CLEMENCEAU AND THE DREYFUS AFFAIR
In December, 1894, Captain Dreyfus, a member of the General Staff, was
found guilty of treason by a Court Martial. The Court was unanimous.
He was condemned to be sent to the Ile du Diable, there to expiate
his offence by the prolonged torture of imprisonment and solitary
confinement, in a tropical climate. It was a terrible punishment. But
the offence of betraying France to Germany, committed by an officer
entrusted with the military secrets of the Republic, was a terrible one
too. It seemed so incredible, especially as Captain Dreyfus was a man
of considerable means, that up to the last moment the gravest doubt
as to the possibility of his having committed such a crime prevailed.
When, however, the Court declared against him as one man, and without
the slightest hesitation, there could no longer be any question of the
correctness of the decision. For the trial had lasted four whole days,
and Dreyfus had been defended by one of the ablest advocates at the
Paris Bar. "What need have we of further witness?"
That was the universal feeling. Nearly a quarter of a century before,
Marshal Bazaine had betrayed France to her mortal enemy, and had
escaped the penalty which was his due. Common soldiers were frequently
condemned to death and executed for impulsive actions against their
superiors. High time an example should be made of a man of higher
rank. Dreyfus was lucky not to be shot out of hand. That an Alsatian,
a rich man, a soldier sworn to defend his country, an officer employed
in a confidential post, should thus sell his nation to Germany was
frightful. The thing was more than infamous. No punishment could be
too bad for him. Permanent solitary confinement under a blazing sun is
worse than immediate death. All the better. His fate will encourage the
others.
And Captain Dreyfus was a Jew. That made the matter worse. Powerful as
they are in politics and finance, Jews are not popular in France. By
Catholics and sworn anti-Semites they are believed to be capable of
anything. Even by men of open mind they are regarded with distrust as
citizens of no country, a set of Asiatic marauders encamped for the
time being in the West, whose God is a queer compound of Jahveh, Moloch
and Mammon. There was thus the bitterest race and religious prejudice
eager to confirm the judgment of the Court Martial. The case was
decided. Dreyfus was sent off to the Island of the Devil.
Clemenceau shared the general opinion. He accepted the statement of
the president of the Court Martial that "there are interests superior
to all personal interests." And these were the interests which forbade
that the court martial should be held in public, or that the secret
evidence of treason should be disclosed. Given the honour, good
faith, capacity and freedom from prejudice of the judges, this was a
reasonable contention on the part of the chief officer of the Court.
But there was that to come out, in this very Dreyfus case, which should
throw grave doubt upon the advisability of any sittings behind closed
doors of any court that deals with matters into which professional,
personal or political considerations may be imported. Secrecy is
invariably harmful to democracy and injurious to fair play.
Three years later Clemenceau began to understand what lay behind this
veil of obscurity which he then allowed to be thrown over the whole of
the Dreyfus proceedings. He took upon himself the full burden of his
own mistake. When he had distinguished his fine career by the vigorous
and sustained effort in favour of justice to the victim, he reprinted
at full length his articles denouncing the man about whom he had been
misled. "I cannot claim," he writes, "credit for having from the first
instinctively felt the iniquity. I believed Dreyfus to be guilty, and
I said so in scathing terms. It seemed to me impossible that officers
should lightly inflict such a sentence on one of themselves. I imagined
there had been some desperate imprudence. I considered the punishment
terrible, but I excused it on the ground of devotion to patriotism."
Nothing was farther from Clemenceau's thoughts, even at the close of
1897, than that Dreyfus should after all be not guilty. He laughed
at Bernard Lazare when he said so. Meeting M. Ranc by accident, this
politician and journalist confirmed the opinion of Lazare and declared
that Dreyfus was innocent. Again Clemenceau smiled incredulously,
and was recommended to go at once and see M. Scheurer-Kestner,
Vice-President of the Senate, the famous Alsatian whose high qualities
he many years afterwards proclaimed in a funeral oration.
The editor of _l'Aurore_ called upon that courageous and indefatigable
champion of Dreyfus; and comparison of the handwriting of Esterhazy,
the chief witness against the captain, with that of the _bordereau_
attributed to Dreyfus and decisive of his guilt, convinced Clemenceau,
not that Dreyfus was innocent, but that the judgment had been quite
irregular. Therefore he resolved to begin a campaign for a revision
of the case. He did not share Scheurer-Kestner's view as to the
enormous difficulty and danger of such an undertaking. Trouble and
misrepresentation he anticipated. Bitter opposition from the members
of the court and of the General Staff--Yes. Virulent misrepresentation
due to priestly hatred--Yes. Unceasing malignity of anti-Semites--Yes.
