The Dreyfus Affair Read online

  Saussier’s immediate reaction when Mercier informed him that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was suspected of treason was to let the matter drop. He thought the prestige of the army would suffer if an officer on the General Staff was accused of selling secrets to the Germans, and that it would antagonise the Jewish community: ‘you will see a hundred million francs leave France’.36 The solution he proposed was to post Dreyfus to North Africa in the hope that he would be killed in action; but, as Mercier pointed out, he might do well and ‘return with a promotion’.

  Saussier also disliked Sandherr, whom he knew had a dossier on Weil and kept him under surveillance: it seemed possible that Sandherr was the source of the stories in La Libre Parole accusing Weil of spying. He was therefore inclined to dismiss the whole thing as ‘a story invented by the Statistical Section’. As Military Governor of Paris, it was Saussier’s prerogative to authorise the arrest of Captain Dreyfus should that become necessary: the thinness of the evidence made such a request unlikely.

  Mercier, too, was aware that the view taken by an amateur graphologist, Commandant du Paty de Clam, would have to be confirmed by an expert and, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers held on 9 October, he asked a colleague, the Minister of Justice, Eugène Guérin, if he could recommend a professional graphologist. Guérin gave him the name of an expert at the Bank of France, Alfred Gobert.

  On 10 October, Mercier went to see the President of the Republic, Jean Casimir-Perier, to tell him about the bordereau and the discovery of a suspect from among the officers of the General Staff; he did not give that officer’s name. Like Saussier, Casimir-Perier was not unduly disturbed by what he was told: the documents listed in the bordereau did not seem of great importance and measures could surely be taken by the War Office to limit any damage that might be done by the leak. Mercier next told the Prime Minister (President of the Council of Ministers), Charles Dupuy: again, he did not name the suspect. Dupuy proposed a sub-committee to deal with the matter composed of himself, the Minister of War, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  It was this last, Gabriel Hanotaux, who when the sub-committee met on the following day, 11 October, spoke forcefully against embarking on a process that could lead to nothing but disaster. The evidence had been stolen from the German Embassy and should that become known it would lead to a diplomatic incident of a most serious kind.* Mercier stood firm. The security of the nation was in jeopardy and, anyway, it was now ‘too late to turn back’. The Prime Minister, Dupuy, proposed a compromise. The investigation would proceed for now but, if no better evidence could be found against the suspect than the similarity of his handwriting to that of the bordereau, then it would be abandoned.

  Why was Mercier so determined to pursue the inquiry? He was, as we have seen, a ‘republican’ officer married to an English Protestant and so free of the knee-jerk anti-Jewish prejudice found among many of his conservative Catholic colleagues. Did a stubborn trait in his character lead him to defy Hanotaux as he had Saussier – a personal prejudice exacerbated by the traditional rivalry between the Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay and the War Ministry on the rue Saint-Dominique? Was he afraid of losing face with Sandherr, Gonse and Boisdeffre if he was seen to back down? Or was it in the back of his mind that the prosecution of a Jewish officer would re-establish his credentials among right-wing deputies and the journalists on La Libre Parole?

  Marcel Thomas believed that he made the decision to pursue the inquiry ‘in good faith, and after having fully considered the matter’. 37 Mercier had been given prima facie evidence of treason by the Statistical Section and felt it was his duty to uncover the traitor. However, he may not have realised at this point the extent to which his hold on office would depend upon a successful outcome to this investigation, nor was he aware of that flaw in his character which led him to convert suspicion into a probability and probability into a certainty, and stick to that certainty through thick and thin. Having made up his own mind that Dreyfus was guilty, Mercier saw ‘the legal process, though necessary, as no more than a simple formality’.38

  The simple formality, however, required detailed preparation: nothing should be left to chance. It was important to have the police on side, and so Mercier told Sandherr, Henry and du Paty to brief the Prefect of the Paris Police, Louis Lépine. The handwriting expert from the Bank of France, Alfred Gobert, was summoned to the rue Saint-Dominique and worked throughout the day of Friday, 12 October; he was not given the name of the suspect. Lépine promised the services of his Chef du Service d’Identité Judiciare (head of the Judicial Identification Service), Alphonse Bertillon.

