The Dreyfus Affair (42 page)

Those unacquainted with the relation of penitent to confessor may find it difficult to accept that General de Boisdeffre had not consulted Père du Lac, his spiritual director, on the question of Dreyfus. But as the editor of the journal of the English Jesuits, the
Month
, wrote on this point:

Anyone who will take the slightest pains to ascertain from his Catholic acquaintances what kind of relations a Catholic public man can have with his priest-friends, or even with his confessor, will learn that such relations do not include subjecting his own judgement to theirs in regard to the matters, secret or otherwise, of his public employment. We can imagine what a Catholic Postmaster General would reply to a priest who should have the impudence, which none could have, to strive through him to direct the administration of the General Post Office. And the same may be said of General de Boisdeffre and Père du Lac. Père du Lac would be the last man in the world to pry into the official secrets of a Commander-in-Chief, and General de Boisdeffre would have been the last to permit such an intrusion – for, let us take this opportunity of saying it, those who know General de Boisdeffre, know him to be a man of conspicuously high and honourable character, and absolutely incapable of the iniquities imputed to him by reckless partisans . . .
27

With hindsight it may be wondered whether this judgement of General de Boisdeffre’s character is sound; but it remains unlikely, though not impossible, that he would have consulted his confessor – whether it be Père du Lac or any other – on matters of state.

With the exception of the Assumptionists and their Comités Justice-Égalité
formed to support nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard candidates in the election of May 1898, there would seem to have been no direct intervention by the institutional Church in the Dreyfus Affair. Anti-Semitism is found in some bishops and a number of priests, but broadly speaking the Catholic bishops took the line that the case of Alfred Dreyfus was a judicial matter in which, by the terms of the Concordat, they were not permitted to intervene: it was a reticence that was to cost the Church dear. Edward H. Flannery, in his
The Anguish of the Jews
, dismisses Hannah Arendt’s claim that the Jesuits masterminded the anti-Dreyfusard campaign but concurs with her view that the staunchest anti-Dreyfusards were tribal Catholics – ‘Catholics without faith’ – who regarded Catholicism as integral to French identity and saw the Dreyfusard campaign to discredit the army as part of a long-term ‘de-Christianisation’ of society by ‘Talmudic Judaism’.
28

The most significant exponent of this view was Charles Maurras, a writer and journalist from a monarchist family in Provence and the adversary of Gabriel Monod. He had lost his faith in his youth but wrote that ‘the interests of Roman Catholicism and those of France’ were ‘nearly always identical and nowhere contradictory’.
29
He regarded French Jews, and more particularly French Protestants, as alien entities within the nation.

Nationalist writers observe that our Jews, thus naturalized, have not ceased for this reason to form a community of their own, a state quite distinct from the French State: their practice of marrying either among themselves, or with their kind from the North or the South of Europe, accentuates this difference between Jewish society and the rest of French society. A similar complaint . . . has been raised against the Huguenots. Though they were originally of irreproachable French blood, they are intellectual and moral dissidents, and have special affinities with our most redoubtable foreign rivals. It is to be regretted that . . . Protestant society has come to have a mentality quite different from the traditional French mentality; and between the two there has developed, more and more, a state of secret war, not a war of race, or even of religion, but, rather, of culture, of thought and of taste.
30

Jews, but particularly Protestants, were therefore a cultural Fifth Column that sapped the strength of France in its struggle with its ‘redoubtable enemies’, Protestant Germany, Britain and the United States (the US at that moment was wresting Cuba and the Philippines from Catholic Spain). The crime of the Dreyfusards, in Maurras’s view, was to exalt ‘a vague and unrealistic ideal of “Justice” above the concrete conditions within which the human race alone could attain as much justice as possible. It was folly to put justice before the state: there had been states without justice but no justice without the state.’
31

