The Dreyfus Affair (46 page)

On that first day, Rennes was like a city under martial law. Soldiers and gendarmes lined the streets. Cavalry were posted at junctions. A number of roadblocks were set up in the streets leading to the lycée and only those with tickets for the trial were allowed through. It was a show of force to impose order but also, perhaps, to intimidate the Dreyfusards. ‘There was a great clamour from the movement of the horses,’ wrote Mathieu Dreyfus, ‘the rattling of sabres, the noises of rifle butts.’
13
The short path his brother would take from the military prison to the lycée was lined by soldiers, their backs to the prisoner, which the Dreyfusards considered a calculated insult.

Inside the
salle des fêtes
,
on the stage beneath a crucifix, was an oblong table and behind it chairs for the seven judges. Behind them were seats for the official representatives of the Ministry of War and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, General Eugène Chamoin and Maurice Paléologue. To the right of the stage sat counsel for the defence, and there were two chairs for the prisoner and his guard. To the left sat the military prosecutor, Commandant Carrière, with his assistant Auffray and the clerk of the court. Behind the lawyers on both sides of the room were benches for the press; and facing the stage, taking up the bulk of the auditorium, were rows of seats for the witnesses who would be called to give evidence, and those who through connections or their innate distinction had managed to obtain tickets to watch the show.

A barrier separated this audience from the witnesses, and a voluntary segregation separated the witnesses into two camps. Here, after all, was a group of men – and one woman, Mme Henry – whose mutual antagonism had brought France close to civil war. Here, in the front row, was Jean Casimir-Perier, President of the Republic at the time of Dreyfus’s arrest in 1894, and next to him General Mercier. Here, among the many officers with their clanking sabres and clinking spurs, were the former Ministers of War General Billot, General Zurlinden and Godefroy Cavaignac. Here was General Roget – the man who had once asked the Statistical Section to help him dispose of a troublesome mistress, who had been Dreyfus’s assessor at the École de Guerre and judged him unsuitable for the General Staff, and who, six months before, had refused to join Déroulède’s attempted coup. Here were Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse, and Captains Cuignet and Lauth – Lauth present both as a witness in his own right and as an escort for Mme Henry.

There was little glitter of uniforms in the opposing camp on the left of the auditorium. There were two officers prepared to give evidence that exonerated Dreyfus, Commandants Ducros and Hartman; and Captain Martin Freystaetter, one of the judges in the first court martial, now convinced that its judgment had been wrong. The key witness for the defence and hero of the Dreyfusards, Georges Picquart, who in all the previous hearings had appeared in the blue and gold uniform of his regiment, had been thrown out of the army and so now wore civilian clothes. He sat next to the Socialist politicians Jean Jaurès and René Viviani, with whom he chatted as the room filled up. Paléologue feared that the three men grouped together would be seen by the anti-Dreyfusards as a
tableau vivant
of treason – the alliance between ‘the defenders of the Jew and the destroyers of our national traditions. I fear that the Jew will pay for this edifying spectacle.’
14
A finding that Dreyfus was innocent would prove Picquart right.

At seven in the morning, all stood as the seven military judges wearing full-dress uniform filed into the school hall. The guards saluted. The judges acknowledged their salute and took their seats. The presiding judge, Colonel Albert Jouaust, declared the session open and, in a sharp, dry voice, summoned the accused. The room was silent. All eyes turned towards the door through which the principal protagonist of the national drama would appear. As ‘the whole hall seemed to hold its breath’, the door opened and Dreyfus marched into the room. He reached the podium, saluted the judges, went to his place beside his lawyers and, with Colonel Jouaust’s permission, removed his
képi
and sat down.

