That weapon no one better understood how to use than he did. His great ambition had always been to become Prime Minister, if not President, of France, but so far he had not seen any possibility of realising his dream. The Dreyfus affair gave him the opportunity he sought, and he was not the man to allow it to slip.
He engineered the whole campaign begun by M. Scheurer Kestner, when he proclaimed aloud that he had obtained the proofs of the innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus; he encouraged M. Zola to write his famous letter, “I accuse”; he gave all the benefit of his experience to those whom he sent fighting for the cause which he considered to be more his than anyone else’s, and in the end he reaped the reward of his unremitting zeal. To the Dreyfus case he owed finally the Premiership of France, a post which he had coveted all his life, and on the wave of this affair he would have been elected President of the Republic had he not found an adversary of importance in M. Briand, whom he himself had helped to come to the front without suspecting that he could become his rival.
A curious feature in the Dreyfus campaign was the celerity with which it became a personal matter with those who took part in it. One and all sought in its intricacies their own advantage, more than anything else, and the Captain was very soon forgotten. Having been the pretext for furthering innumerable personal ambitions, he was scarcely remembered whilst the fight for his rehabilitation lasted.
As an instance of what I have just said, I will relate an amusing incident. After the trial at Rennes, and when it became known that President Loubet had pardoned Dreyfus, I was dining one evening with a lady, Madame de——, whose salon had been one of the strongholds of the Dreyfusards. Of course, the affair was discussed. Someone remarked that it was a pity that the accused man had not been acquitted, as it would have put an end to the whole sad and, in many points, sordid business, whereon our hostess exclaimed, “Oh, no, it is not a pity; fancy how sad it would be if we had not a pretext for carrying it farther!”
This hasty retort, which I am sure Madame de —— regretted later on, represented the opinion of most of the partisans of Dreyfus; they forgot entirely the personal feelings of the victim of this injustice of political passion, and only sought in the agitation the furtherance of their own schemes and intrigues.
This Dreyfus campaign completely hypnotised every person who was drawn into its intricacies. Towards its close, I do not think that even among the principal actors of the drama one could have found one man or woman who really understood it, or who could speak of it without allowing their personal interest to interfere with the opinions held.
As for the real circumstances attending this curious episode in the history of modern France, I do not think that they will ever be known. It is certain that among some of the adversaries of Dreyfus there were several sincere people who believed that he was guilty. There were also others, quite as earnest, who professed the erroneous conviction, that once a mistake had been made this mistake ought not, for the honour of the army and for that of its generals, to be admitted. Of course, this was a point of view which could never be accepted by anyone calling himself honest, but, in a certain sense, it can be understood though never excused.
Only the severest condemnation can be given to the means by which it was endeavoured to prove Dreyfus guilty, the hideous way in which each one among all those upon whom his fate depended not only refused to acknowledge error, but, on the contrary, tried everything that could be thought of in order to uphold the false theories as to his guilt.
During the time that the agitation for the new trial lasted, I had more than one opportunity of discussing the innocence of Dreyfus with several officers holding high commands, and I was horrified to observe the cynical way in which they tried to explain to me that it was indispensable that the decision of the Paris court-martial should be confirmed. When I asked them why, they always replied the same thing: “Les arrêts d’un conseil de guerre, ne peuvent être critiqués, cela leur enleverait toute autorité sur l’armée dans l’avenir.” (“The decisions of a court-martial can never be criticised; it would deprive them of all their authority over the army in the future.”)
I have never been able to make them understand that, however important the evidence, a court-martial can be mistaken just as well as other people.