The Dreyfus Affair (49 page)

The court martial had been followed closely, particularly in Britain and the United States, and there had been consternation at the way it had been conducted with witnesses not so much giving evidence as expressing their opinions and making emotive speeches. What a contrast to the strict rules of evidence found in the courts of the Anglo-Saxon nations.
*
This criticism of the French judicial system became criticism of French society and civilisation as such.
52
British public opinion blamed the whole French nation for the iniquities of the army’s High Command, and bundled it with every other evil perpetrated throughout French history – the massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day and of aristocrats during the Terror, and the aggressive wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon. The heroes of the Dreyfus Affair – Picquart, Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, Demange – were perceived as exceptions that proved the rule. The fact that Dreyfus was a Jew was irrelevant: ‘Dreyfus is, to the untainted conscience of humanity, no Semite,’ editorialised
The Times
, ‘but a human being.’
53
Queen Victoria referred to him as ‘the poor martyr Dreyfus’.
54

It was clear that the anti-Dreyfusards were also anti-British: Commandant de Bréon’s anti-Dreyfusard cousin Colonel de Villebois-Mareuil would not be the only French volunteer to fight for the Boers. Should a coup of the kind planned by Déroulède succeed, France’s policy towards Britain would change for the worse. ‘I heard from a good source’, the Dowager Empress of Germany wrote to her mother, Queen Victoria, on 22 August, in the middle of the Rennes court martial, ‘that the French talk seriously of having a war with England in 1900.’
55
Waldeck-Rousseau’s government was deemed more pro-British than most, but the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Monson, had reported to the Foreign Office a few days before, on 14 August, that ‘anything is possible’ because a foreign quarrel would divert attention from France’s ‘internal discord and disgrace’.
56

Many in Britain blamed the Dreyfus Affair on the Catholic Church. In
The Times
,
both editorial comment and readers’ letters ascribed a moral responsibility to the Pope in Rome, the Roman
Curia
and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vaughan. As in France, religious and tribal loyalties affected people’s judgement. The Catholic periodical the
Tablet
condemned the hypocrisy of the British press ‘in cases in which religious or national passions are involved’ and ascribed the Affair not to ‘religion or nationality’ but to the mistakes made by amateur judges.

The report by Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, to Queen Victoria took a similar line. He told her that Dreyfus’s second conviction was a result of mistakes made by inexperienced military judges under a system found ‘in all countries of Europe in which the Roman Civil Law . . . prevails’. Passions had been inflamed by self-interested politicians such as Clemenceau and Jaurès, and the foreign, particularly the British, press. The French had rallied to defend the honour of their army and had been influenced by the views of its High Command. This was not a symptom, as had been suggested, of ‘a general decadence of moral tone and sense’. Certainly, anti-Semitism had played a role, but Jews were unpopular in most countries where they resided, ‘assuredly not on religious, but on racial and social grounds’.
57
The Dreyfus Affair was certainly not the fault of the Catholic Church, ‘the religion of the mass of the people of France which is also the religion of a not unimportant section of her Majesty’s subjects at home and in her empire abroad’. Lord Russell of Killowen was an Irish Catholic.

George Bernard Shaw was not a Catholic but he was Irish, and he concurred with his fellow countryman, the Lord Chief Justice; he thought the attacks on the Jesuits were no better than the anti-Semitism of ‘Rochefort & Co.’. The failure of Catholics both in Britain and in the United States to go along with the British establishment’s view of the Dreyfus Affair, wrote Robert Tombs, shows ‘how clearly it was identified with Protestant and Anglo-Saxon ideology’.
58
To the French nationalists, it was a replay of the Damascus Affair: the Protestant British would always side with the Jews. Louis Martin’s
L’Anglais, est-il un Juif???
(The Englishman, is he a Jew?) was published in France in 1895 and Martin Chagny’s
La Sémitique Albion
(Semitic Albion) in 1898.
59

The government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau might have felt able to shrug off foreign outrage at the verdict delivered at Rennes were it not for the Exposition Universelle due to be held in Paris in 1900. It was a re-run of the Exhibition held eleven years earlier which had seen the opening of the Eiffel Tower – but on a much grander scale. New public buildings to adorn Paris for the Exhibition were nearing completion – the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Orsay; the Pont Alexandre III; the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais; a wine rotunda designed by Gustave Eiffel, La Ruche; an indoor cycling circuit, the Vélodrome d’Hiver; and the first line of the new Paris Métro with a station at the Palais du Trocadéro.

