The Dreyfus Affair (33 page)

Two days later, it was the turn of Scheurer-Kestner to face the Senate. Castigated in the anti-Dreyfusard press as ‘the general agent of the Dreyfus syndicate’ and ‘a filthy Huguenot’, he was heard out in polite silence by his peers. His friend the author Romain Rolland, who watched from the gallery, described Scheurer-Kestner – ‘tall, erect and pale, his beard white with yellow locks and the austere air of a Huguenot of the sixteenth century’ – mounting the podium ‘as if he were climbing the scaffold’ and stepping down ‘as though he were stepping into the grave’.
36
Scheurer-Kestner, too, had made the expected protestations of love for the army and faith in its leaders, but in his ‘slow, heavy, glacial voice’ had appealed for reason and justice to prevail. Only the former Minister of Justice, Ludovic Trarieux, supported him, saying that serious errors had been made during his tenure of office and measures should now be taken to rectify them.

The Minister of War, Jean-Baptiste Billot, answering for the government, repeated what he had said in the Chamber of Deputies: that ‘in his soul and conscience, as a soldier and as chief of the Army’, he was sure that Dreyfus was guilty. The Prime Minister, Jules Méline, said once again: ‘There is no Dreyfus Affair.’ A motion supporting the government’s stance was then passed by the Senate with no dissenting vote.

6: The Court Martial of Esterhazy

With the guilt of Dreyfus and the innocence of Esterhazy the settled opinion of France’s National Assembly and of the army’s High Command, it was unlikely that Esterhazy would be found guilty of treason. Nonetheless, his court martial was staged with meticulous care. First a retired officer, Commandant Alexandre-Alfred Ravary, was appointed as investigating magistrate: he held daily consultations with General Gonse. Three supposed experts were asked to compare Esterhazy’s handwriting with that of the
bordereau
: one was a retired architect, the second a palaeographer and the third a former school inspector. They were all agreed that the
bordereau
was not written by Esterhazy: some of the letters were similar, which suggested that his hand might have been copied by the traitor. And would Esterhazy, had he been the traitor, not have taken more trouble to disguise his hand? Thus both the similarities and the differences exonerated Esterhazy.

Commandant Ravary concluded that Esterhazy had no case to answer, but his recommendation was rejected and the court martial went ahead on 10 January 1898. The Dreyfus family were represented in court – Mathieu by his brother’s lawyer, Maître Demange, and Lucie by a bright young advocate who had made his name defending the anarchist Vaillant, Fernand Labori. Seats were reserved for them, and for the first time Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus set eyes on the man they held responsible for Alfred’s suffering – Charles Walsin-Esterhazy. As he was led into court, he came so close to Mathieu that he almost brushed against him; he seemed to Mathieu like some great bird of prey with his aquiline nose and dark, restless, hooded, piercing eyes. Indeed, all the players in the drama were present except for Generals Mercier and de Boisdeffre: Commandants Henry and du Paty de Clam, Captain Lauth and General Gonse.

It was also the first time that Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus had seen Georges Picquart, set apart from the other officers around him by the sky-blue uniform of a lieutenant-colonel in the Algerian
francs-tireurs
. Mathieu introduced himself to Picquart, who was seated next to Scheurer-Kestner. Later, after Picquart had given his evidence, Mathieu thanked him. ‘You have no reason to thank me,’ Picquart replied curtly. ‘I was only obeying my conscience.’
37

Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, like Mathieu Dreyfus, was able to make his deposition in open court: both were heckled by the large body of army officers following the proceedings. The court also heard from Marguerite Pays and Maurice Weil, but it ruled that Picquart’s testimony, for the sake of national security, should be held
in camera
. The President of the court martial, General Henri-Désiré Luxer, was not just antagonistic in his questioning but, when Picquart brought up the names of Billot, Mercier and Boisdeffre, he allowed General de Pellieux to interrupt saying that he forbade Picquart to pronounce such glorious names in such a context. Picquart’s evidence was followed by that of Gonse, Lauth and Henry. Henry said that he had seen Picquart show Leblois the secret dossier. Gribelin also swore on oath that he had seen the officer show the dossier to his civilian friend.

