A History of the Third French Republic

by C. H. C. Wright

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.