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

  It was this power exerted over governments by bankers such as the Rothschilds that gave rise to the idea of a secretive supranational Jewish lobby known at the time of the Dreyfus Affair as the ‘syndicate’. In France its influence was thought to have been responsible for the release of Jews in Damascus who had been charged with the ritual murder of a Capucin friar in 1840. The investigation had been conducted by the French Consul in Damascus, the Comte de Ratti-Menton. ‘It is with real distress’, he wrote in a dispatch to Paris, ‘that, bit by bit, I have had to discard my scepticism in the face of the evidence.’12 After torture by the Ottoman authorities, the suspects confessed. However, when the news reached western Europe, a radical Jewish deputy in Paris, Adolphe Crémieux, and a leading member of the Jewish community in London, Sir Moses Montefiore, lobbied for their release. A subscription was raised to send these two eminent representatives of their respective communities to Cairo: Nathaniel Rothschild in London contributed £1,000.

  The French government led by Adolphe Thiers backed the French Consul but the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, took up the cause of the Damascus Jews. Based on his premise that ‘Britain has no permanent friends, only permanent interests’, Palmerston sought to counter the influence that was exercised by Russia as protector of the Orthodox and by France as protector of the Catholic communities in the Ottoman Empire by championing the Jews living in the Middle East. Diplomatic pressure was put on the Ottoman Vizier in Cairo, Muhammed Ali, who, when he saw British gunboats off the coast at Alexandria, ordered that the Damascus Jews be set free.

  In the course of the controversy over the Damascus Jews, the Talmud had been scrutinised by European scholars and, while nothing was found that called for ritual murder, certain passages ‘damaging to the good name of the Jewish people’ came to light such as that in which the enlightened codifier of the Talmud, Maimonides, ruled that ‘it is forbidden to save a Kuti* when he is near death; for example, if you were to see that one of them has fallen into the sea, you should not pull him out’.13

  In Britain, most newspapers followed the government line that the charges of ritual murder against the Damascus Jews were vile calumnies; however, The Times declared itself to be open-minded on the Damascus Affair, and some of the readers’ letters showed that the government’s judgement was not necessarily accepted by the public at large. ‘I, and I firmly believe, nine-tenths of my fellow-countrymen’, wrote one reader, ‘share the perception of the enormous guilt of the Jews of Damascus, brought home to them by proofs which, had they been before an English tribunal, would long ere have sealed their fate.’14

  ‘Anti-Semites,’ wrote Albert S. Lindemann, ‘and even some Europeans who were not particularly hostile to Jews, saw in the Damascus Affair evidence of a central contradiction in the ideal of Jewish emancipation. A Jewish nation remained Jews; no matter in which country they lived and in spite of their protestations of modern-style patriotism, they still held the interest of their Jewish brethren to be higher than those of their adopted country.’15 This was felt most acutely in France, humiliated and discredited throughout the Middle East. It also revealed the limitations to the power of their elected representatives. When objections were raised to the appointment of the Comte de Ratti-Menton as French consul in Canton, his cousin, Vicomtesse Vadresse de Sur, wrote pleading that this new posting should be allowed to proceed. With a proper appreciation of where power now lay, she wrote not to France’s Prime Minister or Foreign Minister but to Baron James de Rothschild who replied magnanimously that he would not veto the appointment. ‘My sentiments never permit me to hit a man when he is down.’16

  3: The Catholic Church

  At the time of the French Revolution, it was not Jewish bankers who were perceived to own a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth but the Catholic Church. Endowments by the devout over the centuries had made Catholic dioceses and monastic foundations substantial landowners: the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris owned land equivalent to two arrondissements of Paris.17 Moreover, bishoprics, abbacies and other ecclesiastical posts had become sinecures for the aristocracy. The future statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, forced to become a priest by his family because he had a club foot, secured an income of 18,000 livres a year as the absentee abbot of Saint-Denis in Rheims even before he was ordained a priest and, at the age of thirty-five, was consecrated bishop of the wealthy diocese of Autun. The young François-René de Chateaubriand obtained an income of 200,000 livres a year as a notional Knight of Malta. Many of the ordinary parish priests were poor, and ‘the incomes of the 135 bishops varied from ten thousand livres per annum to two hundred thousand’, but only ‘One bishop in 1789 was from a bourgeois background; the rest were aristocrats, 65 per cent of them from families whose nobility emerged in illustrious mists before the year 1400.’18