Maurras did not simply reject the claims of Christianity, he thought Jesus of Nazareth ‘essentially a charlatan’
32
whose exaltation of the meek and poor over the ‘mighty’ was a ‘recipe for disaster’ at a time of a Darwinian struggle for survival by Europe’s nation states. He applied this Nietzschean ruthlessness to the case of Dreyfus. ‘Was France to be weakened because of some artificial doubts about the guilt of one man?’ It was not surprising that those who sought to discredit the French Army by calling for a review of Dreyfus’s conviction were almost all from the Jewish and Protestant communities, who felt a greater affinity for their co-religionists in other countries than they did for their fellow citizens in France: he referred to them as
métèques
, a term used in ancient Greece for resident foreigners with limited rights.

Maurras had a fertile and flexible mind. Faced with the suicide of Henry, he did not support the idea put forward in some provincial editions of
La Croix
that he had been murdered by agents of the syndicate to keep him quiet but, quite to the contrary, wrote that Henry had forged the letter from Panizzardi and then taken his own life to save the nation from war. In two articles published in
La Gazette de France
on 5 and 6 September, Maurras described how this ‘energetic plebeian’
*
had taken upon himself to counteract Picquart’s forgery of the
petit bleu
with a forgery of his own. To reveal the real source of his certainty of the guilt of Dreyfus – by implication, the
bordereau
annotated by Kaiser Wilhelm II – would lead to war. A court martial might lead to damaging disclosures about his superior officers. ‘Our poor half-Protestant upbringing’, wrote Maurras, ‘is incapable of appreciating so much moral and intellectual nobility.’ He went on: ‘Colonel, there is not a drop of your precious blood which does not steam still wherever the heart of the Nation beats . . . Before long from the country’s soil, in Paris, in your little village, there will arise monuments to expiate our cowardice . . . In life as in death, you marched forward. Your unhappy forgery will be counted among the best acts of war.’
33

This idea of Henry as a martyr was taken up by the other anti-Dreyfusard newspapers –
La Libre Parole
,
Le Petit Journal
,
L’Éclair
and of course
La Croix
,
which dropped the idea that Henry had been murdered. It reinvigorated the anti-Dreyfusards who had been demoralised by Henry’s suicide. It led to a surge of sympathy throughout the nation for Henry’s pretty widow, Berthe, and her little son Joseph. Always on the lookout for something to boost circulation,
La Libre Parole
published an article about the plight of ‘the widow Henry’ by the proto-feminist writer Marie-Anne de Bovet (the Marquise de Bois-Hébert) entitled ‘To Good People’ – ‘Aux braves gens’. In it she revealed the plight of Mme Henry, a woman whose noble husband had been calumniated by Joseph Reinach: Reinach had accused Henry of being Esterhazy’s partner in treason. How could an impoverished widow seek redress for such an insult in the courts?
La Libre Parole
would open a subscription list to raise money for legal action. It would be a memorial to ‘the brave French officer killed, murdered by Jews . . . However small the contribution, it will be a slap in the obscene face of the ignoble Reinach.’

The appeal was an astounding success. In the space of a month, 25,000 contributions raised 131,000 francs. A list of subscribers was published in
La Libre Parole
which allows a dissection of the social forces arraigned against Dreyfus, and the vituperative comments that accompanied some of the contributions gives an insight into the deep loathing found in some circles for Jews. Few contributions came from white-collar workers, domestic servants, industrialists or professionals in the countryside. A high proportion came from manual workers, artisans, students and the liberal professions in the big cities. The largest number of contributors were serving members of the armed forces – 4,500, of whom 3,000 were officers on active service, among them nine colonels and lieutenant-colonels and five generals – one of them General Mercier; and, from the army reserve, thirty generals and fifty-five colonels or lieutenant-colonels.
34
Out of 55,000 priests in France, 300 subscribed to the Henry memorial – approximately one-half of 1 per cent.
35
No Catholic bishop sent a contribution, something which disappointed some of their clergy – ‘A poor priest, sickened to realize that no bishop in France has sent in his offering’; and ‘M. . . . heartbroken to see that not a single bishop has participated in the subscription.’
36

Incongruously, there were few contributions from Brittany and the Vendée – the most Catholic French regions and also politically the most royalist and right wing: Stephen Wilson ascribes this to the fact that the population was too backward and illiterate to be susceptible to a press campaign, or that in those areas ‘Jewish minorities were unimportant or unknown’, but it might also be explained by the disapproval by devout Catholics of Henry’s suicide – a mortal sin.

