The Dreyfus Affair Read online

  ‘We are only at the beginning of a civil war,’ Morès wrote in L’Écho de Paris after his acquittal. He now joined forces with those trying to unseat Georges Clemenceau in the 1893 election during which much muck was raked up by either side. Some of the mud thrown at Morès by Clemenceau was not easily brushed off. It turned out that Morès, to pay off a gambling debt which he could not at the time settle from his own resources, had borrowed money from the Jewish fixer of the Panama Canal Company, Cornelius Herz.

  After this humiliation, Morès thought it best to leave France. His plan was to travel across the Sahara from Tunisia to Sudan to open up a trade route that would bypass the British-controlled Suez Canal, enlist nomadic tribes under the tricolour and form an alliance against the British with the Mahdi. Morès’s expedition had no official backing, but he proceeded all the same. He sailed to Gabes on the coast of Tunisia from where his caravan set off south towards Sudan. Four days into his journey, he was murdered by his Tuareg guides – ‘robbed, stripped, his body mutilated, and all but one of his servants slaughtered’.29 Many believed, among them his wife Medora, that this was not a case of mere banditry but was a judicial assassination instigated by ministers in the republican government in Paris.

  André Crémieu-Foa also died in Africa. Feeling himself dishonoured by the whole imbroglio that had led to the death of his friend Armand Mayer, he requested a transfer to Dahomey. There he was injured during an engagement with hostile natives and later died of his wounds.

  Among the letters of condolence received by his grieving mother in Paris was one from the man who had served as a second in her son’s duel with Drumont, the Comte Marie-Charles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy. Esterhazy had encouraged the younger Crémieu-Foa, Ernest, to send an account of the duel to the Dalziel news agency – the ‘dishonourable’ act that had precipitated the duel between Morès and Armand Mayer – but that was not held against him by Mme Crémieu-Foa. ‘I have the supreme consolation’, she wrote back to Esterhazy,

  that my beloved son André has died as a soldier. The war in Dahomey is finished: seventeen officers died, two of them Jews! That is our response to the attacks of La Libre Parole . . . There will be a memorial service on Thursday in the Jewish synagogue for these brave young men who died in the service of their country. It would make me happy to see you there among our friends – you who remained true amidst all these sorrows, you who are among those courageous men who, like me, put honour before life itself.30

  The death of André Crémieu-Foa and another Jewish officer in the service of their country did not make a headline in La Libre Parole. The death of Armand Mayer had discredited the anti-Semites and put Drumont and his friends on the defensive. The circulation of La Libre Parole started to decline: the paper was in need of a dramatic new outrage like the Panama scandal.

  In December 1893, a new government was formed by Jean Casimir-Perier with General Auguste Mercier as Minister of War. Despite a reputation for competence and a distinguished military career, Mercier did not meet with the approval of Drumont and his colleagues on La Libre Parole. He was a republican and graduate of the École Polytechnique, not of Saint-Cyr. Though nominally a Catholic, his wife was English and Protestant: Mercier did not go to Mass. He was known to have liberal opinions and thought to be covering up the corruption of a Jewish army doctor, Schulmann, by ordering a second inquiry when the first had condemned him. If Schulmann’s conviction is confirmed, thundered La Libre Parole, then Mercier would have to resign. ‘That would be the only act in his ministerial career that a good Frenchman could applaud.’31

  However, the case of Schulmann was not enough to rouse the nation or increase the circulation of La Libre Parole. Something more dramatic was required, and something more dramatic turned up. At the end of October 1894, an anonymous letter was received by the paper which vindicated all the warnings and forebodings of Drumont and La Libre Parole. On 1 November, under a banner headline, the paper announced the arrest of a Jewish officer on a charge of espionage. ‘Arrested fifteen days ago, he has confessed all and there is ABSOLUTE PROOF that he has sold our secrets to Germany.’ It named the Jewish officer: Alfred Dreyfus.

  * Drumont greatly exaggerated the number of Jews living in France.

