The Caillaux Drama

by John N. Raphael

Monsieur Lépine had urged the judicial authorities to take action in the Rochette case long before action was taken, and he alluded with some bitterness to the difficulty in getting a serious charge brought against any financier suspected of fraud who was rich enough to make it worth the while of his creditors to withdraw such charges. There had been several charges made against Rochette, and they had all fallen through because the plaintiffs got their money or got money enough to induce them to withdraw.

When, therefore, Monsieur Lépine told Monsieur Yves Durand, his chef de Cabinet, that he must go out and find him a plaintiff, he added that he himself knew of nobody who was likely to assume the rôle. The French law gives no greater claim on the assets in such a case to the man who goes to the expense of prosecuting than it affords to all the other creditors, and as he has to put up funds for the prosecution, it is often, as Monsieur Lépine explained, more than difficult to find a victim ready to fleece himself after he has been fleeced. But Monsieur Yves Durand happened to have heard that Monsieur Prevet was a likely man to undertake the prosecution, and he called on him immediately. He went first to his private house, failed to find him there, and found him eventually at his office in the Petit Journal building in the Rue Lafayette. Monsieur Prevet told Monsieur Yves Durand that a banker named Gaudrion was perfectly ready to prosecute Rochette, and that he had mentioned his willingness to him. Monsieur Yves Durand and Monsieur Prevet drove together immediately to the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where Monsieur Gaudrion had his office. They found Monsieur Gaudrion there and he told them that although he was not ready to prosecute Rochette himself, a friend of his, Monsieur Pichereau, whom he described as a man of property living at Corbeil, was ready to prosecute and would do so. Monsieur Pichereau, Monsieur Gaudrion declared, had put £6000 into some of Rochette’s financial enterprises, the Nerva Mines and Hella Gas Mantle Co. among others, had lost a good deal of his money, and was ready to do everything possible to get some of it back again.

At a quarter past two that afternoon, the afternoon of Friday, March 20, 1908, Monsieur Yves Durand returned to the Police Prefecture and told Monsieur Lépine what he had done. Monsieur Lépine sent Monsieur Yves Durand to the Procureur de la République, Monsieur Monier (Monsieur Monier has been promoted since and is the high legal authority whom Madame Caillaux consulted on the morning of the day she shot Monsieur Calmette, as to the means of putting a stop to his campaign against her husband), whom he was to advise of the existence of a plaintiff ready to prosecute Rochette.

Monsieur Lépine, in his evidence before the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, explained that he had hoped to get the whole matter settled that same day, or at all events between the closing of one Bourse and the opening of the next, so as to avoid news of the prosecution being allowed to leak out and to be used as a basis for speculation. However, Monsieur Monier told Monsieur Yves Durand that he would see Monsieur Pichereau on the next day, Saturday, at two o’clock, and he informed the Procureur Général and the Minister of Justice that a charge in due form was to be laid against Rochette on the morrow. At ten o’clock the next morning, Saturday, March 21, Monsieur Yves Durand went to Monsieur Gaudrion at his office and told him that the Procureur de la République would receive Monsieur Pichereau’s charge at two o’clock that afternoon at the Palace of Justice. Monsieur Pichereau was in Monsieur Gaudrion’s office, and had drawn up and signed his accusation against Rochette. Monsieur Gaudrion read it through to Monsieur Yves Durand, who was not in the least aware that Monsieur Pichereau was not the proprietor of Nerva shares and Hella Gas Mantle shares as he stated himself to be in his accusation, but that Monsieur Gaudrion was really the shareholder, and that Pichereau was only a man of straw. Gaudrion was a speculator. He had sold shares “short” in the Rochette enterprises, and seeing his way to a Bourse coup he had coached Pichereau in the part he was to play, given him a few shares of his own with which to play it, and paid him a thousand pounds so that he should be able to make the necessary guarantee on bringing his action and have something over for himself.

Monsieur Yves Durand, who got himself into terribly hot water over these preliminaries when the whole matter came to light, and who was openly accused of speculating himself on the fall of Rochette shares, declared that he was quite unaware of this dishonest combination, and that he had been misled by Monsieur Prevet, who had told him that he knew all about Gaudrion and about Pichereau as well. At a quarter-past two that afternoon Pichereau laid his formal charge against Rochette at the Palace of Justice, deposited £80 by way of guarantee for costs, and signed a request to be a civil party to the action. The matter was placed in the hands of the examining magistrate, Monsieur Berr, for his immediate attention, and poor Monsieur Berr sat up all Saturday night and all Sunday night, and worked through all day on Sunday at the Rochette dossier. At ten o’clock on Monday morning, March 23, 1908, Rochette was arrested.

