The Dreyfus Affair (39 page)

The government of Jules Méline seemed safe, but this was an illusion. The left-leaning deputies in his centrist block were alarmed by the clericalist and anti-Semitic belligerence of the nationalists on the right and would not permit Méline to govern with their support. His government fell on 15 June 1898 and, after two false starts, the President, Félix Faure, asked the Radical, Henri Brisson, to form a government. The right – Drumont and his friends – had voted to bring down Méline because of his perceived weakness in the face of Dreyfusard agitation. Brisson, to spike their guns, appointed as Minister of War in his cabinet Godefroy Cavaignac – a Radical and republican with an impeccable pedigree: his grandfather had been a prominent revolutionary in 1789, voting for the execution of King Louis XVI; his father was the general who had restored order in Paris in the 1848 revolution and stood for president against Louis Napoleon; and Cavaignac himself, as a student at the Sorbonne, had established his republican credentials by refusing to accept a prize from the hands of the Prince Imperial.

Cavaignac had already served under Brisson as Under-Secretary for War in the mid-1880s, and under Léon Bourgeois as Minister of War two years before his present appointment. He was therefore no novice when it came to the exercise of power and became the ‘preponderant personality’ in the new government.
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He had gained a reputation for integrity and incorruptibility at the time of the Panama Canal scandal, and was held in high regard for his commitment to social justice.

Cavaignac was also a patriot and convinced anti-Dreyfusard. This should have made his appointment as Minister of War welcome to Boisdeffre and Gonse, but in fact his inflexible sense of mission and famous integrity were not as reassuring to the conspirators when it came to Dreyfus as the shifty inertia of Méline and Billot. Cavaignac was anything but inert, and was determined upon taking office to settle the Dreyfus Affair once and for all. He would cut loose the seedy Esterhazy and nail the treacherous Picquart. On 28 June 1898, he instructed Colonel Gaudérique Roget, chief of the Fourth Bureau of the General Staff, and Captain Louis Cuignet, who had worked with Gonse and Wattine on the file, to extract those documents, so often referred to but not yet brought into the public domain, that established definitively the guilt of Dreyfus.

Boisdeffre and Gonse had hoped that the size of the dossier would deter anyone from looking too closely at its contents, but Cavaignac was not to be put off. Boisdeffre, as a precaution, told Cavaignac that he himself had not authenticated every item in the dossier but his ‘unlimited trust in Lieutenant-Colonel Henry had seemed to him a sufficient guarantee’. He also advised Cavaignac of the dangers of referring to those documents which implicated the military attachés of foreign powers. Cavaignac ignored his advice.

A debate in the Chamber of Deputies was scheduled for 7 July 1898. Cavaignac decided he would make this debate the occasion of a major speech on the Dreyfus Affair. He equipped himself with the pertinent documents, among them a copy of notes supposedly made by Captain Lebrun-Renault at the time of Dreyfus’s ‘confession’ in 1898. Two days before the debate, he showed sixty of the most pertinent documents to the Prime Minister, Henri Brisson, and the Minister of Justice, Ferdinand Sarrien. Captain Cuignet was there to point out their significance. Brisson and Sarrien were predictably impressed by the letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen which mentioned Dreyfus by name. Cavaignac was authorised to proceed with his plan to ‘pulverize’ the syndicate.
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Cavaignac’s sense of mission was invigorated by a move made by the Dreyfusards that same day: Lucie Dreyfus applied to the Minister of Justice, Sarrien, to have her husband’s conviction annulled on the grounds that secret documents had been unlawfully shown to the judges at his court martial and not to the defence. Such audacity enraged the anti-Dreyfusards, and when the debate opened on 7 July the terrier-like Deputy for the Aisne, André Castelin, demanded that punitive measures be taken against the leaders of the Dreyfusards – Mathieu Dreyfus, Georges Picquart, Joseph Reinach and Edgar Demange.

