The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (27 page)

Yet, with the passage of time, there was healing. While few French were prepared to give up for ever the hope of regaining Alsace and
Lorraine, they accepted that France could not for the foreseeable future afford another war. As the future socialist leader Jean Jaurès put it in 1887, ‘neither war nor renunciation’. With some notable exceptions, the younger generation which was coming of age in the 1890s and 1900s no longer felt as strongly about the loss of Alsace and Lorraine or longed passionately for revenge on Germany. A noisy nationalist minority such as General Georges Boulanger – ‘Général Revanche’ – demanded that the government do something, but generally stopped short of advocating war. Boulanger served to discredit his own cause when he made a half-hearted stab at a coup in 1889 and then fled to Belgium, where he committed suicide a year later on the grave of his mistress. As Adolphe Thiers, France’s first provisional President after the catastrophe of 1870–71, had remarked: ‘Those who speak of vengeance and of revenge are thoughtless, the imposters of patriotism, whose statements have no echo. Honest people, the real patriots, want peace while leaving to the far off future the responsibility to determine all of our fates. As for me, I want peace.’ The sentiment appears to have been widely shared among France’s subsequent leaders, even if it was not something they cared to articulate too frequently for fear of being attacked by the nationalist right. The public too, at least until the nationalist revival in the years immediately before 1914, seems to have been largely unenthusiastic, indeed apprehensive, about the prospect of another war even for Alsace and Lorraine.
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Intellectuals made fun of the dreams of military adventure. ‘Personally, I would not give the little finger of my right hand for these forgotten lands,’ wrote the prominent intellectual Remy de Gourmont in 1891. ‘I need it to shake the ash off my cigarette.’
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In left-wing and liberal circles in particular, pacifist and anti-militarist sentiments were growing. In 1910 another politician, like Thiers on the right, carefully laid out the French position at a ceremony to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of one of the other key French defeats in the Franco-Prussian War. Raymond Poincaré, who was to be President of France when the Great War broke out, and who himself came from the part of Lorraine that remained French, said: ‘France sincerely desires peace. She will never do anything to disturb it. To maintain it, she will always do everything that is compatible with her dignity. But peace condemns us neither to forgetfulness nor to disloyalty.’
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The French also had much to preoccupy them at home in the
decades after 1871. The antipathies dating back to the Revolution and the Napoleonic period – the religious against the anti-clerical, royalists against republicans, left against right, revolutionaries against conservatives and reactionaries – remained to divide French society and undermine the legitimacy of one form of government after another. Indeed, even in 1989 when France commemorated the bicentennial of the Revolution there were deep disagreements about what it meant and how it should be remembered. The Third Republic which was born in defeat and civil war added another layer of divisions. The new Provisional Government not only had to make peace with a triumphant Germany but it also had to deal with the Paris Commune which had seized power in the name of revolution. In the end, and it was to be a scar that the Third Republic carried, the government turned its guns on the Communards; after a week of savage fighting their barricades were dismantled, the Commune dissolved, and the last rebels executed in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

The new republic looked as though it would last even less time than the First Republic of 1792, which had been overthrown by Napoleon twelve years later, or the Second which met the same fate at the hands of his nephew in 1851 after only three years. The Third Republic had many enemies, from the Communards on the left to royalists on the right, and few friends. As Gustave Flaubert said, ‘I defend the poor Republic but I don’t believe in it.’
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Indeed, at times even republican politicians seemed not to believe in it as they jockeyed for office – between 1871 and 1914 France had fifty different ministries – and, far too often, appeared to be interested only in what they could make from what the public took to calling the Whore or the Republic of Cronies. In 1887, the son-in-law of the President was discovered to be selling honours, even the Légion d’Honneur; for a time, ‘
vieux décoré
’ was an insult. In 1891–2 the Panama Canal Company collapsed, carrying away with it millions of francs and the reputations of the great de Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel, builder of the famous tower, as well as those of scores of deputies, senators, and ministers. When President Faure died in the arms of his mistress it was at least a different sort of scandal. Not surprisingly there were those in France who looked for a hero, a man on horseback, to gallop up and turn the whole sordid lot out of government. Yet even those men were failures, from Marshal MacMahon, who
as President tried to bring back the monarchy (at least, said a cartoon, ‘the horse looks intelligent’) to the unfortunate Boulanger.

