The Dreyfus Affair (44 page)

Loubet was elected on the first round of voting with 483 votes against 279 for Méline. Already the nationalist press were claiming that Félix Faure, ‘the great friend of the army’, had been murdered by ‘some Judith or Delilah’ at the behest of the Jews. Now the election of Loubet, a known Dreyfusard and so ‘the elect of the synagogue’, was regarded as ‘an insult to France’, ‘a challenge to the army’ and ‘a victory for Jewish treason’. On his way to the Élysée to pay his respects to his dead predecessor, the sound of the military band playing the ‘Marseillaise’ was drowned out by the boos, whistles and abuse of the crowds lining the route.
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For the nationalist opponents of the republican regime, the election by a clique of corrupt politicians of the Panamist ‘candidate from Devil’s Island’, and the evidence of popular fury at their choice, convinced them that the time was ripe for a
coup d’état
. Paul Déroulède alerted the members of his League of Patriots and Jules Guérin mobilised his Anti-Semitic League. The aim of the coup, in Déroulède’s words, was ‘to kick out of France a foreign constitution – just as Joan of Arc had kicked out the English’ and ‘leave it to the people to choose the President of the Republic’.
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While the militant members of the two Leagues were ready for action, and Déroulède felt he could count on the sympathy of the Parisian crowd, it would be the army that would overthrow the rotten Republic at the state funeral of Félix Faure.

To enlist the support of the army, a general of some standing would have to be brought onside. The first candidate was General de Pellieux who, since holding the inquiry into Esterhazy, had become Esterhazy’s champion and an implacable anti-Dreyfusard. Pellieux gave vague assurances. The funeral took place on 23 February 1899 starting with a Requiem Mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Learning that the cavalcade accompanying the catafalque would end at the Place de la Nation, Déroulède summoned his supporters by posters and
petits bleus
to gather to intercept the column of soldiers at the Place de la Bastille. At his side were his deputy, Marcel Habert, and the right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras. When the troops approached, however, they were led not by General de Pellieux but by General Roget – formerly chief of the Fourth Bureau of the General Staff, subsequently Cavaignac’s
chef de cabinet
, and a convinced anti-Dreyfusard, but not privy to the plans for a coup. Pellieux, it turned out, had lost his nerve and persuaded General Zurlinden, still Military Governor of Paris, to replace him with General Roget.

Déroulède tried to make the best of this unexpected turn of events. The number of supporters who had gathered at the Place de la Bastille was smaller than he had hoped for, but many more lined the route to the Élysée. Déroulède therefore stepped forward and took hold of the bridle of General Roget’s horse. ‘Follow us, General! Take pity on the nation! Save France and the Republic! To the Élysée!’ Roget refused. Trying to shake off the importunate Déroulède, he pointed his sabre towards the Boulevard Diderot which led to the barracks. Déroulède would not give up. He ran beside the General’s horse and, when the column reached the gates to the Reuilly barracks, once again took hold of the bridle and repeated his plea. Roget ignored him. Clinging to the horse’s reins, Déroulède and Habert were dragged through the gates of the barracks while Guérin, Maurras and his other supporters remained outside.

Déroulède now harangued both General Roget and his junior officers, chastising them for betraying their own cause: ‘You are no longer soldiers, you are parliamentarians!’ Roget tried to get his uninvited guests to leave. They refused. At midnight, the police commissioner Armand Cochefert arrived at the barracks and arrested Déroulède and Habert – the same Cochefert who had taken part in the interrogation and arrest of Alfred Dreyfus in October 1894, telling him that ‘the evidence is overwhelming’ (see p. 87 above). He took his prisoners back to the central police station where, to Déroulède’s disgust, they were merely charged with riotous trespass. He persuaded Cochefert to insert in the charge-sheet that he ‘had gone to the Place de la Nation to persuade soldiers to overthrow the Republic’.
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On 29 May 1899, Déroulède and Habert were put on trial for sedition. After a cursory deliberation by the jury, they were acquitted and Déroulède was carried from the Palais de Justice on the shoulders of his cheering supporters.

