The Dreyfus Affair (45 page)

*
An official appointed by the court to look into a case.

*
Graduates of the Jesuit school in Paris on the rue des Postes.

*
Maurras had just returned from the Olympic Games in Athens, which may be why he used categories such as ‘plebeian’ and ‘
métèque
’.

*
Marguerite Steinheil went on to have affairs with a number of famous men. She was charged with perjury, married an English peer and died in Hove in 1954.

14

Rennes

1: The Return from Devil’s Island

On 5 June 1899, at 12.30 p.m., the chief warder on Devil’s Island entered the hut in which Alfred Dreyfus had been living for more than four years and handed him a note. It stated that the verdict imposed on him on 22 December 1894 had been annulled, and that he was to be retried by a court martial to be held in Rennes. Dreyfus was no longer a convict but a prisoner on remand. He was to be allowed to wear the uniform of an officer in the French Army with the rank of captain. The military guard was to be withdrawn and replaced by civilian gendarmes. A cruiser of the French navy, the
Sfax
, had been dispatched to bring the prisoner back to France.

‘My joy was boundless, unutterable. At last, I was escaping from the rack to which I had been bound for five years . . .’
1
Dreyfus records this in his memoirs with a certain sadness because, as he later realised, he was under a misapprehension. He assumed that the annulment of the verdict meant that he had been proclaimed innocent. ‘I thought everything was going to be terminated speedily; that there was no further question of anything but a mere formality.’ It had taken seven months for his appeal to be heard, first by the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation, then by the Combined Chambers, and only in the last of those seven months had some scraps of information about his own case got through to him – the existence of Esterhazy, Henry’s forgery and suicide, Zola’s intervention and Picquart’s travails. The ‘grand struggle undertaken by a few great minds, full of the love of truth, was utterly unknown to me’.

A squad of gendarmes arrived from Cayenne to replace the military warders, as did civilian clothes and a hat sent by the mayor of Cayenne. While waiting for the
Sfax
, Dreyfus wrote a note to be telegraphed to his wife: ‘My heart and soul are with you, with my children, with all of you. I leave Friday. I await with immense joy the moment of supreme happiness to hold you in my arms. A thousand kisses.’

On the evening of Thursday, 8 June, Dreyfus saw the smoke of a steamer on the horizon: it was the
Sfax
. At seven the next morning, the prison launch came to take him to the cruiser and, after more than four years of solitary confinement on the inhospitable outcrop of rock, he left Devil’s Island. A heavy swell prevented him from making the transfer on to the
Sfax
. Dreyfus was sea-sick. At ten, the sea was sufficiently calm for the launch to come alongside the warship. Dreyfus was received on deck by the second officer and taken to a cabin of a non-commissioned officer; a metal grating had been placed over the porthole. During the long voyage back to France, Dreyfus was allowed an hour’s exercise on deck in the morning and another in the evening. For the rest of the day, and during the night, he was locked in his cabin. When the ship stopped in the Caribbean, an officer gave him some books and a copy of
The Times
in which he read that Commandant du Paty de Clam had been arrested and taken to the Cherche-Midi prison. When the
Sfax
called at the Cape Verde Islands to take on coal, Dreyfus asked to send a telegram to General de Boisdeffre to thank him for all he had done.
2

The
Sfax
reached France in the early morning of 30 June 1899. That night, in heavy rain and with a gale-force wind, Dreyfus was transferred first into a small dinghy, then into a steam-launch, which took him to the quay at Port-Haliguen on the coast of Brittany. A line of soldiers surrounded the dock. From there, with an escort of three gendarmes, a carriage took him to the railway station at Quiberon; here again, soldiers were posted on the platform. From Quiberon, they took a train to Rennes. After a journey of more than two hours, and another ride in a coach from the station through the streets of Rennes, Dreyfus arrived at the military prison.

