The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics

Eric Cahm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317889458
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Dreyfus affair remains one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in modern times. Eric Cahm's study does justice to the human drama, whilst also throwing light on the wider society and politics of the Third Republic in the traumatic years after the Franco-Prussian War. This wide-ranging survey - the only short modern account in English anchors the Affair in its full social and political context. Organised round a narrative of events, it offers portraits of all the main characters, substantial extracts from key sources in fresh translations, a comprehensive bibliography and a detailed chronology.

1
The First Dreyfus Affair: Dreyfus is Tried and Convicted of Treason

A Bordereau

The date was 27 September 1894. In a low room in the Paris War Ministry in the rue Saint-Dominique, a massively-built officer with a moustache showed his comrades in the counter-espionage service a document proving that a French officer had committed treason.

‘Just look at what has come into my hands! This is really strong stuff and I hope we shall nab him!’

This is what the author of the unsigned document had written:

Though I have no news to indicate that you wish to see me, nevertheless, Sir, I am sending you some interesting items of information:

1. A note on the hydraulic buffer of the 120 and on the way this piece behaved.
2. A note on the covering troops (some changes will be made under the new plan).
3. A note on a change in the artillery formations.
4. A note relating to Madagascar.
5. The draft Field Artillery Firing Manual (14th March 1894).

This last document is extremely difficult to obtain and I can only have it at my disposal for a very few days. The War Minister has sent a fixed number of copies to the army corps, and the corps are responsible for them. Each officer in possession of one must return it after manoeuvres. If, then, you would like to extract what interests you from it and keep it for me afterwards I shall obtain one – unless you would like me to have it copied out in full, and then to send you the copy.
I am going to leave for manoeuvres.

Major Henry

Who was the officer who had obtained this incontrovertible evidence of treason, and how had it reached him? It was Major Henry, a man of 48, a ranker who had become the dominant figure in the counter-espionage service. He was ‘bullet-headed, with a low forehead and an upturned nose above a short, heavy moustache; his eyes were small and protruding’. From a peasant background, intelligent and wily, but uncultured and ignorant of foreign languages, he had owed his first appointment to the department – known for security reasons as the ‘Statistical Department’ – to the patronage of General Miribel, who was anxious to be seen to be ‘democratizing’ the War Ministry. In 1894, it was Major Henry’s task to sort the documents arriving in the department and, if they were in French, to reconstitute them. This is what he had done in the present case, by sticking together the torn pieces. He was efficient at what were essentially police duties; these also included the preparation of forgeries intended to deceive foreign powers.

The latest document, which came to be known as the bordereau, or covering note, had been handed over to him by Marie Bastian, a French agent employed as a domestic servant at the German Embassy. Being thought of as a stupid woman, she had never aroused the suspicions of her employers. Once or twice a month, she would deliver to Henry or one of his emissaries the documents she had quietly removed from the embassy waste-paper baskets. These meetings, straight out of a cheap novel, took place at dusk, in a nearby church, usually the basilica of Sainte-Clotilde, which was directly opposite the War Ministry and set back less than a hundred yards from the rue Saint-Dominique.

Henry immediately submitted the bordereau to his departmental chief, Colonel Sandherr, an Alsatian and a great patriot, who prided himself on having bombarded the German general staff with false information for years. All the officers in the Ministry who saw the bordereau on the first day were sure the author was one of their own number: his language, they thought, was so much the same as that which they used themselves. They did not trouble to notice the incorrect terms he had used.

As a result, they all became suspect at once. Their apprehension was only heightened by the atmosphere of spy-mania that prevailed in the Ministry, and in the country at large. The German press found it only too easy to mock the French propensity to discover spies at every street corner.

The bordereau was then submitted to the top officials: it even reached the office of the Minister, General Mercier. But for several days the enquiry got nowhere. It was then decided to put a photograph of the bordereau to the four Bureau chiefs and to the directorate of artillery.

Those at the top were already convinced that the traitor was someone in the Ministry, and, because of the references to artillery matters in the bordereau, they also believed that he was a gunner. But no one could recognize the handwriting.

On 6 October, they were ready to consider the matter closed. However, it was just at this moment that the head of the Fourth Bureau, Colonel Fabre, showed the photograph to his new second-in-command, Lieutenant-Colonel d’Aboville, who had just taken up his duties. The latter responded that it would not be difficult to identify the author of the document. ‘If I were asked, I think I should manage it.’

‘How?’

‘Obviously the author is an officer extremely well versed in technical matters.’

Then, wishing to draw attention to himself in his new position, d’Aboville explained that the author of the document must have been in contact with the First, the Second and the Third Bureaux, and that only a staff trainee could have had such opportunities.

