The Dreyfus Affair (59 page)
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Authors: Piers Paul Read
Marcel Proust described himself as âthe first Dreyfusard' because he persuaded the writer Anatole France to sign a petition in favour of Dreyfus. Proust's mother was Jewish: his father, Dr Adrian Proust, when he learned that his two sons had become Dreyfusards, would not speak to them for a week.
Ãmile Zola. One of France's leading novelists, he exposed the conspiracy against Dreyfus in his polemical article,
J'Accuse
. It led to anti-Semitic riots throughout France.
Edgar Demange, the eminent lawyer who was convinced of Dreyfus's innocence and undertook his defence. He was a devout Catholic and married to the daughter of a general.
Jean Jaurès. Socialist firebrand and the finest orator in the National Assembly, he was a late convert to the Dreyfusard cause. He blamed the conspiracy on âJesuit-spawned generals' and exploited the Affair for an anti-clerical agenda.
Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, French prime minister in 1899. He persuaded President Loubet, after Dreyfus's second conviction, to grant him a pardon. Dreyfus was freed but many of his supporters thought he ought to have returned to prison to fight on. Waldeck-Rousseau used the Affair to close down Catholic schools and disband religious orders.
Alfred Dreyfus leaving the courthouse during his second court martial, at Rennes in 1899. The soldiers have their backs turned â considered by the Dreyfusards to be a calculated insult.
Georges Clemenceau. A Socialist politician tarnished by the Panama Canal Scandal, he became a leading Dreyfusard and fought duels with both Edouard Drumont and Paul Déroulède.
The anticlerical governments of Waldeck-Rousseau and Ãmile Combes closed all Catholic schools in France and dissolved Catholic religious orders. Dreyfus believed that his Affair had prepared public opinion for this legislation. Here Carthusian monks are evicted from their mother house, La Grande Chartreuse.
In 1906, Dreyfus was declared innocent by the joint Courts of Appeal and reinstated in the army with the rank of Major. Here he receives the cross of the Legion of Honour at a ceremony at the Ãcole Militaire where he had suffered ritual degradation eleven years before.
My thanks are due to the many historians of nineteenth-century France and the Dreyfus Affair whose works have furnished material for this book. I am particularly grateful to Dr Ruth Harris, who generously answered my queries over lunch at New College, Oxford; and to Professor Jeremy Jennings, who kindly gave me a preview of a chapter of his
Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century
.
I should like to acknowledge the help of the staff at the London Library whose comprehensive collection of books on the Dreyfus Affair proved invaluable.
I should also like to thank my wife Emily for her help in translating difficult passages from French sources; my agent, Gillon Aitken, who encouraged me to write about the Dreyfus Affair; and Michael Fishwick, my editor at Bloomsbury, who commissioned this book and gave sound advice on the revision of my first draft. I am grateful to Anna Simpson for shepherding my manuscript through its different stages; to Peter James for his superb copy-editing, Catherine Best for reading the proofs and Alan Rutter for the index. I should like to thank Henry Jeffreys, Alexa von Hirschberg, Tess Viljoen, Paul Nash, Polly Napper and all at Bloomsbury who helped in the publication of this book. My thanks also go to Peter Ginna and Pete Beatty of Bloomsbury Press in New York.
I am grateful for permission to quote from the following works by other authors: Ralph Gibson,
A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914
(Routledge, 1989); Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
Pages from the Goncourt Journal
,
ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (New York Review Books, 1962); Albert S. Lindemann,
The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894–1915
(Cambridge University Press, 1991); Maurice Paléologue,
My Secret Diary of the Dreyfus Case, 1894–1899
,
trans. Eric Mosbacher (Secker & Warburg, 1957), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group; Ruth Harris,
T
he Man on Devil’s Island:
Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France
(Allen Lane), by permission of the Penguin Group; and Vincent Duclert,
Alfred Dreyfus: L’honneur d’un patriote
, reprinted by permission of Libraire Arthème Fayard.
Aboville, Commandant Albert d’
Second-in-command of the Fourth Bureau of the General Staff. Suggested that the author of the incriminating
bordereau
may have been one of the interns (
stagiaires
).
André, General Louis
Minister of War, 1900–November 1904.
Arconati-Visconti, Marquise Marie (née Peyrat)
Dreyfusard
salonnière
who befriended Dreyfus after his pardon. Both Joseph Reinach and Émile Combes belonged to her circle.
Barrès, Maurice
Anti-Dreyfusard journalist and intellectual. Covered the Rennes court martial for
Le Journal
. One of the founders in 1899 of the Ligue de la Patrie Française to oppose the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme.
Bastian, Mme Marie-Caudron
Cleaning lady at the German Embassy on the rue de Lille. Recruited by Martin-Joseph Brücker as an agent for the French secret service. Delivered the contents of the Embassy’s waste-paper baskets to Commandant Joseph Henry.
Beauvais, Captain Charles
Judge at the Rennes court martial.