  However, before the experts’ reports were submitted, the decision was taken to prepare for the arrest of Captain Dreyfus. On the evening of 12 October, Commandant du Paty de Clam was summoned by General de Boisdeffre and told that he had been chosen to make the arrest. Du Paty, realising that he was being asked to embroil himself in a matter likely to be controversial and of uncertain outcome, did what he could to persuade Boisdeffre that he was not the right man for the job. ‘You will poison my life,’ he told his cousin. ‘I am head of a family. It is a job for a bachelor.’ He suggested a fellow officer, Georges Picquart. But Boisdeffre insisted: ‘You weren’t educated by the Jesuits, you have no Jewish connections.’39 Du Paty acquiesced.

  On 13 October, General Mercier left Paris to attend military manoeuvres in Limoges. In his absence, the arrangements he had made for the expeditious arrest and conviction of Captain Dreyfus hit their first obstacle. The handwriting expert from the Bank of France, Alfred Gobert, delivered his report. The samples of handwriting he had been asked to compare were certainly ‘of the same graphic type’, but there were ‘numerous and important disparities which had to be taken into account’. The bordereau, ‘written quite naturally and normally in a rapid hand’, could have been written by ‘a person other than the suspect’.

  This setback was serious but not insurmountable, and certainly not sufficient to stop the momentum towards making an arrest. Gobert had not been told the name of the suspect but, on his own admission, he had quickly guessed it, and this made Gobert himself suspect in the eyes of those who had called upon his expertise. Gobert worked for the Bank of France, and the Bank of France was in the hands of the Jews. Gobert would not want to antagonise them by giving evidence that compromised one of their own.

  Secondly, his opinion was contradicted by the man brought in to study the bordereau by the Prefect of Police, Lépine. Alphonse Bertillon was not a handwriting expert as such but the inventor of a system of criminal identification known as anthropometry. He had developed it over the fifteen years that he had worked in the Prefecture and, with the science of fingerprinting still in its infancy, had been successful in identifying multiple offenders: his system had been adopted by police forces in Britain and the United States.

  Bertillon acknowledged at once that the two examples of handwriting were not identical but said it was ridiculous to suppose that a spy would write such a compromising note in his own hand. Naturally, he had taken the precaution of disguising his handwriting. The bordereau was an ‘auto-forgery’. Subsequently Bertillon would show how, cunningly, the spy had imitated the hand of different members of his own family for different words so that, if an incriminating document was found in his home, he could show that it was a botched forgery, while if it was found outside his home, the differences would establish that it could not have been written by him.

  This convoluted theory was illustrated with a drawing of a fort that might have been designed by Vauban to show how a besieged spy would defend himself against attacks coming from different directions.40 The theory would later be dismissed as the product of an unsound mind, but at the time it was treated with respect and impressed Mercier. Bertillon was, after all, an internationally acknowledged expert on criminal identification and he was vouched for by the civilian Prefect of Police, Lépine. His opinion was also a godsend as a counterweight to that of Gobert.

>   Mercier ordered the arrest of Captain Dreyfus. A date was set. The Governor of the Cherche-Midi military prison, Commandant Ferdinand Forzinetti, was told to prepare a cell for a high-ranking prisoner. Commissaire Armand Cochefert, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at the Prefecture of Police, was seconded to assist du Paty in making the arrest. On the evening of 15 October a group consisting of Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse, Colonel Sandherr, Commandant du Paty and Commissaire Cochefert met to confirm the details of the plan. Dreyfus would be summoned to the War Ministry for a ‘general inspection’ by the Chief of the General Staff. He would be met by an officer who had taught him at the École Polytechnique, Commandant Georges Picquart. Picquart would escort him to the ante-room of Boisdeffre’s office where they would find du Paty de Clam. Commandant Henry from the Statistical Section and Commissaire Cochefert would remain concealed behind a screen.

