The Pursuit of Laughter (50 page)

David Lewis describes the dreadful ceremony of the degradation, when Dreyfus had the buttons and braid torn off his uniform and his sword was broken across the knee of an officer. As he was marched back he cried out in his harsh voice:
‘Soldats! Je suis innocent! Vive la France!'
The angry crowd shouted: ‘
Salaud! Silence! Mort au juif!
' [Bastard. Shut up. Death to the Jew.]

How could such a terrible thing happen? A few people suspected almost from the beginning that there might have been a miscarriage of justice, but they had nothing to go on and they kept their thoughts to themselves. There were several reasons for this. The most respectable was that some of the items on the
bordereau
concerned the artillery, and the French were then developing their famous 75 mm gun. It would have been a disaster if details of this had reached the Germans. Then, whenever during the weeks leading up to the court martial awkward questions were asked, Major Henry produced new ‘
evidence
', some of it highly dramatic. He even said he had intercepted a letter from Emperor William II to Dreyfus, though nobody actually set eyes upon it. The German ambassador, an old-fashioned aristocrat, Count von Münster, gave his word that neither he nor the
military
attaché had ever heard of Dreyfus. This shook the Foreign Minister, but the gutter press said it was another German lie.

As time went on many of the ‘intellectuals' became violently pro-Dreyfus; some of them convinced of his innocence, others for party political reasons, but they often did more harm than good. ‘The intellectuals have all more or less lost their national
mentality
,' wrote Maurice Paléologue, who called them ‘these presumptuous pedants who believe they are the aristocrats of intelligence'. To the ordinary patriotic Frenchman they simply represented a group of nondescript writers and publicists who put every other country before their own, ready and willing to knock the government, the army, and France itself. There is no doubt that most of Dreyfus's supporters managed in their tactless way to
stiffen 
the opinion that ‘
raison d'état
,' or the life of the country, mattered infinitely more than the fate of one man.

A very terrible fate it was. They sent him across the ocean to be the only prisoner on Devil's Island. His wife and brother were unremitting in their efforts to get the case
reopened
. Mathieu Dreyfus, afraid that the whole thing was being forgotten, almost
managed
to finish him off: he arranged for an English paper to print a story that Dreyfus had escaped from Devil's Island. The result was that he was no longer allowed to walk on the island, or to look at the sea; a high palisade was put up to contain him. Worst of all, he was riveted to his bed at night, by the ankles and the wrists. The misery of this in a
tropical
climate in a cell buzzing with insects can easily be imagined.

The hero of the ‘affaire' is Colonel Picquart, who had become head of the Statistical Section. Picquart had been present at the court martial; at the time he never doubted that Dreyfus was guilty. Some time later, following the traces of the amateurish spy Esterhazy, he saw Esterhazy's handwriting and immediately recognised it as the writing on the ‘
bordereau
'. He told his superiors. They said there could be no question of a re-trial; it might set off a diplomatic ‘incident' with Germany; it might even lead to war. Picquart, now
convinced
that Dreyfus was innocent, continued his inquiries. Nothing would induce him to throw up the case, he could not bear the heavy load on his conscience. As a result, in order to shut his mouth, Picquart was ordered to the Tunisian frontier where a colonial war was in progress. There were those who fervently hoped he might leave his bones in North Africa; but eventually he returned, more determined than ever to get the Dreyfus case
reopened
. Major Henry's forgeries and lies gradually came to light, and he was arrested. Alone in his cell, he took his razor and cut his throat.

Major Henry's suicide excited the press of the entire world. Even French newspapers, hitherto neutral, now demanded revision. One of the court martial judges announced publicly that his eyes had been opened. When Mercier, Minister of War, heard the news he uttered the one word: ‘
Foutu!
' [Screwed].