  * Ten years before, aged sixty-four, he had married his second wife who was aged twenty-one at the time. They had twelve children, the last born when de Lesseps was eighty-four.

  * Centrist republicans, known as ‘Opportunists’ because they postponed the radical reforms they supposedly supported until the time was opportune.

  * He later got rid of her by ordering the Prefect of Police to have her followed and, after she was caught with a young lover, threaten her with imprisonment for adultery unless she returned to the United States.

  * Prior to his duel with Clemenceau in 1898, Drumont had fought duels with Arthur Meyer in 1886, André Crémieu-Foa in 1892, Camille Dreyfus in 1893 and Bernard Lazare in 1896. Other duels fought by Jews include those between Catulle Mendès and Paul Foucher; Camille Dreyfus and Henri Rochefort; Joseph Reinach and Paul Déroulède; Henri Bernstein and Léon Daudet; Baron Robert de Rothschild and the Comte de Lubersac; and Armand Mayer and the Marquis de Morès.

  PART TWO

  Alfred Dreyfus

  4

  Evidence of Treason

  1: The Statistical Section

  After its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, the French Army had been reorganised along the lines of its German counterpart which had so emphatically demonstrated its superiority in the field. Conscription was introduced and the High Command was divided into four departments, or bureaux. Attached to the Second Bureau was a secret unit for intelligence and counter-intelligence with the obfuscating name of the Section for Statistics and Military Reconnaissance. Its first commander was a Jewish officer, Major Samuel, who set up espionage networks in Berlin and the lost province of Alsace.

  It was generally accepted in France that the Treaty of Frankfurt was not the end of the matter so far as Franco-German relations were concerned: sooner or later there would be another war. The Statistical Section’s energies were therefore directed mainly towards Germany rather than other great-power rivals such as Britain, Italy or Russia, and its office in Paris was close to the German Embassy on the rue de Lille. It worked in concert with the Prefect of the Parisian police, and used methods employed by French intelligence since the time of Henri IV – in particular, the interception of correspondence. The intelligence gathered in this way was not limited to military matters but included compromising information on courtiers and statesmen.* The post-war Prefect of the Paris Police, Léon Renault, set up a parallel network of informers in France and also agents abroad: a memorandum from the Prefecture dated around 1872 recommended ‘as suitable for future recruitment . . . les Israélites allemands, presque tous achatables mais tous à surveiller’1 – ‘German Jews, almost all venal but all to be watched’. The Paris correspondents of foreign newspapers were particularly suspect, with the Danish journalist Hansen and Blowitz, the Paris correspondent of the London Times, ‘international celebrities known as double agents throughout Europe’.2

  French anxiety about espionage increased in the 1880s when it became apparent that, even after the reforms, the French Army remained inferior to that of Germany. A demographic disparity meant a smaller pool for recruits; and despite new plans for rapid mobilisation, a reconfiguration of defensive fortifications in the east and development of new weaponry, doubts remained that France could win a new war with its enemy across the Rhine.

  The proposed solution was diplomatic – an alliance with Tsarist Russia – and in 1893 the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, went to St Petersburg to negotiate a treaty of mutual assistance. In the short term, however, this increased rather than diminished French anxieties. Was it not possible that the Germans, realising that the Russian alliance would put them at a disadvantage, would find some excuse for a pre-emptive war before it could become effective?
r />   A sense of responsibility for the security of the nation weighed heavily on the French Army’s High Command. In almost all the other nations of Europe, the army and people were united behind a monarch; Germany in particular was a semi-militarised nation under the Kaiser. France, however, had known many different regimes in the course of the nineteenth century – the First Republic, the Directory, the Consulate, the First Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire and now a Third Republic whose governments came and went, and whose stability, on many occasions, seemed precarious. With no king or emperor at the head of the nation, and presidents who, for fear of a coup, were deliberately chosen for their lack of military stature, officers in the French Army developed the view that ‘they served the French state, not a particular regime’.3

