The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two Read online

  Contents

  Map

  Preface

  Part One: Before the Affair

  1 The French Revolution

  2 The Third Republic

  3 Édouard Drumont

  Part Two: Alfred Dreyfus

  4 Evidence of Treason

  5 Dreyfus Accused

  6 Dreyfus Condemned

  7 The Salvation Islands

  Part Three: The Affair

  8 The First Dreyfusards

  9 Colonel Picquart

  10 Commandant Esterhazy

  11 Émile Zola

  12 The Pen versus the Sword

  13 The Road to Rennes

  14 Rennes

  15 The Last Act

  Epilogue

  Plate Section

  Acknowledgements

  Principal Characters

  Bibliography

  Notes

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  Many books have been written about the miscarriage of justice in France in 1894 which led to the Dreyfus Affair. A complete bibliography of the Affair published in 1970 listed 551 titles1 and many more have been published since then. Few have contained startling revelations. Already by 1960 the French historian Marcel Thomas recognised that ‘it would be vain to hope to solve in an entirely new way a “mystery” which, in fact, has no longer been a mystery for quite a time’.2

  One reason for the continuing interest in the Affair is the intriguing nature of the story itself. A year before he himself became a protagonist by writing ‘J’accuse’, the French novelist Émile Zola saw its potential. ‘What a poignant drama,’ he wrote in Le Figaro, ‘and what superb characters.’3 Moreover the events took place at a period in French history – the belle époque – which saw an extraordinary flourishing of arts and sciences, flamboyant fin de siècle architecture and a sexual permissiveness that brought Edward, Prince of Wales and Oscar Wilde to Paris to escape the chilly moral climate of Victorian England.

  However, as the Dreyfusard poet Charles Péguy realised at the time, the Affair was more than a dramatic story in a colourful setting. The tumult that divided France was of major and long-lasting significance in three interconnected histories – that of France, that of Israel and ‘above all’ that of Christianity.4 When Péguy talked of Christianity he had in mind the Roman Catholic Church, and by Israel he meant not the state of that name, yet to be established, but the Jews. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew and it was the anti-Semitic passions that erupted during the Dreyfus Affair that provoked outrage at the time and, after the Second World War, led some to regard it as ‘a kind of dress-rehearsal’5 for the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  Modern historians of the Affair dispute this linkage. ‘The history of the Right during the affair’, wrote Ruth Harris in her The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (2010), ‘has too often been distorted by attempts to press the fin de siècle into an inter-war mould, to find a dark teleology that does not really exist.’6 However, the enormity of the Holocaust has affected some historians’ perceptions. ‘After the Nazi genocide,’ wrote Stephen Wilson, ‘the endemic prejudice of non-Jews against Jews has assumed a monstrously inhuman dimension that has unbalanced the study of the Affair.’7 Vincent Duclert, in his Alfred Dreyfus: L’honneur d’un patriote (2006) wrote of ‘a hyper-sensitivity’ found in reputable Jewish historians which ‘distorts their analysis’.8

  As the title of Duclert’s book suggests, he sees Alfred Dreyfus as a hero of the secular French Republic and of the values of the Enlightenment, rather than of the Jewish people or the Jewish religion. That is undoubtedly how Dreyfus saw himself. However, if Dreyfus had not been Jewish it seems unlikely that his case would have become a cause célèbre of such magnitude. The French historian Alain Pagès asked how the sufferings of Dreyfus could cause worldwide indignation at a time when France was committing crimes in Africa or in Indo-China that were ‘without a doubt a thousand times more odious . . . without arousing much reaction from French political opinion’.9 Nor was Alfred Dreyfus the only innocent man to be deported to the prison colonies of French Guiana: the case of Guillaume Seznec, pardoned by General de Gaulle in 1946 after twenty-four years imprisoned in French Guiana and posthumously rehabilitated by the Cour de Cassation only in 2005,10 is as obscure as that of Dreyfus is well known.

