The Dreyfus Affair (5 page)

One of the main attractions of Freemasonry to its members was a commitment to mutual assistance. Masons took a vow to come to one another’s aid. They made useful contacts in the Lodges and supposedly identified one another outside by secret handshakes. Because of the oath of secrecy, non-Masons had no way of knowing whether they were denied a promotion or lost a contract because their competitors were Freemasons and they were not.

A contemporary historian of nineteenth-century France, Robert Tombs, judges the influence of Freemasonry to have been relatively benign, ‘a federation of clubs for aspiring left-wing politicians, a place for networking rather than conspiracy, and a discreet refuge for political discussion when the atmosphere outside was unfavourable’.
16
However, even the pragmatic Bismarck regarded the secretive nature of Masonic networks as ‘detrimental to civic equality and to public interests’. Masons were suspected of putting loyalty to their fellow Masons over loyalty to the nation or society in which they lived.

Freemasonry was also perceived as a conspiracy against the Catholic Church. As early as 1738 Pope Clement XII had published a papal constitution,
In Eminenti
, condemning Freemasonry for its secrecy, its religious indifferentism and its promotion of humanistic values detached from Christian revelation. Catholics were forbidden to become Masons. The spread of the ideas of the French Enlightenment confirmed, in the eyes of subsequent popes, the prescience of Clement’s warnings. Freemasonry ‘was officially blamed for the calamities that had befallen the Church since the French Revolution, for example in the Encyclical
Quo Graviora
of 1826’
.
17

In 1884 Pope Leo XIII, who had succeeded Pius IX in 1878, repeated his predecessor’s warnings about Freemasonry in an encyclical,
Humanus Genus
. Leo was already aged sixty-eight and in poor health when he was chosen as pope but was to reign for seventeen years. He would go down in history as the pope who came to terms with many of those aspects of modernity that his predecessor, Pius IX, had rejected – in particular the idea of democracy. To the consternation of the royalists in France, he initiated what came to be called the
ralliement
– the rallying of Catholics to the Republic – and in May 1881 had issued a historic encyclical,
Rerum Novarum
(‘New Things’), which condemned socialism, upheld the right to private property but insisted upon the Church’s commitment to social justice, including the right of workers to form trades unions and receive a just wage.

However, Pope Leo remained a man of profound personal piety and he looked with horror upon the assault on Catholic schools in Germany and above all in France, for which he held the Freemasons largely to blame.
Humanus Genus
was unambiguous and uncompromising in its condemnation of ‘that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons that was planning the destruction of holy Church publicly and openly, and this with the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom’. Freemasonry was a ‘vast evil’ and a ‘fatal plague’. ‘The teaching of morality which alone finds favour with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call “civil” and “independent”, and “free”, namely, that which does not contain any religious belief.’ Leo warned that if Christian principles be ‘taken away, as the naturalists
*
and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded’.

Although no mention is made in
Humanus Genus
of a link between Freemasonry and the Jews, there is no doubt that throughout Europe, and particularly in France, it ‘was generally regarded as a Jewish organization’ by its critics. In an attack published in 1893, the French Bishop Meurin referred to Freemasonry as ‘the
Synagogue de Satan
’,
†
and had portrayed it as ‘a Satanic cult, with which the Jews and Judaism were closely associated’.
18

Four years before, in 1889, on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, the authoritative Jesuit journal published in Rome,
Civiltà Cattolica
, published a series of articles describing the ascendancy of the Jews in France as God’s punishment for the nation’s apostasy at that time. ‘Heaven’s chosen instrument of anger for punishing the degenerate Christianity of our time is the Hebrews. Their power over Christianity is continually increasing, along with the predominance of that evil spirit’ that replaced the Rights of God with the Rights of Man. Once granted equal rights with Christians, ‘the dam which previously had held back the Hebrews was opened for them, and in a short time, like a devastating torrent, they penetrated and cunningly took over everything; gold, trade, the stock market, the highest appointments in political administrations, in the army and in diplomacy; public education, the press, everything fell into their hands or into the hands of those who were inevitably depending on them’.

The tone of the articles was intemperate and singled out France, not just as the source of the ungodly notion of ‘liberty’, but also as the nation in which it had been most effectively exploited by the Jews. In France,

the entire so-called High Finance is in the grip of non-French Jews who possess inestimable wealth. The litany of these princes of Israel is long and all have last names which sound as French as those of Arabs or Zulus. The Dreyfuses, Bischoffheims, Oppenheims, Erlangers, Hottinguers and so on, altogether form a banking Sanhedrin that represents a value of at least 10 billion francs, entirely extracted from the veins of France thanks to the
rights of man
, invented by this cosmopolitan and insatiable race.

Jews planned to ‘take over the means of controlling public opinion . . . Journalism and public education are like the two wings that carry the Israelite dragon, so that it might corrupt and plunder all over Europe . . . The Jews buy the press, over half the newspapers are in their power, and they use it’ to promote pornography and irreligion. The Jews ‘tear down the crucifixes from the walls of the Paris schools, breaking them and giving orders to throw them into the sewers, and they defend sword in hand, children’s obligatory attendance of secular schools, that is of those without and against the Christian God’.

3: The Army

In the view of the authors of this series of articles in
Civiltà Cattolica
, Jews might be taking over French journalism, the civil service, the judiciary, the schools and the universities, but there was one French institution where the conservative, Catholic Frenchman had reason to believe that he was still in control – the army. A Jew might be well equipped by inherited aptitudes to be a banker, a lawyer, a businessman, a doctor, a journalist, a teacher or a civil servant – but in a nation where the defence of the realm had historically been the prerogative of the aristocracy, and where Jews had been confined to civilian pursuits since the defeat of Simeon Ben Koseba in the second century
ad
, the French Jew was hardly credible as a soldier.