It was six in the morning. Dreyfus was locked in a cell. At nine he was led to an adjacent cell that had been furnished with a table and two chairs. He was told that his wife had arrived to see him. Dreyfus was seized by ‘a violent trembling’; ‘my tears flowed, tears which I had not known for so long a time . . .’ Lucie was shown in. ‘It is impossible for words to describe the deep emotion which my wife and I both felt at seeing each other once more. In our meeting were mingled feelings of joy and grief . . .’ Inhibited by the presence of an army lieutenant, they could do little more than look into one another’s eyes, ‘concentrating in this interchange of looks all the strength of our affection and of our determination’.

Over the following days, Dreyfus received in this furnished cell further visits from Lucie, from Mathieu and from his lawyers, Edgar Demange and Fernand Labori. In his weakened condition, both physical and mental, it took a great effort for Dreyfus to absorb and understand what he was now told. He had always been sure that in the end justice would prevail, but he had had no inkling of what tortuous dramas had culminated in the decision of the Combined Chambers.

Only now did Dreyfus learn from his brother and his lawyers about the heroes and villains of his Affair: the upright Picquart, the anguished Lazare; of Zola, Trarieux, Mornard, Clemenceau, Jaurès; and of those who had stopped at nothing to keep him on Devil’s Island – the Ministers Billot and Cavaignac, the Generals de Pellieux, Roget, Gonse and – most wounding of all – the man in whom Dreyfus had placed so much faith, de Boisdeffre. ‘My illusions with regard to some of my former chiefs faded away, one by one; my soul was filled with anguish. I was moved with profound pity and sorrow for that Army which I so loved.’
3
Dreyfus also learned that the sudden and baffling change in the conditions in which he had been held on Devil’s Island at the beginning of September 1896 – the shackles and the palisade – was a response to the story of his escape that Mathieu had planted in the English papers.

The new court martial was scheduled to start on 9 August 1899. Dreyfus had little more than a month to study the documentary evidence of the complex conspiracy that had started with the single secret file containing the few forgeries shown by General Mercier to the judges at his first court martial, and now consisted of 1,500 documents in ‘ten boxes of files’
4
assembled by Captain Cuignet under the tutelage of General Gonse. He had to read the transcripts of the trial of Zola with General de Boisdeffre’s sworn testimony as to the authenticity of Henry’s forgery, the report prepared for the Cour de Cassation by Maître Mornard, and the record of the hearings of the Court’s Criminal Chamber, and then of its Combined Chambers.

Dreyfus’s health deteriorated. The sudden transfer from a tropical to a temperate climate meant that he constantly shivered with cold. There was a recurrence of the fever he had contracted on Devil’s Island. Concentration was difficult; for a while he was confined to his bed and fed on a diet of milk and eggs. But all this suffering was now bearable because he was confident that, after passing through the formality of the second court martial, his ordeal would finally end and he would be able, ‘restored to my wife and little ones, tranquilly to forget all the sorrows of the past, and live again once more’.
5

2: The Second Court Martial – 1

Rennes, the capital of Brittany, had been chosen as a venue for the second court martial by Charles Dupuy before leaving office. The reason given was its proximity to the west coast of France. It was hardly a neutral city: Brittany was the most profoundly Catholic part of France. There had been anti-Semitic riots at the time of Zola’s trial. Folk memories of the brutal suppression of the Catholic royalists
by the revolutionaries of 1789 remained strong. ‘Thus Dreyfus and Judas were the same thing, as were the English and the Germans, both Protestants.’
6
As Joseph Reinach was to point out, ‘Mercier himself could not have chosen a better place for the re-condemnation of his victim.’