  In France the Dreyfus Affair remained contentious well into the twentieth century. Alfred Dreyfus’s son Pierre wrote that his father would ‘be recognised by future generations as one of the truest heroes in the history of our beloved France’;11 yet even today, writes Vincent Duclert, ‘Dreyfus is not to be found in the Panthéon of the national memory . . . and the French authorities remain hesitant when faced with the commemoration of the event.’12 The historian Marie-Christine Leps describes how, in 1985, an offer made by the Socialist President Mitterrand of a statue of Alfred Dreyfus to be erected in the École Militaire was refused by the French military ‘because it was perceived as a reminder of division and humiliation’. In 1994 the Director of the Historical Section of the Army was dismissed by the Minister of Defence for stating that Dreyfus’s innocence was merely ‘a thesis generally admitted by historians’. It was not until 1995 that the French Army officially declared through the then Director of its Historical Section that Dreyfus was innocent.13

  On the centenary of the publication of ‘J’accuse’ in 1998, the then President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, wrote to the descendants of both Alfred Dreyfus and Émile Zola to mark the occasion. In 2006, a stamp was issued depicting Alfred Dreyfus, and the Socialist Minister of Culture Jack Lang proposed that the body of Dreyfus, like that of Zola, should be reinterred in the Panthéon. Dreyfus’s grandson, Jean-Louis Lévy, said he thought his grandfather would rather remain in the Montparnasse cemetery. ‘His grave is extremely modest and I think he was a man who would not like to have been Panthéonised.’14

  The ‘Panthéonisation’ of Alfred Dreyfus has been left to historians. ‘If Dreyfus and his friends become historians and write text-books,’ wrote Maurice Barrès, the anti-Dreyfusard author and journalist, ‘we shall be villains in the eyes of posterity.’15 Albert S. Lindemann, in The Jew Accused, talks of ‘the confident tone of moral superiority assumed by most Dreyfusards and accepted by later generations as wholly justified’.16 The subtitle of Vincent Duclert’s recent work, L’honneur d’un patriote – the honour of a patriot – conveys the author’s view of Dreyfus in this volume of more than a thousand pages. Ruth Harris, in her recent book on the Dreyfus Affair, acknowledged that the subject has been overwhelmingly dominated by the Dreyfusard historians. She expresses an anxiety that her attempt to be fair to both sides ‘might be seen as undermining a vision of French history that has galvanized French men and women to oppose oppression’;17 yet one reviewer judged that she herself never entirely abjures ‘her own preference for the Dreyfusard cause’.18

  Can anything be said for the anti-Dreyfusards? Because so many of them were Catholics, both tribal and devout, Catholic historians have been wary of writing about the Affair, and before starting this book I asked myself whether it was prudent for me, as a Catholic, to remind the world of their role. However, Péguy was right to see the Affair as a defining moment in the history of the Catholic Church. The Affair is intelligible only if it is seen in the context of the ideological struggle between the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire. Moreover, as Albert S. Lindemann wrote in The Jew Accused, if ‘anti-Semitism is to be comprehended, it must be through an analysis of the Gentile mind, a dissection of the
pathologies of western Christian thought that have over the ages powerfully conditioned non-Jews to hate Jews’. Like Lindemann, I believe that ‘a calm, balanced and unflinching effort to understand anti-Semitism and anti-Semites is in the long run the best defence against the views they propagate’.19

  The Dreyfus Affair tells a story that needs no fictional embellishment and the account which follows is based either on the memoirs of those involved or on facts established by reputable historians. Unless otherwise indicated in the Notes and Bibliography, translations from the French are my own. I have been free in rendering dialogue to make it easy on the modern ear. I have used the term ‘Prime Minister’ rather than‘President of the Council of Ministers’ for the same reason. ‘Commandant’ and ‘Major’ are used interchangeably. To make the story manageable, and yet render its complexities comprehensible for a general reader, I have started this account with the event that saw the birth of modern Europe – the French Revolution of 1789.