  This was especially true of the Statistical Section. Like other intelligence services the world over, the need for secrecy led to an isolation of its personnel from the rest of the army, and created among them an elitist esprit de corps. The Statistical Section came to consider itself to some extent superior to other state institutions, including the government, and felt authorised to subject ministers to surveillance and an assessment of their loyalty to France. There was a file on the civilian Minister of War, Charles de Freycinet; and, when a senior general, Gaudérique Roget, asked the Section to help him get rid of a troublesome mistress, he discovered it already knew all about the affair.4

  The man who came closest to imposing an authoritarian form of government on the Third Republic, General Georges Boulanger, had served as Minister of War in 1886–7. Known as ‘Général Revanche’ for his bombastic speeches about the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, he ordered a shake-up of counter-intelligence and the establishment of contingency plans for dealing with unreliable elements in the event of war. There was a national census in 1886 which Boulanger wanted to use to establish how many foreigners were living in the border zones of France.

  The chief of the Statistical Section at the time was Colonel Jean Sandherr, an Alsatian from Mulhouse. His father had been a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism who, during the industrial unrest in 1870, had demonstrated against ‘the Prussians of the interior’ – that is, the Protestants and Jews. The son, Jean, was said to be the most handsome man in the French Army. He was a graduate of Saint-Cyr, served as a regimental officer until 1885 and subsequently taught at the École de Guerre. As an Alsatian, Sandherr was aware of the particular problems of security in the border areas of eastern France, and he diligently followed Boulanger’s instructions to form a register of aliens and potential spies.

  When Boulanger fell from power, Sandherr pursued the project on his own initiative. He drew up lists of those whose loyalty to France was suspect. Carnet A contained the names of resident aliens, most of them Germans, and Carnet B of non-resident aliens and suspect French citizens. Corps commanders were instructed to prepare premises where, in the event of war, those on the lists could be interned. At a meeting of the High Council of War held on 1 April 1889, it was agreed that in the event of war Sandherr’s plan would be put into effect, with all enemy aliens of military age interned as prisoners of war and the women and children deported.

  General Auguste Mercier, appointed Minister of War in December 1893, enthusiastically endorsed Sandherr’s plans for the mass internment of up to 100,000 people in the event of war. The civilian prefects and army regional commanders were warned that the enemy aliens listed on Carnet A as Germans would often claim to be ‘Alsatians, Lorrainers, Luxembourgeois, Swiss, Belgians, etc.’; and they were told that potential spies on Carnet B ‘should be considered as criminals’. Inevitably Alsatians ‘figured prominently’ in Sandherr’s list of suspects, his Carnet B.5 And ‘for Sandherr and Mercier . . . the distinction between indictment and conviction for spying was a mere legal formality. The assumption of guilt would hang heavily indeed on the accused.’6

  Sandherr’s plans for mass internment without due process of law have been considered a sign of paranoia in the French High Command, as have the elaborate measures taken to weed out spies. Douglas Porch, in writing about the French secret services, states that ‘paranoia becomes an occupational hazard in counter-intelligence’ and that the Statistical Section at this time was ‘suffused with an atmosphere of exaggerated spy mania’; but Sandherr and his subordinates had to deal with the unique and complex questions of loyalties that followed the annexation by Germany of Alsace and Lorraine. With an ever increasing pitch in nationalistic rhetoric among the European powers, the ambivalent status of Frenchmen from these ‘amputated provinces’ made them either super-patriots or potential traitors. There was a disproportionate number of Alsatians in the Statistical Section not just because they spoke German but because they were thought best able to smoke out the traitors among those fellow Alsatians who had opted for French nationality.

