The Proud Tower (35 page)

Under the law of the Republic all Pretenders to the throne lived in exile. Bonapartist hopes were lodged in Prince Victor Napoleon, grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, while legitimist allegiance went to a grandson of Louis-Philippe, the Comte de Paris, of whom Thiers said, “From a distance he looks like a Prussian, from close up like an imbecile.” On his death in 1894 he was succeeded by his son, the Duc d’Orléans, a hare-brained young man who in 1890 had dashingly appeared in France with declared intent to “share the French soldier’s
gamelle
[mess],” that is, to do his military service. Being equally celebrated for his romance with the prima donna, Nellie Melba, he was irreverently known thereafter as “Gamelba,” a name coined by Rochefort. Before the Affair, his cause seemed moribund; but in the Affair the royalists found a new rallying point, new hope and excitement and in the anti-Semites, new partners and energy. Anti-Semitism became the fashion, although with certain unwanted effects on Society, for parvenus were able to force their way in by virtue of the degree of warmth with which they espoused the new cause. “All this Dreyfus business is destroying society,” complained the Baron de Charlus, and the Duchesse de Guermantes found it “perfectly intolerable” that all the people one had spent one’s life trying to avoid now had to be accepted just because they boycotted Jewish tradesmen and had “Down with Jews” printed on their parasols.

Important neither in government nor in culture, the
gratin
were important only in providing the background, motive, stimulus and financial backing to reaction. In the Affair the only serious leader to emerge from their class was de Mun. It was he who forced the Government to prosecute Zola for libel of the Army in his public letter,
J’Accuse
, and thus brought on the trial which made the case a national, no longer containable, issue. Had the Government had its way it would have taken no action, for discussion and testimony and above all cross-examination were to be avoided. But led by de Mun, the Right in its wrath demanded revenge and his authority exercised a spell. When no one from the Ministry of War was present in the Chamber to reply to Zola’s attack, de Mun demanded that the session be suspended until the Minister of War could be summoned so that nothing should take precedence over defence of the Army’s honor. A deputy suggested that the matter could wait while other business continued. “The Army cannot wait!” de Mun declared haughtily. Obediently the deputies filed out until the Minister arrived and afterward, swept up in a passionate oration by de Mun, voted to proceed against Zola.

“A colossus with dirty feet, nevertheless a colossus,” Flaubert had called Zola. Although he was probably the most widely read and best-paid French author of the time, the brutal realism of his novels had aroused the disgust and resentment of many. He dug mercilessly into the base, sordid and corrupt elements of every class in society, from the slums to the Senate. Peasants, prostitutes, miners, bourgeois businessmen, alcoholics, doctors, officers, churchmen and politicians were exposed in gigantic detail. Worse, the supposedly beneficent Nineteenth Century itself was exposed in his picture of the terrible impoverishment brought upon the masses by industrialization. The doors of the Academy never opened to him. His account of 1870 in
La Débâcle
infuriated the Army and after
Germinal
he was classed as a champion of the workers against the established order. He was an agnostic who believed in science as the only instrument of social progress. Already, however, a literary reaction against realism and the “bankruptcy of science” was taking place.

In the year before Dreyfus’ arrest, Zola’s fame had reached its peak upon publication of the final novel in his immense twenty-volume panorama of French life. At a party given by his publisher to celebrate the occasion on the Grand Lac in the Bois de Boulogne, writers, statesmen, ambassadors, actresses and beauties, celebrities of every kind from Poincaré to Yvette Guilbert, were present. Where was he to go from here? The Dreyfus case opened a new road to greatness, but only to a man capable of taking it. It required courage to challenge the State, the training and genius of a great writer to compose
J’Accuse
, and sympathy with suffering to inspire him to act. Zola had known suffering: In his youth he had spent two unemployed years in the garret of a shabby boardinghouse, often so hungry that he set traps for sparrows on the roof and broiled them on the end of a curtain rod over a candle.

