The Proud Tower (39 page)

In the election of a new president, held in the midst of hysterical battle over jurisdiction of the Court, Emile Loubet, President of the Senate, a steady, simple Republican and product of peasant stock, won over the Conservative Méline. As Premier at the time of the Panama scandal, Loubet was despised by the Nationalists. They called his election an “insult to France,” a “challenge to the Army,” a “victory for Jewish treason.” Their hired mobs sent to hoot his progress from the Gare St-Lazare to the Elysée raised such a clamor that even the band playing the “Marseillaise” could not be heard. “The Republic will not founder in my hands,” said Loubet calmly. “They know it and it maddens them.”

The Right in a state of ungovernable excitement was prepared to make it founder. “In a week we will have driven Loubet from the Presidency,” boasted Jules Lemaître. The state funeral of Faure was fixed on as the occasion for a coup d’état. The Army must be persuaded to save the country. The “Leaguers” thought they could do it by a cry, a gesture, an occasion, and did not concern themselves with serious organization. Their plan was to intercept the military escort of the cortege while it was returning from the cemetery to its barracks in the Place de la Nation, and lead it to seize the Elysée. Déroulède joined by Guérin led a band of two hundred patriots into the streets, caught hold of the bridle of General Roget, commander of the escort, shouting, “To the Elysée, General! Follow us, General, follow us! To the Place Bastille! To the Hotel de Ville! To the Elysée! Friends await us. I beg you, General, save France, establish a Republic of the people, kick out the
parlementaires!
” The General kept his head and kept moving, the crowd, ignorant but willing, shouted, “Save France!
Vive l’Armée!
”, the troops sweeping Déroulède and his followers with them, marched on to the barracks and entered. Déroulède, throwing open his coat to reveal his deputy’s scarf, emblem of parliamentary immunity, was nevertheless carted off to the police station to be indicted for insurrection and provide at his trial one more cause for combative passions. The fiasco did nothing to daunt the expectations of the Right. In the following month the Anti-Semitic League received 56,000 francs from the Duc d’Orléans and 100,000 from Boni de Castellane.

Hardly had breath been drawn when the verdict that all France was awaiting was announced by the Cour de Cassation. Forty-six judges in scarlet and ermine declared for Revision. A cruiser was sent to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for retrial. Zola returned from England with an article which
l’Aurore
headlined in the now familiar type,
JUSTICE
! He saw all factional and party lines now dissipated in one great division separating France into two camps: the forces of reaction and the past against the forces of justice and the future. This was the logical order of battle to complete the task of 1789. With the unquenchable optimism of their age the Dreyfusards hailed the Court’s decision as the herald of social justice for the century about to be born. A great burden of shame seemed lifted and replaced by pride in France. “What other country,” wrote a correspondent of
Le Temps
at The Hague where the Peace Conference was assembled, “has had the privilege of making the world’s heart beat faster as we have for the last three years?” Revision meant not only the triumph of justice but of “the liberty of mankind.” Others beside Frenchmen felt this universality. William James, traveling in Europe, wrote as he saw daylight breaking through the Affair, “It may be one of those moral crises that become starting points and high water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and new faces behind them.”

The Nationalists were flung into paroxysms of wrath. Caran d’Ache drew a cartoon showing Dreyfus with a smirk and Reinach with a whip ordering, “Come here, Marianne.” On the facing page he drew Zola emerging from a toilet bowl holding a toy Dreyfus, with the caption, “Truth Rising from Its Well.”

Fury at the Court’s decision was vented the next day on the head of President Loubet when he attended the races at Auteuil. It was the Sunday of
le Grand Steeple
, the most fashionable event of the season. When the President’s carriage drove up to the grandstand, groups of well-dressed gentlemen wearing in their buttonholes the white carnation of the royalists and the blue cornflower of the anti-Semites, and brandishing their canes, shouted in pounding rhythm, “
Dé-mis-sion!
[resign]
Pa-na-ma! Dé-mis-sion! Pa-na-ma!”
Through the howls and threats Loubet took his seat. Suddenly a tall man with a blond moustache, wearing a white carnation and white cravat, later identified as the Baron Fernand de Christiani, detached himself from the group, dashed up the steps two at a time and struck the President on the head with a heavy cane. Ladies screamed. A sudden silence of general stupor followed, then an uproar as the assailant’s companions rushed to rescue him from the guards. As some were arrested others converged on the police in yelling groups, striking with their canes. The scene was
“un charivari infernal.”
General Zurlinden, Governor of Paris, telephoned for reinforcements of three cavalry detachments. Loubet, though shaken, apologized for the disturbance to Countess Tornielli, the Italian Ambassadress, in the seat beside him. “It was a place of honor,” she replied.

