AND OF FÉLIX FAURE
January, 1895, to February, 1899
The customary promptness in the choice of a President, so unfamiliar to American campaigns, was observed in the election of Carnot's successor. The historic name and the social and financial position of the new chief magistrate, Jean Casimir-Perier, seemed to the monarchical sister-nations a guarantee of national stability and dignity. In reality the election brought about a more definite cleavage between rival political tendencies. Casimir-Perier, grandson of Louis-Philippe's great minister, obviously represented the Moderates, most of whom tried in all sincerity to carry out the esprit nouveau and a policy of good-will toward the Catholic Church. The Radicals said that this was playing into the hands of the Clericals, and to the Socialists Casimir-Perier was merely a hated capitalist. He was, moreover, unfortunately unfit for the acrimonies of political life. High-strung and emotional, he writhed under misinterpretation and abuse, and rebelled against the constitutional powerlessness of his office. He had never really wanted the Presidency and had accepted it chiefly through the personal persuasion of his friend the statesman Burdeau, who unfortunately died soon after his election. The brief Presidency of Casimir-Perier, lasting less than a year, was destined to see the beginning of the worst trial the French Republic had yet experienced, the famous Dreyfus case.
The Administration, in which Dupuy remained Prime Minister, began by repressive measures, laws directed against the anarchists and the trial en masse of thirty defendants ranging from utopian theorists to actual criminals. Most of them were acquitted, but the procedure did not ingratiate the Government with the advanced parties. Toward the end of 1894 the Dreyfus case began to be talked of, an affair which was destined to develop into a tremendous struggle of the leaders of the army and the Church to obtain control of the nation.
In September, 1894, an officer named Henry, of the spy service of the French army, came into possession of a document pieced together from fragments stolen from a waste-paper basket in the German Embassy. This document, containing a bordereau or memorandum of information largely about the French artillery offered to the German military attaché, Schwartzkoppen, was anonymous, but Henry undoubtedly recognized, sooner or later, the handwriting of a friend, Major Esterhazy, a soldier of fortune in the French army, of bad reputation and shady character. Unable to destroy the document, which had been seen by others, Henry tried to fasten it on somebody else. Indeed, many people believe that Henry was an accomplice of Esterhazy in German pay. By a strange coincidence it happened that the handwriting of the bordereau somewhat resembled that of a brilliant young Jewish officer of the General Staff named Alfred Dreyfus. He belonged to a wealthy Alsatian family, and from antecedent probability would not seem to need to play a traitor's part, but he was intensely unpopular among his fellows because of many disagreeable traits of character. Moreover, anti-Semitism, formerly non-existent in France, was now rife. It had been largely fomented by the anti-Jewish agitator Edouard Drumont, with his book la France juive (1886) and his newspaper the Libre Parole (1892). Prejudice against the Jews as tricky financiers had been prepared and encouraged by the sensational failure of the great bank, the Union générale, a Catholic rival of the Rothschilds, in 1882, and by the Panama scandals with the doings of Jacques de Reinach, Cornelius Herz, and Arton. The Libre Parole had worked against Jewish officers in the army, an activity which culminated in some sensational duels, particularly one between Captain Mayer and the marquis de Morès (1892), in which the Jew was killed.
So, in the present instance, the Minister of War, General Mercier, who had recently committed some much-criticized administrative blunders, and who now wished to show his efficiency, caused the arrest of Dreyfus. Then, egged on by anti-Semitic newspapers which had got hold of Dreyfus's name, Mercier brought him before a court-martial. The trial was held in secret, and the War Department sent to the officers constituting the tribunal, without the knowledge of the prisoner or his counsel Maître Demange, a secret dossier, a collection of trumped-up incriminating documents. Demange devoted himself to proving that Dreyfus was not the author of the bordereau, but the members of the court-martial, believing in the genuineness of the additional documents, unhesitatingly convicted him of treason. Consequently, in spite of his protestations of innocence, Dreyfus was publicly degraded on January 5, 1895, and hustled off to solitary confinement on the unhealthy Devil's Isle, off the coast of French Guiana. Meanwhile the whole French people sincerely believed that a vile traitor had been justly condemned and that the secrecy of the case was due to the advisability of avoiding diplomatic complications with Germany. With dramatic unexpectedness, only ten days later (January 15), Casimir-Perier resigned the Presidency.