Cavaignac then mounted the rostrum and in his ‘dry and harsh’ tone of voice began his peroration. He spoke caustically of Esterhazy, ‘an officer who tomorrow will receive the punishment he deserves’, and gently of the Dreyfusards who through ‘a misunderstanding’ had come into conflict with the army ‘whose sacred mission is to defend the patrimony of France, not only her material patrimony, but her intellectual and moral patrimony as well’. ‘Never’, Cavaignac insisted, ‘could any consideration of public welfare, whatever it be, lead me to keep an innocent man in prison,’ but the proofs of Dreyfus’s guilt were overwhelming. It sufficed to produce three ‘out of thousands’. The first was the letter from Alessandro Panizzardi to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen mentioning ‘that scoundrel D.’. The second was a letter which actually mentioned Dreyfus by name. And the third was evidence that, at the time of his degradation, Dreyfus had confessed his guilt to Captain Lebrun-Renault. In the face of these incontrovertible proofs, it was surely time for all Frenchmen to accept the verdict and ‘proclaim that the Army which is their pride and their hope . . . is not only strong with the nation’s trust, but strong as well in the justice of the acts that it has accomplished’.

The overwhelming majority of deputies rose to applaud Cavaignac, who, as he descended from the rostrum, basked in the euphoria of his admirers on both
left and right. The Prime Minister, Henri Brisson, hoping to share in Cavaignac’s glory, declared that he had spoken for the government, not just for himself. A motion that Cavaignac’s speech should be posted in every commune in France was carried unanimously with sixteen abstentions: fifteen Socialists and the former Prime Minister, Jules Méline.

The Dreyfusards were shocked and dismayed that Cavaignac should have decided so emphatically in favour of documents which they knew must have been forged. His reputation for integrity and a commitment to justice led the press to accept what he had said. Only Jaurès realised that Cavaignac’s speech had in fact furthered the Dreyfusard cause. The new Minister of War had conceded that the anti-Dreyfusards had acted in good faith; that diplomatic embarrassment or a fear of war was an insufficient reason to conceal the roles of the German and Italian military attachés; that
res judicata
should not block an examination of the evidence against Dreyfus; that secret documents had indeed been shown to the judges; that Esterhazy was a scoundrel who would be thrown out of the army. And the
bordereau
, the only real evidence against Dreyfus, had not been mentioned by Cavaignac at all.

If all this was clear to Jaurès, it was also evident to Gonse and his friends in the Statistical Section. ‘The Minister would have done well not to have read the letters,’ remarked Lieutenant-Colonel Henry, whose forgeries, quoted by Cavaignac, were now posted in all the 36,000 communes in France. And what would be made of Méline’s abstention? Gonse agreed with Henry. The apparent triumph was in fact a disaster. Things would not end well.
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In the other camp, because the forged letters were now in the public domain, Georges Picquart felt able to write to the Prime Minister, Henri Brisson, to tell him that he was ‘in a position to establish before any competent jurisdiction that the two documents dated 1894 cannot be applied to Dreyfus and that the one dated 1896 has every appearance of being a forgery’.
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This letter, sent on by Brisson to Cavaignac, so enraged the Minister of War that he initiated legal proceedings against Picquart.

Picquart, meanwhile, was involved in legal proceedings of his own: he had filed a complaint against persons unknown for sending him telegrams in Tunisia, one signed ‘Speranza’, the other ‘Blanche’, intended to prove that he was in league with the Dreyfusards. The examining magistrate in charge of the case was Paul Bertulus, first drawn into the Dreyfus Affair over Esterhazy’s compromising letters to Mme de Boulancy (the ‘Uhlan’ letter: see p. 201 above). It was clear to Picquart that the fake telegrams were the work of his former subordinates in the Statistical Section, but which of them could be charged with the crime?

Then, at the beginning of July 1898, a witness came forward to say that he knew all about the provenance of the false telegrams and more besides. This witness was Christian Esterhazy, the nephew of Charles, who had finally discovered that the money he had inherited from his father Paul, and which he had thought was invested with the Rothschilds, had in fact been spent by his uncle on high living and stock-market speculations. To punish his uncle Christian had made contact with the Dreyfusards and presented them with documentary proof of the contacts between Esterhazy and du Paty de Clam. He said that one of the telegrams under investigation had been written by Esterhazy’s mistress, Marguerite Pays. To gain a sample of her handwriting, Mathieu Dreyfus had flowers sent to her by an intermediary which elicited a polite note of thanks in a hand identical to that of the ‘Speranza’ telegram.

