The Dreyfus Affair (27 page)

‘But since he’s innocent . . .’ said Picquart.

‘So what?’ said Gonse. ‘That is not something that should enter into our calculations. If you keep quiet, no one will know.’

‘What you’re saying is vile. I don’t know what I will do, but of one thing I am certain – I will not take this secret to the grave.’
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2: The Fall of Picquart

Both Gonse and Picquart had lost their tempers. The following day the two men met in calmer frames of mind. Picquart proposed sending a telegram, purporting to come from Schwartzkoppen, summoning Esterhazy to a secret meeting. Gonse demurred. Billot, on Boisdeffre’s advice, rejected the idea: ‘as chief of the Army, I have no right to subject a high officer to such a thing’. Clearly, the horror at the thought of a treasonous officer which had possessed the Minister of War and the two men at the apex of the army High Command upon the discovery of the
bordereau
was not felt upon the discovery of the
petit bleu
. No one at this stage doubted its authenticity, but it was, after all, no more than ‘an unsigned communication in an unknown or disguised hand, with an unclear meaning and of uncertain provenance’ which, if produced as evidence in court, would lead to protests from the Germans; and the fact that Esterhazy, who on the whole was held in high regard by his superiors, had shown an unusual curiosity about artillery proved nothing.

However, it was the thought of reopening the Dreyfus case that led the three men who felt themselves responsible for the security of the state – Boisdeffre, Gonse and Billot – to impede Picquart’s proceedings against Esterhazy. Was this the moment when, like the High Priest Caiaphas, they decided that ‘it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed’?
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History would judge them severely for a decision which left an innocent man rotting on Devil’s Island; and, as Gonse’s outburst to Picquart suggests, it might have been different had Dreyfus not been a Jew. But, as Marcel Thomas points out in his dispassionate account of these events, the three men ‘were neither madmen nor criminals’ and ‘the gravity of what was at stake makes it important to try and understand the motives for their decisions’.
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To them the choice was between injustice and disorder. With the body politic corrupt and enfeebled by social and cultural fissures, the army embodied the unity and integrity of the nation. To make public the fact that the trial of Dreyfus had been fraudulent and its verdict unsound would so discredit the High Command that the army would be fatally weakened. Furthermore, the conviction of Esterhazy would open a new can of worms, because Esterhazy might implicate Weil and Weil the ‘generalissimo’, Saussier.

‘There will always be men’, wrote Thomas, ‘who will prefer injustice to disorder. It is here a matter of temperament.’
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Had not Goethe expressed such a preference at the siege of Mainz during the French Revolutionary wars? ‘The position of a Boisdeffre, of a Billot, will always be opportunistic . . . but to make the choice requires a lucid appreciation of what is involved. In this case, Gonse’s decision, warmly approved by his superiors, only managed to create disorder and perpetuate injustice’ and ‘plunge the whole country in a dreadful struggle whose wounds took a long time to heal’.
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A period of ‘phoney war’ now started between Picquart and his superiors in which Picquart stood alone. None of his subordinates in the Statistical Section would support him because all were implicated in preparing the false evidence against Dreyfus. Moreover, all knew that their future prospects depended more on Gonse and Boisdeffre than they did on Picquart. Henry tried to convey to Picquart the folly of crossing one’s superiors by telling how, when he was in the French North African light infantry, the Zouaves, the son of a colonel serving in the ranks was caught stealing from another soldier. His platoon commander wanted to prosecute him, but the influence of the culprit’s father, the colonel, ensured that it was the officer, not the criminal, who was sacked.
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Picquart did not take the hint; he proceeded with the investigation of Esterhazy. He was well aware that this annoyed Gonse and Boisdeffre but persisted all the same. Gonse made critical comments to the effect that Picquart’s obsession with Esterhazy was distracting him from his other responsibilities, but, much as they might have liked to, Gonse and Boisdeffre did not dare dismiss Picquart as chief of the Statistical Section: there was no suitable candidate to take his place. Henry, who kept them informed of what Picquart was up to, was still not considered a plausible replacement. However, it was thought possible to remove Picquart from operational control by sending him off on some special mission; and on 27 October 1896 Billot, on Gonse’s advice, signed an order dispatching Picquart to reorganise the intelligence networks on the eastern borders of France. He was given only two weeks’ notice.