His first article on the Affair, after summarizing the evidence against Esterhazy—the handwriting, the
petit bleu
, the Uhlan letters—had asserted, “Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.” When a month later the Army ordered Esterhazy’s court-martial, the Dreyfusards, believing this was a roundabout way of succumbing to Revision, were exuberant. In fact, it was a device for dealing with the Esterhazy problem through a trial whose verdict the Army could control. Esterhazy was acquitted and acclaimed by the mob as the “martyr of the Jews.” The verdict “came upon us like the blow of a bludgeon,” wrote Blum. It was as if Dreyfus had been condemned a second time. The march of truth had, after all, been stopped.

The only way to force the evidence onto the record was to provoke a civil trial. This was the purpose of Zola’s open letter addressed to the President of France. He conceived it on the day of Esterhazy’s acquittal with deliberate intent to bring himself to trial. He told no one but his wife and did not hesitate. Locking himself in his study, he worked without stopping for twenty-four hours, mastered the intricacies and mysteries of what by now had become one of the most complex puzzles in history and wrote his indictment in four thousand words. He took it over to
l’Aurore
on the evening of January 12, and it appeared next morning under the title suggested by Ernest Vaughan (or, according to another version, by Clemenceau):
J’ACCUSE
! Three hundred thousand copies were sold, many to Nationalists who burned them in the streets.

In separate paragraphs, each beginning “I accuse,” Zola specifically named two Ministers of War, Generals Mercier and Billot, one “as accomplice in one of the greatest iniquities of the century,” and the other of “possessing positive proofs of the innocence of Dreyfus and suppressing them.” He accused the Chiefs of the General Staff, Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse, as accomplices in the same crime, and Colonel du Paty de Clam (he knew nothing about Major Henry) as its “diabolical author.” He accused the War Ministry of conducting an “abominable campaign” in the press to mislead the public and conceal its own misdeeds. He accused the first court-martial of conducting an illegal trial and the Esterhazy court-martial of covering that illegal verdict “on order” as well as of the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty person. The accusations were made in full awareness of the law of libel “to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. Let them bring me to court. Let the inquiry be in broad daylight. I wait.”

The public was aghast; such charges flung at the military leaders of the nation seemed equivalent to an act of revolt. Many Revisionists felt Zola had gone too far. He had inflamed an already heated situation almost unbearably by frightening and angering the middle classes and increasing their support of the Army and their dislike of the Dreyfusards. Following de Mun’s resolution next day, the Government announced that Zola would be prosecuted. Hatred, filth and insults were spewed on him by the press and in songs sold on the streets. He was viciously caricatured. “Pornographic pig” was polite among the names he was called. Packages of excrement were mailed to him. He was burnt in effigy. Placards were distributed reading, “The answer of all good Frenchmen to Emile Zola:
Merde!
” Evoking one of the major emotions of the Affair, the attacks denounced him as a “foreigner,” in reference to his Italian father. In fact, Zola had been born in Paris of a French mother and brought up in the home of her parents in Aix-en-Provence.

The Government’s suit, filed in the name of General Billot as Minister of War, ignored all the accusations relevant to Dreyfus and confined itself to the single charge that the court-martial of Esterhazy had acquitted him “on order.” By this device the presiding judge could exclude any testimony not bearing precisely on that point. In a fiery protest against this procedure, Jaurès thundered in the Chamber at the Government, “You are delivering the Republic to the Jesuit Generals!” at which a Nationalist deputy, the Comte de Bernis, assaulted him physically, causing such an uproar that the military guard was required to restore order.

J’Accuse
drew world attention to the Affair and gave it the proportions of heroic drama. That the French Army could be accused of such crimes and the French author best known to the foreign public be attacked in such terms were equally astounding. The world watched with “stupor and distress,” wrote Björnstjerne Björnson from Norway. When the trial opened, the Dreyfusards were conscious of that audience. “The scene is France; the theatre is the world,” they said. The trial transformed the Affair from the local to the universal.

The writer of his time who most truly touched the universal, Chekhov, was profoundly stirred by Zola’s intervention. Staying in Nice at the time, he followed the trial in growing excitement, read all the verbatim testimony and wrote home, “We talk here of nothing but Zola and Dreyfus.” He found the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus tirades of the St. Petersburg
New Times
, the leading daily which had published most of his own stories, “simply repulsive” and quarreled with its editor, his old and intimate friend.