In Loubet’s top hat the Republic itself had been assaulted and the public was startled and indignant. Telegrams from committees and municipal councils all over France poured in expressing a loyalty deeper than might have been supposed from the experience of the last years. Loubet announced that as an invited guest he intended to appear at next Sunday’s races at Longchamps. Forewarned, the leagues and newspapers of both sides called for demonstrations and assembled their battalions. The Government took extraordinary precautions. Thirty squadrons of cavalry and a brigade of infantry in battle dress were lined up along the route from the Elysée to Longchamps, while at the racecourse itself dragoons of the
Garde Républicaine
armed with rifles were stationed at every ten yards around the course and at every betting window. Mounted police guarded the lawn. More than 100,000 people turned out along the route and at the racecourse, many wearing the red rose boutonniere of the Left. Again the threat of the Right brought out the workers, less, perhaps, to defend the bourgeois state than to defy the representatives of the ruling class. The presence of more than six thousand guardians of the law prevented a major outbreak, but throughout the day demonstrators clashed, private riots and melees erupted, cries and counter-cries resounded, hundreds were arrested, reporters and police as well as demonstrators were injured. As the crowds flowed back to Paris in the evening the turbulence swept through the cafés; “
Vive la République!
” met “
Vive l’Armée!
” Bottles and glasses, carafes and trays were hurled, tables and chairs became weapons, police charged; anger, broken heads and national animosities mounted. Even outside Paris, in a pension in Brest where officers and professors boarded, “these young men equally animated by love of France” could no longer talk to or understand each other without coming to the point of a duel. It was time, urged
Le Temps
, for a “truce of God.”

But it was not to be had. When again the Government fell in the week after Longchamps, the fears and difficulties to be faced in office were now so great that for eight days no one could form a Government. In the vacuum the man who came forward with intent to “liquidate” the Affair was able to impose conditions that would otherwise have been unacceptable. He was René Waldeck-Rousseau, fifty-three, the leading lawyer of Paris and a polished orator, known as the “Pericles of the Republic.” A Catholic from Britanny, wealthy and wellborn, he was impressive in manner and British in appearance, with cropped hair and moustache, a taste for hunting and fishing, a talent for watercolors and impeccable clothes. Rochefort called him
Waldeck le pommadé
because he was so well groomed. Admired by the Radicals and approved by the Center, he represented the
juste milieu.

With the retrial of Dreyfus ahead, the Affair was moving toward climax. To retain office under the terrible buffeting he could expect, Waldeck deliberately chose to form a Government which, by being equally obnoxious to both sides, would cancel the blows of either. He selected a Socialist, Millerand, as Minister of Commerce and a military hero, the Marquis de Galliffet, “butcher” of the Commune, as Minister of War. The tumult in press and parliament that greeted this remarkable expedient was unequalled. “Pure madness … absolute lunacy … monstrous … infamous!” came from both sides. The appointment of Millerand not only infuriated the Right; his acceptance created a scandal and a schism in his own party and in the Socialist International of major proportions and historic significance. Acceptance of office in a capitalist Government was a betrayal comparable to that of Judas. Profoundly saddened, Jaurès begged Millerand to shun the offer, but Waldeck had knowingly selected a man to whom the lure of office was strong. The Socialists now had to face the choice whether or not to support the Waldeck Government when it came to the Chamber for a vote of confidence. If the Government lost, the prospect was chaos. Jaurès was persuaded by Lucien Herr’s argument: “What a triumph for Socialism that the Republic cannot be saved without calling on the party of the proletariat!” The Guesde faction, however, clung to the class struggle. Socialists, stated Guesde, “enter Parliament as though we were in an enemy State only in order to fight the enemy class.” Jaurès warned that if Socialsm persisted in this attitude it would sink to the level of “sterile and intransigent anarchism,” but he did not prevail. The Union Socialiste broke apart; twenty-five of the parliamentary members agreed to support the Government; seventeen refused. Guesde enchanted his group with the exciting suggestion that it should greet the new Government’s appearance in the Chamber with cries of “
Vive la Commune!
” but, so as not to find themselves allied with the Right, abstain when it came to a vote.