  Feigning an injury to his finger, du Paty would ask Dreyfus to copy out a letter, and closely study him while he was writing. Du Paty would then subject him to a summary interrogation and finally charge him with treason. A service revolver with a single bullet in its chamber would be placed within reach so that Dreyfus, if a shred of honour remained in him, would be able to ‘render justice to himself’.41

  * Under Napoleon III Victor Hugo, an opponent of the regime, would send several letters in a single packet with a request that, after it had been opened, they be forwarded by the police.

  * Pronounced ‘onrri’.

  * The Franco-Prussian war had arisen out of the umbrage taken by the French over the Ems dispatch – a telegram from the secretary of Kaiser Wilhelm I, then taking a cure in Bad Ems, to the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck describing an exchange between the Kaiser and the French Ambassador which was edited by Bismarck and released to the press.

  5

  Dreyfus Accused

  1: Alfred Dreyfus

  While this plan for the morning of 14 October 1894 was being rehearsed at General Staff Headquarters on the rue Saint-Dominique, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was at home with his family in his apartment on the other side of the River Seine. He had by now received the order to present himself for a general inspection the next morning wearing civilian clothes, but it gave him no cause for anxiety. At ease among those he loved, that Sunday evening was, as he later told his wife Lucie, a moment of particular happiness.

  A brilliant and facile career was opened to me; the future appeared under bright auspices. After the day’s labours I tasted the repose and the charms of family life. Interested in all the manifestations of the human mind, I delighted in reading during the pleasant evenings passed at my own fireside. My wife and I were perfectly happy, and our first child enlivened our home. I had no worldly anxieties; the same profound affection united me with the members of my own and my wife’s family. All that renders life happy seemed to smile on me.1

  This is how Alfred Dreyfus remembered his last moments of freedom, and aspects of this recollection are undoubtedly accurate. He and his wife did indeed have no ‘worldly anxieties’ – both were rich in their own right. They had a spacious and elegant apartment on the avenue du Trocadéro: when teaching at the École Supérieure de Guerre, Alfred could walk to work, crossing the Seine on the Pont de l’Alma or the Pont des Invalides. It is also true that his was a closely knit family, and that he had great intellectual curiosity which he could satisfy reading by the fireside in his home.

  Less certain can have been Dreyfus’s confidence in the continuance of his ‘brilliant and facile career’: he had already suffered, in his own view, from the prejudice felt among senior officers against Jews. There was also the possibility that a scandal might erupt which would jeopardise both his career and his happy marriage. He had always enjoyed the company of attractive women, in particular femmes galantes – women, we are told by Vincent Duclert, who were ‘neither prostitutes nor women of the world’ but ‘who took lovers and liked love, sometimes profiting from it’. Duclert, one of the most recent and most hagiographic of Dreyfus’s biographers, admits that his subject’s ‘recent marriage had not wholly persuaded him to give up these pleasures. And even his great affection for Lucie had not extinguished the desire to please and seduce.’2

  Dreyfus had met a young woman called Suzanne Cron at the races in April 1894. She was separated from her husband and in the process of getting a divorce. He had visited her on a number of occasions in her apartment on the rue de Calais and envisaged renting a villa in which she would live as his mistress. In July, he seems to have got cold feet and brought the liaison to an end, but Suzanne Cron continued to write impassioned letters, the last ending ‘Life and death’. She was not the first object of Dreyfus’s extramarital dalliances. There had been an earlier liaison with a slightly older woman of Austrian origin, Marie Déry, which had ended in 1893, and another with a woman called Mme Bodson.3 Earlier still, before his marriage, Dreyfus had befriended a widow, a Mme Dida, who was later shot dead by a Russian adventurer, Pierre Wladimiroff. Soon after the murder, Mme Dida’s father had called on Dreyfus at his home on rue François 1er to tell him that he had been named by Wladimiroff as one of Mme Dida’s former lovers. Dreyfus had denied this – he said that they had merely been friends; but he had subsequently been summoned to give evidence before the juge d’instruction. His career would undoubtedly suffer if there was another incident of this kind.

