THE ADMINISTRATIONS OF JEAN CASIMIR-PERIER
June, 1894, to January, 1895
AND OF FELIX FAURE
January, 1895, to February, 1899
The customary promptness in the choice of a President, so unfamiliar to
American campaigns, was observed in the election of Carnot's successor.
The historic name and the social and financial position of the new chief
magistrate, Jean Casimir-Perier, seemed to the monarchical
sister-nations a guarantee of national stability and dignity. In reality
the election brought about a more definite cleavage between rival
political tendencies. Casimir-Perier, grandson of Louis-Philippe's great
minister, obviously represented the Moderates, most of whom tried in all
sincerity to carry out the _esprit nouveau_ and a policy of good-will
toward the Catholic Church. The Radicals said that this was playing into
the hands of the Clericals, and to the Socialists Casimir-Perier was
merely a hated capitalist. He was, moreover, unfortunately unfit for
the acrimonies of political life. High-strung and emotional, he writhed
under misinterpretation and abuse, and rebelled against the
constitutional powerlessness of his office. He had never really wanted
the Presidency and had accepted it chiefly through the personal
persuasion of his friend the statesman Burdeau, who unfortunately died
soon after his election. The brief Presidency of Casimir-Perier, lasting
less than a year, was destined to see the beginning of the worst trial
the French Republic had yet experienced, the famous Dreyfus case.
The Administration, in which Dupuy remained Prime Minister, began by
repressive measures, laws directed against the anarchists and the trial
_en masse_ of thirty defendants ranging from utopian theorists to actual
criminals. Most of them were acquitted, but the procedure did not
ingratiate the Government with the advanced parties. Toward the end of
1894 the Dreyfus case began to be talked of, an affair which was
destined to develop into a tremendous struggle of the leaders of the
army and the Church to obtain control of the nation.
In September, 1894, an officer named Henry, of the spy service of the
French army, came into possession of a document pieced together from
fragments stolen from a waste-paper basket in the German Embassy. This
document, containing a _bordereau_ or memorandum of information largely
about the French artillery offered to the German military attache,
Schwartzkoppen, was anonymous, but Henry undoubtedly recognized, sooner
or later, the handwriting of a friend, Major Esterhazy, a soldier of
fortune in the French army, of bad reputation and shady character.
Unable to destroy the document, which had been seen by others, Henry
tried to fasten it on somebody else. Indeed, many people believe that
Henry was an accomplice of Esterhazy in German pay. By a strange
coincidence it happened that the handwriting of the _bordereau_ somewhat
resembled that of a brilliant young Jewish officer of the General Staff
named Alfred Dreyfus. He belonged to a wealthy Alsatian family, and from
antecedent probability would not seem to need to play a traitor's part,
but he was intensely unpopular among his fellows because of many
disagreeable traits of character. Moreover, anti-Semitism, formerly
non-existent in France, was now rife. It had been largely fomented by
the anti-Jewish agitator Edouard Drumont, with his book _la France
juive_ (1886) and his newspaper the _Libre Parole_ (1892). Prejudice
against the Jews as tricky financiers had been prepared and encouraged
by the sensational failure of the great bank, the Union generale, a
Catholic rival of the Rothschilds, in 1882, and by the Panama scandals
with the doings of Jacques de Reinach, Cornelius Herz, and Arton. The
_Libre Parole_ had worked against Jewish officers in the army, an
activity which culminated in some sensational duels, particularly one
between Captain Mayer and the marquis de Mores (1892), in which the Jew
was killed.
So, in the present instance, the Minister of War, General Mercier, who
had recently committed some much-criticized administrative blunders, and
who now wished to show his efficiency, caused the arrest of Dreyfus.
Then, egged on by anti-Semitic newspapers which had got hold of
Dreyfus's name, Mercier brought him before a court-martial. The trial
was held in secret, and the War Department sent to the officers
constituting the tribunal, without the knowledge of the prisoner or his
counsel Maitre Demange, a secret _dossier_, a collection of trumped-up
incriminating documents. Demange devoted himself to proving that Dreyfus
was not the author of the _bordereau_, but the members of the
court-martial, believing in the genuineness of the additional documents,
unhesitatingly convicted him of treason. Consequently, in spite of his
protestations of innocence, Dreyfus was publicly degraded on January 5,
1895, and hustled off to solitary confinement on the unhealthy Devil's
Isle, off the coast of French Guiana. Meanwhile the whole French people
sincerely believed that a vile traitor had been justly condemned and
that the secrecy of the case was due to the advisability of avoiding
diplomatic complications with Germany. With dramatic unexpectedness,
only ten days later (January 15), Casimir-Perier resigned the
Presidency.