Strong political objection to any reopening of a "_chose jugée_," on
public grounds--Yes. But, in spite of all, the truth in modern France
would easily and triumphantly prevail! "Events showed me how very far
out I was in my calculations."
As on more than one occasion in his stormy life, therefore, Clemenceau
underrated the strength of the enemy. He had to contend against a
combination of some of the strongest interests and passions that
can affect human life and sentiment. There had been from the very
commencement a bitter feeling among some of the most powerful sections
of French society against the Republic. As was shown in the rise
of Boulanger, Clemenceau, by exposing the drawbacks of successive
Republican Governments, had done much to strengthen this feeling
among its opponents and to weaken the loyalty of its supporters.
There was, in fact, nothing in the Republic itself to be enthusiastic
about. It was essentially a bourgeois Republic, living on in a welter
of bourgeois scandals, unbalanced by any great policy at home, any
great military successes abroad, or any great personalities at the
head of affairs. The glories of France were dimmed: the financiers of
France--especially the Jew financiers--were more influential than ever.
All this helped the party of reaction.
Religion, too, had come in to fortify finance and build up the
anti-Semite group. The Catholics, to whom Jews and Free-Masons are
the red flags of the political and social bull ring, had not very
long before challenged the former to deadly combat in that Field of
the Cloth of Gold on which, to use the phrase of one of their less
enlightened competitors, they "do seem a sort of inspired." It is
possible that had the Catholic Union Générale listened to the advice
of their ablest and coolest brain, who was, be it said, neither a
Frenchman nor a Catholic, the great financial combination of the
Church, with all its sanctified funds of the faithful behind it, might
have won. Even as it was, it drove a Rothschild to commit suicide,
which was regarded as a great feat at the time.
But M. Bontoux was too ambitious, he did not possess the real financial
faculty, his first successes turned such head as he possessed. The
Jews, therefore, were able to work their will upon the whole of his
projects and groups, and the devout Catholic investors of Paris, Vienna
and other places had the intolerable mortification of seeing their
savings swept into the coffers of the infidel. This had happened some
years before the Dreyfus case. But losers have long memories, and here
was a sore monetary grievance superadded to the previous religious
hatred of the Hebrew.
Dreyfus was a Jew. Nay, more, he came of financial Jews who had had
their pickings out of the collapse of the Union Générale as well as out
of the guano and other concessions malignantly obtained in the Catholic
Republic of Peru. Monstrous that a man of that race and name should
be an officer in the French Army at all! Still more outrageous that
he should be placed by his ability and family influence in a position
of military importance, and entrusted with serious military secrets!
Something must be done.
Now the persons forming the most powerful coterie in the higher circles
of the French Army at this time were not only men who had been educated
at the famous military academy of St. Cyr and imbued with an _esprit
de corps_ cultivated from their school-days upwards, but they were
officers who believed heartily, if not in the religion, at any rate in
the beneficent secular persuasion of the Catholic Church. They were,
as was clearly shown, greatly influenced by the Jesuits, who saw the
enormous advantage of keeping in close touch with the chiefs of the
army.
Then there were the monarchists and Buonapartists, male and female, of
every light and shade, who were eagerly on the look-out for any stroke
that might discredit the new studious but scientific and unbelieving
class of officers, whom the exigencies of modern warfare were making
more and more essential to military efficiency. Their interest was to
keep as far as possible the main higher organisation and patronage of
the army and the General Staff a close borough and out of the hands of
these new men.
All this formed a formidable phalanx of organised enmity against any
officer who might not suit the prejudices or, at a critical moment,
might be dangerous to the plans of people who, differ as they might in
other matters, were at one in disliking capable soldiers who were not
of their particular set. And here was Dreyfus, who embodied in his own
person all their most cherished hatreds, who could be made the means of
striking a blow at all similar intruders upon their preserve, in such
wise as greatly to injure all their enemies at once. Unfortunately for
him, Dreyfus was at the same time an able officer--so much the more
dangerous, therefore--and personally not an agreeable man. Not even
their best friends would deny to clever Jews the virtue of arrogance.
Dreyfus was arrogant. He was not a grateful person to his superiors or
to his equals. They all wanted to get rid of him on their own account,
and their friends outside were ready enough to embitter them against
him because he was a Jew.
