Clemenceau, the Man and His Time

by H. M. Hyndman

But M. Bontoux was too ambitious, he did not possess the real financial faculty, his first successes turned such head as he possessed. The Jews, therefore, were able to work their will upon the whole of his projects and groups, and the devout Catholic investors of Paris, Vienna and other places had the intolerable mortification of seeing their savings swept into the coffers of the infidel. This had happened some years before the Dreyfus case. But losers have long memories, and here was a sore monetary grievance superadded to the previous religious hatred of the Hebrew.

Dreyfus was a Jew. Nay, more, he came of financial Jews who had had their pickings out of the collapse of the Union Générale as well as out of the guano and other concessions malignantly obtained in the Catholic Republic of Peru. Monstrous that a man of that race and name should be an officer in the French Army at all! Still more outrageous that he should be placed by his ability and family influence in a position of military importance, and entrusted with serious military secrets! Something must be done.

Now the persons forming the most powerful coterie in the higher circles of the French Army at this time were not only men who had been educated at the famous military academy of St. Cyr and imbued with an esprit de corps cultivated from their school-days upwards, but they were officers who believed heartily, if not in the religion, at any rate in the beneficent secular persuasion of the Catholic Church. They were, as was clearly shown, greatly influenced by the Jesuits, who saw the enormous advantage of keeping in close touch with the chiefs of the army.

Then there were the monarchists and Buonapartists, male and female, of every light and shade, who were eagerly on the look-out for any stroke that might discredit the new studious but scientific and unbelieving class of officers, whom the exigencies of modern warfare were making more and more essential to military efficiency. Their interest was to keep as far as possible the main higher organisation and patronage of the army and the General Staff a close borough and out of the hands of these new men.

All this formed a formidable phalanx of organised enmity against any officer who might not suit the prejudices or, at a critical moment, might be dangerous to the plans of people who, differ as they might in other matters, were at one in disliking capable soldiers who were not of their particular set. And here was Dreyfus, who embodied in his own person all their most cherished hatreds, who could be made the means of striking a blow at all similar intruders upon their preserve, in such wise as greatly to injure all their enemies at once. Unfortunately for him, Dreyfus was at the same time an able officer—so much the more dangerous, therefore—and personally not an agreeable man. Not even their best friends would deny to clever Jews the virtue of arrogance. Dreyfus was arrogant. He was not a grateful person to his superiors or to his equals. They all wanted to get rid of him on their own account, and their friends outside were ready enough to embitter them against him because he was a Jew.

This is not to say that there was an elaborate plot afoot among all who were brought in contact with Dreyfus, or that, when the charge against him was formulated, there was a deliberate intention, on the part of the members of the Court Martial, to find him guilty, no matter what happened. But it is now quite certain that, from the first, the idea that he was a spy was agreeable to his fellow-officers in the Ministry of War; and, being satisfied as to his responsibility for the crime that they wished to believe him guilty of, they did not stick at trifles, in the matter of procedure and testimony, which might relieve their consciences and justify their judgment. Knowing, then, the powerful combination which would oppose to the death any revision of Dreyfus’s trial, Scheurer-Kestner, resolute and self-sacrificing as he was, might well take a less sanguine view than Clemenceau of the probabilities of certain victory as soon as the truth was made known.

But when once he began to doubt whether Dreyfus had had fair play, Clemenceau immediately showed those qualities of personal and political courage, persistence, disregard of popularity, and power of concentrating all his forces upon the immediate matter in hand, indifferent to the numbers and strength of his opponents, which had gained him so high a place in the estimation of all democrats and lovers of fair play long before. “If there are manifest probabilities of error, the case must be revised.” That was his view. But the National Army and the National Religion, as bitter opponents of justice put it, were one and indivisible on this matter. Militarism and Jesuitism together, backed by the high society of reaction and a large section of the bourgeoisie, constituted a stalwart array in favour of the perpetuation of injustice. There was literally scarce a crime of which this combination was not capable rather than admit that by any possibility a Court Martial on a Jew captain could go wrong.

The Minister of War, General Billot, the Prime Ministers Méline and Brisson, generals of high standing such as Mercier, Boisdeffre, Gonse, Zurlinden and others, officers of lower rank and persons connected with them, were gradually mixed up with and defended such a series of attempted murders, ordered suicides, wholesale forgeries, defence and decoration of exposed spies, perjury, misrepresentation and false imprisonment that the marvel is how France survived such a tornado of turpitude. Clemenceau little knew what it would all lead to when, by no means claiming that Dreyfus was innocent, he and Scheurer-Kestner and Zola and Jaurès, and all honest Radicals and Socialists, demanded that, even if Dreyfus were guilty, he could not have been legally condemned on false evidence and forged documents: the latter never having been communicated to his counsel. It was on this ground that Clemenceau demanded a revision of the trial.

But quite early in the fray the defenders of the Court Martial became desperate in their determination that the matter should never be thoroughly investigated. The honour of the army was at stake. Colonel Picquart, a man of the highest credit and capacity, comes to the conclusion in the course of his official inspection of documents at headquarters that the incriminating paper on which Dreyfus was condemned, but which he was never allowed to see, was not in his handwriting at all, but in that of Major Esterhazy, an officer disliked and distrusted by all fellow-officers with whom he had served. Picquart, in fact, suspected that Esterhazy was a Prussian spy and that he forged the bordereau which convinced the Court Martial of Dreyfus’s guilt. But before this, in 1894 when the story leaked out that an officer having relations with the General Staff was suspected of treachery, it was not Dreyfus whose name was first mentioned. His old comrades said with one accord, “It must be Esterhazy: we thought so.” Esterhazy, however, soon made himself necessary to the army chiefs and their Catholics. If his character was blasted publicly, down these gentry would come, and with them the whole of the proceedings against Dreyfus. They therefore suggested to Picquart that he should simply hold his tongue. “You are not at l’Ile du Diable,” they said. But Picquart would persist, so they sent him off to Tunis. However, thanks to Scheurer-Kestner and others, the truth began to come out, and Picquart still refused to be silenced. So instead of dealing with Esterhazy, they arrested his accuser and gave the Major a certificate of the very highest character.

As it began, so it went on. Clemenceau’s daily articles and attacks drove the militarists, the Catholics, the anti-Semites, and the reactionaries generally, into a fury. Colonel Henry, Colonel Paty du Clam, the Jesuit Father du Lac, the editors and contributors of the Figaro, the Echo de Paris (the special organ of the Staff), the Gaulois were in a permanent conspiracy with the generals named above, and the General Staff itself, to prevent the truth from being known. It was all of no use. Picquart under lock and key was more effective than Picquart at large. Slowly but surely men of open mind became convinced that, little as they wished to believe it, something was wrong. But these were always the minority. Few could grasp the fact that an innocent man was being put in chains on the Ile du Diable, virtually because there was an agitation in favour of his re-trial in Paris.