During the whole Dreyfus affair Casimir-Perier had chafed because his
ministers had constantly acted without keeping him informed,
particularly when he was called upon by the German Government to
acknowledge that it had had nothing to do with Dreyfus. He had lost by
death the support of his friend Burdeau; he was discouraged by the
campaign of abuse against him, especially the election as Deputy in
Paris of Gerault-Richard, one of his most active vilifiers. In
particular he felt that his own Cabinet, and above all its leader Dupuy,
were false to him. A discussion in the Chamber concerning the duration
of the state guarantees to certain of the great railway companies ended
in a vote unfavorable to the Cabinet, which resigned, whereupon
Casimir-Perier seized the opportunity to go too. The Socialists declared
that Dupuy had provoked his own defeat in order to embarrass the
President by the difficulty of forming a new Cabinet, and make him
resign as well.
Two days later the electoral Congress met at Versailles. The Radicals
supported Henri Brisson. The Moderates and the Conservatives were
divided between Waldeck-Rousseau and Felix Faure, but Waldeck-Rousseau
having thrown his strength on the second ballot to Faure, the latter was
elected.
The new President, recently Minister of the Navy, was a well-meaning
man, but full of vanity and naively delighted with his own rise in the
world from a humble position to that of chief magistrate. The extent to
which his judgment was warped by his temperament is shown by the later
developments of the Dreyfus case.
Felix Faure's first Cabinet was led by the Republican Moderate Alexandre
Ribot. It lasted less than a year and its history was chiefly
noteworthy, at least in foreign affairs, by the increasing openness of
the Franco-Russian _rapprochement_ at the ceremonies of the inauguration
of the Kiel Canal. In internal affairs there were some violent
industrial disturbances and strikes.
In October, 1895, the Moderates gave way to the Radical Cabinet of Leon
Bourgeois. It was viewed with suspicion by the moneyed interests, who
accused it of gravitating toward the Socialists. The cleavage between
the two tendencies of the Republican Party became more marked. The
Moderates joined forces with the Conservatives to oppose the schemes for
social and financial reforms of the Radicals and of the representatives
of the working classes. Prominent among these was the proposal for a
progressive income tax. The Senate, naturally a more conservative body,
was opposed to the Bourgeois Cabinet, which had a majority, though not a
very steadfast one, in the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate, usually a
nonentity in determining the fall of a cabinet, for once successfully
asserted its power and, by refusing to vote the credits asked for by the
Ministry for the Madagascar campaign, caused it to resign in April,
1896. The enemies of the Senate maintained that the Chamber of Deputies,
elected by direct suffrage, was the only judge of the fate of a cabinet.
But Bourgeois's hold was at best precarious and he seized the
opportunity to withdraw.
The Meline Cabinet which followed was a return to the Moderates
supported by the Conservatives. Its opponents accused it of following
what in American political parlance is called a "stand-pat" policy, but
it remained in office longer than any ministry up to its time, a little
over two years. It afforded, at any rate, an opportunity for the
adversaries of the Republic to strengthen their positions and encouraged
the transformation of the Dreyfus case into a political instead of a
purely judicial matter.
In foreign affairs the most spectacular events were the visit of the
Czar and Czarina to France in 1896 and the return visit of the French
President to Russia in 1897. At the banquet of leave-taking on the
French warship _Pothuau_, in their prepared speeches, the Czar and the
President made use of the same expression "friendly and _allied_
nations," thus publicly proclaiming to Europe the alliance suspected
since 1891.
In spite of the unanimous feeling of Dreyfus's guilt, his family did not
lose faith in him, and his brother Mathieu set about the apparently
impossible task of rehabilitation. But it chanced that one other person
began to have doubts of the justice of Dreyfus's condemnation. This was
Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, who had been present at the court-martial
as representative of the War Department, and who had since become chief
of the espionage service, and Henry's superior. Another document stolen
from a waste-paper basket at the German Embassy, an unforwarded
pneumatic despatch (_petit bleu_), was brought to him, and directed his
suspicions to Esterhazy, to whom it was addressed. At first he did not
connect Esterhazy and Dreyfus, but on obtaining specimens of
Esterhazy's handwriting he was struck by the likeness with that of the
_bordereau_. Then, examining the secret _dossier_, to which he now had
access, he was stupefied to see its insignificance.
[Illustration: MARIE-GEORGES PICQUART]
From this time on, Picquart worked, with extraordinary tenacity of
purpose and against all obstacles, for the rehabilitation of a stranger.
