The Dreyfus Affair (37 page)

Brunetière’s anti-Dreyfusard stance went beyond questioning the qualification of a novelist to judge judicial questions; he had been critical of Zola as a writer long before the Dreyfus Affair.
3
His misgivings about intellectuals, which he expressed in a book entitled
After the Trial
, were part and parcel of his misgivings about academics as such, with their arrogant assumption that their insights into the working of the material world somehow placed them on the moral high ground. He did not understand, he wrote, ‘what entitles a professor of Tibetan to govern his equals, nor what rights to obedience and respect are conferred by a knowledge of the properties of quinine or cinchonine’. To Brunetière, the Dreyfusard impugning of the integrity of the French High Command was symptomatic of the wider takeover of France by ‘arrivistes’ – ‘Freemasons, Protestants and Jews’, who all had ‘the great advantage of not being tied by any commitment to the past’.
4

Barrès was even more specific in associating the Dreyfusards with those ‘foreign’ elements in French society – the sons of immigrants like Zola, rootless cosmopolitans, Germanised philosophers and of course the academics at the École Normale where ‘many students and the most respected masters were Jewish’.
5
His stance surprised and disappointed Léon Blum, who had tried to win him to the Dreyfusard cause.
6
Some of the antagonisms that came to the surface during the Dreyfus Affair harked back to past conflicts; Brunetière had attacked Zola in his
Le Roman naturaliste
of 1883, for example, and a similar antagonism was felt by another young right-wing intellectual, Charles Maurras, for the eminent and influential historian, Gabriel Monod. Monod was one of the earliest Dreyfusards, sceptical since the time of Dreyfus’s conviction, who before Zola’s ‘J’accuse’,
on 6 November 1897, had published an open letter in
Le Temps
calling for a review.

Monod and Maurras had crossed swords long before the Affair over the Latin versus Germanic influences on Merovingian France – Maurras seeing Monod’s historicism as part and parcel of an affinity for all things German. Monod was a Protestant from an extended family of Franco-Swiss-Danish industrialists whose choice of wives from the Protestant nations of northern Europe showed, said Maurras, that they were not true Frenchmen. As a boy, while studying in Paris, Gabriel Monod had lodged with the Protestant pastor Edmond de Pressené. Later, he had married Olga Herzen, the daughter of the exiled half-Russian, half-German revolutionary writer Alexander Herzen. It was only to be expected, then, said Maurras, that Monod should join the Dreyfusards’ attack on the French Army.

Gabriel Monod had taught Bernard Lazare; Lazare was a friend of Léon Blum and Charles Péguy. Péguy, then a Socialist, was a militant Dreyfusard – ‘the military leader’ of a ‘little army of Justice and Truth’ formed by the students from the École Normale who congregated in a bookshop, the Librairie Bellas, that Péguy had bought with his wife’s dowry. Léon Blum spent most mornings there. The little army would protect Dreyfusard professors from attacks by anti-Semitic gangs. They were heady days for the young, feeling themselves to be the protagonists of righteousness in these great events – a defining moment, as Péguy was to say, in the histories of France, of Christianity and of Israel.
7

Moving in a rather different milieu, Marcel Proust was also an active Dreyfusard. His father, Adrien Proust, a distinguished doctor, originally from Illiers in Normandy, had considered the Catholic priesthood before turning to medicine. At one time
chef de clinique
at the Charité Hospital in Paris, he had been admitted to the Légion d’Honneur for his pioneering work on the spread of cholera.