  PART ONE

  Before the Affair

  1

  The French Revolution

  1: The Estates General

  In 1788, King Louis XVI of France, faced with bankruptcy, was obliged to summon the Estates General to authorise new taxes. Last convened under King Louis XIII in 1614, this vehicle for democratic representation had fallen into desuetude. The Bourbons believed in their God-given right to rule as absolute monarchs, and even now Louis XVI was reluctant to concede to his people a say in how they were governed. The nobility and clergy, too, saw a potential threat to their privileges, in particular their exemption from existing taxes such as the taille. However, the government’s financial predicament, and growing disorder throughout the country, left the King with no alternative and the Estates General was commanded to convene at Versailles in May 1789.

  The First of the three Estates was chosen by the nobility, the Second by the clergy and the Third by the commons. Voting for the delegates took place in January. The novelty of an election meant a high turn-out and a surge of political debate in cafés, clubs and Masonic Lodges. Pamphleteers discussed and disseminated the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, the French Encyclopaedists and the English philosopher John Locke. All condemned the concept of royal absolutism, but none at this stage envisaged a nation without a king.1 After much wrangling, it was agreed that the Third Estate, since it represented 96 per cent of the population, should have double the representation of the first two: there were 610 members as against 291 for the First Estate, the nobility, and 300 for the Second, the clergy.

  The first session of the Estates General was opened by the King at Versailles on 2 May 1789. On 17 June, after a number of disputes over its authority, the Third Estate declared itself a ‘National Assembly’ and was joined by some radical aristocrats and a majority of the clergy. Locked out of their usual meeting place by orders of the King, the members of the new Assembly retreated to an indoor tennis-court and took an oath never to disperse until they had established a democratic constitution. They then went to work to draw up such a constitution under the presidency of the Archbishop of Vienne.

  The rejection of royal authority by the new National Assembly was supported by a mob of angry Parisians. On 14 July, a crowd of 60,000 seized 28,000 muskets from the military hospital, the Invalides, and then marched on the Bastille, a large, fourteenth-century fortress where prisoners were held on the whim of the King. At the time there were only seven inmates – four forgers, an Irish lunatic and an incestuous aristocrat imprisoned at the request of his family. However, the Bastille symbolised the despotic powers of the King. It fell to the mob with casualties on both sides. ‘Is this a rebellion?’ asked King Louis when told of the fall of the Bastille. ‘No, sire,’ replied the Duc de la Rochefoucault-Liancourt, who had given him the news, ‘it is a revolution.’

  There had been revolutions before. In 1649 the English had executed their king, Charles I, and in 1688 replaced his son, James II, with monarchs more to their liking – James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. More recently the British colonists in North America had broken their ties with their king, George III, and had established a republic. However, these revolutions were essentially conservative – a change of personnel at the top of a ruling class. None had the profound, far-reaching and long-lasting consequences of the French Revolution.

  Rather, as the historian Michael Burleigh has pointed out, the French Revolution – that ‘singular accomplishment of moralising lawyers, renegade priests and hack journalists’2 – was the ‘distant progeny’ of an earlier upheaval in European history, the Protestant Reformation. ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ – Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – took the place of ‘sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia’ – salvation by scripture, faith and grace alone – as a slogan for undoing the existing order. What transpired in France in the last decade of the eighteenth century would influence the course of European history well into the twentieth century and affect in particular those who became embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair – the Jews, the Germans and the Catholic Church.