Everybody was against him. His chief subordinate Henry dreaded
revelations above all things, and set his colleagues against him. His
superiors disliked any suggestion that an army court could have made a
mistake, the remedying of which would help a Jew.
Gradually, however, the agitation started by Mathieu Dreyfus was
becoming stronger. He had won the help of a skilled writer Bernard
Lazare; a daily paper succeeded in obtaining and publishing a facsimile
of the _bordereau_. But Picquart was sent away from Paris on a tour of
inspection, and when the matter came up in the Chamber, through an
interpellation, the Minister of War, General Billot, declared that the
judgment of 1894 was absolutely legal and just. Matters thus seemed
settled again.
But a prominent Alsatian member of Parliament, Scheurer-Kestner, one of
the Vice-Presidents of the Senate, was half-persuaded by Mathieu and
Bernard Lazare. When Picquart's friend and legal adviser, Leblois,
rather injudiciously, from a professional point of view, confided to him
his client's suspicions, he was thoroughly convinced and the two
separate currents of activity now coalesced. Yet the greater the
agitation in favor of Dreyfus, the greater grew the opposition. The
anti-Semites shrieked with rage against Judas, the "traitor." The upper
ranks of the army were honeycombed by Clerical influences. An enormous
proportion of the officers belonged to reactionary families and the
Chief of Staff himself, General de Boisdeffre, was under the thumb of
the Pere Du Lac, one of the most prominent Jesuits in France. The
Clericals and anti-Semites, therefore, joined forces, and, by calling
the Dreyfus agitation an attack on the honor of the army and a play into
the hands of Germany, they won over all the jingoes and former
Boulangists, who formed the new party of Nationalists. This was the
so-called alliance of "the sword and the holy-water sprinkler" (_le
sabre et le goupillon_). Above all, certain religious associations,
particularly the Assumptionists, under the name of religion, organized a
campaign of slander and abuse against all who ventured to speak for
Dreyfus. By a ludicrous counter-play the scoundrel Esterhazy had
defenders as an injured innocent, the more so that Henry and the clique
at the War Office found it to their interest to support him.
Matters reached a crisis when, on November 15, 1897, Mathieu Dreyfus
denounced Esterhazy to the Minister of War as author of the _bordereau_
and as guilty of the treason for which his brother had been condemned.
This was partly a tactical mistake, because, even if Esterhazy were
proved to have written the _bordereau_, it would still be necessary to
show him guilty of actual treason. It made it possible to swerve the
discussion from the conviction of Dreyfus as a _res adjudicata_ (_chose
jugee_) to vague charges against Esterhazy. The later called for a
vindication, he was triumphantly acquitted by a court-martial early in
January, 1898, and Picquart was put under arrest on various charges of
indiscipline in connection with the whole affair.
Few and far between as they now seemed, the lovers of justice were still
to be counted with. They consisted at first of a small number of
much-derided _intellectuels_, scholars and trained thinkers, who used
their judgment and not their prejudices. One of these was the famous
novelist Emile Zola, who, to keep the case under discussion, published
in the _Aurore_ on January 13, a few days after Esterhazy's acquittal,
his famous letter, _J'accuse_. In this article Zola denounced the guilty
machinations of Dreyfus's adversaries _seriatim_, blamed the Dreyfus
court-martial for convicting on secret evidence and the Esterhazy court
for acquitting a guilty man in obedience to orders. Zola was not in
possession of all the facts, since his precise aim was to have them
brought out, and in his charges against the Esterhazy court he was
technically and legally at fault. But he courted prosecution and got it.
On February 7 Zola was brought to trial. The crafty authorities
eliminated all references to the trial of 1894 as a _chose jugee_ and
prosecuted Zola for having declared that Esterhazy was acquitted by
order. Their tool, the presiding magistrate Delegorgue, seconded their
efforts by ruling out every question which might throw light on the
Dreyfus case, in spite of the attempts of Zola's chief lawyer Labori.
Party passion was at its height, hired gangs of men were posted about
the court-house to hoot and attack the Dreyfusites, members of the
General Staff appeared in full uniform to interrupt the trial and
bulldoze the jury by mysterious hints of war with Germany. Finally Zola
was condemned to fine and imprisonment. At this trial for the first time
mention was mysteriously but openly made of a new document, understood
to be a communication alluding to Dreyfus between the Italian and the
German military _attaches_ at Paris. Zola appealed, the higher court
broke the verdict on the ground that the prosecution should have been
instigated by the offended court-martial and not by the Government, he
was brought to trial again on a change of venue at Versailles, was
unsuccessful in interposing obstacles to an inevitable condemnation, and
so fled to England (July).
