The Dreyfus Affair (7 page)

Herz, though not in the same league as Reinach, cut a considerable figure in Parisian society, and splashed money around to make friends and influence people, giving two expensive bracelets to the granddaughters of the President of the Republic, Jules Grévy. He now began to augment the funds he received as a lobbyist for the Panama Canal Company with money paid to him by Reinach to keep quiet about some past treachery, sin or scandal, the exact nature of which never became known. The web of corruption grew ever larger with 510 members of the National Assembly, among them six government ministers, eventually accused of accepting inducements via Reinach and Herz to hide from the public the disastrous financial position of the Panama Canal Company and pass a law to permit a lottery to bail it out. The bill was passed by both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies to raise 720 million francs, but it was under-subscribed by more than 50 per cent. The money raised was not enough. The company was bust.

The bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company, with the loss of almost a billion francs by its French investors, ‘was the greatest disaster since the collapse of the Empire, the greatest purely financial disaster since the Mississippi scheme of nearly 200 years before'.
14
There was a fear among government ministers, who had so recently seen off the threat of an authoritarian coup by General Boulanger, that if the truth became known about the means employed to cover up the true state of the company's finances before its collapse, the opprobrium would mean the end of the Republic. They therefore procrastinated over demands for an inquiry, and hoped that the truth might never come to light; but those hopes were dashed when a series of articles began to appear in
La Libre Parole
under the headline ‘The Dirty Linen of Panama' – ‘Les Dessous de Panama'.

The articles were written by a journalist, Ferdinand Martin, under the name ‘Micros', but the material was supplied by Jacques de Reinach himself in return for an assurance that his name would be kept out of the ensuing scandal. It was too late. The conspiracy was unravelling. Reinach realised he would be exposed and, after an unpleasant interview with his nephew and son-in-law, Joseph Reinach, he returned home where, the next morning, he was found dead in his bed.

Was it suicide? Or was he silenced by powerful interests because he knew too much? It was said that Reinach had been poisoned, and Herz claimed that Reinach had earlier tried to poison him. Charges of fraud were brought against directors of the Panama Canal Company, among them de Lesseps, his son Charles and the contractor Eiffel whose tower dominating the Paris skyline symbolised the triumph of secularism, modernity and progress. The Chamber of Deputies was forced to vote for a public inquiry. Governments rose and fell, though all were formed from the same coalition of cronies – ‘la République des Camarades'. The arraigned directors refused the role of scapegoats and produced the stubs of the cheques paid to the politicians. The parliamentary immunity of five deputies was lifted so that they could be charged with corruption; so too that of five members of the Senate. Some of the chief culprits had fled abroad – Arton, Reinach's first gofer, over the Rhine to wander around Europe, and Herz over the Channel to settle in Bournemouth on the south coast of England.

In the event, there were few convictions and, in the elections of 1893, remarkably few of the tainted deputies lost their seats. There was no credible alternative to the Opportunists. If they had ‘been shown to be knaves, their enemies had been shown up as fools; and a peasant elector prefers a knave to a fool'.
15
There were Socialist gains and conservative losses. The only exception among the victorious Socialists was Georges Clemenceau, who had made his friend Cornelius Herz a Grand Officer of the Légion d'Honneur. Because Clemenceau spoke English and was known to support a policy favourable to England, he was accused of being an English agent and personal protégé of Queen Victoria. His speeches were interrupted by shouts in English of ‘aoh yes' and, though the Socialist representation in the Chamber of Deputies rose from twelve to fifty, Clemenceau lost his seat.

3: Matters of Honour

The charge that Clemenceau was an English agent was made in the Chamber of Deputies by the leader of the French League of Patriots, and supporter of General Boulanger, Paul Déroulède. For this affront to his honour, Clemenceau challenged Déroulède to a duel. Clemenceau was a skilled and experienced duellist but in this instance his three shots missed their mark. So did those of Déroulède.

