, and in the offices of the Statistical Section, there were a few loose ends to be tied up. General Mercier had received the news of Dreyfus’s conviction as he waited, in full-dress uniform, to leave for a dinner at the Élysée Palace. He said nothing. The only comment came from his English wife: ‘The poor man.’
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Later, back at work at the Ministry of War, he summoned Boisdeffre, Gonse, Sandherr, du Paty and Henry and asked for assurances, on their word of honour, that they would never reveal what had occurred before and during the trial of Dreyfus. He ordered that the secret dossier, which had been returned by Colonel Maurel to Commandant du Paty de Clam, and by du Paty to Sandherr, should be disassembled – the different documents returned to their relevant files and du Paty’s commentary destroyed. The order was carried out, but not before Colonel Sandherr had taken the precaution of making a copy of du Paty’s commentary, to which he could refer should there be a change of government with a new Minister of War.

4: Degradation

Before Alfred Dreyfus could start his life sentence in a penal colony, he had first to suffer the ordeal of a ritual degradation. This ceremony took place on the morning of 5 January 1895 in the large courtyard of the École Militaire before contingents from different branches of the armed forces, including officers from his alma mater, the École de Guerre, and an invited group of spectators. Dreyfus was brought there early in the morning from the Cherche-Midi prison by a detachment of Republican Guards commanded by a Captain Lebrun-Renault. While waiting in a small room for Dreyfus to be summoned to play his painful role, Lebrun-Renault engaged his prisoner in conversation. ‘Have you considered killing yourself?’ he asked Dreyfus. Dreyfus replied that he would certainly have killed himself had he been guilty but he was not. He told Lebrun-Renault that he had even rejected a suggestion by Commandant du Paty de Clam that he should claim that he had been acting as a double agent on his own initiative, handing over some worthless documents to Colonel von Schwartzkoppen in the hope of receiving some more substantial information in return.

At 8.45 a.m. Dreyfus was handed over by Captain Lebrun-Renault to an escort of an officer and four men from the artillery. He was led out into the courtyard of the École Militaire where the serried ranks of soldiers had been drawn up to witness the spectacle. A stand had been erected for journalists and distinguished guests. The troops were silent but from beyond the gates separating the courtyard from the Place de Fontenoy came the roar of a huge crowd shouting ‘Death to the traitor!’, ‘Dirty Jew!’, ‘Long live France!’; and Parisian urchins, who had climbed up into the branches of trees, shouted ‘The swine!’ and ‘The coward!’ as Dreyfus emerged from the École Militaire.

To the beat of drums, Dreyfus marched ‘with an assured step’ to the centre of the courtyard where General Paul Darras, mounted on a horse, and the clerk of the court martial, Vallecalle, awaited him. The drumbeat stopped. The four officers of the escort stepped back. Vallecalle saluted General Darras and read aloud the judgment pronounced on Dreyfus by the court martial. Dreyfus listened to this sentence in silence. General Darras now spoke: ‘Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the President of the Republic, you are hereby degraded.’ Dreyfus cried out in his metallic voice: ‘Soldiers, an innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers, an innocent man is being dishonoured!
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I am innocent, I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the army. Long live France! Long live the army!’
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Sergeant-Major Bouxin of the Republican Guard, ‘a giant of a man’, stepped forward. The stitching of Dreyfus’s insignia of rank had been loosened the day before by a fellow inmate of the Cherche-Midi prison, and his sabre scored at its centre: now the insignia and epaulettes were torn from his tunic and the red stripes from his trousers. Next, Bouxin took Dreyfus’s sword, drew it from its sheath and broke it over his knee. Again, Dreyfus shouted: ‘Long live France! I am innocent! I swear it on the heads of my wife and my children.’

His uniform now in tatters, Dreyfus was paraded in front of the silent ranks of soldiers, journalists and guests. As the crowds behind the closed gates and railings caught sight of him, the cry went up: ‘Coward! Judas! Dirty Jew!’ To the friend of Edmond de Goncourt, Léon Daudet, this ‘debris from the ghetto’ was like ‘an automaton on parade’, his face ‘the colour of treason’. ‘A stubborn audacity persisted which killed all compassion. This was his last walk among men, yet he seemed to be profiting from it, so great was his self-control and his defiance of disgrace.’
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Another right-wing journalist, Maurice Barrès, described Dreyfus marching towards the assembled journalists ‘with his cap thrust down over his forehead, his pince-nez on his ethnic nose, his eyes dry and angry, his whole face hard and defiant . . . Through some fatal power he possessed, or as a result of the ideas now associated with his name, the wretch evoked only loathing among those who watched him walk past. His foreign physiognomy, his impassive stiffness, the very atmosphere he exuded, revolted even the most self-controlled spectators.’