  2: The Liberation of the Jews

  On 21 September 1791, the French National Assembly voted to remove all the existing discriminatory laws affecting Jews and admit ‘those who took the civic oath and committed themselves to fulfil those duties imposed by the constitution’ to full citizenship with the same rights as anyone else. It was a momentous change because for 1,200 years France had been a Catholic nation in which men and women from the different regions of France ‘felt united and distinguished by their overwhelming Catholicism, even though the majority of them had still to learn how to speak or write the French language’.3 Protestants, at first tolerated under King Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes, had been either driven into exile or obliged to convert to Catholicism when that Edict was revoked by King Louis XIV in 1685. Jews had been expelled from France in the Middle Ages; the only substantial communities at the time of the Revolution were in Alsace, annexed by France as recently as the seventeenth century. These communities had existed in and around the River Rhine since the time of the Roman Empire. ‘After the conquest of Judah by Pompey,’ we are told by Max Dimont, ‘Jews and Romans became inseparable. Behind the Roman armies carrying the Imperial Eagles marched the Jews carrying the banners of free enterprise.’4 Trier, from which the name Dreyfus is derived, was the largest Roman city north of the Alps.

  It would be more than fifty years before any other European nation would follow suit in extending full civil rights to Jews, and the new law was not passed without dissenting voices. Jean-François Rebel, a deputy from Alsace, begged the Assembly to consider the views of his gentile constituents, that ‘numerous, industrious and honest class . . . ground down by cruel hordes of Africans who have infested my region’.5 He warned that the Alsatian Jews had no desire to assimilate and, with their distinctive dress, dietary laws and Germanic dialect, would constitute ‘a nation of aliens within France’. There were also rabbinical misgivings because ‘implicit in return for this emancipation was a commitment to assimilation, the abandonment of the idea of a “Jewish Nation”’.6 However, the overwhelming reaction of Jews living in France was one of joy. After centuries of oppression and discrimination, Jews were to enjoy the same liberty, equality and fraternity as the rest of mankind. When the French revolutionary armies threw back those of Prussians, Austrians and émigré French aristocrats and crossed the Rhine, they were welcomed by Jews. ‘Jews even composed messianic hymns in honour of their liberators.’7

  Full civic equality meant that Jews in France could attend schools and universities, and enter the professions, on an equal footing with any other citizen. They could also take advantage of the transformation of France in the course of the nineteenth century from a largely agricultural to a money economy. ‘Economic changes’, wrote Abram Sacher, ‘were more crucial in winning political equality for Jews than all the glittering generality about the rights of man and the sanctity of the human personality.’8 Jews emerged fr
om the ghettos into a world in the midst of an industrial revolution that opened unimagined opportunities for social and material progress. Well equipped by their experience and connections, many Jews entered into commercial and financial enterprises and distinguished themselves.9 In France, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a doubling of industrial production, a tripling of foreign trade, a fivefold increase in the use of steam power, a sixfold increase in the railways; and among the bankers and entrepreneurs who made huge fortunes ‘there was a disproportionate number of “outsiders” – notably men of Protestant or Jewish origin’,10 a number from families with affiliates in other nations such the Rothschilds (Germany and Britain) and the Ephrussis (Austria and Russia).

  The continuing restrictions imposed upon Jews in the Austrian Empire or the United Kingdom of Great Britain did not mean that Jews in those nations were without influence. At the Congress of Vienna, held after the defeat of Napoleon, the question of Jewish emancipation was supported by the ministers of Protestant Prussia, Wilhelm von Humbolt and Karl-August von Hardenberg, and also by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. During the negotiations Castlereagh received a letter on the matter from the head of the London branch of the Rothschild family, with a covering note from the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool ‘assuring him that “Mr. Rothschild has been a very useful friend” and adding, by way of postcript: “I don’t know what we should have done without him last year”’.11

  Prince Metternich, and many other members of the Austrian aristocracy, were also intimately involved with the Rothschilds. Salomon von Rothschild had been ennobled as Baron Rothschild and many of the grand aristocratic families banked with the Rothschilds, among them Metternich’s relatives, the Zichys and the Esterhazys. Metternich’s third wife, Melanie Zichy-Farrari, was a close friend of Salomon’s sisters-in-law, Betty Rothschild in Paris and Adelheid Rothschild in Naples. Salomon’s brothers served as honorary Austrian consuls in Frankfurt, London and Paris.