Picquart was quite aware of what was going on. Before leaving for Châlons, he handed over to General Gonse the fruits of his investigations to date of Esterhazy and to Henry the original of the
petit bleu
. The secret dossier used to convict Dreyfus was also back in their hands and was studied for any annotations that may have been made by Picquart. François Guénée, the former agent of the Sûreté whose reports on his contacts with the Spanish diplomat, Val Carlos, had been ‘nourished’ to implicate Dreyfus, sent a memo to General Gonse warning him that Picquart had questioned him closely on these reports, and seemed to doubt the inferences in du Paty’s commentary.

Clearly, should the case against Dreyfus be reopened, some incontrovertible piece of evidence against him had to be found in the dossier of whose existence the Dreyfus family were now aware. On 1 November – the feast of All Saints and a public holiday – Commandant Henry worked at home to manufacture a document that would put the guilt of Dreyfus beyond doubt. He had brought back from the office a short letter from the Italian military attaché, Panizzardi, to his German counterpart (and lover) Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen and an envelope on which was written Schwartzkoppen’s name and address in Panizzardi’s handwriting. ‘My dear friend,’ the letter began. ‘Here is the manual. I paid for you as agreed. Wednesday, eight in the evening, at Larent’s place is fine. I have invited three from my embassy, including one Jew. Don’t miss it. Alexandrine.’

Henry had also obtained a sheet of the same lined paper used by Panizzardi for his letter. With the help of his wife, and possibly of an expert forger, Henry wrote an extra paragraph in Panizzardi’s hand in the same blue pencil. He cut out the innocuous message from the genuine letter and glued the top with the opening ‘My dear friend’ and the bottom with the signature ‘Alexandrine’ to the forged text. The letter now read: ‘My dear friend. I have read that a deputy is to ask questions about Dreyfus. If someone in Rome asks for new explanations, I will say that I have never had any dealings with the Jew. If someone asks you, say the same for no one must ever know what happened with him. Alexandrine.’

The ‘deputy who is to ask questions about Dreyfus’ was a reference to André Castelin, Deputy for the Aisne, who had announced his intention of putting questions about Dreyfus to Billot in the Chamber of Deputies; the undercover policeman Guénée believed Castelin, though ostensibly anti-Dreyfus, to be on a retainer from the Dreyfus family. Billot could now feel confident in confirming the soundness of Dreyfus’s conviction because on 2 January 1897 Gonse and Boisdeffre showed him a photograph of the forged letter that they said had reached Henry by Mme Bastian’s ‘ordinary way’. Gonse and Boisdeffre had seen the original of Henry’s forgery, the Minister only a photograph; and because the photograph was not altogether clear, Gribelin, the archivist, made a copy of the original in his own hand which was authenticated by the signatures of Gonse, Henry, Lauth and Gribelin himself. Though Picquart had not yet left for Châlons, and was still nominally in charge of the Statistical Section, it was thought best by the Minister to keep him in the dark.

This was not only because Picquart might have realised that the timing of this new proof of Dreyfus’s guilt was rather too convenient to be plausible, but also because Picquart was suspected of being the source of leaks to the Dreyfusard camp – first of the existence of the secret dossier revealed in the article in
L’Éclair
(something that was in fact widely known); and then of the far more detailed revelations that appeared in a pamphlet that on 7 and 8 November had been sent to every member of the National Assembly, all journalists of note and other figures in public life.

