The Caillaux Drama

by John N. Raphael

(Rochette is the central figure with the black beard)

France rejoices, however, in the possession of a succession of more or less avowedly Socialist Governments which govern or try to govern the country on fatherly lines, and the French Government on the one hand, and the judicial authorities on the other, began to look with suspicion and alarm on Rochette’s increasing prosperity. The Bourse, too, began to become suspicious of Rochette’s success, and an opinion began to gain ground that sooner or later his rocket-like flight into the regions of high finance would be followed by one of those crashing stick-like falls, by one of those disastrous krachs of which so many have been chronicled during the last century in all great capitals. It was towards the end of February or the beginning of March 1908, that Rochette made his big mistake. He attacked the Petit Journal, one of the biggest and most influential newspapers in France. Rochette made this attack on the Petit Journal and on its managing director Monsieur Prevet, a member of the Senate, because he had a very definite object in view. Rochette’s companies appealed to the imagination and to the pockets of the small investor, and the small investor in France is not a regular reader of financial newspapers, which he neither trusts nor understands.

These small financial newspapers are legion, but although Rochette undoubtedly had numbers of them at his disposal he realized that a paper more generally read and appealing more directly to the people he wanted to touch was necessary to his ambitions, and to the greater and wider success for which he was working. He made up his mind, therefore, to obtain control of the Petit Journal, a newspaper which is sold all over France in every town, in every village, and in every hamlet, and which, though it no longer enjoys the largest circulation of any newspaper in France, was one of the two newspapers most suitable for his purpose and the only one of the two which he had any chance at all of getting. In order to obtain control of the Petit Journal, Rochette set to work with tactics which were characteristic of the astuteness and the utter lack of scruple of the man. He issued circulars which he had printed in enormous quantities, forwarded them to every shareholder of the Petit Journal, and scattered them broadcast, elsewhere. In this circular, which was issued in view of the next general meeting of the shareholders of the paper, a meeting which was to be held on April 5, 1908, Rochette painted the financial position of the Petit Journal in the blackest possible colours, stating without the slightest reference to truth, that the paper as a property was in a very bad way, and advising shareholders to sell their shares.

The managing director of the Petit Journal, the powerful member of the Senate, Monsieur Prevet, was naturally very much annoyed and somewhat alarmed by these manœuvres, and took legal action to put a stop to them. He commenced a prosecution against a “person or persons unknown,” by which euphemism of course Rochette was indicated, for the purpose of putting a stop to the disloyal manœuvres by which Monsieur Rochette was rapidly obtaining a large number of shares and powers of attorney from discontented shareholders.

Monsieur Prevet realized that unless some such immediate action were taken it was more than possible that at the general meeting of the Petit Journal Company on April 5, 1908, the discontented shareholders either in person or by proxy would oust him, Monsieur Prevet, from his position as managing director of the Petit Journal, and would hand over the control of this newspaper with its enormous influence and immense phalanx of readers to the financier Rochette. Monsieur Prevet occupied a very high position. He was not only the managing director of the Petit Journal, he was not only a member of the Senate, but he was actually, at that time, the “rapporteur” or advisory summariser for the Senate on the big question of the purchase by the State of the Western Railway.

It is a curious sidelight on the Rochette affair that this financier who had begun his career five years before with a capital of £2000 was the principal mover in the immense agitation against the acquisition by the State of the Western Railway of France. That he moved in this matter on purely personal grounds is of far less importance than the fact that if he had succeeded in overthrowing Senator Prevet the French nation would undoubtedly have been spared a very heavy money loss, for the acquisition by the State of the Western Railway has been a disastrous undertaking from a money point of view, and has cost and will continue to cost French taxpayers a large sum of money every year till the railway begins, if it ever does begin, to pay. Rochette’s attacks on Monsieur Prevet, and his obvious intentions on the Petit Journal created a storm of antagonism against him in the French Press.

In spite of the persistent and unfailing confidence of his shareholders public opinion began to make itself felt, and as always happens in France when public opinion is roused, a great deal of mud began to be flung and accusations of corruption became very frequent and were directed against the highest in the land. The Government was hotly accused of laxity, and Monsieur Georges Clemenceau, who was Prime Minister in 1908, was accused of moral complicity with the financier Rochette. It is a curious proof of the poetical justice, which comes to its own even in financial questions, that these accusations against Monsieur Clemenceau did more to cause the eventual downfall of Rochette than anything which had happened before. They made “the tiger” angry, and when Monsieur Clemenceau grew angry with Rochette, the day of Rochette’s wane had dawned. Accusations were launched against the high magistrates, who were accused of weakness and of being afraid to take action. Members of Parliament were directly accused in the public Press of protecting Rochette and his enterprises, and of taking money for so doing. No day passed without the launching of an accusation against some member of the Chamber or the Senate of having accepted heavy bribes to cover Monsieur Rochette, or to back him up, and the names of numbers of well-known men who are now more or less indirectly connected with the Caillaux drama were constantly mentioned at the time in connexion with Rochette, the financier.

The connexion between the two cases, the case of Rochette and the Caillaux drama which followed the attack in the Figaro on Monsieur Caillaux’s conduct in connexion with it, is curiously close. There have been two Parliamentary inquiries into the Rochette affair. In the first one in 1911, among the members of the Parliamentary Commission we find the names of Monsieur Caillaux himself (he very nearly, in fact, was the president) and of Monsieur Ceccaldi, who was approached by Monsieur Caillaux on the afternoon of the crime, and to whom the Minister of Finance confided his uneasiness with regard to his wife. In the list of the second Commission Monsieur Ceccaldi’s name and others closely connected with the Caillaux drama appear once more. But there was no question, yet, in 1908, of a Rochette inquiry, for the affaire Rochette was only just beginning. Monsieur Clemenceau fired the first shot, as Monsieur Clemenceau was bound to do. There had been talk on the Bourse, there had been talk in the newspapers, Monsieur Clemenceau had been accused of slackness, and he had made up his mind that he would not justify the accusation.

On Friday (it is quite a curious coincidence that so many important dates of the Caillaux, Agadir, and Rochette affairs should have fallen on a Friday)—on Friday, March 20, 1908, at exactly twenty minutes to twelve in the forenoon, Monsieur Clemenceau, the Prime Minister, sent for Monsieur Lépine, who was then Prefect of Police, and ordered him to take measures for a judicial inquiry into Rochette’s financial transactions. Monsieur Lépine spent exactly a quarter of an hour with Monsieur Clemenceau in his room at the Home Office in the Place Beauvau, and at five minutes to twelve he returned to the Police Prefecture, sent for Monsieur Mouquin, the head of the Research Department of the Paris police, and for Monsieur Yves Durand, his chef de Cabinet, and told them what Monsieur Clemenceau had said to him.

Now the French have a way of their own of conducting these matters. The State does not prosecute for fraud. Monsieur Lépine’s orders were to find a plaintiff who would bring a charge against Rochette, who would show proof that Rochette had damaged his pocket, and who would be willing to pay the caution which the French courts require from such a plaintiff before legal action begins. Monsieur Yves Durand was ordered by Monsieur Lépine to go out and find such a plaintiff. Monsieur Lépine, in his examination by the Parliamentary Commission on July 26, 1911, was very explicit with regard to his own opinion and the opinions he had heard expressed on Rochette’s financial undertakings. He alluded to them as “a house of cards built on puffs of hot air, kept afloat by public credulity and bound to fall to pieces at the first breath of suspicion.”