  Vincent Duclert takes the view that Dreyfus’s infatuations with these femmes galantes were not consummated – were mere amitiés amoureuses: ‘After the serious illness of his wife, following the birth of their second child, he returned in part to a bachelor life. He was constantly drawn to beautiful women in whose company he experienced an amorous pleasure [un plaisir amoureux].’ He takes Dreyfus at his word in stating that he ‘did not cross the gap between this and consummated adultery’, although it seems unlikely that Dreyfus would plan to install Suzanne Cron in a villa simply for tea and sympathy. Be that as it may, by the middle of October 1894, Dreyfus seemed to have mastered his dangerous weakness for beautiful femmes galantes and the risk of scandal receded. The future did indeed seem bright for this captain in the artillery, still only thirty-five years old.

  Dreyfus’s rapid rise in the military hierarchy was particularly noteworthy because his background was so different from that of most officers in the French Army. Born on 9 October 1859, he was the youngest of seven children of the textile manufacturer Raphaël Dreyfus and his wife Rachel. For the first ten years of his life he had lived with his parents in Mulhouse – first in a small apartment on the rue du Sauvage, later in a large house on the rue de la Sinne, the move reflecting the rapid rise in the fortunes of the family following Raphaël’s commercial success. Alfred had three sisters and three brothers and ‘as the youngest-born, he was especially petted by his parents and elder brothers and sisters’.4 Because of his mother’s ill-health, his eldest sister Henriette played a maternal role. Among his siblings, Alfred was particularly close to his brother Mathieu – as open and easy-going as Alfred was reserved and retiring.

  The improvement in the family’s material circumstances was only part of a metamorphosis that had taken place as a result of Jewish emancipation following the French Revolution. Raphaël’s first language was German, and his French had at times been ridiculed by French-speaking brokers at the cotton exchange because of his use of German words and his thick Alsatian accent.5 However, by the late 1850s Raphaël had given up some of the practices of orthodox Judaism, had dropped the Germanic spelling of his name, Dreÿfuss, and had adopted a French wardrobe and way of life. Photographs show him clean-shaven with short side-whiskers – a striking contrast to the ‘long, full beards of his forefathers’.6 His children were bilingual but even Alfred, who had received a French education, ‘spoke French with a distinctly German accent’.7

  Mulhouse, formerly Mülhausen, was a predominantly Protestant city that, until the French Revolution, had been a free city within the Swiss Confederation and often a plac
e of refuge for Jews fleeing from the intermittent pogroms in Alsace. A sense of solidarity between the two oppressed minorities led the Protestant industrial oligarchy to open up, ‘if only part way’, to Jewish entrepreneurs. The town’s synagogue was designed by a Protestant architect. ‘Not one Catholic enterprise would be established in Mulhouse in the nineteenth century.’8 Catholicism was the religion of the mainly German workers who manned the looms. These workers had gone on strike in 1870; the fabricantocratie had called in a regiment of cavalry to restore order. ‘These social protests exacerbated religious antagonism between the Protestants and Catholics.’9 It was during these disturbances that Jean Sandherr, the father of the chief of the Statistical Section in 1894, had ‘marched through Mulhouse shouting “Down with the Prussians of the Interior!” which in local parlance meant “Down with Protestants and Jews”’.10 The Dreyfus family had kept off the streets and remained behind the closed doors of their apartment.

  France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war was a catastrophe for the Dreyfuses and had a traumatic but formative effect on the young Alfred. ‘Do you remember my telling you’, Alfred would later write to his wife Lucie, ‘how, more than ten years ago, at Mulhouse, in the month of September, I heard a German military band go marching past our house, celebrating the victory of Sedan? My grief was so overwhelming that I swore to devote all my strength and intelligence to the service of my country . . .’11 The Dreyfuses were ardent French patriots, but France for them was not so much a tribe with a Christian heritage or a territory studded with the monuments of its Christian past as a nation that had repudiated sectarianism and superstition to guarantee for all its citizens the Rights of Man.