  The lower clergy during the eighteenth century were ‘on the whole chaste, resident and conscientious’,19 and many priests initially supported the Revolution. However, on 12 July 1790, the National Assembly enacted a Civil Constitution of the Clergy which stipulated the popular election of priests and bishops and severed all links between the French Church and the Pope in Rome. An oath of loyalty to this new Civil Constitution was demanded of the Catholic clergy: all but seven of the bishops refused to take it; so too half of the lower clergy. This led to a violent persecution. Non-juring priests, members of religious orders and lay Catholics were imprisoned and in the autumn of 1792, when an army of royalist émigrés threatened Paris, mobs broke into abbeys and convents where Catholics had been interned: between two and three thousand were murdered, among them three bishops and 220 priests.20

  In Paris, 150 priests held in the Carmelite convent off the rue de Vaugirard were ‘summoned before a makeshift tribunal’ and when they refused to take the oath ‘were taken away to be killed’.21 Mme du Barry, the ageing mistress of King Louis XV, went to the scaffold in the company of eight Carmelite nuns. Priests who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy were sentenced to deportation to New Guinea in West Africa. Others were ‘interned for years in deplorable circumstances on ships anchored off Bordeaux or Rochefort’.22 Few of the deportees survived the voyage to West Africa, and of the 762 priests incarcerated in one of the ‘floating bastilles’, 527 died of disease.

  The alienation of devout Catholics by the French revolutionaries led to an uprising in the Vendée in the west of France, which later spread to other parts of the country and led to the most sanguineous reprisals by the revolutionaries. In Nantes, to economise on musket balls and powder, prisoners were drowned in the Loire – either trapped in scuttled barges or thrown off boats. Those who tried to save themselves by clinging on to the boats had their hands cut off by the soldiers’ sabres. Many Catholic priests were among those receiving these ‘patriotic baptisms’. Also in Nantes, men and women were stripped naked, tied together and then flung off boats in what the revolutionaries called ‘republican marriages’. There were 1,800 victims of these so-called noyades. Those on dry land witnessed such scenes as ‘young women stretched upside down on trees and almost cut in half’. As a result of the suppression of the royalist insurrection in the west of France, and the persecution of Catholics, ‘up to a third of the population perished, a statistic roughly equivalent to the horrors of twentieth-century Cambodia’.23 It was, in the view of the historian Michael Burleigh, tantamount to genocide.24

  Not all the revolutionaries wanted to abolish religion as such. The Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre organised festivals of the ‘Supreme Being’: churches and cathedrals, including Notre Dame in Paris, were turned into ‘Temples of Reason’. The Catholic Mass was replaced by ceremonies in which a lightly clad young woman was displayed as the Goddess of Reason. A number of Catholic priests took the oath of allegiance to the Civil Constitution and continued to say Mass, but ‘even those clergy who sought to collaborate with the Revolution were eventually persecuted too . . .’25 and the loathing
of Catholicism provoked the same iconoclasm shown by French Protestants during the wars of religion: carvings were hacked off the portals of churches and cathedrals, and statues and stained glass destroyed. By the spring of 1794, Mass was being celebrated in only around 150 parishes in the whole of France.26

  The atrocities perpetrated in the name of the Republic remained embedded in the collective memory of future generations in the west of France. They also forged a bond between the Catholic Church and the émigré aristocracy. ‘A counter-revolution hitherto perhaps too facilely identified with the defence of mere privilege could thenceforth claim with reason to be about fundamental issues of conscience.’27 ‘For Catholics in the nineteenth century’, wrote Ralph Gibson, the Rights of Man meant not ‘liberty, equality and fraternity . . . but the September massacres, the noyades of Nantes, the pontons de Rochefort, the dry and wet guillotines. Only by keeping these things in the front of our minds can we understand what sometimes seems the mindlessly reactionary politics of Catholics in nineteenth century France.’28