This is not to say that there was an elaborate plot afoot among all
who were brought in contact with Dreyfus, or that, when the charge
against him was formulated, there was a deliberate intention, on the
part of the members of the Court Martial, to find him guilty, no matter
what happened. But it is now quite certain that, from the first, the
idea that he was a spy was agreeable to his fellow-officers in the
Ministry of War; and, being satisfied as to his responsibility for the
crime that they wished to believe him guilty of, they did not stick
at trifles, in the matter of procedure and testimony, which might
relieve their consciences and justify their judgment. Knowing, then,
the powerful combination which would oppose to the death any revision
of Dreyfus's trial, Scheurer-Kestner, resolute and self-sacrificing as
he was, might well take a less sanguine view than Clemenceau of the
probabilities of certain victory as soon as the truth was made known.
But when once he began to doubt whether Dreyfus had had fair play,
Clemenceau immediately showed those qualities of personal and
political courage, persistence, disregard of popularity, and power
of concentrating all his forces upon the immediate matter in hand,
indifferent to the numbers and strength of his opponents, which had
gained him so high a place in the estimation of all democrats and
lovers of fair play long before. "If there are manifest probabilities
of error, the case must be revised." That was his view. But the
National Army and the National Religion, as bitter opponents of justice
put it, were one and indivisible on this matter. Militarism and
Jesuitism together, backed by the high society of reaction and a large
section of the bourgeoisie, constituted a stalwart array in favour of
the perpetuation of injustice. There was literally scarce a crime of
which this combination was not capable rather than admit that by any
possibility a Court Martial on a Jew captain could go wrong.
The Minister of War, General Billot, the Prime Ministers Méline and
Brisson, generals of high standing such as Mercier, Boisdeffre, Gonse,
Zurlinden and others, officers of lower rank and persons connected
with them, were gradually mixed up with and defended such a series
of attempted murders, ordered suicides, wholesale forgeries, defence
and decoration of exposed spies, perjury, misrepresentation and false
imprisonment that the marvel is how France survived such a tornado of
turpitude. Clemenceau little knew what it would all lead to when, by no
means claiming that Dreyfus was innocent, he and Scheurer-Kestner and
Zola and Jaurès, and all honest Radicals and Socialists, demanded that,
even if Dreyfus were guilty, he could not have been _legally_ condemned
on false evidence and forged documents: the latter never having been
communicated to his counsel. It was on this ground that Clemenceau
demanded a revision of the trial.
But quite early in the fray the defenders of the Court Martial became
desperate in their determination that the matter should never be
thoroughly investigated. The honour of the army was at stake. Colonel
Picquart, a man of the highest credit and capacity, comes to the
conclusion in the course of his official inspection of documents
at headquarters that the incriminating paper on which Dreyfus was
condemned, but which he was never allowed to see, was not in his
handwriting at all, but in that of Major Esterhazy, an officer disliked
and distrusted by all fellow-officers with whom he had served.
Picquart, in fact, suspected that Esterhazy was a Prussian spy and
that he forged the _bordereau_ which convinced the Court Martial of
Dreyfus's guilt. But before this, in 1894 when the story leaked out
that an officer having relations with the General Staff was suspected
of treachery, it was not Dreyfus whose name was first mentioned. His
old comrades said with one accord, "It must be Esterhazy: we thought
so." Esterhazy, however, soon made himself necessary to the army chiefs
and their Catholics. If his character was blasted publicly, down
these gentry would come, and with them the whole of the proceedings
against Dreyfus. They therefore suggested to Picquart that he should
simply hold his tongue. "_You_ are not at l'Ile du Diable," they said.
But Picquart would persist, so they sent him off to Tunis. However,
thanks to Scheurer-Kestner and others, the truth began to come out,
and Picquart still refused to be silenced. So instead of dealing with
Esterhazy, they arrested his accuser and gave the Major a certificate
of the very highest character.
As it began, so it went on. Clemenceau's daily articles and attacks
drove the militarists, the Catholics, the anti-Semites, and the
reactionaries generally, into a fury. Colonel Henry, Colonel Paty du
Clam, the Jesuit Father du Lac, the editors and contributors of the
_Figaro_, the _Echo de Paris_ (the special organ of the Staff), the
_Gaulois_ were in a permanent conspiracy with the generals named above,
and the General Staff itself, to prevent the truth from being known. It
was all of no use. Picquart under lock and key was more effective than
Picquart at large. Slowly but surely men of open mind became convinced
that, little as they wished to believe it, something was wrong. But
these were always the minority. Few could grasp the fact that an
innocent man was being put in chains on the Ile du Diable, virtually
because there was an agitation in favour of his re-trial in Paris.
Then came Zola's terrible letter in the _Aurore_, which Clemenceau had
suggested, and gave up his daily article in order to give place to.
He also supplied the title "_J'Accuse_." Zola summed up the whole
evidence relentlessly against the General Staff and its tools and
forgers, Esterhazy, Henry, Paty du Clam and the rest of them.