What alarmed Waldeck-Rousseau were the increasing demands of liberal opinion abroad to boycott the Exposition Universelle. Images of the imprisoned Dreyfus appeared in newspapers under the title ‘French Exhibit ’99’. The French correspondent of
Le Figaro
was told, ‘The Exhibition is finished. It won’t take place.’
60
Waldeck-Rousseau was also dismayed by the thought that the divisions in French society caused by the Affair would continue. He looked for a way for the executive branch of government to cut through the Gordian knot which the judicial branch of government had failed to untie. On 11 September, in
Le Siècle
, Joseph Reinach proposed a solution. Alfred Dreyfus should be pardoned by presidential decree.

Later that day, Reinach held a meeting with Waldeck-Rousseau at the Élysée Palace. The two men were friends and political allies. The Prime Minister warmed to the idea of a pardon. But he foresaw difficulties. President Loubet might balk at doing something that could be seen as an insult to the army. General Galliffet might take the same line. When the idea was put to him, Galliffet did, indeed, point out the dangers inherent in pardoning Dreyfus – of alienating not just the army but many of the deputies and the French voters – but thought it would be more acceptable if it was combined with a general amnesty for anyone involved in the Affair.

The Socialist Minister Millerand, who was a Dreyfusard but also a lawyer, explained that Dreyfus could not be pardoned unless he withdrew his appeal. This could then be taken as an admission of guilt. That afternoon Millerand chaired a meeting of the Dreyfusard high command in his office on the rue de Lille – Mathieu Dreyfus, Georges Clemenceau, Jean Jaurès and Joseph Reinach. Mathieu at first thought it impossible to ask his brother, who valued honour more than life, to ask to be pardoned for a crime he did not commit. However, he was anxious about Alfred’s state of health and doubted that he would survive further incarceration. ‘Think,’ said Reinach. ‘In a couple of days, if you like, you and he can be far away in some peaceful place: he’ll be with his wife, his children and a measure of happiness . . .’ Clemenceau, on the other hand, argued against a pardon: ‘you are humiliating the Republic before the sabre’. Jaurès, too, was reluctant, but was persuaded that a pardon need not mean an end to the campaign for full rehabilitation of an innocent man.
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The challenge now was to persuade Dreyfus himself to accept the idea of a pardon. Equipped with a promise from Millerand that he would resign from the cabinet if Dreyfus was not pardoned the next day, a statement drawn up by Jaurès stating that the struggle to establish his innocence would continue, and an order signed by General Galliffet that he should be allowed to see the prisoner alone, Mathieu took the night train to Rennes.

At six the following morning, 12 September, the meeting of the two brothers took place in Alfred’s cell. Mathieu laid out the offer: Alfred would be pardoned if he withdrew his appeal. Alfred refused. Although he did not expect his appeal to be successful, he did not want to withdraw it because it would suggest that he accepted the verdict of the court martial. Mathieu persisted. Already in a poor state of health, Alfred might not survive if he returned to prison; free, he could continue to campaign for a review. He said that the idea of a pardon was supported by Reinach and Jaurès. Alfred demurred and finally he himself came up with the most persuasive argument of all for accepting a pardon: ‘I thought of the sufferings of my wife and family, of the children I had not yet seen, and the thought of whom haunted me ever since my return to France.’
62
He agreed to withdraw his appeal.