4: Review

On the same day as Déroulède and Habert were set free, the Combined Chambers of the Cour de Cassation assembled in the
grande-chambre
of the Palais de Justice to consider their verdict on the case of Alfred Dreyfus. The building was suitably grandiose for this gathering of fifty judges in their splendid robes. It had been built on the site of the palace of the saintly King of France, Louis IX; the only part that survived was the exquisite Sainte-Chapelle, built by the King to house a most precious relic that he had purchased from the Byzantine Emperor in the thirteenth century, Christ’s Crown of Thorns. The relic had disappeared at the time of the Revolution of 1789 and the chapel was now dwarfed by the grandiose monument to the high ideal of that Revolution – the Palais de Justice.

Maurice Paléologue, who claimed descent from the emperors of Byzantium, describes the
grande-chambre
as ‘sumptuously decorated in the glittering Roman
palazzo
style; there are too many accessories, too many mouldings, too much foliage, too many garlands, too many allegorical scenes. Among all this richness all the charm of the clear harmonies of Paul Baudry’s glorious ceiling,
The Apotheosis of Law
, is lost.’
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Paléologue had been called twice to give evidence before the Combined Chambers. As representative of the Foreign Office, he was asked about the crucial telegram of 2 November 1894 from the Italian military attaché, Alessandro Panizzardi, to his superiors in Rome (see p. 98 above). Document No. 44 in the Dreyfus file was the first version of the telegram which implicated Dreyfus: ‘Captain Dreyfus has been arrested . . . I have taken all precautions.’ Paléologue attested before the court that both his conscience and his instructions from his superiors obliged him to say that this document ‘is not just a wrong translation; it is a falsification’.
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This had caused consternation in the court: among the fifty judges there were passionate anti-Dreyfusards who believed that anyone who gave evidence in Dreyfus’s favour was, as the nationalist press termed Paléologue, a traitor, liar, forger and German spy.

On 27 April 1899, Paléologue had been recalled to the court to have the original telegram decrypted in the presence of Captain Cuignet, now an energetic opponent of review, and of General Eugène Chamoin, an impartial observer sent by the Minister of War. The telegram was deciphered and proved that the text Paléologue had shown to the court was correct and Document No. 44 a forgery. General Chamoin signed the report which established this with ‘a good grace’; Cuignet also signed, ‘quivering with rage’.
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A few days later, at a dinner with the Romanian Minister, Grégoire Ghika, Maurice Paléologue found himself sitting next to Hermance de Weede, the wife of the Counsellor of the Netherlands Legation. Paléologue, who was himself conducting an affair that was to last a lifetime with the actress Julia Bartet, took a certain pleasure in discussing the Dreyfus Affair with this woman who had been Schwartzkoppen’s mistress: Paléologue had seen the file of more than eighty of their love letters. He told her that he still had doubts about the innocence of Dreyfus; Hermance de Weede was indignant but admitted that her husband, too, had the same doubts. Paléologue was tempted to point out that she had been in a better position than either of the two diplomats to ‘extract from Schwartzkoppen the truth about the Dreyfus case’.

On Saturday, 3 June, after four days of intense and sometimes acrimonious disputation, the fifty judges of the Combined Chambers gathered to deliver their judgment. The Cour de Cassation could not declare Dreyfus innocent or guilty; it had the power, as its name suggests, to ‘break’ (or quash) a verdict but not to reverse it. It could have ruled that he had no case to answer; but such a judgment was not what Dreyfus or his family or his supporters wanted. They were determined that he should be exonerated by his fellow officers in a second court martial. Lucie Dreyfus’s lawyer, Maître Henri Mornard, made this clear to the court: it was for ‘military judges’ to admit the error ‘with joy in their hearts’. He looked forward to that moment when ‘the blessed dawn of the day will allow the great light of concord and truth to shine over the nation’.

Mathieu Dreyfus, Bernard Lazare, Jean Jaurès, Georges Clemenceau and Louis Leblois were among the lawyers, journalists and politicians packed into the ornate
grande-chambre
to hear the verdict. This was not like the snakepit of the National Assembly with its seedy politicians: here they were in the Holy of Holies of the secular Republic committed to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And just as the army had its glittering gold-braided uniforms, and the Church its dazzling vestments, so these fifty high priests of the Republic, with the Cour de Cassation’s chief presiding judge Charles Mazeau as their primate, had their ermine-edged robes in scarlet and black, and black hats to match the
képis
and mitres.

