Du Paty remained certain that Alfred Dreyfus was the traitor who had written the bordereau, but his failure to get him to admit his guilt after interminable interrogation made him see that there was insufficient evidence to gain a conviction. On 27 October the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, at a meeting in his office with Sandherr, Henry and du Paty, chastised his cousin for his failure to build a case against Dreyfus. ‘You’ve got nowhere with your Dreyfus. You’ve got nothing. You must surely realise that all your moral certainties, all your deductions, your expertise in handwriting, don’t make up for the lack of a clear confession. That’s what you must get and, if you can come up with nothing more than that scrap of paper, General Saussier is quite capable of refusing to sign an order to proceed.’
According to his own account of this meeting, du Paty replied with an equal vehemence, ‘Allow me to say, mon général, that the man you call “my Dreyfus” is also yours; and what you call “my scrap of paper” is the basis of the inquiries which you told me to pursue, and is the only material proof which you have shown me . . . I am unable to say that I have found any others in Dreyfus’s home: I am unable to say that he has confessed. So, if the moral certainty is judged insufficient, if the material evidence is too weak, the solution is simple: we must let him go.’11
Two days later, du Paty wrote a formal letter to General de Boisdeffre confirming what he had said at the meeting. On 31 October, he wrote to the same effect to the Minister of War, General Mercier. He told him that he remained convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus but there was not enough proof to convict him. He recommended that he be released.
2: The Secret File
General Mercier faced a dilemma. He had recently been defeated in the Chamber of Deputies on a number of issues; politically his position was precarious.12 The charge that he had been soft on the Jewish doctor, Schulmann, was repeated over and over again in the right-wing press. He had exceeded his powers in ordering the arrest of Dreyfus without the authorisation of General Saussier. Mercier had enemies both within the army and in the Chamber who were ready to pounce on any mistake he might make. It was already clear that the Prime Minister, Dupuy, would ask for his resignation if the premature arrest of a French officer was exposed by the release of Dreyfus.
But Dreyfus’s arrest could not be kept secret. On the very day that Mercier received du Paty’s letter, 31 October, the Havas news agency reported the arrest of ‘an officer suspected of having communicated to a foreign power some unimportant but nevertheless confidential documents’. The next day, 1 November, the story was picked up by La Libre Parole and published under the headline ‘High Treason. Arrest of a Jewish officer A. Dreyfus’. The acting editor, Adrien Papillaud, had received an anonymous letter on 28 October which read as follows:
My dear friend. You see, what I told you is quite correct. The man arrested on the 15th on a charge of espionage, and who has been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, is Captain Dreyfus, living at 6, avenue du Trocadéro. It has been put about that he has gone on a journey, but that is a lie to hush up the affair. All Israel is in a state of ferment.13
The die was cast. If Mercier were now to free Dreyfus, he would be accused, as in the case of Schulmann, of being in the pay of the Jews. He would also lose face with his cabinet colleagues, particularly the Foreign Minister Hanotaux, who had advised him to drop the case against Dreyfus. On 3 November, at Mercier’s instigation, General Saussier finally signed the order to proceed against Captain Alfred Dreyfus and appointed a Commandant Besson d’Ormescheville as the examining magistrate.
Saussier’s acquiescence in Mercier’s plans is puzzling. He had rebuked Forzinetti for imprisoning Dreyfus without his authorisation. ‘If you weren’t my friend,’ Saussier had said, ‘I’d send you to prison for two months for having accepted a prisoner without my orders.’14 Could Saussier have intervened because of the irregularity of the process leading to Dreyfus’s arrest? At a shooting party at Marly, he had told the French President, Jean Casimir-Perier: ‘Dreyfus is not guilty. That fool Mercier has put his finger in his own eye again.’ Quite possibly Saussier, frequently attacked in La Libre Parole for protecting the Jewish officer Maurice Weil, did not want to make things more difficult for himself by intervening in the case of another Jew, Alfred Dreyfus; or, more probably, as he suggested to Casimir-Perier, he was confident that if he let the thing run, it would lead to the fall of his adversary, General Mercier.