By far the most damaging scandal of all for the Third Republic was the Dreyfus affair, which was at once very simple in its central issue – had Captain Alfred Dreyfus, of the army’s general staff, been rightly or wrongly convicted of passing French military secrets to the Germans? – and very complicated in its details with forgeries, lies, honest and dishonest army officers, and alternative suspects. Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted with trumped-up evidence, showed extraordinary stoicism and fortitude in the face of public disgrace and a savage punishment while the military authorities, particularly those in the general staff, and the government showed, to put it mildly, a marked unwillingness to investigate the increasingly threadbare case against him. Indeed, certain members of the general staff took steps to create new materials which could be used against Dreyfus only to find, as in the Watergate scandal many years later in the United States, that an attempt to conceal the initial crimes led them deeper and deeper into the morass of criminal conspiracy.

The affair had been simmering on for some time before it burst into the open in 1898. Dreyfus had been hastily convicted at a court martial, and dispatched to the French penal colony on Devil’s Island in the Atlantic off the coast of South America in 1894. His family and the handful of supporters who were convinced of his innocence agitated to have the verdict reopened. They were aided by the fact that the passing of French secrets to the Germans continued, and encouraged to hope when Colonel Georges Picquart, who was put in charge of investigating this second traitor, concluded that the espionage had been the work all along of the dissolute Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy and that the army’s proceedings against Dreyfus were a miscarriage of justice. Faced with this unwelcome result, the military authorities and their supporters in the government took the view that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the Dreyfus conviction, the army could not afford to have its prestige and reputation undermined. So Picquart’s reward for his work was to be sent off to Tunisia, where the army may well have hoped that he would rot, and, when he refused to recant, to be dismissed, arrested and charged on grounds which turned out to be as flimsy as those in the Dreyfus case.

In January 1898, as the affair was already stirring public interest, Esterhazy was tried before a court martial and acquitted. Two days later the great writer Emile Zola published his famous letter, ‘J’Accuse’, addressed to the President of the Republic, Faure of amorous fame, in which he laid out the facts of the case and accused the military and the government of a shameful cover-up. He also accused Dreyfus’s opponents of using the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew to stir up anti-Semitism, and of undermining the republic and its liberties. And this, he said, at a time when France was preparing for the great Paris Exposition, which would crown a century of truth and freedom. As he defiantly pointed out in his letter, Zola expected to be charged with libel and the government, with some misgivings, obliged. He was tried and sentenced for insulting the army but fled to England before he could be incarcerated.

By this point the affair had developed into a major political crisis and French society was dividing into Dreyfus supporters, the Dreyfusards, and opponents, the Anti-Dreyfusards. Radicals, liberals, republicans, anti-clericals (often overlapping categories) tended to fall into the first camp with royalists, conservatives, anti-Semites, supporters of the Church and the army, into the second. But it was never as clear-cut as that: families, friends, professions, all were divided by the affair. ‘This five years’ war was fought out in the newspapers’, wrote Thomas Barclay, the British journalist and businessman, ‘in the law courts, in the music-halls, in the churches, and even in the public thoroughfares.’
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One family dinner ended in court when a son-in-law, who was an Anti-Dreyfusard, slapped his mother-in-law who was for Dreyfus. His wife sued for divorce. Among artists, Pissarro and Monet were Dreyfusard, Degas and Cézanne Anti. The editorial board of a cycling journal split and the Anti-Dreyfusards left to set up their own journal, devoted to the car. In February 1899 Paul Déroulède, a right-wing firebrand and notorious Anti-Dreyfusard, tried to carry out a coup against the Dreyfusard Emile Loubet, who had just been elected as President to succeed Faure. Déroulède was a much better agitator than leader and the attempt fell flat. That summer, though, Loubet had his hat smashed in by the cane of an Anti-Dreyfusard at the horse races at Auteuil.
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Although moderates on both sides were increasingly concerned
about the future of the republic, it proved difficult to wind the affair down. In 1899 Picquart was released from jail and Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to face a second court martial. It was a measure of the passions surrounding the affair that when Dreyfus’s lawyer was shot in the back by an attacker (who was never caught) passers-by in the conservative town of Rennes refused to help him. Dreyfusards for their part spoke darkly of a right-wing plot. Although this time the judges split, Dreyfus was again found guilty with extenuating circumstances. The verdict and the resulting pardon by Loubet were too much for his opponents and not enough for his supporters. Dreyfus demanded a retrial, which he finally obtained in 1906. The Court of Appeal annulled the verdict and Dreyfus was reinstated in the army, as was Picquart. While the latter died in a hunting accident in January 1914, Dreyfus, who had retired from the army, re-enlisted and fought in the Great War. He died in 1935.