It was an incongruous feature of the French Third Republic, which considered itself in the vanguard of progress and civilisation, that this medieval way of settling differences should still be in force. In the course of the twentieth century the concept of honour – that is, a man's reputation for honesty and integrity – was to pass into abeyance, but in the late nineteenth century it was very much alive, and impugning it was still a reason for one man to challenge another to a duel.

Duelling had been accepted as a judicial process among the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire, and even by Christian kingdoms in the early Middle Ages: it was assumed that God would always ensure that the innocent would triumph over the guilty. Cardinal Richelieu, whose brother had been killed in a duel, persuaded King Louis XIII to ban it in 1626, and the Comte de Montmorency-Bouteville and his second, the Comte de Chapelles, were executed for fighting a duel in the Place Royale in Paris.
16
However, this means of settling ‘affairs of honour' had survived the demise of the
ancien régime
. The contrast between the social status of swashbuckling French aristocrats and the middle-aged and often portly bourgeois journalists and politicians clearly did not deter the latter from throwing down the gauntlet to those who had insulted them – even if that gauntlet was no longer a chain-mail glove but rather a rolled-up newspaper. Clemenceau would later fight a duel with Édouard Drumont, and Déroulède with Jean Jaurès. Joseph Reinach, the nephew of Baron Jacques de Reinach, would fight thirteen duels in the course of his career.
17

In some countries in central and eastern Europe, Jews, because of their lowly status, were not considered
satisfaktionsfähig
– capable of giving satisfaction to a man of honour
18
– but this was not the case in France. Drumont, because of the numerous libels and insults published in
La Libre Parole
, was frequently challenged.
*
In 1886 he was challenged by Arthur Meyer, the editor of
Le Gaulois
, for reprinting an old article in
La France juive
which accused Meyer of cheating at cards. Edmond de Goncourt describes Drumont on the day of the duel as being in

 

a nervous, excited, gay mood. ‘Today,' he exclaimed, ‘I had fifty-five callers . . . The bell never stopped ringing. Crowds have started gathering in the street at the sight of all the people coming in . . . people who come to say to me: “How grateful we are to you for saying what we think!” There are some Carmelites who sent word to me that they would pray for me on Saturday . . . and somebody told my housekeeper, who's a pious old thing, that I was a sort of lay priest . . .'
19

 

The obsession with duelling of this ‘lay priest' and ‘secular monk' reached absurd proportions. ‘The mania for fighting which has taken hold of Drumont', wrote Goncourt,

 

is turning him into a figure of fun. Nature is nothing for him now but a setting for affairs of honour. When he took the lease of his house at Soisy, he exclaimed: ‘Ah, now there's a real garden for a pistol-duel!' A certain walk in Daudet's park called forth the comment: ‘Oh, what a splendid spot for a sword-fight!' And when, recently, his friends were discussing a marriage they wanted to arrange for him, he suddenly said: ‘Yes, everything you say about the girl is perfect . . . But do you think she is likely to get upset when two gentlemen call for me in the morning?'
20

 

A charge more serious than card-sharping, made over and over again in both
La France juive
and
La Libre Parole
, was that Jews could not be trusted as officers in the French Army. Up to that point, wrote Drumont, the Jews had infiltrated and now dominated every branch of the French state. ‘France, thanks to the principles of '89 easily exploited by the Jews, fell to pieces. The Jews monopolised the public finances, took over everything, except the army.'
21
Now they were moving in on that most sacred of French institutions. In May 1892,
La Libre Parole
began publishing a series of articles, with the byline of the Comte de Pradel de Lamaze, under the headline ‘The Jews in the Army'.

 

No sooner have the Jews gained a foothold in the army than they have sought in every different way to gain influence. Already masters in finance, in the administration, promoting their interests in the law courts, they will be definitively masters of France on the day when they command the Army. Rothschild will be given the plans of mobilisation and one knows well to what end.
22

 

One of the articles, ‘The Jews at the École Polytechnique', stated that ‘among the members of the society of former pupils, one finds 18 Martins, the most common name in France, but there are 19 Lévys. The Mayers and Meyers are 13.'