The military investigating magistrate, Commandant Besson d’Ormescheville, held twelve sessions between 7 and 23 November 1894. Although appointed by the sceptical Saussier, d’Ormescheville appears to have accepted from the start the view of the Statistical Section and the General Staff that Dreyfus was guilty and so saw it as his duty to draw up an irrefutable case against him. Perhaps, like so many officers in the French Army, he believed that espionage by a Jewish officer was an accident waiting to happen; or he had been influenced by reading a trashy novel set in the War Ministry that had been serialised in Le Petit Journal during the summer and featured spies, artillery officers, former Polytechniciens, bellicose journalists and devious Jewish gamblers.15 Or perhaps he was intimidated. ‘I know’, wrote a correspondent in La Libre Parole, ‘that someone has dared to offer a million francs to the investigating magistrate if he agrees, not necessarily to conclude that Dreyfus is innocent, but simply to cast doubt on his culpability.’16
For whatever reason, d’Ormescheville certainly did not work on the case with an open mind. He went through the police reports, interviewed witnesses and interrogated the accused, putting the same questions, often word for word, as du Paty de Clam. He looked into information gathered by Guénée about Dreyfus’s life in the demi-monde – some of it accurate but much of it untrue. Dreyfus’s accounts were examined in detail and revealed nothing irregular. A police report that Dreyfus was not known in gambling cirles was ‘lost’ in the Prefecture and so was never submitted to d’Ormescheville. D’Ormescheville accepted du Paty’s view that Gobert, the handwriting expert of the Banque de France, could not be trusted because of the bank’s links with Jewish financiers, and judged his opinion no more authoritative than that of Colonels Fabre and d’Aboville.17
D’Ormescheville looked into Dreyfus’s two years at the École de Guerre. His failure to make friends among his fellow students was considered sinister: his companions remembered him as awkward, obsequious, indiscreet and inordinately pleased with himself. Everything for which Dreyfus was once commended by his teachers was now used against him. His eagerness to learn became an incriminating curiosity; it was remembered that he hung around in offices and asked to see documents which often went missing: ‘wherever he passed, documents disappeared’.18 His remarkable memory was a tool for espionage; so too his knowledge of German and Italian.
This same inversion was applied to the failure of the investigators to find anything incriminating among Dreyfus’s private possessions.
The search of his residence yielded more or less the results that he claimed it would. But it is legitimate to suspect that if no letter, even from family members . . . and no bill, even from tradesmen, was found in the search, it was because anything that might have been in any way compromising had been hidden or already destroyed.
Assisted by du Paty in preparing his report, d’Ormescheville accepted his Alice in Wonderland logic that the absence of evidence was a sign of guilt. He also suggested that, because Dreyfus had the character and temperament that you might expect to find in a spy, he was a spy.
He is . . . of a rather supple – even obsequious – character, quite suited for relations of espionage with foreign agents. He was thus the perfect choice for the miserable and shameful mission that he either inspired or accepted and to which – quite luckily for France, perhaps – the discovery of his intrigues has put an end.
On 3 December, Commandant d’Ormescheville presented his report (acte d’accusation) to General Saussier, who the next day signed the order for Dreyfus’s court marti
al.
Throughout November 1894, when d’Ormescheville was conducting his investigations, the right-wing press had been feasting on the leaks emanating from the War Ministry, and hounding its chief, General Mercier. On 4 November, La Libre Parole published a long list of Mercier’s failings as Minister of War, leading up to the uncovering of a Jewish spy on the General Staff. ‘We have, nevertheless, a consolation: it was not a true Frenchman who committed the crime.’19 On 9 November the same paper published a statement from General de Bonnefond, the officer who had marked Dreyfus down at the École de Guerre: ‘You know . . . we buy our information about foreign armies [from] Italian Jews, German Jews, Rumanian Jews . . . Why would a French Jew behave any differently from the others?’20 Also on the 9th, La Patrie linked Dreyfus to Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché, which led to a letter in Le Figaro the following day from the German Ambassador, Graf Münster von Derneburg, stating that ‘Never has Lieutenant-Colonel von Schwartzkoppen received letters from Dreyfus. Never has he had any relations, either direct or indirect, with him. If this officer is found guilty of the crime of which he is accused, the German Embassy is not mixed up in the afffair.’