The Third Republic, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, survived the affair. It was more stable than it sometimes appeared and it also benefited from an unwillingness on the part of most French, no matter how deeply divided they were, to risk another civil conflict. And there was more continuity than it might at first seem. Although governments came and went with great frequency the same names popped up again and again. When Georges Clemenceau, the ferocious radical politician and journalist who himself held office several times before and during the war, was accused of making a profession of bringing down governments, he replied: ‘I have overthrown only one. They are all the same.’
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The civil servants also provided continuity. Indeed, they gained considerable autonomy and influence as governments came and went.

At the Quai d’Orsay, the home of the Foreign Ministry, and among French diplomats stationed abroad, the prevailing attitude was one of contempt for the politicians and a reluctance to take direction from them. With some exceptions, Foreign Ministers were not interested in foreign affairs or in office long enough to acquire an understanding of them. The French parliament, preoccupied as its members were by the search for office or by political combat, provided little sustained oversight.
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The commission responsible for foreign and colonial affairs was ineffectual and lackadaisical. It could ask for documents from the Quai d’Orsay or to see the minister but could do nothing when, as often
happened, it was refused. The politician (and leading Dreyfusard) Joseph Reinach complained to the British ambassador: ‘Its forty-four members gossip a lot; they recount confidential information to their wives, to their mistresses, to their intimate friends, who, themselves, also gossip.’
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The French press generally had more information and influence than the French parliament. Since almost half the Foreign Ministers under the Third Republic had been journalists themselves at one time or another they understood well how useful or dangerous the press could be.

The Dreyfus affair did nevertheless leave lasting damage. The old divisions in French society were reinforced and fed by new grievances. If many on the right were confirmed in their contempt for republican and liberal values, on the left the hostility to tradition, to religion and to the military was likewise strengthened. Radicals used the affair to bring the army, which they viewed unfairly as nothing more than a repository of conservatism and a home for unreconstructed aristocrats, under control. Officers suspected of not having the correct republican outlook were purged and promotions, particularly at the highest levels, increasingly came to depend on the right sort of political credentials and connections. The consequence was to damage morale and further lower the prestige of the army. Respectable families by and large did not want their sons going into the army. In the decade before the Great War the number and the quality of applicants for the officer corps went down sharply. In 1907 Adolphe Messimy, a future Minister of War who was at that time a leading radical critic of the army, said in parliament that all officers seemed to need was a good primary education. Certainly the army did little to improve on this. Its curriculum for its officers, even at the elite staff level, was patchy, out of date, and incoherent. Too often, moreover, conformity was rewarded and talent passed over. On the eve of the Great War, the French army was poorly led, overly bureaucratic and unwelcoming to new ideas and techniques. ‘Democracies are uneasy,’ wrote General Emile Zurlinden, among the more principled of those who had tried and failed to resolve the Dreyfus affair. ‘They have a tendency to suspect men to whom talent and circumstances draw attention, not because they do not recognize their qualities and services but because they tremble for the republic.’
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