Some of the subscribers were not Catholic at all: one came from ‘a freethinker who is opposed to Jewish or Protestant clericalism as to any other’, another from ‘a freethinker’ who feared that ‘the Jews will turn us all into church-goers’. Many of the workers and artisans felt that they had been exploited or badly treated by Jewish employers and they expressed the common complaints against the amorality of the money economy: ‘In contrast to honour which is embodied in the army and the family, the Jew is identified with money which is liquid and unstable, and associated with social change, uncertainty and possible disaster’; ‘For France, against the triple alliance of Freemasons, Jews and Protestants . . .’.
37
Some of the donations were accompanied by the kind of crude anti-Semitic abuse found in Drumont’s
La France juive
.
Jews were ‘unclean’. One contributor ‘would like to eat some Jew, so that he could defecate it’; another said he would like ‘a bedside rug made with Yid skins so that he could tread on it night and morning’. There was ‘a military doctor . . . who wishes that vivisection were practised on Jews rather than on harmless rabbits’.
38

There was ‘a definite social cachet in contributing to the cause’.
39
The pre-revolutionary aristocracy was strongly represented with seven dukes and duchesses, two princes, fifty marquises and over two hundred counts, viscounts and barons, among them Comte Albert de Mun who sent in fifty francs ‘to defend our beloved army’. The Duc d’Orléans, on the other hand, made a contribution, ‘not actually under his own name, but yet transparently’; there was a measure of opportunism in this because ‘some of the Orléans princes knew, through their relations with Queen Victoria, that the Kaiser had told his grandmother that Dreyfus was innocent’.
40
So too the Empress Eugénie, living in exile in Britain, which may be why the Bonapartists were largely absent from the subscription list.

There were a large number of doctors and lawyers: analysts of the list have suggested that the competition of Jews within these professions had fostered anti-Semitism, just as perceived exploitation by Jewish employers accounts for contributions from ‘three embroiderers from Bains-les-Bains, Vosges, who in working for a Jew make 14 sous in 15 hours’. There were many women among the subscribers, and a strain of sexual phobia is discernible in some comments that accompanied their contributions: ‘a working woman seduced and deceived by her Jewish boss’ and ‘a man of Roubaix who wants to contribute his modest share to snatch a French woman out of the hands of a Jew’.
41

Mme Henry, ‘veiled in mourning, epitomizing pure and fragile womanhood’,
42
became an icon for the anti-Dreyfusards to match the Dreyfusards’ Lucie: one a real widow, the other a grass widow who had worn black since her husband’s incarceration. The many thousands of letters of support that Lucie received from well-wishers provide a snapshot of Dreyfusards comparable to the list of contributors to the ‘Henry monument’. Here too there were Catholics and aristocrats, but there were often personal reasons for acting contrary to type. Monseigneur de Schad, the Private Chamberlain to Pope Leo XIII, was a German; Lady Stanley, the wife of the explorer, was English; Père Hyacinthe was a defrocked priest married to an Englishwoman; Prince Albert of Monaco, who sent a message to Lucie inviting her and her husband to his chateau at Marchais in Champagne after ‘the holy work of justice was done’,
43
was married to Alice Heine, the daughter of a German-Jewish financier, widow of Duc Armand de Richelieu and distant cousin of the poet Heinrich Heine.
44
Prince Albert rewarded the first Dreyfusard from outside the Dreyfus family, Major Forzinetti, by giving him a job in the government of Monaco.
45