It is worth noticing that the Rochette question had now become, as almost everything becomes in France, a political matter, and that the Socialists, with Monsieur Jaurès at their head, affected to consider Rochette a victim of arbitrary treatment by vested authority. A Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry was appointed on July 12 to examine the question. Monsieur Caillaux was a member of this Commission, and if he had not just at that time taken Ministerial rank he would very probably have been its president. The first meeting of the Parliamentary Commission was held on July 15. The first witness called was Monsieur Yves Durand, who had been Monsieur Lépine’s chef de Cabinet. His evidence has already been summarized in the last chapter, and need not therefore be repeated. Monsieur Monier, who was at that time Procureur de la République (a position which is more or less equivalent to that of Deputy Public Prosecutor), produced an immense budget of documents, all of which accused Rochette of fraud. These accusations stated that the Nerva Mines Company, the Syndicat Minier, the Banque Franco-Espagnole, the Crédit Minier, Franco-Belgian Union, the Laviana Coal Company, the Liat and Val d’Aran Mines, the Hella Incandescent Mantle Company, and the Buisson Hella, nine companies in all, which Rochette had launched by public subscription, had been floated fraudulently and irregularly. The charge was that these companies had no reasonable prospect whatever of earning money by honourable means, and that there were no real commercial assets for exploitation behind them.
On July 26 Monsieur Lépine was examined by the Commission. He began by affirming that the arrest of Rochette had been perfectly justified, and while admitting that Monsieur Yves Durand had perhaps not been prudent enough in arranging the preliminaries and checking the information he received, he acquitted him of all personal action of a dishonourable nature. He defended the arrest of Rochette, and declared that its consequence had been to put a brake on the wild speculation which Rochette’s issues had created. “I consider,” said Monsieur Lépine, “that the arrest of Rochette turned off the tap and prevented him from making new issues of shares. This preventive measure was a public benefit. Some people lost money undoubtedly, but they deserved to lose it. The speculation mania had been enormous and widely spread. It had been crazy. There were shares which were worth £4 one morning and which were run up to £22 before the same evening. If matters had been allowed to go on like this, financial catastrophe would surely have followed.”
In the deposition on November 16 made before the Commission d’Enquête by Monsieur Georges Clemenceau, the ex-Premier, after declaring that he himself had no personal knowledge of Rochette, described with characteristic brevity the conversation which he had with Monsieur Lépine just before Rochette’s arrest. “This has got to be finished off promptly,” I told him. “Do you believe Rochette to be an innocent man against whom calumniators are at work?” Monsieur Lépine replied: “Rochette is a scoundrel. He is a serious danger to the small investor, and if he is allowed to go on as he has begun we shall have a catastrophe one of these days.” “I told Monsieur Lépine to go and see the magistrates and make arrangements,” said Monsieur Clemenceau. “If I had to begin it all over again I would do again exactly what I did before, and I am quite certain that if I had allowed Rochette to get clear away with his millions out of private people’s pockets then, there would be a Commission of Inquiry at work now asking me to explain my complicity with the man.”
Monsieur Lépine was called before the Commission of Inquiry again on November 18, and once more affirmed his conviction that Rochette’s arrest had been necessary. He gave a few significant details of Rochette’s methods. Rochette had bought properties for £8000 and floated them as a company for £32,000. He had bought the Aratra Mines for £9000, and floated them with a capital of £200,000. Patents for which Rochette had paid £1200, and which, Monsieur Lépine declared, were really not worth four shillings, were valued in the prospectus of the company, which asked for, and obtained, subscriptions, at £480,000. There were fictitious dividends declared, fraudulent balance sheets concocted, prices inflated to figures which had no real existence except by Rochette’s will. Rochette paid enormous sums for advertising. One newspaper alone cost him £14,000. His advertising adviser drew a salary of nearly £2000 a year. On one deal he spent £52,000, for advertisement alone, in twelve months, and he spent £24,000 on advertisement in the ten weeks before he was arrested. In three years he created fifteen companies, issued £4,800,000 worth of shares, and bought over £3,000,000 worth of his own shares at prices above the price of issue to inflate and to keep prices up. He had then about a million and a half sterling in cash to play with.