Shortly after eight in the evening of the second day of Esterhazy’s court martial, the public were readmitted to hear the verdict. By a unanimous decision of the seven judges, Commandant Charles Walsin-Esterhazy was found not guilty. From the majority of those present came rapturous cries of ‘Long live the army!’, ‘Death to the Syndicate!’ and ‘Death to the Jews!’ Georges Picquart and Mathieu Dreyfus were jeered at and insulted as they left the courtroom. Esterhazy, by contrast, found it hard to make his way through the throng of well-wishers – those in the court, but also the crowd of over a thousand people waiting outside the prison who, when seeing him leave the Cherche-Midi prison with his escort of friends and fellow officers, shouted ‘Long live the army!’, ‘Long live Esterhazy!’, ‘Long live the martyr of the Jews!’

The day after the acquittal of Esterhazy, the Senate voted to remove Auguste Scheurer-Kestner from his position as Vice-President; and on the other side of Paris, Georges Picquart was arrested on suspicion of imparting official secrets to a civilian and sent to the Mont-Valérien prison.

11

Émile Zola

1: A Letter to France

The acquittal of Esterhazy, and the confirmation by both the government and the National Assembly that the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus was not to be questioned, left the Dreyfus family and their supporters baffled and dismayed. It was clear that, whatever the evidence and however clear the reasoning, the French were unwilling to accept that they were being deceived by the leaders of the one institution that retained their respect – the army. It was a time of intense rivalry among the European powers, particularly in Africa. A force of 150 French riflemen under Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand was hacking its way through the jungles of central Africa from Senegal to the Sudan to establish a French presence on the Nile at Fashoda to thwart Britain's ambition of establishing its rule from the Cape to Cairo.

In France, there was little respect for the state as such. Charles Péguy, an ardent Dreyfusard, felt that the republican ‘mystique' had died at the time of General Boulanger. The middle-class ascendancy that had existed since the Restoration – whether under kings, an emperor or a republic – with bankers and leading industrialists firmly in charge was now being challenged by anarchists, socialists and trades unions. France was a democracy; there were periodic elections. But there was a widespread belief, confirmed by the Panama Canal scandal, that the politicians were corrupt, manipulated by secretive and unaccountable agencies – the Jesuits, claimed the left; the Freemasons, claimed the right – and, in the case of Dreyfus, the Jewish syndicate.

Not that all the members of a particular group were necessarily of a like mind. There were some Catholic Dreyfusards and Jewish anti-Dreyfusards, but on the whole the different ‘tribes' closed ranks. Jews, Protestants and free-thinkers thought the worst of the Jesuit-educated officers on the General Staff while the Catholic, conservative, aristocratic elements in society had a blind faith in the integrity of the High Command.

At the time of Esterhazy's acquittal, the centrist republican politicians were mostly concerned to establish their patriotic credentials by lauding the army: they had yet to see that the Affair could be used as a stick with which to belabour the right. A difference of opinion, however, had appeared on the left with Alexandre Millerand, as we have seen, vilifying the Dreyfusards and castigating in particular the Dreyfusard Deputy Joseph Reinach, Jean Jaurès wavering and Georges Clemenceau now a convinced Dreyfusard.

Clemenceau's political career had faltered because of his involvement in the Panama Canal scandal, and his identification with British interests: ‘aoh yes'! After losing his seat in 1893, he had concentrated on journalism and, even though back in the Chamber by 1897, he still saw the press as a powerful ‘fourth estate'. As Pierre Miquel noted in his
L'Affaire Dreyfus
, ‘the Clemenceaus, the Rocheforts, knew how to use the press and to inflate it with their faith and their passion . . . The Dreyfus Affair is above all about the manipulation of public opinion. At every stage, as it unfolds, one finds the press – not a press faithfully reporting on what was taking place, but an aggressive, provocative partisan press . . . a ‘‘gutter press''.'
1