  The persecution of the Catholic Church diminished under the Directory* and ceased under Napoleon when irreligion came to be seen as a source of disorder. ‘Children’, reported the Prefect of the Aisne in 1800, ‘have no idea of the Divinity, no notion of what is just and unjust; hence their wild and barbarous behaviour and their resemblance to a people of savages.’29 François-René de Chateaubriand made the same point in his Génie du christianisme. ‘Think of all those children who, born during the revolution, have neither heard anything of God, nor of the immortality of their souls, nor of the punishments or rewards that await them in a future.’30 In 1801, Napoleon negotiated a Concordat with Pope Pius VII which restored Catholicism, ‘the religion of the majority of Frenchmen’, as the established Church of the French state. It was to remain in force until 1906.

  4: Germany

  At the time of the French Revolution, the German-speaking peoples of Europe lived under a number of different jurisdictions. The largest was the Austrian Empire which incorporated multiple races and nationalities, notably Magyars and Slavs. Next came Prussia, essentially German but, prior to the French Revolution, a minor state. It was clear to patriotic Germans that their weakness in the face of the French since the time of King Louis XIV lay in their disunity; but, when Europe was reordered at the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon, the German-speaking people remained divided into thirty-nine states. The country that gained most was the Kingdom of Prussia: as a reward for its contribution to the defeat of Napoleon, and in return for ceding its Polish provinces to Russia, it was given territory in Westphalia and the Rhineland which brought it a greatly increased industrial potential and a common border with France.

  The French were aware of the dangers they faced should the aspirations of German nationalists be realised. In 1851 Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, elected President of France in 1848, had proclaimed himself sovereign of a Second Empire as Napoleon III. He had quickly made France the predominant military power in Europe, defeating Austrian armies in northern Italy in 1859. However, even without the German-speaking population of the Austrian Empire, the combined population of the small and medium states of the German Confederation – such as Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover and Hamburg – was twenty million. Were they to unite with Prussia, the new state would be the most powerful in Europe.31 But the smaller German states showed no inclination to abandon their independence, and anyway their inhabitants were seen as no match for the belligerent French. The Russian diarist Alexander Herzen dismissed the Germans as pantouflards.* The French saw Germany, wrote Paul de Saint-Victor, as ‘the land of innocence and good nature, the sentimental nest of platonic love’.32

  This view of Germans as cosy, romantic and unwarlike was shown to be illusory. In 1862, the Chancellor of Prussia, Graf Otto von Bismarck, told his compatriots that ‘not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided . . . but by iron and blood [Eisen und Blut]’. In 1864 Prussia won a short war against Denmark and in 1866 defeated Austria at the Battle of Königgrätz. The possibility of a united Germany was now real, and Napoleon III saw the threat posed to France only too clearly. ‘I can only guarantee the peace of Europe’, he told the British Foreign Secretary, ‘so long as Bismarck respects the present state of affairs. If he draws the South German states into the North German Confederation, our guns will go off of themselves.’

  This was precisely what Bismarck hoped would happen. Nothing would be more likely to bring the smaller German states on side than a war with France. Diplomatically, he subjected the French Emperor to minor provocations. Napoleon III might not have fallen into his trap had he not had his own reasons for wanting a war. In elections for the legislature in the spring of 1869, three-quarters of the votes were cast for opponents of the regime. It was thought that a war against Prussia would rally public support for the Second Empire and militarily ‘the odds were in France’s favour’.33

  Great confidence was placed in France’s new Chassepot rifle, as superior to the Prussian Dreyse needle gun as the Dreyse had been to the Austrians’ muzzle-loading Lorenz rifles at the Battle of Königgrätz. The French had also developed the world’s first machine-gun, the Montigny mitrailleuse. These advantages, however, were outweighed by the superiority of the Prussian artillery – the breech-loading, steel-tubed Krupp guns which were faster, more accurate and had a greater range than France’s bronze muzzle-loaded cannon.34

  Also the Prussians, with universal conscription, had a larger army than the French. The south German states contributed contingents which showed themselves to be more than mere pantouflards. The Prussian commander, Helmuth von Moltke, used mobile batteries to blast holes in the French lines. The French were defeated – the armies in the south under Marshal François Bazaine driven into the fortress of Metz, and those in the north routed at Sedan and their commander, Napoleon III himself, taken prisoner.