For ten minutes next day they stood hurling “
Vive la Commune! A bas les fusilleurs! A bas l’assassin!”
at the new ministers. The object of it all, General the Marquis de Galliffet, Prince de Martigues, nearly seventy, with red-bronze face and bright eyes, looked mockingly on the scene, half-gratified, half-disgusted. He had fought in the Crimea, Italy, Mexico, Algeria and at Sedan, where he had led his regiment into the last cavalry charge with the reply to his commanding officer, “As often as you like, Sir, as long as one of us is left.” Impressed by the great Gambetta’s patriotism and fighting spirit, Galliffet became and remained a loyal Republican and openly despised Boulanger. The eyes in his highly colored face were sunk on either side of a nose like the beak of a bird of prey, but his figure was vigorous and young and he still wore “the same air that had made his fortune, as of a bandit chief who feared nothing or a
grand seigneur
who cared for nothing.” Despite a silver-plated stomach and a limp from old wounds, he played tennis in the Tuileries Gardens and his love affairs, recounted with sparkle and ribaldry, were the delight of the Bixio. He told how Mme de Castiglione showed him her nude portrait by Baudry, and when he asked if she was really as beautiful as that, she disrobed and posed on the sofa. “The picture was better,” Galliffet concluded. He was called the
sabreur de la parole
because he told stories “as if he were charging at the head of his squadron.” Devoted to the fighting efficiency of the Army and to Picquart who had served under his command, he had become a Revisionist. For this sin he was cut at the Jockey, and after he became a Minister, resigned from the Cercle de l’Union, less because of his own opinions than because of “imbecile” members who got themselves arrested at Auteuil; as he said, “It’s not possible to belong to a club if one has to arrest the members; it’s not sociable.” Caustic and eccentric, proud of having nothing to live on but his pension after having once been rich, he possessed “courage, effrontery, intelligence, contempt for death and thirst for life.”

He needed all these to become Minister of War at the peak of the Affair. Confronting the taunts of the Guesde extremists in the Chamber, he suddenly stood up and barked, “
L’assassin, présent
!” The din became general. Nationalists, Radicals, Center, were shouting insults and shaking fists. Millerand, a lawyer like Waldeck, with gray hair
en brosse
, a lorgnon, a neat black moustache and a precise, aggressive manner, was wilting. His moustache trembled and he looked “like a huge cat caught in a downpour.” Galliffet was observed taking down names and explained later, “I thought I’d better invite those chaps to dinner.” Waldeck, trying to speak, stood at the tribune for an hour without being heard for more than ten minutes. He fought desperately and succeeded in establishing the Government by a majority of twenty-six.

Galliffet joined it “without illusions,” he wrote to Princess Radziwill, because of its promise to pacify France, “if that is still possible. The Rightist papers beg me to do another Boulanger and those of the Left want me to cut off the heads of all the Generals who displease them. The public is an idiot. If I touch a guilty general I am accused of massacring the Army; if I abstain I am accused of treason. What a dilemma. Pity me.” Actually, although he found Loubet “too bourgeois,” he was pleased to be a Minister and was very “gay and amusing” at the next meeting of the Bixio. He told a lively story of a rather large but lovely lady of forty-five who visited him at his office to propose a little deal involving 20,000 horses to be bought for the Army. There would be a million in it for him. “A million,” he said to her. “That’s not much considering the twenty-five million I got from the Syndicate as everyone knows. Go to see Waldeck. He is jealous of me because he only got seventeen million.”

Six weeks later, on August 8, 1899, the retrial of Dreyfus by a new court-martial was scheduled to open in the garrison town of Rennes, a Catholic and aristocratic corner of traditionally Counter-Revolutionary Brittany. France quivered in expectation; as each week passed bringing the moment closer, the tension grew. The world’s eyes were turned on Rennes. All the important foreign newspapers sent their star correspondents. Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice of England, came as an observer. All the leading figures in the Affair, hundreds of French journalists and important political, social and literary figures crammed the town. The Secret File was brought from Paris in an iron box on an artillery caisson. No one anywhere talked of anything but the coming verdict. Acquittal would mean for the Dreyfusards vindication at last; for the Nationalists it would be lethal; an unimaginable blow not to be permitted. As if on order they returned to the theme of the first blackmail: Dreyfus or the Army. “A choice is to be made,” wrote Barrès in the
Journal
; Rennes, he said, was the Rubicon. “If Dreyfus is innocent then seven Ministers of War are guilty and the last more than the first,” echoed Meyer in
Le Gaulois.
General Mercier, leaving for Rennes to appear as a witness, issued his Order of the Day: “Dreyfus will be condemned once more. For in this affair someone is certainly guilty and the guilty one is either him or me. As it is certainly not me, it is Dreyfus.… Dreyfus is a traitor and I shall prove it.”