There was now a race between the military and civilian branches of justice to arrest Esterhazy. Bertulus got there first. Esterhazy and Marguerite Pays were both arrested on 12 July. On the same day, the order was signed to proceed against Picquart, and on 14 July Picquart joined Esterhazy in the Santé prison. Du Paty de Clam had been named by Christian Esterhazy as the officer who had colluded with his uncle, and both the archivist of the Statistical Section, Gribelin, and General Gonse – summoned by Cavaignac for an explanation – were happy to make du Paty the scapegoat. Henry realised that things were unravelling: he ‘could feel the ground quaking’ and, when confronted by his old friend Bertulus, he broke down and wept, shouting: ‘Save us, save us . . . you must save the honour of the Army.’
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However, Henry had recovered sufficient composure when giving evidence against Picquart before the military investigating magistrate, Colonel Pierre-Élie Fabre. Henry, together with Lauth and Gribelin, insisted that they had seen Picquart showing top-secret documents to Picquart’s lawyer Leblois. Fabre therefore ordered the arrest of Leblois; but could Leblois, as a civilian, be brought before a military court?

On 18 July, these two legal processes provoked by the Dreyfus Affair were supplemented by a third – the opening at Versailles of the second trial of Émile Zola on the charge of defamation. His lawyer, Maître Labori, had objected to the trial being held outside Paris, and had tried to get the scope of the charge extended beyond Zola’s claim that the military judges in Esterhazy’s court martial had acquitted him ‘under orders’. All these judicial moves failed. In protest, and on the advice of Labori, Zola withdrew from his own trial, leaving the courtroom to cries of ‘Coward!’, ‘Traitor!’, ‘Go back to the Jews!’ and, from Paul Déroulède, ‘Get out of France! Go back to Venice!’

Along with Alexandre Perrenx, the managing editor of
L’Aurore
, Zola was sentenced
in absentia
to a year’s imprisonment. But by then Zola had taken the advice of his detractors: he had left France for England, where he would remain under an assumed name for the next eleven months.

Zola had eluded Cavaignac’s fanatical attempt to punish the Dreyfusards, but the Minister of War had others besides Zola in his sights. He now elaborated a plan to bring before the Senate, constituted as a High Court, all the leading Dreyfusards on a charge of treason. The Prime Minister, Henri Brisson, and the other ministers turned it down flat. Cavaignac was frustrated by his colleagues’ pusillanimity; he would have to bring charges of defamation instead. But he was consoled by developments in the courts. The Court of Appeal ruled that Commandant du Paty de Clam, as an officer, did not fall under the jurisdiction of the civilian examining magistrate Bertulus; and on 12 August a grand jury dismissed the charges against Esterhazy and Marguerite Pays. Both were released from gaol. The only person now in prison and facing criminal charges of revealing state secrets to Leblois was Georges Picquart.

13

The Road to Rennes

1: Lieutenant-Colonel Henry

Captain Louis Cuignet, the young officer asked by General Billot, when he was still Minister of War, to assist his son-in-law, the magistrate Adolphe Wattine, in examining and ordering the dossier on Dreyfus at the War Office, had been told to continue his work, without the help of Wattine, by the new Minister, Godefroy Cavaignac. Cavaignac would need all the evidence at his fingertips for the actions he planned to bring against the Dreyfusards.

On 13 August 1898, the day after charges of forgery had been dropped against Charles Esterhazy and Marguerite Pays, Cuignet was working late at the War Office. He was taking a closer look at the critical 1896 letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen, mentioning Dreyfus by name, which his boss, Cavaignac, had quoted in his powerful speech in the Chamber of Deputies on 7 July, and which was now posted outside the
mairie
of every commune in France. The letter had been written on a piece of paper with faint coloured lines. Holding it up to the light of the lamp on his desk, Cuignet noticed that the colour of these lines at the top and bottom of the letter differed slightly in hue from those in the middle: all were blue but the former were a blue-grey whereas the latter were a blue tinged with mauve. Clearly, the central section had been inserted between the opening and closing sections of the letter. This crucial piece of evidence in the case against Alfred Dreyfus had been forged.