In 1870, Adrien Proust had married Jeanne Weil, the Jewish daughter of a rich stockbroker – at twenty-one, fifteen years younger than her husband. Her family came originally from Metz in Lorraine. Marcel was thus half-Jewish, something he felt ashamed of, like his homosexuality. In the view of his biographer George D. Painter, Proust sought ‘to palliate the guilt of his Jewish blood’ and ‘his awakening perversion’ by assiduous social climbing.
8
Thanks to his father’s high reputation and the money that came from the Weils, Marcel was raised in a privileged
haut-bourgeois
circle; he used to play with Antoinette and Lucie Faure, the daughters of the future President, in the gardens on the Champs-Élysées. However, as a young man his ambition was to be received in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and by December 1893, the year before Dreyfus’s court martial, Proust had gained an entrée into the salons of the Princesse de Wagram and her sister, the Duchesse de Gramont. Both these ladies were born Rothschilds, which meant that Proust had not yet reached the top because ‘it was felt that their husbands had been declassed by marrying outside the nobility into non-Aryan money’.
9

Some of France’s most illustrious aristocrats had restored the fortune of their houses by marrying Jewish or American heiresses. ‘It is interesting to note’, wrote Proust’s friend Boni de Castellane, ‘that the great wealth of some Americans gives them a particular allure . . .’
10
De Castellane himself married an American, Anna Gould. Édouard Drumont, in
La France juive
, raged against the rich Jews who had bought the ancestral estates of the French nobility, and also against those French aristocrats who had ‘tainted’ their blood by marrying Jewish heiresses. Jules Guérin complained that the arrogant aristocrats ousted from their chateaux by the Revolution of 1789 had merely been replaced by ‘our Jewish financiers and their friends, new
seigneurs
, insolent and without pity’.
11

Anti-Semitism among the aristocracy itself had been exacerbated by their financial losses with the collapse of the Union Générale, and the first major anti-Semitic rally in France, in January 1880, was held at the Jockey Club. However, nothing was clear-cut. Boni de Castellane, ostensibly anti-Semitic, mixed socially with the Rothschilds and was keen to get the half-Jewish Sarah Bernhardt to dine with him. The editor of the main society newspaper,
Le Gaulois
,
Arthur Meyer, was a Jewish convert to Catholicism married to a Turenne. The Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James was a Viennese Jew with the maiden name of Gutman: she ‘was said to keep a secret weapon in her desk: a list of all the Jewish marriages in the noble families of Europe’.
12
In fact they were published in the
Almanach de Gotha
and were widely known.

There were French Jews who preferred not to be identified as such. Both Proust and his mother sought to avoid a hotel in Évian filled with Jews, and did not want to be counted among them;
13
but when Marcel came to champion Dreyfus his Jewish connections could be neither concealed nor denied. ‘What’s the good old syndicate doing now, eh?’ he was asked by the Prince de Polignac. Polignac was a friend of Charles Haas, the model for Swann in Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
; but he did not, like Swann, ‘turn from those friends who became anti-Dreyfusards’. Proust’s friend Marie Finlay also adopted the anti-Dreyfus cause, despite her Jewish parentage, ‘in the name of good taste’.
14

Proust’s Dreyfusism was nurtured in the salon of Mme Straus, the daughter of Fromental Halévy and widow of the composer Georges Bizet: half Spanish through her mother, she was said to be the model for Carmen. Unlike the fickle Carmen, however, Geneviève Straus was ‘notoriously’ faithful to her second husband, the Rothschilds’ lawyer Émile Straus, who happily spent his money on the entertainment of the writers, painters and politicians who came to her salon.

The influence of such society women on French politics was considerable in disseminating information and organising networks. It was in Mme Straus’s salon in October 1897 that Joseph Reinach first declared that Dreyfus was innocent, and under his influence ‘it became the G.H.Q. of Dreyfusism’ where her son Jacques Bizet, her Halévy nephews and Marcel Proust organised the first petition of the intellectuals that was published in
L’Aurore
.
15

When Dr Adrien Proust learned that his two sons, Marcel and Robert, had come out as Dreyfusards he refused to speak to them for a week.
16
He would not sign his son’s petition: he was an example of an upright man with no trace of anti-Semitic sentiment who accepted the judgement on the question of Dreyfus’s guilt by those he felt were in a position to know. He was a personal friend of many of the members of Méline’s government, particularly of the Foreign Minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, who had used his influence to get Marcel a job at the Mazarine Library.