However, even here the pre-eminence of conservative Catholics was under threat. There was a new spirit of professionalism in the army and the introduction of universal conscription changed the nature of the rank and file from ‘middle-aged, illiterate sots’ to ‘fresh-faced, educated’ youths.
19
The army was infected with the spirit of modernity that had brought new roads, railways, banks, business and literacy into every corner of France and there was a difference of opinion between the modernisers and the traditionalists – not on questions of weaponry, strategy and tactics but on the composition of the officer corps.

There were two routes to a commission. One was via the military academy at Saint-Cyr, the other via the École Polytechnique. The feeder schools for Saint-Cyr were often Catholic establishments run by Catholic religious orders, in particular the Jesuit school of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. The feeder schools for the École Polytechnique were the lycées or secular private schools such as the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. There was intense competition for all the Grandes Écoles of the University with ‘the examination for entrance to the École Polytechnique being the most revered of these tests’. As a result, the officers who joined the army from the École Polytechnique were from a wide range of backgrounds, and were very clever.

Graduates from Saint-Cyr had, since 1871, come increasingly ‘from the aristocracy and the conservative and Catholic bourgeoisie. In 1868, the yearbook of Saint-Cyr counted among its graduates 89 names “with the noble particle”
*
out of 284. Ten years later, there were 102 aristocrats out of a class of 365.’
20
This was partly because income from land had declined, but also because ‘the practical exclusion of the Conservative and Catholic classes from most branches of public life made the Army more than ever the natural career of the sons of these classes’.
21
Republicans had gradually displaced the older monarchist and Bonapartist cadres in the civil service and government bureaucracy. This displacement entailed a change in social class as well, from aristocrats to bourgeoisie, and in religion from Catholic to Protestant or non-believer – or Jew. In short, a new governing class began to come to power in France.

Catholics ascribed this to prejudice, but the politician and journalist Yves Guyot thought that all too often ‘people of Catholic origin, but now more or less agnostic’, blamed discrimination rather than their own shortcomings for their failure in life.

They don’t want to take the trouble to learn a foreign language; they don’t want to submit themselves to the tedium of hard work; they don’t want to strain themselves by mastering the complexities of high finance; they want jobs and positions to come to them without effort in the traditional way. They are thus very jealous of the Jews who demonstrate in these jobs and positions the qualities of perseverance and know-how that they lack; and, like good protectionists . . . they demand that their rivals be removed; they pretend that they are persecuted, while in fact, it is they who want to persecute those whom they blame for their own lack of success.
22

Whether they were excluded from the civil service as a result of incompetence or discrimination, many of those from a conservative Catholic background turned to the one major area of employment by the state that remained open to them, the army.
23
This increased representation in the officer corps of men of questionable loyalty to the Republic and revived ‘myths about power-mad Jesuits’ who were said to have ‘packed the General Staff with their pupils’. In fact, ‘in 1898, only a dozen General Staff officers out of 180 had attended their schools’.
24
However, the myths were potent and in 1888 the first civilian Minister of War, Charles Louis de Freycinet – himself a Polytechnicien – instituted a number of reforms. The École Militaire Supérieure was renamed the École Supérieure de Guerre and, in October 1890, Freycinet created the post of Chief of the General Staff, appointing to fill it General François de Miribel, also a Polytechnicien – indeed, ‘the son, brother, and father of Polytechniciens’ and ‘a reformer by temperament and conviction’.

To open up access to officers with talent but no connections, General de Miribel ruled that each year the top twelve graduates of the École Supérieure de Guerre should serve as interns on the General Staff. This would not necessarily lead to a permanent appointment but it would make it more difficult for graduates of Saint-Cyr to advance through the old-boy network. However, Miribel himself was considered to be a poor judge of men. He appointed as his deputy General Raoul François Charles le Mouton de Boisdeffre, later described by General Edmond Legrand-Girard in his memoirs as ‘refined, cunning but a lazy slug who directed things in a dilettante way’. Miribel promoted to the General Staff General Charles-Arthur Gonse, characterised in the same memoirs as ‘a nullity made man’.
25
These republican officers were denigrated by their enemies as ‘drawing-room intriguers’, and appointments were made, according to Legrand-Girard, for ‘their name or their connections’. General Félix Saussier, who was esteemed by republicans because he had seen off the potential putschist General Georges Boulanger, remained the Military Governor of Paris despite his louche private life.

Miribel’s appointment of General de Boisdeffre as his deputy was, according to the first historian of the Dreyfus Affair, Joseph Reinach, made precisely
because
of his indolence. ‘Miribel appointed him to the General Staff not because of his positive qualities but because of his nonchalance. This great worker, jealous of his work, wanted to do everything himself. De Boisdeffre’s laziness didn’t annoy him.’ However, Miribel died suddenly of an apoplectic fit on 8 September 1893, and, wrote Reinach, ‘the ignorance of Republicans about the armed forces allowed Boisdeffre to succeed him. He was installed like a prebendary, spending at most a few hours in his office, leaving his work to his subordinates, immersing himself rather in worldly affairs, indulging in expensive pleasures, and representing the army at various functions – something at which he excelled with his height, his having the manner of a military and diplomatic gentleman, his decorative quality, with something deep and serious in his expression which made him seem profound.’
26
The death of Miribel ‘unquestionably weakened the position of the interns at the General Staff, particularly the Polytechniciens’,
27
because Boisdeffre reverted to the old system of co-option.