On 22 November, La Libre Parole laid into Mercier once again:
The Dreyfus affair has taken a nasty turn for the government. We have spoken to several senior officers, all of whom have replied by presenting the following dilemma: either General Mercier has arrested Captain Dreyfus without proof, in which case his superficiality is a crime; or he has allowed evidence of his treason to be lost, in which case his negligence is a crime. In both cases, General Mercier is unworthy of the post he holds. In such a situation, one can be guilty of stupidity as well as of a crime.21
Mercier was well aware of this dilemma, and on 28 November he gave an interview to a journalist on Le Figaro, Charles Leser. ‘It is said that Captain Dreyfus offered documents to the Italian government. This is wrong. It is impossible for me to say anything more because of the current investigation. All that I can say is that his guilt is absolute, it is certain.’22
By this highly irregular intervention in the judicial process, Mercier had laid down his marker and so, when it came to the court martial, nothing could be left to chance. It was now that this ‘republican’ general favoured by the left decided to compile a secret dossier of dubious evidence that would strengthen the case against Dreyfus.23 Colonel Sandherr was happy to co-operate. He too feared for his position and for the reputation of the Statistical Section, if it was shown that it had jumped to the wrong conclusion in a precipitate way: its methods had recently been attacked in the conservative journal, France Militaire.24
Sandherr also felt that he possessed corroborative evidence that seemed to implicate Dreyfus directly. A French agent, Richard Cuers, working in the German counter-intelligence agency, the Nachrichtenbureau, had informed the head of his network in Brussels, Laboux, that a decorated officer was paying visits to Colonel von Schwartzkoppen in Paris and was in in his pay. Laboux passed the information back to Sandherr. Who else could this refer to but Dreyfus?
Sandherr was no fool. He knew as well as du Paty that there was no irrefutable evidence against Dreyfus. If he had not been under pressure from Mercier to nail Dreyfus, would he have dropped the case? Probably not. There was a spy in the officer corps of the French Army; information from Cuers and Val Carlos, the agent in the Spanish Embassy, warned of this, and the bordereau confirmed it. It also suggested that the spy had access to secrets from the different bureaux of the General Staff. The interns had such access. Dreyfus was therefore a suspect, and those suspicions were confirmed by the opinion of three out of the five expert graphologists who had by now been consulted that his handwriting and that of the bordereau were the same.
A final and what appeared to be conclusive piece of evidence of Dreyfus’s guilt came in the form of a telegram sent by Alessandro Panizzardi of the Italian Embassy to his superiors in Rome on 2 November 1894. This was intercepted by the Post Office and sent to the Bureau du Chiffre at the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay for decryption. There it became apparent that Panizzardi was using a new key for the code. On 6 November, a provisional decrypted version of the telegram was sent to Sandherr which seemed to confirm the guilt of Dreyfus: ‘Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The War Minister has proof of his relations with Germany. I have taken all precautions.’
Sandherr was delighted. However, four days later, on 10 November, the codebreakers at the Quai d’Orsay tried a new key to decipher the telegram and this gave a different meaning to the telegram – one which suggested that Panizzardi knew nothing about Dreyfus: ‘If Captain Dreyfus has had no relations with you, it would be advisable to instruct the Ambassador to publish an official denial to avoid comments in the Press.’25
To prove to Sandherr that the new version was the more accurate, the army’s liaison officer with the Quai d’Orsay, Captain Pierre Matton, had a double agent working in the Italian Embassy slip a message with recognisable names to Panizzardi who encrypted the message and sent it to Rome. The intercepted message was duly delivered to the codebreakers at the Quai d’Orsay who were unaware of Matton’s experiment: the message was deciphered and demonstrated conclusively that the new key was correct.26
This did not suit Sandherr or those now working on the secret dossier in the Statistical Section, and the version of the telegram that went into the file read: ‘Captain Dreyfus has been arrested. The War Minister has proof of his relations with Germany. I have taken all precautions.’ All were now convinced that the traitor had to be convicted and the end justified any means. Commandant Henry led the team that trawled through the fragments of information in the files of the Statistical Section to see if something could be found that would link the bordereau to Dreyfus. There was, first of all, the letter from Schwartzkoppen to Panizzardi dating from the spring: ‘Attached are 12 master plans of Nice which that scoundrel D. gave me in the hope of restoring relations.’ This filching of master plans had been going on for some time, and so the ‘D’ was unlikely to refer to Dreyfus: moreover, as Sandherr’s drunken deputy, Commandant Cordier – Father Josué – had pointed out, it was unlikely that the military attachés would refer to an agent by the initial of his real name. But it was not impossible, and certainly could be made to seem likely to the judges at a court martial. There was also a letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen dating from February 1894 which opened ‘My dear Bugger’, and contained a request for Schwartzkoppen ‘to broach this question with your friend’ – which could be taken to be a reference to Dreyfus.