Of course the arrest of Rochette created an immense sensation, and equally of course it occasioned the downfall of the shares of the companies in which he was interested. But while these shares tumbled headlong, an immense wave of public indignation swelled against the financier’s arrest, for so far from finding empty coffers at the offices of the Crédit Minier, the authorities admitted that there were, in cash, £240,000 at this office, and £160,000 more at the Banque Franco-Espagnole, a sister enterprise of Rochette’s. Rochette had been arrested and sent to the Santé prison on Monday, March 23, 1908. On Wednesday he wrote a letter to the examining magistrate, Monsieur Berr, in which he protested with some appearance of justice against his arrest and the situation created by it for the shareholders of his companies. “It is my duty,” wrote Monsieur Rochette, “to declare that on the day of my arrest I left the industrial and financial companies under my control in an excellent situation. There were about £240,000 in cash in the safe of the Crédit Minier, and £160,000 in the safe of the Banque Franco-Espagnole. This makes a total of £400,000. If I were a malefactor, as attempts are being made to prove me, it would have been easy for me to get out of my difficulties. I was advised from all sides of the intrigues which were in course against me under the leadership of a few men who considered that the growing prosperity of my companies threatened the enterprises of which they were at the head. It was these men who put up the plaintiff Pichereau. It was these men who managed to get you to take action, and who are really responsible for the exceptional measures which have been taken against me and the establishments which I control. You have put me in prison, sir, and you have refused to allow me to communicate with anybody except yourself outside the prison. You have given orders for the dismissal of all the clerks of the Crédit Minier and the Banque Franco-Espagnole. You have closed these establishments. You have given orders for the closing of all the provincial branches. You have struck a terrible blow at these companies, without having heard what I have to say, without having questioned me, without any preliminary examination by accountants of the financial condition of my banks, without the slightest concern for the shareholders or the other people interested. Do you know of any bank, of any financial institution however powerful that would be capable of withstanding such a blow? And for whom, why, on whose account, have you done all this? For Pichereau! On account of one single plaintiff at whose request a judicial examination was ordered, and of whom after four days imprisonment I know nothing at all, for I know neither the man himself nor the charge he has made against me.”

The examining magistrate, on receipt of this letter, confronted Monsieur Rochette with Monsieur Pichereau, and told the financier the exact terms of Monsieur Pichereau’s claim. Monsieur Pichereau claimed to have bought Nerva Copper Mines of the B series, which proved to be unnegotiable, and he put in nine documents to prove it. Rochette declared that the nine documents proved nothing, that before his arrest an attempt had been made to blackmail him, that these same documents had been offered him on that occasion for £3200, and that he had refused the offer. In proof of this, he stated that copies of Monsieur Pichereau’s nine documents would be found among his (Rochette’s) papers in the private desk in his office.

In connexion with these statements, it was proved that a number of attempts had been made to blackmail Rochette, and that he had always refused any advances of the kind. It is needless to say that the arrest of this man and the closing of the banks and shutting down of mines and other enterprises in which he was interested had a disastrous effect on the market. All the money, and there was a great deal of money in Rochette’s safes, had been sequestrated by the legal authorities, and therefore of course no payments could be made. To put one case only, eighteen hundred men and women in the employ of the Syndicat Minier were clamouring for wages which could not be given them.

Eventually the court decided that liquidators should be appointed who should pay out money from a reserve fund of £110,000 which the Crédit Minier placed in the liquidator’s hands for this purpose. In July 1908, Rochette was declared a bankrupt. He resisted vigorously, and even now many people are inclined to doubt whether the declaration of his bankruptcy was legally justifiable. But the whole matter of Rochette’s financial position soon became involved in such a tangle of legal procedure that it is quite impossible to say whether Rochette could have got out of his difficulties if he had been left alone, or whether he could not. It is noteworthy at all events that a very large percentage was paid to his creditors. On the other hand, the Rochette enterprises were wildly speculative, and new flotations were frequently used to fill up financial gaps in former enterprises which were unsuccessful. One thing is very certain, and was proved during the parliamentary inquiry into the beginnings of the Rochette affair. A large number of people, Monsieur Gaudrion among them, had been keenly interested in the downfall of Rochette and had sold quantities of the shares in his companies for a fall some time before it came. Most of them had lost money. Gaudrion, on March 16, that is to say a week before Rochette’s arrest, had been severely bitten by a sudden upward jump, or “‘bear’ squeeze,” as it is called, on the Bourse, and was forced by the rapid rise of Rochette’s shares to buy back with a loss of nearly £5000.

Rochette was tried, and the case went against him, but again there were illegalities in the trial. Information was communicated to the court which was not, as the French law insists that it should be, communicated first of all to the defendant or his lawyer. In the course of the trial the liquidator, who had been officially appointed, announced that he had distributed 50 per cent. to the creditors of Rochette, and that he would be able to pay the 50 per cent. balance integrally. Rochette lodged an appeal against the verdict, and at the same time took legal action against Pichereau for making a false declaration. His appeal was heard, dismissed, and judgment rendered, by the Tenth Correctional Chamber of the Seine Tribunal on July 27, 1910—two years after his original arrest. The case was a long one, very complicated, and proceedings had been obstructed legally, whenever and wherever Rochette and his lawyers could obstruct them. The case, however, provoked considerable scandal. Charges of illegality were made by Rochette and his lawyer, Maître Maurice Bernard, in court and before the case came to court, the Press took hold of the matter, and on July 10 Monsieur Yves Durand resigned and left the employ of the Prefecture of Police. It was proved that this chef de Cabinet of Monsieur Lépine was a sleeping partner in a stock-broking firm which had made a lot of money by dealing in the shares of Rochette companies at the time of his arrest, and though Monsieur Durand was not actually proved to have profited by these transactions, grave suspicion rested on him and made his official position untenable. On July 11, 1910, Monsieur Jaurès brought the question of Rochette’s arrest before the Chamber, and accused Monsieur Clemenceau in clear terms of having proceeded illegally against the man, irrespective of his guilt or innocence.