During the whole Dreyfus affair Casimir-Perier had chafed because his ministers had constantly acted without keeping him informed, particularly when he was called upon by the German Government to acknowledge that it had had nothing to do with Dreyfus. He had lost by death the support of his friend Burdeau; he was discouraged by the campaign of abuse against him, especially the election as Deputy in Paris of Gérault-Richard, one of his most active vilifiers. In particular he felt that his own Cabinet, and above all its leader Dupuy, were false to him. A discussion in the Chamber concerning the duration of the state guarantees to certain of the great railway companies ended in a vote unfavorable to the Cabinet, which resigned, whereupon Casimir-Perier seized the opportunity to go too. The Socialists declared that Dupuy had provoked his own defeat in order to embarrass the President by the difficulty of forming a new Cabinet, and make him resign as well.
Two days later the electoral Congress met at Versailles. The Radicals supported Henri Brisson. The Moderates and the Conservatives were divided between Waldeck-Rousseau and Félix Faure, but Waldeck-Rousseau having thrown his strength on the second ballot to Faure, the latter was elected.
The new President, recently Minister of the Navy, was a well-meaning man, but full of vanity and naïvely delighted with his own rise in the world from a humble position to that of chief magistrate. The extent to which his judgment was warped by his temperament is shown by the later developments of the Dreyfus case.
Félix Faure's first Cabinet was led by the Republican Moderate Alexandre Ribot. It lasted less than a year and its history was chiefly noteworthy, at least in foreign affairs, by the increasing openness of the Franco-Russian rapprochement at the ceremonies of the inauguration of the Kiel Canal. In internal affairs there were some violent industrial disturbances and strikes.
In October, 1895, the Moderates gave way to the Radical Cabinet of Léon Bourgeois. It was viewed with suspicion by the moneyed interests, who accused it of gravitating toward the Socialists. The cleavage between the two tendencies of the Republican Party became more marked. The Moderates joined forces with the Conservatives to oppose the schemes for social and financial reforms of the Radicals and of the representatives of the working classes. Prominent among these was the proposal for a progressive income tax. The Senate, naturally a more conservative body, was opposed to the Bourgeois Cabinet, which had a majority, though not a very steadfast one, in the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate, usually a nonentity in determining the fall of a cabinet, for once successfully asserted its power and, by refusing to vote the credits asked for by the Ministry for the Madagascar campaign, caused it to resign in April, 1896. The enemies of the Senate maintained that the Chamber of Deputies, elected by direct suffrage, was the only judge of the fate of a cabinet. But Bourgeois's hold was at best precarious and he seized the opportunity to withdraw.
The Méline Cabinet which followed was a return to the Moderates supported by the Conservatives. Its opponents accused it of following what in American political parlance is called a "stand-pat" policy, but it remained in office longer than any ministry up to its time, a little over two years. It afforded, at any rate, an opportunity for the adversaries of the Republic to strengthen their positions and encouraged the transformation of the Dreyfus case into a political instead of a purely judicial matter.
In foreign affairs the most spectacular events were the visit of the Czar and Czarina to France in 1896 and the return visit of the French President to Russia in 1897. At the banquet of leave-taking on the French warship Pothuau, in their prepared speeches, the Czar and the President made use of the same expression "friendly and allied nations," thus publicly proclaiming to Europe the alliance suspected since 1891.
In spite of the unanimous feeling of Dreyfus's guilt, his family did not lose faith in him, and his brother Mathieu set about the apparently impossible task of rehabilitation. But it chanced that one other person began to have doubts of the justice of Dreyfus's condemnation. This was Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, who had been present at the court-martial as representative of the War Department, and who had since become chief of the espionage service, and Henry's superior. Another document stolen from a waste-paper basket at the German Embassy, an unforwarded pneumatic despatch (petit bleu), was brought to him, and directed his suspicions to Esterhazy, to whom it was addressed. At first he did not connect Esterhazy and Dreyfus, but on obtaining specimens of Esterhazy's handwriting he was struck by the likeness with that of the bordereau. Then, examining the secret dossier, to which he now had access, he was stupefied to see its insignificance.