Fabre could think of no reply. He looked through the list of trainees on attachment to the General Staff and his eye fell on the name of Alfred Dreyfus, to whom he had given a poor training report: ‘This officer is not fully competent. While he is intelligent and very gifted, he is pretentious and does not fulfil, in regard to his character, his conscientiousness and the execution of his duties, the necessary conditions for employment on the General Staff of the army.’ D’Aboville went further, adding: ‘His character was underhand, he was not liked by his comrades and everyone noticed his indiscreet curiosity.’

A captain in the artillery, Alfred Dreyfus had so far had a brilliant career. He was already a General Staff trainee at 35. He belonged to a family of Jewish industrialists from Alsace, which had been incorporated into the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. From the day in 1871 when, as a boy of 12, he had watched German troops marching into Mulhouse (his ‘first sadness’), he had harboured feelings of hostility and resentment towards Germany. These had been a major factor in his decision to take up a military career. The whole family, apart from one of his brothers, had opted for French nationality in 1872. Until now, Alfred had been considered by practically all his superiors to be a keen and intelligent soldier. He had had an exceptional education, and set out to master the most difficult problems. His future looked rosy, and he could even hope to rise to the rank of general. Furthermore, he was wealthy, having married Lucie Hadamard, the daughter of a Paris diamond merchant. He lived with her and their two children in an apartment in the smart 16th arrondissement, at the bottom of the Avenue du Trocadéro (now the Avenue du Président-Wilson.

But it was true that he was not liked by his fellow-officers. One who had known him at the Ecole de Guerre drew this unflattering picture of him:

Physically he was not well-endowed but he seemed unaware of it as he had such a high opinion of himself. Medium-sized, with red hair and eyes level with his face, his head set deep between his shoulders, he was excessively short-sighted. He was very intelligent and not at all dissolute: those in his year had more confidence in his integrity than sympathy towards his personality.

He was overproud by nature, which inclined him to constant and universal ostentation. He took great pride in his wealth and his connections, and had a room at the Ecole where he lived alone.¹

There was no doubt that Dreyfus’s wealth cut him off from the other officers, many of whom had to live entirely on their meagre pay. Also, he did not belong to the same artistocratic milieu as a number of his comrades. He represented a new type of officer, who owed his promotion solely to his technical ability. However, his isolation, his unpopularity and his excessive curiosity were not enough to provide Fabre and d’Aboville with proof of his treason. There was still the handwriting question. But, as ill luck would have it, his handwriting bore a superficial resemblance to that of the bordereau. As soon as the two officers found a sample, they saw a ‘striking similarity’. They immediately made known their discovery to General Gonse, the second-in-command, and to General de Boisdeffre, the Chief of Staff.

When Sandherr, the antisemitic head of the Statistical Department, learned the suspect’s name, he exclaimed: ‘I should have known!’ But, as Marcel Thomas has pointed out, the fact that neither he nor the other officers had made the connection before shows that it was not Dreyfus’s Jewish background which first made him a suspect.

Jewish Officers

Before the Dreyfus Affair, Jewish officers had been able to rise to the highest ranks in the French army without meeting any official obstacles as Jews. Republican policy was to treat all officers equally, regardless of religion. Twenty-five Jews were to become generals under the Third Republic: Dreyfus himself had only had one occasion to complain when he received a poor report at the Ecole de Guerre from General Bonnefond, who declared he wanted no Jews on the General Staff. General Dionne wrote, ‘I have seen many Jewish officers at the Ecole de Guerre. I can state that none of them met with any animosity from their superior officers or their comrades. If this was not so for the honourable M. Dreyfus, this was because of his revolting character, his intemperate language and his undignified private life, and in no way because of his religion.’ It was only from the time of the Dreyfus Affair that Jewish officers began to find the progress of their careers hampered by the fact that they were Jewish.²

During the first days of the Affair, Dreyfus’s origins simply made his treason seem less surprising in the eyes of certain of his fellow-officers. He was suspected initially because of a similarity of handwriting. This similarity immediately struck General Mercier, the War Minister. Mercier was ‘a tall, slim man of 60, with sallow skin and harsh features’; he had a grey moustache and eyes that always seemed half-closed. When he was informed by the Chief of Staff that Dreyfus was under suspicion, he experienced, he said, ‘a terrible feeling. At first sight, there appeared to be no doubt.’ He believed at once that Dreyfus was guilty. Mercier had the reputation of sticking obstinately to his first impressions: he had taken to remarking that he never went back on an order. From the outset, he was thus to remain unshakeably convinced, not only, like his subordinates, that the traitor was to be found within the Ministry, but that the guilty man was indeed Dreyfus. He ordered an enquiry: ‘Make a search! Find the man!’ But he was in no doubt about the result.