The effect Dreyfus produced on the thousand or so spectators packed into the courtroom was both dramatic and confused. Here, finally, in flesh and blood was the man who for years had been talked of almost as a symbol, an abstraction. And what flesh and blood. He wore the gold-braided uniform of a captain in the Artillery, together with boots and spurs, but ‘his arms were withered, his knees so thin that they seemed to pierce the cloth of his trousers. There were just a few white hairs on his bald pate. Only the staring eyes behind his pince-nez gave some slight animation to his cadaverous face.’
15
Even Maurice Barrès, looking on from the benches reserved for the press, wrote of how ‘the whole courtroom swayed with combined horror and pity when Dreyfus appeared’. Here was the traitor, but ‘at that moment we felt nothing but a thin wave of pain breaking over the auditorium. A miserable human rag was being thrown into the glaring light.’
16

The clerk of the court read out the indictment – the same that Dreyfus had heard in 1894. Hearing the allegations for a second time, Dreyfus momentarily lost control of his feelings: a few tears ran down his cheeks. He then regained his composure and ‘resumed his impassive mask, his poor worn-out mask, lined with pain’.
17
Jouaust asked Dreyfus to respond to the charges; his tone was abrupt and unfriendly. Dreyfus answered ‘in a dry, monotonous, jerky voice’. He denied the charges. ‘I affirm again that I am innocent. I have put up with so much for five years,
mon colonel
, but yet again, for the sake of my honour and that of my children, I declare that I am innocent.’ He swayed with dizziness; his face had grown pale. Jouaust persisted: ‘So you deny the charges?’ ‘Yes,
mon colonel
.’ His protestations of innocence were repeated over and over again in a monotonous voice and, in exactly the same way as his dreary delivery had alienated those who had been present at his first court martial, so now his audience felt he was failing to fulfil the dramatic potential of his role.

Paléologue had not been present at the first trial, but he had witnessed Dreyfus’s degradation before the École Militaire and remembered that there too his protestations of innocence had been unconvincing. At that time he had thought Dreyfus guilty; subsequently he had reached a near-certainty that he was not. But now, once again, Dreyfus’s protestations of innocence revived his misgivings. ‘Why, now I
knew
that they were true, did they still sound so false to my ear? Why is this man incapable of putting any warmth into his words? Why in his most vigorous protestations can nothing of his soul emerge through his strangled throat?’
18

Clearly, since there had been no drama school on Devil’s Island, it was perhaps expecting too much of Dreyfus that he should have learned how to play the innocent victim to the public’s satisfaction. Not only was he debilitated by disease and the years of mistreatment, he also retained his inhibited personality, and the same faith in reason and common sense. He had expected the court martial to be a formality, yet here he was being asked to repudiate the same smears and insinuations about his womanising, his gambling, his curiosity about military matters, his trips to Alsace. Only new falsehoods roused him from this tedium: no, he had not dined with the German military attaché with his mistress, Suzanne Cron; no, he had not confessed to his crime to Captain Lebrun-Renault at the time of his degradation. ‘I have always declared my innocence; I have always defended my honour. By the head of my wife and children, I swear that I am innocent!’

The same bafflement at the sheer irrelevance of so much of the material presented in court was evident when, on Tuesday, 8 August, General Chamoin submitted to the court, sitting
in camera
, the Dreyfus dossier from the Ministry of War. Dreyfus appeared bemused. ‘His attitude’, wrote Paléologue, ‘seemed to say: “What have those piles of paper got to do with me?”’ And it was a proper question: among all the mass of documents, ‘there are not twenty lines’, Paléologue realised,

that really apply to him. The whole secret file of the intelligence department consists of nothing but apocryphal or adulterated documents; inaccurate translations, distorted evidence, fragments of foolish or fabricated gossip; scraps of paper arbitrarily fitted together, to which any meaning whatever can be attached, like the sibylline leaves; and insignificant jottings into which profound and cabalistic meanings are read.
19

After General Chamoin it was Paléologue’s turn to present the Dreyfus dossier from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He managed to persuade the court that ‘the packet of sixty-four charming and intimate letters’ written by Hermance de Weede to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen had no relevance to the Dreyfus case and could therefore be removed from the dossier. Of utmost importance to the case, however, was the telegram in the file from Panizzardi to his superiors in Rome sent shortly after Dreyfus’s arrest. Paléologue was able to demonstrate that it was not merely inaccurately deciphered but an outright forgery. There was also the question of a copy of the
bordereau
, annotated by the Kaiser himself and mentioning Dreyfus by name, that had supposedly come into the possession of the Statistical Section by the ‘usual route’. Learning of the theft of this document back in January 1895, it was claimed, the German Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, had threatened war if it was not returned. It was returned, so the prosecution claimed, but not before it had been photographed.