MARIE-GEORGES PICQUART
From this time on, Picquart worked, with extraordinary tenacity of purpose and against all obstacles, for the rehabilitation of a stranger. Everybody was against him. His chief subordinate Henry dreaded revelations above all things, and set his colleagues against him. His superiors disliked any suggestion that an army court could have made a mistake, the remedying of which would help a Jew.
Gradually, however, the agitation started by Mathieu Dreyfus was becoming stronger. He had won the help of a skilled writer Bernard Lazare; a daily paper succeeded in obtaining and publishing a facsimile of the bordereau. But Picquart was sent away from Paris on a tour of inspection, and when the matter came up in the Chamber, through an interpellation, the Minister of War, General Billot, declared that the judgment of 1894 was absolutely legal and just. Matters thus seemed settled again.
But a prominent Alsatian member of Parliament, Scheurer-Kestner, one of the Vice-Presidents of the Senate, was half-persuaded by Mathieu and Bernard Lazare. When Picquart's friend and legal adviser, Leblois, rather injudiciously, from a professional point of view, confided to him his client's suspicions, he was thoroughly convinced and the two separate currents of activity now coalesced. Yet the greater the agitation in favor of Dreyfus, the greater grew the opposition. The anti-Semites shrieked with rage against Judas, the "traitor." The upper ranks of the army were honeycombed by Clerical influences. An enormous proportion of the officers belonged to reactionary families and the Chief of Staff himself, General de Boisdeffre, was under the thumb of the Père Du Lac, one of the most prominent Jesuits in France. The Clericals and anti-Semites, therefore, joined forces, and, by calling the Dreyfus agitation an attack on the honor of the army and a play into the hands of Germany, they won over all the jingoes and former Boulangists, who formed the new party of Nationalists. This was the so-called alliance of "the sword and the holy-water sprinkler" (le sabre et le goupillon). Above all, certain religious associations, particularly the Assumptionists, under the name of religion, organized a campaign of slander and abuse against all who ventured to speak for Dreyfus. By a ludicrous counter-play the scoundrel Esterhazy had defenders as an injured innocent, the more so that Henry and the clique at the War Office found it to their interest to support him.
Matters reached a crisis when, on November 15, 1897, Mathieu Dreyfus denounced Esterhazy to the Minister of War as author of the bordereau and as guilty of the treason for which his brother had been condemned. This was partly a tactical mistake, because, even if Esterhazy were proved to have written the bordereau, it would still be necessary to show him guilty of actual treason. It made it possible to swerve the discussion from the conviction of Dreyfus as a res adjudicata (chose jugée) to vague charges against Esterhazy. The later called for a vindication, he was triumphantly acquitted by a court-martial early in January, 1898, and Picquart was put under arrest on various charges of indiscipline in connection with the whole affair.
Few and far between as they now seemed, the lovers of justice were still to be counted with. They consisted at first of a small number of much-derided intellectuels, scholars and trained thinkers, who used their judgment and not their prejudices. One of these was the famous novelist Emile Zola, who, to keep the case under discussion, published in the Aurore on January 13, a few days after Esterhazy's acquittal, his famous letter, J'accuse. In this article Zola denounced the guilty machinations of Dreyfus's adversaries seriatim, blamed the Dreyfus court-martial for convicting on secret evidence and the Esterhazy court for acquitting a guilty man in obedience to orders. Zola was not in possession of all the facts, since his precise aim was to have them brought out, and in his charges against the Esterhazy court he was technically and legally at fault. But he courted prosecution and got it.
On February 7 Zola was brought to trial. The crafty authorities eliminated all references to the trial of 1894 as a chose jugée and prosecuted Zola for having declared that Esterhazy was acquitted by order. Their tool, the presiding magistrate Delegorgue, seconded their efforts by ruling out every question which might throw light on the Dreyfus case, in spite of the attempts of Zola's chief lawyer Labori. Party passion was at its height, hired gangs of men were posted about the court-house to hoot and attack the Dreyfusites, members of the General Staff appeared in full uniform to interrupt the trial and bulldoze the jury by mysterious hints of war with Germany. Finally Zola was condemned to fine and imprisonment. At this trial for the first time mention was mysteriously but openly made of a new document, understood to be a communication alluding to Dreyfus between the Italian and the German military attachés at Paris. Zola appealed, the higher court broke the verdict on the ground that the prosecution should have been instigated by the offended court-martial and not by the Government, he was brought to trial again on a change of venue at Versailles, was unsuccessful in interposing obstacles to an inevitable condemnation, and so fled to England (July).
