France from Behind the Veil: Fifty Years of Social and Political Life

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

Another remarkable side of the Dreyfus agitation is the rapid way in which it subsided and was forgotten, as soon as the Captain was rehabilitated, and granted the Cross of the Legion of Honour as a reward for his long sufferings. With the exception of a few people, such as Madame Zola and her immediate friends, all those who had taken a leading part in the struggle did everything that they could to induce the world to forget. M. Clemenceau himself was the prime mover in the general desire to consign to oblivion this episode in the political life of the day. The latter, when he became Prime Minister, buried Zola in the Panthéon. The event was the occasion of a new misfortune for the ill-starred Captain Dreyfus, inasmuch as a Royalist and Clerical partisan seized this opportunity to fire at him a shot which slightly wounded him. The incident nearly gave rise to a panic among the assistants, who thought that a bomb had been thrown at President Fallières and the members of the government who were present at the ceremony.

Having paid this last homage to the writer who had lent the help of his powerful pen to the cause which he had so ardently championed, M. Clemenceau hastened to hide in the tomb of Zola every remembrance of the Dreyfus affair, although by it he had realised his every ambition. It had given him a popularity among French politicians of his generation which earlier he had been unable to obtain; it had posed him before the world as something more than a clever man (which reputation he bore)—as a real statesman, able to treat on a footing of equality the statesmen of Europe—and it had paved his way to the Presidency of the Republic, that goal of his ambitions. Now all his desire was to drive away from the mind of the public the memory of the political campaign in which he had taken such a prominent part.

After burying in the Panthéon the mortal remains of the great author whom he had succeeded in persuading that it was his duty to protest in the name of France against the iniquity that had sent Captain Dreyfus in exile to Devil’s Island, M. Clemenceau considered himself free from further obligations toward those who had been associated with him in the task of bringing Captain Dreyfus back to France, and restoring him to his family. He saw no reason to continue to meet them, and when Emile Zola’s daughter married one of his former secretaries, he refrained from assisting at the ceremony under the plea of ill-health, an excuse which appeared to be the more out of place seeing that it was announced in the papers that on that very day he had gone into the country for the shooting. The Prime Minister did not care that the world should think he remained faithful to those associations which had had for their only excuse the political necessities of the moment.

M. Clemenceau was one of many persons who had seen in the Dreyfus affair the possibility of becoming either famous or powerful through the energy with which they defended his cause. Many of the minor satellites had looked to it in order to emerge from the obscurity in which they would otherwise have remained to the end of their days. There was hardly a journalist in Paris who did not try to pose either as a Dreyfusard or the reverse; they became ferocious in their attacks according as their professed opinions differed. Everything which until that time had been considered sacred in France was dragged in the mire and became dirtier every day. Priests forgot their sacred character; soldiers did not remember the honour of their flag; politicians renounced the creeds in which they had believed; respect disappeared from the hearts of men and from the actions of the nation. One can say that France came out of this tragedy dishonoured before the world—diminished in her own eyes.

But Radicalism grew stronger during the struggle which waged between the friends and the adversaries of Dreyfus, and certainly it was owing to this struggle that anti-militarism became so prominent in France. It was this episode which taught the nation to despise the army and to rise against its discipline. From this point of view the campaign in favour of Captain Dreyfus did much harm to France, but from the moral viewpoint it is impossible not to admire the feeling of indignation which roused so many people against the injustice of a few. It is only a pity that this indignation was so often but the mask under which lurked ambitions that had nothing to do with the desire to see Captain Dreyfus righted.

Among all the people who were the actors in this drama, there are some whom it is impossible to pass by. One of them is Colonel Esterhazy, that dark figure who from accuser became the defender of his colleague, who certainly knew more about the hidden currents of the whole affair than anyone else, and who never spoke the truth about it, even when he turned upon his former superiors, perhaps because this truth would have been even more shameful for him than for those who had employed him.

I had occasion to meet Esterhazy before the disgrace which overwhelmed him after the Dreyfus trial. There was a time when he had been a dashing cavalry officer, much sought after in the most elegant of the many elegant salons of Paris. I had seen him at the Tuileries, dancing vis-à-vis with the fair Empress who reigned there, and later on I had the opportunity of watching him in several houses where we were both frequent visitors. He was an amiable man, full of wit, and exceedingly amusing in his conversation. As for his moral worth, no one troubled about it at that period, and though from time to time scandal of some sort became associated with his name, no one could have believed him capable of the dark deeds which later on stamped him with such a stigma of shame and unscrupulousness.

And yet, a man who certainly was one of the most observant of his generation; Jules Ferry, who was not destined to see all the episodes which have rendered the Dreyfus affair so memorable, meeting Esterhazy one evening, expressed to me, as we were going out together from the hospitable house where we had dined, the profound distrust with which the brilliant officer inspired him. “C’est un homme capable de tout,” he told me, and when I asked him what reasons he had for proffering such a severe judgment on a man he did not know except superficially—“Look at his hands,” he said, “ce sont les mains d’un brigand.” Later, when I saw Esterhazy during the Zola trial, I remembered these words, and glanced at the hands of the Colonel as he was giving evidence at the bar; they were repulsive in their shape, and certainly gave one the impression of being the hands of a brigand.

Esterhazy was the saddest of all the sad heroes of the Dreyfus affair, because the other sad actor in the drama, Colonel Henry, had at least the courage to seek in death the expiation of his crime. There has been much talk about his suicide, and some people have expressed a doubt concerning it, suggesting that it had been simulated, and that the Colonel had simply been put out of the way, as he might have become rather an embarrassing witness. I hasten to say that I do not believe in this version. Colonel Henry was a soldier, more imbued with military discipline than Esterhazy; he would not have been able to face the shame of a public trial, and his soldier’s soul would not have found the courage to accuse those who had had the right to order him to do the deed for which he was to lose his life, and his honour after death.

When I say so, it is on the authority of another soldier who also had had to do with the question of the guilt or innocence of Captain Dreyfus, General de Pellieux. It was he who had read during the debates of the Zola trial, when the great writer had been sent before a jury to answer to the accusation of having published his famous letter, “I accuse,” the false document manufactured by Henry. It is impossible to deny that the General had done so in the full conviction that it was decisive and would make the whole world share his own persuasion as to the guilt of Dreyfus. When, later on, M. Cavaignac, who presided at the War Office, had the loyalty to declare publicly that this document was nothing but a forgery, made for the purpose of preventing the revision of the trial of the unfortunate prisoner on Devil’s Island, General de Pellieux was inconsolable. His grief was that anyone could believe he had wanted to crush Dreyfus with the weight of an accusation which he had known to be false, and it was whilst discussing with me later on all the details of this unfortunate episode in his life that he told me his opinion about Colonel Henry, adding that he had not the slightest doubt as to the suicide of the unfortunate officer.