The court martial was held not in Rennes’s Palais de Justice nor in an army barracks but in a lycée adjacent to the military prison. This enabled Dreyfus to pass from the prison to the lycée protected from the public. The school had been built in the 1860s on the site of the Jesuit college where Chateaubriand had been a pupil, and his name was inscribed together with other great Breton writers such as Lammenais and Renan in the school’s auditorium, the
salle des fêtes
, which had been converted into a courtroom. Maurice Paléologue, who attended the trial as the official representative of the Foreign Office, and whose diary is a prime source for what took place behind the scenes, feared that the theatrical setting of the
salle des fêtes
would ‘exaggerate still further the dramatic elements in the case which ought to be decided in cool and calm surroundings’.
7

It was a forlorn hope. Both in France and abroad, the second court martial of Alfred Dreyfus promised to be one of the great trials of the century. Lawyers, generals, witnesses, politicians, official observers and journalists came to Rennes from all over France. There were a large number of foreigners, noted Paléologue: ‘British, German, Italian, Russian, Belgian, Dutch, Scandinavian, Swiss and American – most of whom are of the Jewish type’.
8
All had to find somewhere to stay. The Prefect had reserved rooms for Paléologue and the representative of the Ministry of War, General Chamoin, at the Hôtel Moderne. General Mercier lodged with an old friend who lived in Rennes, General de Saint-Germain: this house became the headquarters of the anti-Dreyfusards, among them Cavaignac, Barrès, Drumont, and also members of the local clergy and gentry.

The Dreyfus family rented a house belonging to a widow, Mme Godard, found for them by a Protestant pastor. Dreyfus’s lawyer, Maître Labori, took lodgings in a house on the Place Laënnec. For safety’s sake, the Dreyfusard headquarters was set up at an inn outside Rennes, the Auberge des Trois Marches; here Colonel Picquart’s former batman helped serve the food prepared by the proprietors for the diverse collection of journalists, intellectuals and politicians. Reinach, Clemenceau and Zola remained in Paris, judging that their presence might provoke the anti-Dreyfusards. Scheurer-Kestner was too ill to attend.

The seven judges appointed to conduct the court martial all held the rank of colonel or below. They were not trained lawyers. The presiding judge, Colonel Albert Jouaust, was Director of Engineering in the 10th Army Corps. The other six officers were all, like Dreyfus, artillery officers – Lieutenant-Colonel François Brogniart and Commandant Julien Profillet from the 10th Artillery Regiment; Commandant Lancrau de Bréon, Commandant Émile Merle, Captain Albert Parfait and Captain Charles Beauvais from the 7th. All had passed through the egalitarian École Polytechnique; none had attended the ‘clericalist’ military academy at Saint-Cyr. Merle and Profillet had known Godefroy Cavaignac at the École Polytechnique, but the only officer who had shown his hand in any way was Commandant Lancrau de Bréon: with his wife, he had contributed five francs to the Henry Monument. Paléologue’s Breton secretary, the Vicomte du Halgouët, who was with him in Rennes, knew the Bréons. They were all devout Catholics; the Commandant’s brother was a priest but one of that rare species, a Dreyfusard priest,
9
while his cousin and fellow officer Colonel de Villebois-Mareuil was a convinced anti-Dreyfusard.
*

The military prosecutor, Commandant Louis-Norbert Carrière, a graduate of Saint-Cyr and former infantry officer, had retrained as a military prosecutor after his retirement from active service; he was now sixty-six years old. He came to Rennes with his dog and a tame crow. ‘He and his crow must get on well together,’ judged Paléologue, who watched them in the courtyard outside the lycée, ‘for, having the same-shaped head, the same facial angle, the same brain structure, why should there be any difference in their mentality?’
10

To assist him Carrière enlisted a civilian lawyer, Jules Auffray, who was a friend of General Mercier and had acted for
La Libre Parole
. Just as Gonse had hoped to establish the guilt of Dreyfus by the sheer number of documents in his dossier, so Carrière’s tactic was to overwhelm the judges with testimony: he summoned eighty
11
witnesses, four times the number called by the defence. A key witness was notable for his absence: Charles Esterhazy had written to Carrière from London saying that he could not afford to travel to Rennes, and that anyway he knew that the judges were determined to acquit Dreyfus. He repeated that he was the author of the
bordereau
but ‘before God and the sacred memory of my father, I swear that I entered into relations with Schwartzkoppen only on orders from Sandherr’.
12
This letter was leaked to
Le Matin
and published on 7 August 1899, the first day of the court martial.