On July 27, 1910, Rochette was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of £120, by the Tenth Correctional Tribunal of the Seine Department. The verdict, with its “attendu,” or reasons, took two and a half hours to read aloud, though it was read with the extraordinary volubility of which only a French clerk of the court possesses the secret. I have this verdict before me in its printed form. It is printed in very small print by the official printing works of the Chamber of Deputies, for the copy I possess was printed for the use of the Commission of Inquiry. The verdict, which is, as I have said, very closely printed, fills forty large quarto sheets of paper. Against this verdict Monsieur Rochette appealed again, and in the meanwhile the Commission of Inquiry spent many full days discussing the questions as to whether Monsieur Clemenceau had really ordered Monsieur Lépine to find a prosecutor against Rochette, whether Monsieur Lépine had really said that Monsieur Clemenceau had given him these orders, whether orders had been given or whether suggestions had been made—the usual waste of time and the usual mass of irrelevant detail which appears to be inseparable from the work of a parliamentary inquiry into any question in any country.
Ultimately, after long, long days of verbiage which appear curiously useless now, Rochette himself was asked to give evidence before the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry. He was delighted to attend, for he had nothing to lose and he had everything to gain by his attendance. He also had a great deal to say, and said it very well, for Rochette is a born orator. Naturally enough, he took the opportunity of pleading his own case from A to Z once more, and of denouncing the illegality of his arrest in March 1908. He launched accusations against the police, he launched accusations against members of Parliament, he was very rude indeed to financiers of repute. Above all, he was always interesting, and often amusing, and he certainly made his case appear clearer than it had ever appeared before.
His evidence is well worthy of consideration in detail, for it must not be forgotten that one of the men before whom he gave it was Monsieur Joseph Caillaux, and that he gave this evidence on November 25, 1910. A few months later, in March 1911, Monsieur Caillaux, who no doubt had been impressed by Rochette’s powers of oratory, advised his colleague, Monsieur Monis, of the dangers that might be incurred, politically speaking, if pressure were not brought to bear on the legal authorities for the postponement of Rochette’s trial, in accordance with the wishes of this extraordinary expert in legal obstruction. It is fair to infer, I think, that Rochette’s attitude before the Commission of Inquiry had impressed Monsieur Caillaux considerably, but Monsieur Caillaux’s political enemies ascribed his attitude to motives of another kind. Rochette’s evidence, if evidence it can be called, occupies twenty-five closely printed pages in quarto in the transcription printed for the Commission of Inquiry of the shorthand notes which were taken. One of the first points Rochette made was on the question of the money which he spent on advertising his various enterprises. He admitted that the figures quoted against him were very largely correct, that for instance, he really had spent as much as £2500 a week for ten weeks on advertising, “but,” he said, “it is only a question of proportion after all. The Bon Marché, the Louvre, or the Printemps can spend thousands on advertising where it would be criminally foolish of a small grocer to spend hundreds. I am not a small grocer. During the period from January 1 to March 23, 1908, in which my publicity bill was £24,000,1 did nearly half a million sterling of business.”
Rochette then made a vicious attack on Monsieur Prevet and the Petit Journal, but vicious though his attack was, it was distinctly plausible. “A shareholder of the Petit Journal called on me,” he said. “He brought some very interesting figures with him. These figures showed that in 1901 the shareholders of the Petit Journal got £2 dividend and the shares were worth £44 to £48. In 1902,” he said “Monsieur Prevet became director and six years afterwards, at the beginning of 1908, the shares were worth from £10 to £12 and the dividend was only sixteen shillings! This drop in value was not due to a general slump in the newspaper industry, for the Petit Parisien, the Journal, and the Matin, all of them halfpenny morning papers, had increased the value of their respective properties enormously.” Rochette’s visitor maintained, Rochette declared to the Commission, that if Monsieur Prevet’s management was disastrous to the Petit Journal shareholders, the fact was largely due to Monsieur Prevet’s need of money, which was notorious. Rochette went, he said, into the question of the Petit Journal’s next dividend. He saw, he declared, that it was problematical, and he therefore “inspired,” though he did not write, the circular which had been sent to the Petit Journal’s shareholders. “With regard to Monsieur Prevet’s action at this time,” says Rochette, “if he really wanted to protect the interests of his shareholders and not his own, all he had to do would have been to send out a private circular of his own to the shareholders, a list of whose names was in his possession, and convince them that my statements were wrong. He couldn’t, of course, do this, because my statements were right, and that is why he was afraid that I should take his position on the paper from him at the next general meeting. That is also why I was arrested just before that general meeting. The shares had to be deposited at the office of the Petit Journal for voting purposes about March 19. Monsieur Prevet was able to convince himself that his authority with the shareholders had dwindled, and he thought it safer for himself to get rid of me.”
