From this story it appeared that efforts were usually made by Rochette to conceal the real amounts which were paid for their services to newspapers and to those lawyers in the employ of the financier who happened to be members of Parliament or political personages. Curiously enough most of Rochette’s lawyers happened to be political personages, and one of the lawyers of the Crédit Minier was Monsieur René Renoult, who is a member of the present Cabinet. In many ways the examination of Rochette by the Parliamentary Commission was an eye-opener to the public. Accusations of venality on the part of public men are so common in France, owing to the licence allowed in the Press, that such words as “corruption,” “theft,” “lying” and the like have almost lost their force when applied to men in the van of politics. But the details of the manner in which Rochette conducted his business impressed and alarmed the public by their unpleasant likeness to the unsavoury details of the Panama case.
One of the members of the Commission, Monsieur Jules Delahaye, who throughout the inquiry acted very much like a counsel for the prosecution of every political man who was mixed up in the Rochette affair, pointed out this unsavoury resemblance. “I consider Monsieur Rochette to be a great corrupter of public morals,” he said. “I am not at all content with his explanations. They do not satisfy me. There are matters of far greater gravity behind his methods than he would have us suppose, and I would ask my colleagues to concentrate their attention on the items of Rochette’s expenditure for publicity with the same intensity as the attention of the Parliamentary Commission had at the time to be concentrated, with the results which you remember, on the publicity accounts of the Panama Canal. In this case, as in the case of Panama, public morals have been corrupted. Millions (“of francs” is meant, of course) have been employed, not only to buy publicity in the newspapers, but, as the Prefect of Police has told us, to corrupt the moral and financial rectitude of people of all ranks and all stations in Paris, in the provinces, all over France. I will go so far as to say that the taint actually extended to the Church. That is a characteristic of the affair.” (Page 547 of the official shorthand reports of the Parliamentary Commission.)
Rochette paid, in many ways, on the plea of publicity. He was in the habit, when he wanted to pay and to preserve secrecy for the payment, of sending a note down to the cashier of the Crédit Minier with his initials “H.R.” and a little cross marked on it next to the amount. These little crosses were used in the books, it is suggested, to signify that the amounts entered against certain names were not the real amounts paid, which were much larger. The payments were made directly from hand to hand by Monsieur Rochette to his political friends and helpers, and no receipts passed. I do not propose to go very much into detail on this uncomfortable question. The evidence of Monsieur Duret, who acted as Rochette’s private secretary, and that of Monsieur Yenck, a clerk in the Crédit Minier, leaves a very uncomfortable taste in the mouth. Monsieur Yenck declared that Monsieur Duret’s sole business was to act as intermediary between political men and Rochette. He used to speak in very familiar terms of many well-known politicians, and was on the friendliest terms with Rochette himself. He always called Rochette by his first name, “Henri,” and was in the habit of alluding to Monsieur Rabier as “Rab.” It was Duret who, according to Yenck, secured, by political influence, the decoration of the Legion of Honour for Henri Rochette. Yenck declared that Duret had on one occasion made erasures in the private books of the Crédit Minier, so as to avoid scandal. He told the Commission that Duret, whom he had seen with a scratcher in his hand, and one of the Crédit Minier’s private books in front of him, had explained what he was doing by the remark: “I am very much afraid that Henri is going to be arrested, and I don’t want the name of ‘Rab’ to be found in the books.” (Page 566 of the official shorthand reports of the Parliamentary Commission.)
On February 1, 1912, the judgment against Rochette was annulled on grounds of technical irregularity, by the Court of Correctional Appeal, and the conclusions of the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission were laid on the table of the Chamber of Deputies. It will be remembered that according to the statement made by the Procureur Général, Monsieur Victor Fabre, the Prime Minister, Monsieur Monis, had brought influence to bear on him for the postponement of the Rochette trial on appeal from the judgment of July 1910. Monsieur Jaurès, the President of the Committee of Inquiry, on March 20, 1912, told the Chamber the history of the Rochette case as he knew it, and he knows it perhaps better than any other Frenchman living except Rochette himself. He told the story of the strangely illegal manner in which the police had had Rochette arrested. He pointed out that the police and the lawyers had been at loggerheads as to the procedure to be employed. The police acted in one way, the Parquet (that is to say the legal authorities) acted in another, and by their ill-considered lack of unity of action with the Parquet, the police had undoubtedly served the interests of a number of men who had speculated and had made money on the downfall of Rochette. It was, said Monsieur Jaurès, a curious fact that while the arrest of Rochette could not be effected for the mere purpose of protecting the small investor, it was effected by means of a conspiracy between a banker, Monsieur Gaudrion, who had sold Rochette shares for the fall, and Monsieur Prevet, the director of a newspaper, who was anxious to throttle a competitor.
