But the further evidence of Monsieur Victor Fabre, when, in March 1914, he told the whole truth at last, shows that the orders he received really did come from Rochette and came almost directly from him. After his interview with Monsieur Monis, the Procureur-Général had a conversation with his assistant, Monsieur Bloch-Laroque, whose title (Substitut) does not exist in England. Monsieur Bloch-Laroque and Monsieur Fabre talked over the fact that Monsieur Maurice Bernard had deliberately threatened Monsieur Fabre, that he had said, before leaving the room and banging the door behind him, that “if Monsieur Fabre did not obey, it would be the worse for him.” It is surely unheard of, that Rochette’s lawyer should be able to have terrorized the French Procureur-Général with such language, but Monsieur le Procureur-Général Victor Fabre told the Commission of Inquiry, “I was well aware of the influence and knew the friends of Maître Maurice Bernard, and I knew that he did not say what he said without knowing that his words would receive sanction in high places.” Maître Maurice Bernard is an intimate friend of Monsieur Caillaux, and was his lawyer in his divorce case.
We may resume this inner history of a series of disgraceful happenings in the history of France in comparatively few words. Rochette has made enormous sums of money in a very few years, and the French authorities believe that he has swindled and is swindling the public. There are difficulties in the way of proving this immediately. The authorities connive at the substitution of a man of straw for a proper prosecutor so as not to allow Rochette to slip through their fingers, and he is arrested. By every means in his power, and the French legal code gives him many opportunities, Rochette drags the case against him from court to court, and succeeds in avoiding final judgment for over two years and six months. Then, when a definite trial appears inevitable, the Prime Minister, acting under advice from the Minister of Finance, who has allowed himself to be terrorized by Rochette—to put the mildest possible construction on the reason for his conduct—brings influence to bear on the magistrature, and postpones the trial again. Rochette in the meanwhile has left France, and has continued to prosecute his financial schemes. There we have the Rochette case in a nutshell. There also we have its intimate connexion with the Caillaux drama, for the Minister of Finance who, for more or less personal reasons, persuaded the Prime Minister to order the postponement of the trial, was Monsieur Joseph Caillaux.
How personal were Monsieur Caillaux’s reasons for advising Monsieur Monis to secure the postponement of the Rochette trial were shown in a letter from Rochette himself, which he sent to the President of the Commission of Inquiry on March 27, 1914. The letter was a very long one. In it Monsieur Rochette told the story of how he had terrorized the Minister of Finance, Monsieur Caillaux, into working for him. Rochette had compiled a volume of 120 pages on the history of financial issues made in France and floated on the market from 1890 to 1910. In these tables it was shown that French investors had had heavy losses amounting in all to four hundred million pounds sterling. The book was likely to create very serious difficulties for Monsieur Caillaux, the Finance Minister, who had been responsible for permitting many of these issues of stock, and it was Rochette’s determination that his lawyer should read these figures in court on the plea of showing that if some of his issues had brought losses to the French investor other issues under higher authority than his own had done the same thing on a larger scale. The importance which Monsieur Caillaux attributed to this book is proved by the fact that he spoke of it to Monsieur Monis as a political reason for doing what Rochette wished, and postponing the trial. It is interesting to note that there are actually thirty-eight prosecutions waiting Rochette’s return to France.
The history of the Rochette case shows unfortunately that Madame Caillaux’s revolver shot was not the only crime in the full story of the Caillaux drama. There is another criminal whom a higher court must try than the Paris Court of Assizes, there is another victim besides Gaston Calmette. The criminal is expediency, expediency which allows men in the positions of Prime Minister, of judge, of Public Prosecutor to tamper with fact, to mislead and to lie in the belief that they “have the right” to do so. The victim whom they murdered is The Truth.
XI
ABOUT FRENCH POLITICS
Perhaps the most difficult part of the life of France for an Englishman to understand is her politics. To give with any thoroughness at all even a slight idea of the French political parties and the opinions for which these parties fight, would require another volume quite as big as this one. But the object of this chapter is not an essay on the intricacies of party politics in France, nor do I propose to attempt a detailed explanation of the differences of opinion which divide the parties. My object is rather to give the reader some insight into the clockwork as it were of the inner political life of France, so as to throw more light, within the measure of my power with the lamp, on the Caillaux drama, which is such a salad of passion, politics, and finance.
It is, as I have said, extremely difficult for an English reader to realize what French political life really is, for it is so very different from political life at home, and though it might more easily be compared perhaps to the political life of the United States it differs in many ways and in many essentials from that also. But French political life does resemble the political life of America in one way, in contrast to the political life of England. Its very foundation is familiarity, and the French politician is not generally respected by his compatriots as one who knows more than themselves. He is admired as one who has more cunning. The French used to take pride in the familiarity with which they treat their politicians, for familiarity such as is the mainspring of France’s politics used to be called Egalité, and is still one of the words, in this disguise, with which the French politician loves to conjure, and succeeds in conjuring, votes out of an empty hat.
If I were asked to name the most powerful political class in modern France I should plump for the marchand de vin. The marchand de vin, the keeper of the little wineshop, with the zinc counter and the little tables with their stone tops beyond it, which is the equivalent of the English public house, is quite the most powerful electoral agent existing in France, and he is recognized as such by every French politician. At election times, or for that matter, at any time, no French politician can afford to neglect him, and he controls votes without number in every town, every village, and every district throughout the length and breadth of the country.