This was
Une Erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus
by Bernard Lazare. At last, after eighteen months of preparation, Lazare had been let off the leash by Mathieu Dreyfus and Edgar Demange. The article in
L’Éclair
had already provided Lucie with a reason to petition the Chamber of Deputies for a review of her husband’s case; but now Lazare presented in great detail, and in a tone shorn of bombast and abuse, the reasons why the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus should be deemed unsound. It printed the text of the
bordereau
in full and revealed that among the papers in the secret dossier shown to the judges but not to the defence was the letter mentioning ‘the scoundrel D.’ – with no evidence to suggest that the letter D stood for Dreyfus. Three thousand copies of the pamphlet were secretly printed in Brussels and sent to France in plain envelopes. Picquart, who on the brink of his departure conducted a hasty investigation, learned that it had cost the Dreyfus family 25,000 francs. However, its impact on public opinion was minimal: only two newspapers,
Le Temps
and
Les Débats
, mentioned its publication and discussed its contents. In the rest of the press, it was ignored.

Its greatest impact was on Gonse. The fact that Picquart had discovered only the cost of Lazare’s pamphlet, not the source of the leaks, increased his suspicions that Picquart himself was that source. Worse was to come. Only two days after the publication of Lazare’s pamphlet, a photograph of the
bordereau
appeared in
Le Matin
. Picquart confounded Gonse’s suspicions by first denying that he had a photograph of the
bordereau
in his files, then admitting that he had been mistaken. The fear was that others would recognise the handwriting of the
bordereau
as being that of Esterhazy. Mathieu Dreyfus had the photograph from
Le Matin
copied on to posters flanked by photographs of letters written by his brother, demonstrating the difference between the two hands: the posters were put up on boards all over Paris.

The plan of the High Command to bury any doubts anyone might have about Esterhazy by sending Picquart into exile was put into effect too late. Unknown to Gonse and Billot, Picquart had been intercepting Esterhazy’s correspondence with Maurice Weil which, though it revealed nothing treasonous, informed Picquart of Esterhazy’s mercurial personality, and his links with Drumont and
La Libre Parole
. Billot, when he learned of this, was outraged, partly because he was afraid Weil might say something to compromise Billot’s friend, General Saussier. On 12 November 1896, Billot learned that Weil had received an anonymous letter warning him that André Castelin, the Deputy for the Aisne, was going to name him and Esterhazy as accomplices of Dreyfus. It was signed ‘Commandant Pierre’. The fear now was that Weil would warn Esterhazy who, seeing his handwriting on posters all over Paris, would do something foolish – flee abroad, confess, kill himself – implicit admissions of guilt that would establish the innocence of Dreyfus and therefore discredit the army High Command.

On 18 November, Jean-Baptiste Billot mounted the podium of the National Assembly to answer the questions that had been put by André Castelin. In the event, the questions were anodyne and Billot had no need to reveal the existence of the new evidence that established the guilt of Dreyfus beyond any doubt. Castelin’s complaints were not about a possible miscarriage of justice but about the activities of the Dreyfusards. He wanted Lazare to be prosecuted and measures to be taken against ‘the civilian accomplices’ of the traitor Dreyfus. Billot reassured him that there was no question of reopening the matter of Dreyfus’s conviction: ‘That matter was brought to trial, and no one has the right to question the results.’
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3: Picquart in Exile

When Georges Picquart left Paris in mid-November 1896 to reorganise the intelligence networks in eastern France, he remained notionally chief of the Statistical Section and on good terms with both General Gonse, his immediate superior, and Henry who, in his absence and under Gonse’s supervision, took on the day-to-day running of the department. Picquart was aware that on the question of Esterhazy and Dreyfus he had been at cross-purposes with Gonse and Boisdeffre, and that the first loyalties of his subordinates were not to him, but he was as yet unaware of the enmity he inspired. His loyalty to the army was paramount: he had not told anyone outside the service of his suspicions and misgivings. He had, however, from the start of his tenure as commander of the Statistical Section, consulted a childhood friend from Strasbourg, Louis Leblois – formerly a magistrate and now a lawyer practising in Paris – on the legality of certain aspects of his work that had not troubled his predecessor, Sandherr.
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