Meanwhile, public opinion was becoming yet more violently excited. France was divided into two great camps, the line of cleavage often estranging the closest friends and relatives. On the one side was a vast majority consisting of the Clericals, the jingoes or Nationalists, the anti-Semites, and the unreflecting mass of the population. On the other were ranged the "intellectuals," the Socialists who were now rallying to the cause of tolerance, the Jews, and the few French Protestants. The League of the Rights of Man stood opposed to the association of the Patrie Française. In the midst of this turmoil were held the elections of May, 1898, for the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies. The political coloring of the new body was not sensibly changed, but the open Dreyfusites were all excluded. The Moderates now generally dubbed themselves "Progressists." None the less at the first session the now long-lived Méline Cabinet resigned after a vote requesting it to govern with fewer concessions to the Right.
The next Cabinet was Radical, headed by Henri Brisson. His mind was not yet definitely made up on the matter of revision, and he gave concessions to the Nationalists by appointing as Minister of War Godefroy Cavaignac. This headstrong personage, proud of an historic name, undertook to manage the Cabinet and to prove once for all to the Chamber the guilt of Dreyfus. In his speech he relied mainly on the letter mentioned at the Zola trial as written by the Italian to the German attaché.
Once more the Dreyfus affair seemed permanently settled, and once more the contrary proved to be the case. In August Cavaignac discovered, to his dismay, that the document he had sent to the Chamber, with such emphasis on its importance, was an out-and-out forgery of Henry. The latter was put under arrest and committed suicide. Discussion followed between Brisson, now converted to revision, and Cavaignac, still too stubborn to change his mind with regard to Dreyfus, in spite of his recent discovery. Cavaignac resigned as Minister of War, was replaced by General Zurlinden, who withdrew in a few days and was in turn succeeded by another general, Chanoine, thought to be in sympathy with the Cabinet. He in turn played his colleagues false and resigned unexpectedly during a meeting of the Chamber. Weakened by these successive blows the Brisson Cabinet itself had to resign, but its leader had now forwarded to the supreme court of the land, the Cour de Cassation, the petition of Dreyfus's wife for a revision of his sentence. The first step had at last been taken. The Criminal Chamber accepted the request and proceeded to a further detailed investigation.
The Brisson Ministry was followed by a third Cabinet of the unabashed Dupuy. It became evident that the Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation was inclining to decide on revision. Wishing to play to both sides and, yielding in this case to the anti-revisionists, early in 1899 Dupuy brought in a bill to take the Dreyfus affair away from the Criminal Chamber in the very midst of its deliberations and submit it to the Court as a whole, where it was hoped a majority of judges would reject revision. Between the dates of the passage of this bill by the Chamber and by the Senate, President Faure died suddenly and under mysterious circumstances on February 16, 1899. He had opposed revision and his death, attributed to apoplexy, was a gain to the revisionists who were accused by his friends of having caused his murder. On the other hand, stories, which it is unnecessary to repeat here, found an echo some years later in the scandals repeated at the sensational trial of Madame Steinheil.
During the turmoil over the Dreyfus affair, France underwent a humiliating experience with England. The colonial rivalry of the two countries had of late gone on unchecked, embittered as it had been by the ousting of France from the Suez Canal and Egypt. To many Frenchmen "Perfidious Albion" was, far more than Germany, the secular foe. In 1896 a French expedition under Captain Marchand was sent from the Congo in the direction of the Nile. The English afterwards argued that its purpose was to cut their sphere of influence and hinder the Cape-to-Cairo project; the French declared they merely wished to occupy a post which should afford a basis for general diplomatic negotiations for the partition of Africa. The mission was numerically insufficient; it struggled painfully for two years through the heart of the continent, and at last the small handful of intrepid Frenchmen established themselves at Fashoda on the upper waters of the Nile in July, 1898. At once General Kitchener arriving from the victory of Omdurman appeared on the scene to occupy Fashoda for the Egyptian Government. England assumed a viciously aggressive attitude and, under veiled threats of war, France was obliged to recall Marchand (November 4). The outburst of fury in France against England at this humiliation was tremendous. No sane man would have then ventured to predict that in a few years the hands of the two countries would be joined in the clasp of the Entente cordiale.