This was in 1899, four years since Dreyfus had been languishing on Devil's Island. The new trial was staged in the lycée at Rennes in August. The town was stuffed with generals and lawyers and Dreyfusists and anti-Dreyfusists and journalists from every country on earth. The best account of this trial and of the atmosphere at Rennes is to be found in the diary kept by Maurice Paléologue, a diplomat in the Intelligence Department of the Quai d'Orsay. It was published in 1955, twenty years after the death of Dreyfus; the same year as the excellent English book on the Dreyfus case by Guy Chapman. Paléologue believed Dreyfus to be innocent, yet he felt sure he would be found guilty all over again. Passions ran high. One of the ‘facts' which damned Dreyfus in the eyes of most Frenchmen was the alleged letter to him from their arch-enemy the Kaiser. Paléologue ridiculed the mere idea of the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, Margrave of Baden, Landgrave of Hessen, and so on and on, taking up his pen and writing to a spy. But
neither
the generals nor the lawyers were men of the world, and they swallowed such
fantasies
.

International interest in the trial was such that the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Russell of Killowen, went over to Rennes for a few days busman's holiday. He was given an armchair near the judges and Paléologue sat beside him. They had breakfast at 5.30 am, for the court sittings began at 6.30. When the accused was brought in, Lord Russell half stood up the better to gaze at this man who had so bitterly divided France and indeed set the whole world arguing his guilt or his innocence, this martyr with his legendary
sufferings
, this victim of lies, forgeries, and a monster miscarriage of justice. After a long look, the Lord Chief Justice turned to Paléologue and whispered in his ear: ‘
Comme il est antipathique!
' [He is so awful] And that seems to have been half the trouble. Nobody liked him, he was quite exceptionally uncharming. Nobody, that is, but his own family. His wife and his brother were devoted to him.

All the same, he aroused deep pity in some observers. An English journalist at Rennes described him thus: ‘There came in a little old man—an old, old man of 39, a
small-statured
, thick-set old man in the black uniform of the artillery—his hair was gone white as silver, and on the temples and back of the head he was bald.'

Lord Russell was loud in his criticism of the conduct of the trial. Hearsay, even at
second
or third hand, was admitted as evidence and readily listened to. The trial dragged on for a month. Amazingly enough, with two of the judges dissenting, Dreyfus was again found guilty at Rennes. Partly the reason was the poor impression made on the military judges by the melodramatic demagogy of the defence lawyers, but principally, and
disgracefully
, it was the old question: Mercier, Minister of War, or Dreyfus? Mercier carried the day.

However, there was no more Devil's Island. Dreyfus was speedily amnestied, and a few years later the whole trumped-up case was reviewed and the verdicts quashed by the High Court. Dreyfus was reinstated in the army and given the Legion of Honour. It was twelve years after his degradation. Picquart, who had been abominably treated, was also
reinstated
. He could not abide the Dreyfus brothers and refused to meet them. His motive for interfering in the case had been singularly pure; there was nothing personal about it; it was love of justice and of truth: no more, and no less.

Mr Lewis's book is never boring. There are one or two tiresome little mistakes (for example, he says the German Embassy in the rue de Lille is in the eighth arrondissement which is the other side of the Seine) and it is written in American. For English readers it should perhaps have a glossary, some of the words are so curious. What do finagle and feisty mean, and how about sworling? One can make a wild guess, and on the whole the
fascinating
and dreadful tale is well told. Madame Straus, hostess of Marcel Proust, would have been as amazed as delighted to find herself and her guests described as the crème de la crème of Paris Society, even in a book from across the Atlantic. But such small details are
unimportant
.
Prisoners of Honour
is interesting and well illustrated. The only one of the protagonists who looks at all attractive in his photograph is Colonel Picquart: and that is as it should be.

Prisoners of Honour: The Dreyfus Affair
, Lewis, D.L.
Books and Bookmen
(1975)

‘There are some people who think themselves progressives who say quite seriously: We accept the principles of 1792, but we reject the violence of the Revolution. Those who say this are either stupid or hypocrites. Can they not see that the violence was the inevitable result of the appearance of such principles?' These words were written by Clemenceau when he was 20. Ten years later he was himself to witness the violent
horrors
of the Commune.