Joseph Reinach, in his article in
Le Siècle
,
had demanded an immediate pardon ‘before the ink could dry’ on the verdict delivered by the court martial in Rennes. Alexandre Millerand had said he would resign if Dreyfus was not pardoned the next day. President Loubet, however, procrastinated; he wanted, as a fig-leaf to cover the implicit repudiation of the authority of the army, a week’s delay during which a doctor would report on Dreyfus’s state of health. A thirty-eight-year-old physician at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, Pierre Delbet, was sent to Rennes to examine Dreyfus – a man, Dreyfus judged, of high intelligence and goodwill.
63
Delbet’s report was duly submitted to the Minister of War. ‘It is clear from the information obtained that the health of the prisoner has been seriously affected and would not endure, without great danger, a prolonged period of detention.’ This was enough for Loubet. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers, held on 19 September, the President of France acceded to the request made by the Minister of War and signed the decree pardoning Alfred Dreyfus for the crime of treason.

At two in the morning of 20 September 1899, Dreyfus left the military prison in Rennes wearing a navy-blue suit, a black overcoat and a black felt hat in the company of the Director of the Sûreté,
Léopold Viguié, and four plain-clothes policemen. A car took Dreyfus and his escort to a small station at Vern, ten kilometres outside Rennes. Here they caught a train to Châteaubriant and then to Nantes, the first leg of a long journey to Carpentras in the south-east of France and the home of his much loved elder sister, Henriette, and her husband Joseph Valabrègue.

Mathieu Dreyfus and the Valabrègues’ son Paul met Dreyfus at Nantes. The two brothers embraced and for a while held each other without saying a word.
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Paul, too, embraced his uncle: it was Paul who had been subjected to du Paty de Clam’s rant about adultery and treason back in 1894. With Mathieu and Paul was a reporter from
Le Figaro
, Jules Huret, who joined them for the rest of their journey.

‘How beautiful the countryside is! Look at that little village, the cockerels, the chickens, the lovely trees in the mist! Can you believe that for a year all I saw was the sky and the sea, and then for four more years, the sky alone: a square of bright blue sky, hard, metallic and always the same, completely cloudless!’
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If Dreyfus had had any doubts about accepting a pardon, they were now dispelled by the joy of freedom. He smoked one cigarette after another. ‘You smoke too much,’ Mathieu said to him.

‘Let me smoke. Let me talk. Give me at least twenty-four hours of debauchery!’

Dreyfus talked while he smoked, and Huret, whom Dreyfus found ‘a pleasant travelling companion’, took notes for his exclusive story. How sad he was, said Dreyfus, to hear that Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, his great champion, had died on the very day of his pardon but without hearing the good news. How encouraged he had been by the 5,000 letters of support that he had received since returning to France – and this was not counting those sent to Lucie. ‘Oh, that did me good. Even officers on active service sent me short notes: “Happy to see you back. Happy at the thought of your rehabilitation.”’

When it came to his enemies, Dreyfus judged Mercier to be ‘a bad and dishonest man’, too ‘lucid and perspicacious’ not to be aware of what he had done. ‘But if he is mentally aware, he is morally oblivious. He is amoral.’ Dreyfus found excuses for his former comrades who had given evidence against him. ‘I am sure it was not out of antagonism towards me. No, it was simply a low calculation of how to please their superiors. These are people who have a very strange idea of duty!’

When the travellers reached Bordeaux at half-past four, they ate a late lunch in the Hôtel Terminus, Dreyfus’s first meal as a free man. The news of their arrival had leaked out and a crowd of journalists and the general public were held back by the men from the Sûreté. But unlike the throng that had bayed for blood when he had disembarked from the train at La Rochelle on his way to the Île de Ré five years before, the passions expressed were now mixed. As they went from the hotel to the platform to catch an overnight train to Narbonne and then Avignon, one man shouted ‘Bravo!’ and another ‘Down with Dreyfus!’ ‘They cancel one another out,’ said Dreyfus. ‘
Cela se balance
.’

When they finally arrived at Avignon, on the morning of 21 September, two landaus awaited Dreyfus and his companions. Here Jules Huret left them to return to Paris. Dreyfus, with his brother and nephew, got into the first landau; his escort from the Sûreté
into the second. They then set out on the twenty-kilometre journey to Carpentras, the road passing through a landscape of olive trees and vines with Mont Ventoux in the distance, pink in the light of the morning sun.