In solemn tones, Mazeau now went through the evidence against Dreyfus. It had been established to his satisfaction that the supposed confession had not taken place and that the
bordereau
, ‘the principal basis for the accusation and the conviction of Dreyfus’, ‘was not written by Dreyfus but by Esterhazy’. This judgment in no way impugned the honour of the army which, ‘thank God, transcends these proceedings which cannot affect it, and does not require to defend its honour that an innocent convict be kept on Devil’s Island’. It was not for the court to pronounce Dreyfus innocent; it merely had to rule that ‘a new element had emerged’ which might lead to a different verdict.

Mazeau now read out the court’s conclusion. The verdict against Alfred Dreyfus delivered on 22 December 1894 was rescinded and annulled. The accused was ordered to appear before a second court martial in the city of Rennes which would decide solely whether or not Dreyfus was guilty of having entered into correspondence with a foreign power or one of its agents in order to assist it in hostilities against France; and whether he had assisted its ability to do so by procuring the notes and documents mentioned in the
bordereau
.

For Mathieu Dreyfus, this was a moment of unalloyed triumph. So too for Lucie who, though not present at the hearing, was immediately informed of the court’s decision. Their battle was won. What was clear to a majority of France’s best legal minds would be equally clear to seven officers conducting a court martial and through them the army and all honest Frenchmen and women. Who could doubt the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus after this decision, and when, on the very day that the judgment was given,
Le Matin
published an interview with Charles Esterhazy in which he admitted that he had written the
bordereau
? ‘Yes, I wrote the
bordereau
, at the request of my superior and friend, Colonel Sandherr.’ It was the explanation that he had tried to put to du Paty de Clam but had been cut short. He went further: Generals de Boisdeffre, Gonse and Billot had all known that the
bordereau
had been written by him.

A hard core of sceptics remained on the far right, but this extra-parliamentary opposition was paying out the rope with which to hang itself. The decision of the Combined Chambers enraged them: the judges had ‘bled the cash boxes of the syndicate dry’. The acquittal of Déroulède and Habert led them to think that the public were behind them: Barrès talked of civil war.
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President Loubet, at the races at Auteuil, was hissed and booed by the
haut monde
and finally attacked by the young Baron Fernand Chevreau de Christiani, the President’s top hat being knocked off his head by the baron’s cane. A fight broke out between the racegoers and the police; most of the fifty men arrested wore white carnations in their buttonholes and had titles dating from the
ancien régime
.

Fifty was a paltry number, however, when compared with the 100,000 who turned out to demonstrate in favour of the Republic and acclaim President Loubet, or even when compared with the majority of deputies who voted to have the verdict of the Combined Chambers on the Dreyfus Affair posted in all the communes of France, thereby effacing the shame of the forgeries embedded in Cavaignac’s proclamation. This shift of opinion in the Chamber doomed the dithering Dupuy. He was voted out of office. Poincaré, Loubet’s first choice to succeed him, failed to form a government; Loubet’s next choice, the inscrutable Waldeck-Rousseau, succeeded. Both President and Prime Minister were now Dreyfusards: it had become a necessary qualification for their jobs.

On 6 June 1899 all charges against Georges Picquart and Louis Leblois were dismissed; after 384 days in prison, Picquart was set free. Hundreds came to lionise him; thousands sent telegrams to congratulate him. Ludovic Trarieux, the former Minister of Justice and founder of the League of the Rights of Man, held a dinner to celebrate the great event. A motion was carried by the League acclaiming the achievements of ‘Dreyfus’s champions – Picquart, Scheurer-Kestner and Zola’. But what of the first Dreyfusards? In an article in
L’Aurore
, Bernard Lazare protested that they had been forgotten: the lawyer Edgar Demange, the prison Governor Ferdinand Forzinetti, Picquart’s lawyer Louis Leblois and, of course, Lazare himself. He had been asked by Mathieu Dreyfus to keep a low profile because he was ‘too committed, too Jewish’, too proud of being a Jew.
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Even at this, their moment of triumph, fissures had started to appear in the Dreyfusard camp.