Dreyfus himself was in a daze. ‘I asked myself what I was doing there. I seemed the victim of a hallucination, but alas my torn and sullied clothing brought me back rudely to the reality of the situation,’
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he later wrote. ‘I heard the howls of the deluded mob. I could feel the shudder with which it looked upon me in the belief that the condemned man in their presence was a traitor to his country.’
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He was sufficiently detached to feel some sympathy for those who abused him and called for his death. ‘I can well excuse the anger, the rage of this noble nation when they learned that there was a traitor among them.’
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More has been made of this spectacle in the courtyard of the École Militaire by subsequent historians than Dreyfus made of it himself. ‘Dreyfus’s degradation’, wrote Vincent Duclert in 2006, ‘allowed the French nation to reinvent itself as a race from which the Jews would be excluded and which would construct itself in opposition to them.’
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To Ruth Harris, writing in 2010, it was an act of revenge taken by the French ‘not only against a modern traitor but against the immemorial Jew, in punishment for his terrible deeds across the centuries’.
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Undoubtedly, evidence for such grandiose judgements is found in the invective of journalists such as Léon Daudet and Maurice Barrès, and also in the remarks attributed to Colonel Sandherr. ‘It’s quite clear that you don’t know the Jews,’ he told the representative of the Foreign Office, Maurice Paléologue, who sat beside him during the ceremony. ‘The race has neither patriotism, nor honour, nor pride. For centuries they have done nothing but betray.’ Paléologue had said that if he were in Dreyfus’s position and was innocent, he would be less docile. ‘I would rebel, I would struggle.’
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And Colonel Picquart, after a fellow officer, Captain Tassin, had remarked on the way Dreyfus had squinted down at the gold-braided insignia as it was torn from his uniform, had said: ‘Good Lord, yes. He was thinking of the weight of the gold. So many grams for this, so many grams for that!’ And when Tassin had said he felt sorry for Dreyfus’s children, Picquart had replied: ‘For goodness sake, there isn’t a Jew who doesn’t have a convict in his family.’
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However, the Paris correspondent of the Austrian
Neue Freie Presse
, Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, who witnessed Dreyfus’s degradation, shared the general view that Dreyfus was guilty and ‘in his initial reports on Dreyfus’s court martial emphasised French anti-German xenophobia’.
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Later it would be claimed that Dreyfus’s degradation was a defining moment in the birth of Zionism because it convinced Herzl that Jews would never be secure in Europe and must establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Herzl himself did not discourage this view when, five years later, the campaign to rehabilitate Dreyfus had led to a major social and political crisis with an anti-Semitic dimension. But it has been established by the historian Shlomo Avineri
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that Herzl hardly mentioned Dreyfus in his journals at the time, and it was rather the rise of anti-Semitism in Russia, Germany, Austria and eastern Europe that convinced him that the Jews must have a state of their own.

On the morning of 5 January 1895, Herzl accepted that Dreyfus was a traitor and that his demeanour was consistent with guilt. Others took a different view. The actress Sarah Bernhardt, herself partly Jewish, judged Dreyfus’s protestations of innocence to be sincere.
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And Edmond de Goncourt, after receiving a report from a friend, Carrière, who had been part of the crowd outside the gates, wrote that he ‘was not convinced of his guilt’, suspecting that ‘the judgements of the journalists were the judgements of the little boys in the trees’.
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After the ceremony, Dreyfus, no longer a soldier, was taken by gendarmes to the civilian La Santé prison to await transportation: he was now, as
Le Petit Journal
put it, ‘no longer a man, he is a number on a chain gang’. Armand Nisard, Director of Political Affairs at the French Foreign Office, was less sanguine: after hearing the report of his deputy, Maurice Paléologue, on the ceremony at the École Militaire, he said, ‘We’ll hear more about this Jew,’ and indeed it was the name of Dreyfus, not the number of a convict, that was blazoned on the front pages of
Le Figaro
that morning.

Dreyfus had confessed! The story came from a journalist, Eugène Clisson, who, the previous evening, had joined a group of army officers at the music hall in Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge. Among the officers was Captain Lebrun-Renault, who bragged about the role he had played earlier that day. He repeated to them what he had told some fellow officers at the École Militaire – that, while awaiting his degradation, Dreyfus had told him that he had indeed given documents to the Germans but they were worthless and this was merely to obtain more significant information from them in return.

The sensational news caused dismay in the High Command
.
Lebrun-Renault himself who, after his mission, had told his superiors that he had ‘nothing to report’, was first summoned by General Gonse to explain himself, and later called to the Élysée Palace by the President of the Republic, Jean Casimir-Perier, alarmed by the reaction of the German Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, to the report stating that his military attaché had been engaged in squalid espionage. Lebrun-Renault, who had earlier been told by General Gonse to keep his mouth shut, at once retracted his story, not just before the President of the Republic but also before the press.