This was still not enough to convince the judges of a court martial of Dreyfus’s guilt. Attention now turned to the reports that Guénée had written earlier in the year on the information provided by his agent in the Spanish Embassy, Val Carlos. Could something be done with these? A couple of sentences, purporting to record the words of Val Carlos, were inserted into these reports: ‘it emerges from my last conversation with Captain von Süsskind that the German attachés have in the offices of the General Staff an officer who is informing them admirably well’. And: ‘Someone in the Ministry of War . . . has tipped off the German military attachés . . . That is further proof that you have one or several wolves in your sheep-pen . . .’27
Knowing just how feeble these scraps were as evidence against Dreyfus, the prosecution decided that they would not be shown to the defence but presented to the judges alone. Du Paty was recruited to write a ‘commentary’ on this additional information, explaining how they established the guilt of the accused. If the judges themselves had misgivings about the legality of what was being done, ‘national security’ would be invoked as a justification. Even in a court martial held in camera, the secret service could not be expected to reveal either its methods or its sources.*
3: The Court Martial
Alfred Dreyfus, still held in the Cherche-Midi prison, was confident that he would soon be released. On 29 October, du Paty had finally shown him a photograph of the b
ordereau. ‘Do you recognize this letter as being in your handwriting?’ he had asked. Dreyfus immediately felt ‘a sense of deliverance’. The handwriting, though similar, was clearly not his.28
Dreyfus was now permitted to communicate with his wife Lucie, and Lucie to inform others of the catastrophe that had befallen Alfred. She immediately wired her brother-in-law, Mathieu Dreyfus, in Mulhouse; he took the night train to Paris, arriving on the morning of 1 November. Two years older than Alfred, he was not just a fond brother but his closest friend. It had never occurred to Mathieu, when he saw the newspaper headlines proclaiming the arrest of a Jewish officer on charges of espionage, that the officer might be his brother. As he would later explain, ‘I was brought up with him, I lived with him in the greatest intimacy; he has no thoughts hidden from me. Nothing in his life or his character indicates the possibility of such a crime.’29
Although close, the two brothers were very different in a number of ways. Where Alfred was awkward and abrupt, Mathieu was suave, charming, witty, sensitive, good-natured. Alfred was balding; Mathieu was tall with blond hair and blue eyes. Alfred’s voice was monotonous and metallic, Mathieu’s ‘pleasant and sonorous’. Alfred’s manner was gauche, Mathieu’s elegant, aristocratic, debonair. It was said that ‘the textile manufacturer had the strong bearing of a distinguished military officer, while the career soldier with the pince-nez had the pallid distracted look of a reserved and serious scholar’.30
Mathieu was intelligent and shared Alfred’s intellectual curiosity. He too had thought of a military career but he had failed to get into the École Polytechnique from Sainte-Barbe and so had returned to Mulhouse, where he ran the family’s factories with his brothers Jacques and Léon. Out of the office, he pursued his interest in literature and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the Enlightenment: he had a bust of Voltaire on his mantel.31 He had married the daughter of an Alsatian industrialist, Suzanne Schwob. Her uncle Adrien Schwob was the mayor of Héricort, and the wedding was celebrated in a garden of his estate – a civil ceremony that was not followed by a second service in the synagogue. Schwob was a Freemason, and it was probably through him, or possibly through fellow industrialists Paul Jeanmarie or Rudolph Koechlin, that Mathieu had been admitted to a Lodge. He was a member of the Mulhousian fabricantocratie and would go hunting with his fellow industrialists in the forests around Mulhouse.32