  When the news of this defeat reached Paris, the imperial government fell in a bloodless coup and a republic was proclaimed. A Government of National Resistance was formed to continue the war; an Army of the Loire was raised and fought a semi-irregular war against the German invaders. This resistance provoked brutal retaliation which does much to explain the fear and loathing of the Germans felt at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Though Bismarck never went so far as his wife – ‘shoot and stab all the French, down to the little babies’ – he insisted that there be no ‘laziness in killing’ so long as France continued its futile resistance. If a French village refused German exactions, Bismarck wanted every male inhabitant hanged. If French boys spat at German troops from bridges or windows, Bismarck wanted the troops to shoot them dead. So too when French women and children picked through the trash or scavenged for potatoes on the fringes of Paris. Troops who quailed would be executed. Bismarck only voiced the threat; his troops implemented it. ‘Ironically,’ wrote Geoffrey Wawro, ‘a Prussian army that had deplored the atrocities and mass casualties of the American Civil War was now grimly embarked on a wholesale Americanization of the Franco-Prussian War . . .’35

  Paris was besieged. The Radical leader, Léon Gambetta, escaped in a hot-air balloon to raise armies in the interior but all attempts to drive out the Germans failed. With the Parisians starving, the remaining members of the republican government went to the German headquarters now installed in Louis XIV’s palace in Versailles and asked for an armistice. It was at Versailles, on 18 January 1871, in Louis XIV’s celebrated hall of mirrors, that Bismarck’s ambition was at last accomplished: a united German empire was proclaimed under the Prussian monarch, now Kaiser Wilhelm I.

  Elections in France held a few weeks later, on 8 February, returned a conservative majority which chose Adolphe Thiers as President, the politician who had lost office thirty years earlier because of the Damascus Affair. Adolphe Crémieux, who had been instrumental in Thiers’s fall, described the new parliament as ‘an Assembly of country bumpkins’.36 Businessmen
were well represented, and one of its first measures was a law ending the wartime moratorium on the repayment of debts.

  This was greatly resented by Parisians, many of whom had borrowed money and pawned their possessions to buy food at astronomical prices during the siege. The Parisian militia mutinied and the government of Thiers, which had prudently retreated to Versailles, was repudiated. In March, a Commune was proclaimed in Paris. An attempt by a detachment of the regular army to reclaim cannon seized by the Communards was repulsed and the general commanding the detachment put up against a wall and shot.

  The general was only the first of a number of victims of the Communards’ fury. When Thiers, backed by the conservative and largely Catholic Assembly, determined that the Commune had to be suppressed, reprisals and counter-reprisals took place on both sides. On 24 May, as the troops of the Versailles government advanced down the barricaded boulevards into the city, the Archbishop of Paris was taken from the prison of La Roquette, where he had been held hostage, and shot. During the next two days, fifty priests were either shot or bayoneted. The clergy in their soutanes were more easily identified as the enemy than the bourgeoisie, who had mostly left the city. ‘The dying commune, ever old-fashioned, had been too busy with priests to bother with bankers.’37

  The troops of the Versailles government took a disproportionate revenge. The brash Colonel Gaston de Gallifet, who had led his 3rd Chasseurs in a famous charge at the German lines at Sedan, now directed his men against their fellow countrymen. Between 21 and 28 May, in what came to be called la semaine sanglante, the bloody week, between 20,000 and 30,000 Communards were slaughtered – either shot on sight or after a trial by kangaroo court. Many thousands of those whose lives were spared were transported to penal colonies overseas. The army lost less than a thousand men.