This long and scholarly book is apparently the first biography of Clemenceau in English. Born in 1841, he was, like his father, a devoted worshipper of the Revolution and a convinced atheist. At home in Vendée, he was brought up to venerate St Just and Robespierre, whose portraits hung on the walls. He insisted that the Revolution was a bloc and must be accepted whole.

A left-wing opponent of Napoleon III, after the Franco-Prussian war he was elected member of the National Assembly and also mayor of Montmartre. To this day it is
sometimes
alleged that Clemenceau was in some way to blame for the murder of General Thomas and General Lecomte, who had been ordered to remove the cannons that the National Guard had dragged up to the Butte. The cannons were no danger to the Prussians, who sat outside Paris preparing the German Empire, while civil war was
brewing
in the city. In truth, as soon as he was told that the Generals had been seized, Clemenceau ran up the hill from his town hall to try to save them. They had already
fallen
victims to mob violence, and a ghastly sight met his eyes: ‘Soldiers, National Guardsmen, women and children, all were shouting like savage beasts, without realising what they were doing. I saw there the pathological phenomenon of bloodlust, children perched on top of a wall were waving indescribable trophies, dishevelled women…
uttering
harsh, inarticulate shouts.' Thus Clemenceau described a scene reminiscent of Paris during the Terror, seventy eight years before.

Politics were his passion. Clemenceau was a violent tornado of a man, brave, clever, quick, ready with wounding sarcasms and insults in debate, prepared to fight as well as to quarrel. His duels were almost as numerous as his love affairs. ‘His personality was
combative
through and through,' writes Mr Watson, and ‘he had an extraordinary facility in debate… he was able time and time again to make his opponents look foolish. Naturally they did not like it.' Déroulède, attacking him in the Chamber for the part he was alleged to have played in the Panama scandal, said he inspired fear ‘fear of his sword, fear of his pistol, fear of his tongue.' Considered ‘too arrogant, too assured of his own ability, of his intellectual superiority, and of his political judgement', he was kept out of office until he
was 65.

During the first three years of the war he constituted himself a sharp critic of the
government
and its conduct of the war. He had a paper,
L'Homme libre
, which was in constant trouble with the censor; he changed its name to
L'Homme enchainé
. In 1917, when the war was going badly for the Allies, Clemenceau at the age of 76 became Prime Minister.

There is no doubt that his courage and fierce tenacity, the way in which he backed up the generals when they were being blamed for every reverse, his frequent visits to the Front, and the fear of him which silenced opposition, all contributed greatly to the final success of Allied arms. He incarnated an intractable will to victory; the Tiger, transformed, became Père la Victoire. He despised and disliked—hated is hardly too strong a word—almost all his colleagues in the government, most of the generals including those of his allies, and all the allied politicians. But he hated the Germans even more. He
subordinated
, as it were, his little local hatreds until after the victory, when they blossomed anew.

For France and for Europe it might have been well had this furiously determined old man chanced to die at the end of the war. Clemenceau's warlike gifts and virtues were singularly inappropriate to the infinitely delicate task of peacemaking, yet as France's Prime Minister he was to be the principal architect of the Peace Treaties. His sole
preoccupation
, the German danger dictated his every move. At the very moment when a
far-seeing
Talleyrand was needed, France was represented by a vengeful politician. Of course public opinion insisted upon revenge; it is no good pretending that Clemenceau did not represent the feelings of the average Frenchman at that time, but it is for statesmen to show more common-sense, not to speak of wisdom. He wanted to hang the Kaiser, and to exact crippling reparations from Germany, as well as to change the map of Europe. Until his dying day he never understood that reparations caused stagnation in France and hurt the receiver more than the donor.