Newspaper proprietors were as partisan as the journalists who wrote for their papers – Drumont on the right, of course, but also members of the syndicate: Edmond de Goncourt was told that ‘the money behind
L'Autorité
, that conservative paper, is supplied by a Jew, by a certain Fould, and there's a clause in his agreement by which Cassagnac [the editor] undertakes not to attack the Jews'.
2
Readers of the Parisian press did not expect detachment or objectivity. ‘French people don't think for themselves any more,' wrote Drumont, ‘they don't have the time, they no longer know how to, they let their newspapers do their thinking for them, their brains are made out of paper.'
3

In order to help French people to think along the same lines as he did, Clemenceau founded a new newspaper,
L'Aurore
, in 1897, with an old leftist, Ernest Vaughan – a former Communard and follower of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon. Sharing Clemenceau's conviction that Dreyfus was innocent,
L'Aurore
called for a review, and this backing was particularly welcome for the Dreyfusards because on 13 December, when the controversy over Esterhazy was at its height,
Le Figaro
, long an ally of the Dreyfusards, was forced by the large number of cancelled subscriptions to withdraw its support; its director, Fernand de Rodays, said that the paper would henceforth remain neutral.

 

It was now that France's best-selling novelist and polemical journalist, Émile Zola, entered the lists as the champion of Alfred Dreyfus. Zola would later admit that his initial interest in the Affair was as a novelist, and was focused on the dramatic possibilities in the story. ‘The novelist was above all seduced and exalted by such a drama,' he wrote, ‘and pity, faith, the passion for truth and justice all came later.'
4
However, rather than write a novel based on the Dreyfus Affair, Zola had joined the fray as a journalist and in articles for
Le Figaro
had gone beyond his denunciation of anti-Semitism in ‘Pour les Juifs'
to an unambiguous support for the Dreyfusard cause. Zola had an acute understanding of the power, but also the amorality, of the French press – not just ‘the gutter press in heat, making its money out of pathological curiosity, perverting the masses in order to sell its blackened paper' but also those ‘so-called serious and honest' papers which content themselves ‘with recording all with scrupulous care, whether it be true or false'.
5

On 6 January 1898, Zola published a pamphlet,
Lettre à la France
,
in which he appealed to France's ‘good-hearted and commonsensical people' not to believe all they read in the papers about Esterhazy and Dreyfus. ‘A hundred papers repeat every day that it is unacceptable to public opinion that Dreyfus should be innocent, that his guilt is necessary for the salvation of the nation.' This was perfect idiocy –
une parfaite bêtise
.
He poured scorn on Commandant Ravary, General de Pellieux and ‘the three experts who did not see at first glance the complete identity of Esterhazy's handwriting and that of the
bordereau
. Take from the street a passing child and show him the two samples: “It's the same gentleman who wrote the two.” He doesn't need experts – the fact that the two are identical is obvious for all to see!'
6

The time had come, wrote Zola, to call to account a press that shamed France in the eyes of the whole world – ‘papers such as
L'Écho
de Paris
, a literary journal, so often in the avant-garde when it comes to ideas, and which has made such trouble over the Dreyfus Affair with vitriolic and partisan columns that are unsigned'. And ‘
le Petit Journal
with its circulation of a million, directed at the humble, reaching everywhere, spreading error, misleading opinion, this is a serious matter. When one has charge of so many souls, when one is the pastor of a whole people, one must act with a scrupulous intellectual probity, or risk committing a civic crime.'
7

2: ‘J'accuse'

Even as his
Lettre à la France
appeared in the bookshops, Zola was working furiously on another pamphlet which went much further than ridiculing Commandant Ravary and General de Pellieux, or the three handwriting experts who had given evidence at Pellieux's inquiry. It was clear that these men were just pawns, as were the judges who would acquit Esterhazy. The time had come, Zola judged, to be done with the sniping in the press and lob a mortar bomb into the debate. He would write an open letter to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, naming names. Ravary and Pellieux were puppets: he would charge the puppet-masters who were conspiring to protect a traitor and let an innocent man rot on Devil's Island.