La Libre Parole
had particular targets among the military, either officers who were Jewish or gentile officers who protected them. One of the latter was General Saussier, the Military Governor of Paris, Vice-President of the High Council of War and, in fact if not in law, because the title did not officially exist, ‘generalissimo' elect of the French armies in time of war. Saussier was not Jewish but had a Jewish mistress, the wife of a Jewish officer, Maurice Weil. For
La Libre Parole
,
Weil epitomised all that was wrong and risky in a Jewish officer. Born in 1844, and with a reasonable record in the Franco-Prussian war (he received the Légion d'Honneur), Weil had worked for a while in army intelligence, then commanded by a fellow Jew, Colonel Samuel. He was an amateur historian, played the stock market, loved horse-racing and was a popular guest in ‘the salons of Jewish high finance . . . an assiduous visitor at the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahen d'Anvers, the Camondos; he was even said to be the lover of a beautiful Jewish countess, the wife of a Jewish banker'.
23

In 1876 he married ‘an elegant Viennese, a co-religionist'. He developed a passion for horse-racing and was ‘regularly to be seen at the paddock at Longchamp, Auteil and Deauville'. He frequently laid bets on the horses, either for himself or for his rich friends. In 1881, one of these rich friends, Baron de Schickler, accused Weil of cheating him and the ensuing scandal, exposed in the periodical
La Vie Moderne
, meant that Weil had to resign his commission in the army reserve. He fled to Spain to avoid judicial proceedings. ‘The brilliant situation which he had built up for himself in Paris', wrote Maurice Paléologue,

 

was in ruins. But, with that mixture of flexibility and tenacity which is one of the marks of his race, he set about gradually re-establishing it. By a stroke of brilliant cynicism, he secured the friendship of the Commander-in-Chief, the Governor of Paris, General Saussier, who, having a lively sensual appetite in spite of his sixty years, became the lover of the attractive Mme Weil. Thus, on 8 January 1890, the complaisant husband was restored to the army with the rank of major in the territorial cavalry and posted as adjutant to the Commander-in-Chief's staff. Henceforward he was his chief's inseparable companion; General Saussier dined with his good friends two or three times a week.
24

 

This mix of sex, money and favouritism in high-ranking officers was a godsend for Drumont and his anti-Semitic friends. Senior officers' weakness for women, and consequent favouring of their
maris complaisants
, was not limited to Weil: according to
La Libre Parole
, Saussier also kept in post a senile and incompetent general named Édon whose wife's favours he also enjoyed. For Saussier, all this was water off a duck's back, but the constant repetition of the charge that the 300 or so Jewish officers in the French Army were incapable of true patriotism, and were therefore untrustworthy, outraged the Jewish officers in question, and in May 1892 one of them, Captain André Crémieu-Foa, wrote to Drumont laying down the gauntlet: ‘in insulting the three hundred officers on active service who belong to the Jewish faith, you are insulting me personally'. Drumont replied: ‘if Jewish officers are wounded by our articles, let them choose by lot as many representatives as they will and we will oppose them with an equal number of French swords'.
25

A duel between Crémieu-Foa, who ‘was rated as one of the best duellists in the army',
26
and Drumont was fought on 1 June 1892. The weapons chosen were swords. The fighting was intense; both men were wounded and Drumont's doctor, Poquelin, intervened to stop the fight. This ‘semi-defeat' of Drumont led his seconds, the Marquis de Morès and the Comte de Pradel de Lamaze, to challenge Crémieu-Foa to a second duel. It was agreed by the duellists and their seconds that, to protect Lamaze's wife and children from anxiety, the duel should remain secret. However, Ernest Crémieu-Foa, the brother of André, sent a report of the duel to the Dalziel news agency.