A History of the Third French Republic

by C. H. C. Wright

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.