Hanotaux, it will be recalled, had advised against prosecuting Dreyfus in November 1894, not because he thought Dreyfus innocent, but because he feared the diplomatic consequences should it become known that documents had been stolen from the German Embassy. Along with other members of the Council of Ministers at the time, he was aware of the haste with which General Mercier had proceeded against Dreyfus, but this did not lead him to cast doubt on the
res judicata
in 1898. The only former minister to do so was Ludovic Trarieux, Minister of Justice at the time. Appalled by the anti-Semitic demonstrations at the Palais de Justice during Zola’s trial, he decided to form an association to protect the rights of individual citizens. On 20 February 1898, Trarieux invited a number of lawyers and academics to his home for the first meeting of this League of the Rights of Man (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme). Though open to men and women of all religions and political persuasions, the reference in its name to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man was unlikely to attract those who saw that Declaration as the source of the evils that came with the French Revolution. Its initial membership of around 800 grew, by September 1899, to 12,000: it was organised into ‘sections’, ‘a term that evoked the radical activism of the Parisian
sans culottes
during the Revolution’.
17

To counter the influence of the League of the Rights of Man, the poet, playwright and veteran politician of the right, Paul Déroulède, revived an association he had formed back in 1882 with Félix Faure, the League of Patriots (Ligue des Patriotes). Its original aim was to stiffen the resolve of the French to recover the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but when Déroulède had backed General Boulanger, he had lost the support of many of its republican members, and the League
was dissolved by the government in 1889.

Now, nine years later, Déroulède sought to revive it, and exploit the political turbulence caused by the Dreyfus Affair to promote his ideas for constitutional reform – an executive presidency on the American model rather than a parliamentary democracy of the kind established in France and Britain. He had a considerable following: he was liked for his open nature and admired for his patriotic poems. The revived League of Patriots recruited 18,000 members, 10,000 of them in Paris.

Numerically, then, at their inception, the two leagues – one Dreyfusard, the other anti-Dreyfusard – were mismatched; and there was an even greater disparity when it came to the press.
L’Aurore
, despite the momentary boost to its circulation with the publication of ‘J’accuse’, sold around 200,000 copies each day as against 500,000 copies of Édouard Drumont’s
La Libre Parole
and one and a half million of Ernest Judet’s anti-Dreyfusard
Petit Journal
. On top of that, there was the enormous circulation of the Assumptionists’
La Croix
which, unlike the Parisian titles, reached deep into rural France with its many regional editions.

2: The Good Name of France Abroad

Jules Méline had said that his government would preserve France’s good name abroad: the opposite turned out to be the case. The verdict on Zola, and the anti-Semitic riots which followed, shocked the world. In Belgium there was dismay, in the United States outrage. In Victorian Britain, Zola would not have been the nation’s first choice as a champion of liberty: his novels dealt with sex with a frankness unimaginable in those of Dickens, Hardy or Trollope – or, for that matter, in those of Turgenev or Tolstoy – and so he was not, in the eyes of
The Times
, ‘a novelist whom one would allow one’s wife or servant to read’.
18
Nevertheless, his conviction was considered a disgrace. ‘Zola’s true crime has been in daring to rise to defend the truth and civil liberty,’ said
The Times
. ‘For that courageous defence of the primordial rights of the citizen, he will be honoured wherever men have souls that are free.’
19

London’s
Daily Mail
took the same line: ‘France is disappearing from the list of civilised nations.’ The British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Monson, though not yet convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, wrote in his dispatches to London of ‘discreditable proceedings’, a ‘diabolical conspiracy’ involving senior officers and ‘a very great probability that justice has not been done’.
20
Even in Russia, where anti-Semitism was quite as powerful and prevalent as it was in France, the verdict on Zola received a bad press.