From his point of view, the matter was urgent and the enquiry must be brought to a rapid conclusion. For he was politically in a highly vulnerable position. He had a reputation as a Republican, but after a very promising start in office, and some easy parliamentary successes, he had become over-confident and had committed two blunders. Firstly, he had refused to see the inventor Turpin, who had already sold an explosive to the French government. This had earned him a reproof in Parliament, after a debate in which he had provoked general mirth by referring to his ‘gunner’s flair’. He had then ordered the early release of 60,000 conscripts, which had depleted the army garrisons. Since the spring of 1894, he had upset the army chiefs, Parliament and the entire press. The nationalist papers constantly made fun of his ‘gunner’s flair’. He was being threatened in Parliament with an appearance before the army committee, and the other members of the government were already thinking that he would have to be dropped. An unresolved case of treason would deal the final blow to his ministerial career.

In this critical situation for the Minister, the assistant Chief of Staff, General Gonse, decided to call in the help of Major du Paty de Clam, who was seen as one of the rising stars in the Ministry. Du Paty was a marquis, proud of his noble rank, a figure representative of those scions of the nobility who, under the Third Republic, no longer shunned the army, as they had done in the democratic days of the Revolution and Napoleon, and, graduating from Saint-Cyr in ever-greater numbers, now took their place again in the upper ranks of the army, which still preserved so many vestiges of the Ancien Regime: one in nine officers was now from the nobility. They felt that in the army they could maintain their traditions of service to France even though they detested her Republican regime. Their only thought was to exclude from the upper echelons Republicans, Protestants and Jews, all those who, like Dreyfus, did not owe their promotion to their noble birth. Of course, Dreyfus was not only a Jew, but one of the new technical elite, and he was a bourgeois upstart and a nouveau riche into the bargain.³

The army of the 1890s had thus not been wholly republicanized, despite the efforts of Gambetta and his successors. For the opponents of the regime, it still remained the possible instrument of a political come-back. It was thus an officer of noble birth, hostile to Dreyfus and his kind, who was put in charge of the initial enquiry and the first handwriting comparison. Du Paty prided himself on his talents as a graphologist, but he was in no way an expert. He was in fact so short-sighted that he walked awkwardly without eyeglasses: he was too vain to wear them. His conclusion was that, despite the differences between the two handwritings, there were enough similarities to warrant calling in an official expert.

Mercier did not need any convincing. An official expert’s report was obviously a legal requirement, but he saw this as a mere formality as his mind was already made up. He sought the name of an expert from his colleague Guérin of the Justice Ministry; the latter recommended Gobert, the graphologist employed by the Banque de France.

Mercier Takes Action

By 9 October, Mercier had thus involved himself personally in the Dreyfus case for the first time. Thinking, however, that he could not act entirely on his own initiative, he went the next day to inform Casimir-Périer, the President of the Republic, explaining that the bordereau was the work of a General Staff officer and that the treason ‘appeared proven’. He also stated that the documents that had been communicated to a foreign power were of ‘little importance’. From the Elysée Palace, he hurried to see the Prime Minister, Charles Dupuy. Dupuy decided that it was necessary to act with the utmost discretion. He called a restricted cabinet meeting involving only those ministers directly concerned. At this meeting, held on 11 October, Mercier announced the discovery of the bordereau, explaininig that it had been found in the waste-paper basket of the German military attaché, and that it had been torn into pieces, reconstituted, and photographed. From the handwriting comparisons, he said he had concluded that the guilty officer was on the General Staff, but he refused to name him.

Gabriel Hanotaux, the Foreign Minister, objected that without more proof it would be impossible to prosecute. He was afraid of a diplomatic incident if the German Embassy were to be implicated publicly in a spy case. He extracted a promise from Mercier not to pursue the matter if no other proof could be found. That same evening, he insisted on the same point again in a private discussion with Mercier. The latter obstinately replied that he had sufficient presumptive evidence, and that he was legally obliged to pursue his enquiries. In any case, as the matter had become known to a number of officers, he was afraid of a scandal from the opposite direction: ‘We should be accused of making a pact with espionage....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on referencing
• Prelude
• 1. The first Dreyfus Affair: Dreyfus is tried and convicted of treason
• 2. The beginnings of the Dreyfusard campaign
• 3. J’Accuse …!: the Affair as national crisis
• 4. Henry’s suicide and the review of the case
• 5. Retrial and pardon: the 1894 judgement is quashed
• Epilogue
• A short chronology of the Affair
• Further reading
• Index