Foreign opinion, except as conditioned by feeling about the Jews, saw the issue chiefly as one of Justice and could not understand the obstinate refusal of the French to allow Revision. Foreign hostility itself became a factor in the refusal. “French papers ask why foreign countries take such an interest in the Affair,” wrote Princess Radziwill, “as if a question of justice did not interest the whole world.” It did, but in France the Affair was not only that. It was not a struggle of the Right against the Left, because men like Scheurer-Kestner and Reinach, Clemenceau and Anatole France, were not men of the Left. It was fought in terms of justice and patriotism, but fundamentally it was the struggle of the Right against Reason.

Zola’s trial opened on February 7, 1898, and lasted sixteen days. The atmosphere at the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cité “smelled of suppressed slaughter,” said a witness. “What passion on people’s faces! What looks of hatred when certain eyes met!” The courtroom was crammed to the window sills with journalists, lawyers, officers in uniform, ladies in furs. Marcel Proust climbed every day to the public gallery, bringing coffee and sandwiches so as not to miss a moment. Outside the windows Drumont’s claque, paid at forty sous a head, hooted and jeered. All the Army officers concerned in the trials and investigations of Dreyfus, Esterhazy and Picquart stood up and swore to the authenticity of the documents, including specifically the Panizzardi letter which was declared to be “positive proof of Dreyfus’ guilt. (The Foreign Minister, already advised by the Italians that it was a forgery, had wanted to call off the trial but the Government had not dared for fear of an Army revolt.) General Mercier, upright, haughty, unmoved, “entrenched in his own infallibility,” affirmed on his honor as a soldier that Dreyfus had been rightfully and legally convicted. Attempts by the defence to cross-examine were met over and over again by the presiding judge with the sharp order, “The question will not be put.” Statements by Zola or by his lawyer, Maître Labori, or by Clemenceau, who, though not a lawyer, was appearing for
l’Aurore
, were met by inarticulate roars from the packed audience. Zola, appearing nervous and sullen, kept his temper until, tormented beyond endurance, he spat out “Cannibals!”—the word used by Voltaire in the Calas affair. Esterhazy, called to testify, was greeted by the crowd with shouts of
“Gloire au victime du Syndicat!
” On the steps of the court, Prince Henri d’Orléans, cousin of the Pretender, shook the hand of the author of the Uhlan letters and saluted in him the “French uniform.”

“Paris palpitated,” wrote an English visitor, and he felt a lust for blood in the air. Mobs broke the windows of Zola’s house and of the offices of
l’Aurore.
Shops closed, foreigners departed. A wave of anti-Semitic riots organized by Drumont’s lieutenant, Jules Guérin, erupted in Le Havre, Orléans, Nancy, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles and smaller towns, and reached a peak in Algiers where the looting and sack of the Jewish quarter lasted for four days, with many beaten and in some cases killed. In Paris an employment office opened where toughs were hired at five francs a day or two francs for an evening to shout, “Down with the Jews! Long live the Army! Spit on Zola!” When Zola left the court on one occasion, in company with Reinach, the crowd flew at them, yelling, “Drown the traitors! Death to the Jews!” and they had to be rescued by police. Thereafter, mounted police escorted Zola’s carriage to and from the court every day, and were sometimes forced to charge the screaming mob threatening to assault it. Zola’s friend Desmoulins, acting as bodyguard, carried a revolver.

In the Court, despite obstructions and jeers, truth was advancing. Neither Labori, young and vehement, of whom it was said, “He is not an intellect, he is a temperament,” nor Clemenceau, hard, merciless, invincible in debate, could be bullied or silenced. The jury was rumored to be inclining toward acquittal. General Boisdeffre, taking the stand, warned, “If the nation does not have confidence in its Army chiefs … then they are ready to transfer to others their heavy task. You have only to say the word.” It was a threat of collective resignation by the General Staff if the jury acquitted. Boisdeffre made it plain: Zola or us. This was the issue, not the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, which the jury had to decide. Its members came mostly from the petty bourgeoisie: a tanner, a market gardener, a wine-dealer, a clerk, a landlord and two workmen. With implied threat
La Libre Parole
published their names and business addresses and letters from readers warning of vengeance if the “Italian” were acquitted.