Several attempts were made, according to Rochette, during the month of March 1908, to induce him to fall into cleverly laid traps which would make his arrest easy. “These traps were laid cleverly, but not cleverly enough,” Rochette declared, “and I was too astute to allow myself to be caught in them. That was why,” he added, “I was arrested on Pichereau’s disgracefully vamped-up charge.” Rochette was convinced, he told the members of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, that the anonymous letters and anonymous telephone calls warning him that his arrest was imminent with which he was bombarded between March 8 and 21 were police tactics for the purpose of persuading him to take flight and so to make matters easy for everybody. “I did not take flight,” said Rochette proudly, “and when I was arrested there were £440,000 in my safe. I could have taken this money out at any time. I did not take it.” Rochette declared that the examining magistrate, Monsieur Berr, had shown unfair prejudice against him from the moment of his arrest, and that this was so apparent that his lawyer, Maître Maurice Bernard, had made this accusation to the examining magistrate’s face: “I know that my client’s arrest was arranged, ‘worked’ if you will, by three men, Monsieur Lépine, Monsieur Prevet, and yourself!” And the examining magistrate made no reply. “Ten thousand shareholders in my companies signed a petition against my arrest and forwarded it to the Chamber of Deputies,” was one of Rochette’s points. “In this petition they stated that my arrest had been caused by Monsieur Prevet with the complicity of Monsieur Gaudrion and Monsieur Pichereau. In February 1909,” Rochette declared, “one of the experts who was examining my books walked into Monsieur Berr’s room in the Palace of Justice. I was in the little room next door, and I heard Monsieur Blanc, the expert in question, who had not seen me, ask the examining magistrate whether my case would come on for trial before the Correctional Court before Easter or not. This was proof that the experts and everybody else knew at this time that I was to be sent for trial, and that the pretence of examining my books was only a pretence and nothing more. The examining magistrate had made his mind up to send me for trial directly he had me under arrest. The Crédit Minier,” Rochette declared, “ought never to have been put into bankruptcy. None of my societies ought to have been declared bankrupt, for every creditor was paid 100 per cent. The only money that was lost was about £160,000, and that loss was due to the disgraceful “bearing” of my shares by speculators. It is not fair to say that I caused this loss of £160,000 to investors. The truth is that people who were too well informed were allowed to make £160,000 at the expense of the public. I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I have committed no fault. Surely the success of the Crédit Minier is not a fault. It had twenty-five customers when I started it, and five years later there were fifty thousand of them. I wish to point out,” said Rochette, “that my enterprises existed and did well before my arrest, and continue to exist after it and in spite of it. I venture to state positively that very few financiers who suffered as I have could make the same statement. The net result of my arrest was the heavy drop of the shares of my enterprises, a loss of £240,000 by the Crédit Minier, and the ruin of shareholders whom the krach caught unawares. Of the £240,000 which the Crédit Minier lost, certain speculators made £160,000, and £80,000 went to the expenses of the bankruptcy. The liquidator alone was paid between £12,000 and £16,000.”
Rochette told the Commission of Inquiry that he had intended taking charge of the Petit Journal, as he had taken control in the krach of the Say sugar refinery. He was, at that time, endeavouring to get hold of the concession of the Paris Omnibus Company and was backing up the Darracq group with money so that Monsieur Darracq could obtain the concession from the Municipal Council. Monsieur Rochette, questioned very closely by the members of the Commission, was forced to admit that one of his lawyers, Monsieur Rabier (one of the stalwarts of the Caillaux party in Parliament), drew about £500 a year for legal advice, and on other occasions received sums varying from £2800 to £3200. The members of the Commission expressed doubt about these figures, and a curious story was told by a former clerk of Rochette’s with regard to his book-keeping methods.