Such an indictment, formulated by a novelist who was universally
recognised as one of the leading men of letters in Europe, quite
outside of the political arena, would have attracted attention at
any time. In the midst of a period when all feelings and minds were
wrought up to the highest point of tension, it came as a direct and
heavy blow at the whole of the military party. It is difficult to
realise to-day the sensation produced. It had all the effect of a
combined attack of horse, foot and artillery for which preparation
had been made long before by a successful bombardment. There was no
effective answer possible in words. This the military cliques and
their friends at once saw and acted upon. They abandoned discussion
and forced Zola and _l'Aurore_ into court on a charge of treason and
libel. The action stirred all Europe and riveted attention throughout
the civilised world. This was due not merely to Zola's great reputation
and popularity, to the political position held by Clemenceau, to the
enthralling interest of the Dreyfus affair itself, to the excitement of
the life-and-death struggle between freedom and reaction, but to the
fact that behind all this lay the never-dying hostility of Germany to
France.
All this was too much for the criminal champions of "the honour of
the Army." _L'Aurore_ and Zola must be prosecuted. They were. And
Clemenceau conducted his own defence. It was a crucial case, and the
famous advocate Labori had previously done his best for Zola, pointing
out that the whole drama turned on the prisoner then suffering at the
Ile du Diable: perhaps the most infamous criminal, perhaps a martyr,
the victim of human fallibility. He had shown, however, that "all the
powers for Justice are combined _against_ Justice," and had called for
the revision of a great case.
"After the jury have adjudicated, public opinion and France herself
will judge you," said Clemenceau himself. "You have been told that a
document was privately communicated to the Court. Do you understand
what that means? It means that a man is tried, is condemned, is covered
with ignominy, his own name, that of his wife, of his children, of his
father, of all his connections eternally blasted, on the faith of a
document he had never been shown. Gentlemen, who among you would not
revolt at the very idea of being condemned under such conditions? Who
among you would not adjure us to demand justice for you if, brought
before a tribunal, after a mockery of investigation, after a purely
formal discussion, the judges, meeting out of your presence, decided
on your honour and your life, condemning you, without appeal, on a
document of whose very existence you were kept in ignorance? Who among
you would quietly submit to such a decision? If this has been done, I
tell you your one duty above all others is that such a case should be
re-tried."
That was the main point, as Clemenceau saw even more clearly than
M. Labori. No man, guilty or innocent, could be justly condemned
and sentenced on the strength of a written document the purport and
even the existence of which had been deliberately concealed from the
prisoner and his counsel. It scarcely needed further argument, not
even the direct proof which was forthcoming that Colonel Sandherr,
the president of the Court Martial, had a bitter and unreasoning
prejudice against Jews. If the validity of the document had been beyond
all possibility of question; if witnesses whose good faith had been
unquestionable had seen Dreyfus write it with their own eyes: even
then the trial was legally vitiated by the fact that it had not been
shown to the accused. But if the document was forged----? All the other
points, serious as some of them were, counted little by the side of
this.
That, therefore, Clemenceau dealt with most persistently. That,
therefore, the General Staff, with its coterie of Jesuits, anti-Semites
and spies, was determined to cover up. The generals who bore witness in
the case against Zola and _l'Aurore_ showed by their threats and their
admissions they knew that it was they themselves and the members of
the secret Court Martial who were really on their trial at the bar of
public opinion.
It was in this sense that Clemenceau closed his memorable defence.
He declared against the forger of the _bordereau_, the Prussian spy,
Esterhazy, who was sheltered and honoured by the chiefs of the French
Army. "Yes, it is we," he cried, amid derisive shouts and howls in
court, "it is we who are the defenders of the army, when we call upon
you to drive Esterhazy out of it. The conscious or unconscious enemies
of the army are those who propose to cashier Picquart and retain
Esterhazy. Gentlemen of the jury, a general has come here to talk to
you about your children. Tell me now which of them would like to find
himself in Esterhazy's battalion? Tell me, would you hand over your
sons to this officer to lead against the enemy? The very question is
enough. Who does not know the answer before it is given?
"Gentlemen of the jury, I have done. We have passed through terrible
experiences in this century. We have known glory and disaster in every
form, we are even at this moment face to face with the unknown. Fears
and hopes encompass us around. Grasp the opportunity as we ourselves
have grasped it. Be masters of your own destinies. A people sitting in
judgment on itself is a noble thing. A stirring scene also is a people
deciding on its own future. Your task, gentlemen of the jury, is to
pronounce a verdict less upon us than upon yourselves. We are appearing
before you. You will appear before history."