  Much was at stake. One of the lessons learned from the Franco-Prussian war was that superior weapons such as the breech-loading, steel-tubed Krupp guns could tip the balance in armed engagements. France had made significant advances in the design of weaponry: in 1892, the artillery had been revolutionised by the advent of the new 120mm howitzers and 155mm cannon; in 1893, the Lebel rifle was modified; and finally, from 1894 onwards, a rapid-firing breech-loading cannon, the 75, with revolutionary recoil mechanism, was brought into service: it could fire twenty rounds a minute instead of the seven of the cannon it replaced.7

  Keeping such advances in weaponry from the Germans was of paramount importance and there were Frenchmen who were venal. In 1888 the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph reported that ‘traitors seem to abound in the French army. The War Office authorities are at their wits’ end.’8 In 1890, a senior civil servant working in the technical section dealing with artillery in the Ministry of War was caught passing secret information to the then German military attaché, Hühne, on a park bench on the avenue Friedland in Paris. Boutonnet, the civil servant, was sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of 5,000 francs, and Hühne, at the request of the French government, was recalled to Berlin. Two years later, in 1892, a civil servant in the Naval Ministry, Greiner, was charged with selling documents to the American military attaché, Borup, who had passed them on to the Germans.9

  The network of German agents was directed by the military attaché in the German Embassy in Paris. In 1894, this post was occupied by a charming and cultivated officer, Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. Schwartzkoppen was already known to the French: he had done a previous tour of duty in the Paris Embassy, and Colonel de Sancy, director of the General Staff’s Second Bureau, had got to know him when serving in the French Embassy in Berlin. It was accepted that, as the German military attaché, Schwartzkoppen would seek to inform himself on the French Army’s potential; he was invited to attend manoeuvres, but suborning traitors was considered dishonourable, not just by the French Foreign Office, but also by the German Ambassador, a veteran diplomat, Georges-Herbert, Graf Münster von Derneburg. After the embarrassment of the Hühne affair, Münster gave strict instructions to Schwartzkoppen that he was not to indulge in espionage, and felt able to reassure the French government apropos of the new attaché: ‘You won’t have any trouble with him.’10

  Schwartzkoppen had indeed promised Münster that he would conform to the code of conduct that the ancient and distinguished Ambassador felt proper, but there were higher powers than the Ambassador, notably the Director of Military Intelligence in Berlin who, with the Kaiser’s approval, instructed Schwartzkoppen to ignore Münster’s scruples. The interests of the German Empire were paramount, and Schwartzkoppen was to proceed on that assumption.

  Schwartzkoppen was flexible when it came to matters of honour. The Statistical Section intercepted eighty of the letters in his correspondence with his mistress, Hermance de Weede, the wife of the Counsellor at the Dutch Embassy, described by Maurice Paléologue as a ‘charming Dutchwoman, with feline movements and big, passionate eyes’.11
They also intercepted the correspondence of Schwartzkoppen and his Italian opposite number in the Italian Embassy, Major Alessandro Panizzardi, which seemed to confirm the rumour picked up by a French agent working in the Spanish Embassy, the Marquis de Val Carlos, that the two men were lovers.

  Dear Maximilienne, am I still your Alexandrine? When will you come to bugger me? A thousand salutations from the girl who loves you so. Alexandrine

  My darling . . . all yours and on the mouth . . . Maximilienne

  Yes little red dog, I shall come to your pleasure. I would be capable of stuffing a metre of swaddling in you and all the fourteen-year-old commandants if needed. Oh, the filthy beast. All yours, still coming. Maximilienne12

  Other exchanges between the two military attachés intercepted by the Statistical Section were of a less personal nature. In April 1894, Panizzardi sent Schwartzkoppen the blueprints of the fortifications of Nice close to the border with Italy, apparently supplied by a spy he had recently spurned. ‘Attached are 12 master plans of Nice which that scoundrel D. gave me in the hope of restoring relations.’ Who was D? Two suspects, one named Dacher, the other Dubois, were investigated but both were cleared of suspicion.

  Given the importance attached to counter-espionage by the French General Staff, it is remarkable that the number of officers serving in the Statistical Section was so small. Colonel Sandherr’s second-in-command was Commandant Albert Cordier, who, had he not been an old friend and protégé of Sandherr’s, would almost certainly not have remained in such a demanding post. Father Josué, as he was known in the office, was lazy, sloppy and fond of a tipple. Beneath Commandant Cordier came Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert Joseph Henry,* who, as an officer who had risen from the ranks, was an anomaly in such an elite group.