Meanwhile, public opinion was becoming yet more violently excited.
France was divided into two great camps, the line of cleavage often
estranging the closest friends and relatives. On the one side was a vast
majority consisting of the Clericals, the jingoes or Nationalists, the
anti-Semites, and the unreflecting mass of the population. On the other
were ranged the "intellectuals," the Socialists who were now rallying to
the cause of tolerance, the Jews, and the few French Protestants. The
League of the Rights of Man stood opposed to the association of the
_Patrie Francaise_. In the midst of this turmoil were held the elections
of May, 1898, for the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies. The political
coloring of the new body was not sensibly changed, but the open
Dreyfusites were all excluded. The Moderates now generally dubbed
themselves "Progressists." None the less at the first session the now
long-lived Meline Cabinet resigned after a vote requesting it to govern
with fewer concessions to the Right.
The next Cabinet was Radical, headed by Henri Brisson. His mind was not
yet definitely made up on the matter of revision, and he gave
concessions to the Nationalists by appointing as Minister of War
Godefroy Cavaignac. This headstrong personage, proud of an historic
name, undertook to manage the Cabinet and to prove once for all to the
Chamber the guilt of Dreyfus. In his speech he relied mainly on the
letter mentioned at the Zola trial as written by the Italian to the
German _attache_.
Once more the Dreyfus affair seemed permanently settled, and once more
the contrary proved to be the case. In August Cavaignac discovered, to
his dismay, that the document he had sent to the Chamber, with such
emphasis on its importance, was an out-and-out forgery of Henry. The
latter was put under arrest and committed suicide. Discussion followed
between Brisson, now converted to revision, and Cavaignac, still too
stubborn to change his mind with regard to Dreyfus, in spite of his
recent discovery. Cavaignac resigned as Minister of War, was replaced by
General Zurlinden, who withdrew in a few days and was in turn succeeded
by another general, Chanoine, thought to be in sympathy with the
Cabinet. He in turn played his colleagues false and resigned
unexpectedly during a meeting of the Chamber. Weakened by these
successive blows the Brisson Cabinet itself had to resign, but its
leader had now forwarded to the supreme court of the land, the Cour de
Cassation, the petition of Dreyfus's wife for a revision of his
sentence. The first step had at last been taken. The Criminal Chamber
accepted the request and proceeded to a further detailed investigation.
The Brisson Ministry was followed by a third Cabinet of the unabashed
Dupuy. It became evident that the Criminal Chamber of the Court of
Cassation was inclining to decide on revision. Wishing to play to both
sides and, yielding in this case to the anti-revisionists, early in 1899
Dupuy brought in a bill to take the Dreyfus affair away from the
Criminal Chamber in the very midst of its deliberations and submit it to
the Court as a whole, where it was hoped a majority of judges would
reject revision. Between the dates of the passage of this bill by the
Chamber and by the Senate, President Faure died suddenly and under
mysterious circumstances on February 16, 1899. He had opposed revision
and his death, attributed to apoplexy, was a gain to the revisionists
who were accused by his friends of having caused his murder. On the
other hand, stories, which it is unnecessary to repeat here, found an
echo some years later in the scandals repeated at the sensational trial
of Madame Steinheil.
During the turmoil over the Dreyfus affair, France underwent a
humiliating experience with England. The colonial rivalry of the two
countries had of late gone on unchecked, embittered as it had been by
the ousting of France from the Suez Canal and Egypt. To many Frenchmen
"Perfidious Albion" was, far more than Germany, the secular foe. In 1896
a French expedition under Captain Marchand was sent from the Congo in
the direction of the Nile. The English afterwards argued that its
purpose was to cut their sphere of influence and hinder the
Cape-to-Cairo project; the French declared they merely wished to occupy
a post which should afford a basis for general diplomatic negotiations
for the partition of Africa. The mission was numerically insufficient;
it struggled painfully for two years through the heart of the continent,
and at last the small handful of intrepid Frenchmen established
themselves at Fashoda on the upper waters of the Nile in July, 1898. At
once General Kitchener arriving from the victory of Omdurman appeared
on the scene to occupy Fashoda for the Egyptian Government. England
assumed a viciously aggressive attitude and, under veiled threats of
war, France was obliged to recall Marchand (November 4). The outburst of
fury in France against England at this humiliation was tremendous. No
sane man would have then ventured to predict that in a few years the
hands of the two countries would be joined in the clasp of the _Entente
cordiale_.