In this conspiracy Monsieur Gaudrion furnished the prosecutor and Monsieur Prevet supplied the influence. Monsieur Gaudrion did not, himself, prosecute. He could not do so because he had been in trouble with the laws of his country. He found a man of straw to act as prosecutor in his stead, a man named Pichereau, and gave him shares and money to act against Rochette. “When we examined Monsieur Gaudrion before the Commission of Inquiry, I said to him,” said Monsieur Jaurès, “I can understand that you, who were gambling for the fall of Rochette shares should be anxious for the arrest of Rochette, but why did Pichereau ruin himself by bringing an action which made the shares in which he had invested his whole fortune perfectly valueless?” “Gaudrion answered,” said Monsieur Jaurès, “‘The shares did not belong to Pichereau’,” and this was the truth. Monsieur Jaurès suggested that the conspiracy had gone even further. Monsieur Clemenceau, who was Prime Minister, told us that he intervened because he was anxious to scotch the legend that the Government were protecting Rochette. “I told him to be careful,” said Monsieur Jaurès. Monsieur Prevet had told the Commission that Gaudrion had advised him on March 19 or early on the morning of the 20th, of the readiness of Pichereau to prosecute.
At half-past eleven on the morning of March 20, Monsieur Clemenceau telephoned for Monsieur Lépine and told him to find a prosecutor. Monsieur Lépine spoke to Monsieur Yves Durand, and Monsieur Yves Durand went straight to Monsieur Prevet. “When I pointed out,” said Monsieur Jaurès, “the significance of these dates, Monsieur Clemenceau exclaimed. ‘It is a coincidence.’ Monsieur Lépine also said, ‘It is a coincidence,’ and I can say no more than ‘It is a coincidence’ to the Chamber to-day.”
Here in a few words we have the real origin of the affaire Rochette, and the “coincidence” which Monsieur Jaurès pointed out to the Chamber is a painfully suggestive one. Rochette, after his first sentence, was allowed to drag proceedings out for many months, from July 27 of one year to April 29 of the next, though the courts always found against him except in very minor subsidiary actions. He then secured a further postponement from April 29, 1911, till January 12, 1912. During all this time Rochette had been a free man, and he was able to continue his financial operations. His reasons for spending immense sums of money on securing these postponements of his trial were self-evident. Monsieur Jaurès pointed out these reasons to the Chamber. Rochette said to himself, Monsieur Jaurès explained, that the more business he did, the more chance he had of ultimate escape. If during these months of delay he succeeded in bringing off one substantial coup he would cease to be the adventurer who was a danger to the small investor, and would be considered as the clever and successful financier who had triumphed over the illegality of his arrest in the first place.
In this speech before the Chamber, Monsieur Jaurès referred to the contradictions in the evidence of the Procureur Général Monsieur Fabre, the Prime Minister Monsieur Monis, and Judge Bidault de L’Isle, with reference to the last and longest postponement of the Rochette trial from April 29, 1911, to January 12, 1912. He alluded to the rumour which was gaining ground that political influence had been brought to bear on the judicial authorities for the postponement of the trial. He expressed the regret that these rumours had not been probed until after the truth was made clear and he declared that Monsieur Fabre had said either too much or too little before the Parliamentary Commission. We know the truth now. We know that political influence was brought to bear for the postponement of the Rochette trial, we know who brought that influence to bear, and the truckling with the truth on the part of those concerned in the postponement must be the subject of the next chapter of this book, for this one is, I fear, too long already.