Henry had alluded to the existence of such a document to Paléologue before his suicide and Paléologue realised that, if it existed, it must be a forgery because the Kaiser would never have direct relations with a spy. In court Paléologue, who was scrupulous to separate his opinions from the facts, told the military judges that the file from the Quai d’Orsay contained no reference to this ‘fantastic episode’ whatsoever. Did the judges believe him? During a recess, Paléologue was questioned by three of them – Profillet, Beauvais and Parfait. ‘If you would only tell us everything you know,’ said Beauvais. Paléologue assured him that he was telling them everything he knew. Clearly, they thought he was holding something back. ‘Don’t insist, Beauvais,’ said Commandant Profillet. ‘Monsieur Paléologue’s task is difficult enough as it is.’
20

In the absence of this annotated
bordereau
, or any piece of new evidence, the court now went over yet again the evidence that had been produced at the first court martial and that had been exhaustively investigated in repeated hearings ever since. Was the handwriting on the
bordereau
that of Dreyfus? Was Dreyfus’s possession of the keys to all the cupboards in the offices of the Fourth Bureau incriminating when it was in fact Commandant Bertin-Mourot who had given him the keys so that he could make a methodical study of the dossiers the cupboards contained?
21
Even the definitive conclusions reached by the Combined Chambers of the Cour de Cassation – for example, that Dreyfus had not confessed his guilt to Captain Lebrun-Renault – did not prevent the prosecution from bringing such matters up once again.

Two crucial witnesses were unavailable – Esterhazy because he was in England, Henry because he was dead. Without Henry to give evidence, his widow Berthe was called to the stand – ‘tall, slender, dark, with fine eyes that shone beneath her long crêpe veils’.
22
Barrès reported that she had several times shouted ‘Judas!’ at Dreyfus from the well of court. She was asked what she knew about the way in which her late husband had obtained the
bordereau
, and then what, in her opinion, Henry had meant, in his last letter to her from the fortress of Mont-Valérien, by the phrase ‘you know in whose interests I acted’. Briefly, she closed her eyes. Then, ‘in a hesitating, sing-song voice, like a little girl reciting her catechism, she said: “It was in the interest of the army . . . the army that my dear husband . . . committed . . . committed his crime. It was the interest of the army that always guided . . . guided his conduct. And in the interest of whom else, gentlemen, could you believe that he would act?”’
23

When Mme Henry stepped down from the witness stand, Captain Lauth rose to give her his arm and escort her out of the room.

After Mme Henry, General Roget was called to the stand. By his military stance and commanding manner, he had an air of authority that inevitably impressed the seven junior officers acting as judges. It was, wrote Paléologue, as if he had been ‘ordering them to carry out a manoeuvre’. He said that Esterhazy could not be the traitor because he had no access to the secret documents mentioned in the
bordereau
. He insisted that Esterhazy’s louche character and disordered private life, while regrettable, had no bearing on the case before them. It was the same when Generals Billot and Zurlinden gave evidence: here were the great military leaders of France assuring their subordinates that Esterhazy was innocent and Dreyfus guilty. Cavaignac, too, though not a soldier, was indubitably a man of great intelligence and high distinction who put the case of the General Staff with lucidity and precision.

General de Boisdeffre gave evidence on 19 August. For Dreyfus, this was perhaps the most painful session of all because for so long he had believed that his former chief wished him well. Now he heard his hero, old before his time, repeat in a weary tone of voice his conviction that Dreyfus was guilty, that Esterhazy was the
homme de paille
– the patsy – put up by the Dreyfus family. When asked if he had any questions to put to Boisdeffre, Dreyfus simply replied: ‘I do not wish to respond to General de Boisdeffre.’