When Mme Henry stepped down from the witness stand, Captain Lauth rose to give her his arm and escort her out of the room.
After Mme Henry, General Roget was called to the stand. By his military stance and commanding manner, he had an air of authority that inevitably impressed the seven junior officers acting as judges. It was, wrote Paléologue, as if he had been ‘ordering them to carry out a manoeuvre’. He said that Esterhazy could not be the traitor because he had no access to the secret documents mentioned in the bordereau. He insisted that Esterhazy’s louche character and disordered private life, while regrettable, had no bearing on the case before them. It was the same when Generals Billot and Zurlinden gave evidence: here were the great military leaders of France assuring their subordinates that Esterhazy was innocent and Dreyfus guilty. Cavaignac, too, though not a soldier, was indubitably a man of great intelligence and high distinction who put the case of the General Staff with lucidity and precision.
General de Boisdeffre gave evidence on 19 August. For Dreyfus, this was perhaps the most painful session of all because for so long he had believed that his former chief wished him well. Now he heard his hero, old before his time, repeat in a weary tone of voice his conviction that Dreyfus was guilty, that Esterhazy was the homme de paille – the patsy – put up by the Dreyfus family. When asked if he had any questions to put to Boisdeffre, Dreyfus simply replied: ‘I do not wish to respond to General de Boisdeffre.’
Just as Dreyfus had had faith in General de Boisdeffre, so too had Commandant Henry; it was in his interest that he had acted. During Henry’s interrogation by Cavaignac, Boisdeffre had said nothing. Had he been ignorant of what this over-zealous subordinate had done for his sake? ‘Why did Henry’, Boisdeffre asked Paléologue after giving evidence, slumped in a chair in Paléologue’s office in the lycée, ‘Why did Henry . . . and others as well, perhaps, commit all these aberrations, since there is no doubt about Dreyfus’s guilt?’
Paléologue reversed the question. ‘Why should Henry and certainly others as well have committed all these aberrations if they had not felt that you and General Gonse were going to be forced to acknowledge Dreyfus’s innocence?’ It was, he believed, to cover the tracks of Esterhazy, and not just Esterhazy: Paléologue believed that Henry was in fact complicit in Esterhazy’s treason, together with Maurice Weil and a fourth and as yet unidentified officer in the army’s High Command.
‘I understand less and less,’ said Boisdeffre, ‘for I can neither accept what you say nor refute it . . . There’s nothing left for me but to disappear. I’m finished, finished!’24
Gonse did no better than de Boisdeffre. Only a week or two before the opening of the court martial, he had been dismissed as Deputy Chief of the General Staff. In giving his evidence, he ‘stumbled, lost the thread of his thought, and retracted what he had said’. The witnesses from the Statistical Section gave conflicting evidence. Lauth, Henry’s friend and the cavaliere servente of his widow, told the court of a secret war waged against the Germans by his former chief, Colonel Sandherr, through ‘intoxification’ – passing false information to the enemy via double agents – evidence which showed that forging documents was part of the everyday work of the Section. Commandant Cordier, Sandherr’s deputy, on the other hand, broke ranks with his former colleagues and told the court of his doubts about Dreyfus’s guilt: the anti-Dreyfusard press dismissed this as the unreliable testimony of an alcoholic.25
Félix Gribelin, the archivist from the Statistical Section who had witnessed the arrest of Dreyfus by du Paty de Clam, told the court that Dreyfus’s shiftiness about his extramarital affairs confirmed his guilt.26 Alphonse Bertillon, the Chef du Service d’Identité Judiciare, took the stand once again to expound his theory of auto-forgery – a theory which the experts appointed by the Combined Chambers had unanimously judged to be ‘devoid of all scientific value’.27
The irrelevance of much of the evidence, the admission of hearsay, the mix of opinion with fact and the mingling of judges, witnesses and prosecutors during the court’s recesses appalled observers from outside France. A drink offered to Picquart during a recess of the Criminal Chamber, and a judge calling him ‘my dear Picquart’, had been sufficient to have the case removed from that court’s jurisdiction. Now, there were regular friendly exchanges between the army officers involved in the court martial. General Mercier discussed the trial with General Chamoin, the representative of the Ministry of War; while Maurice Paléologue, representing the Foreign Office and, like Chamoin, supposedly impartial, was asked by one of the judges, Lieutenant-Colonel Brogniart, ‘as a private individual’, whether he thought Dreyfus innocent or guilty. Paléologue repeated his theory that it was not Dreyfus who was the traitor but Esterhazy in cahoots with Henry and Maurice Weil. ‘Maurice Weil? Who is this Maurice Weil?’ Brogniart had never heard of him, and ‘his surprise turned to astonishment when I told him the improbable story of this Jew’.28
3: The Second Court Martial – 2
The two lawyers defending Dreyfus might have been more effective had they not disagreed, acrimoniously, about how to proceed. Edgar Demange, Dreyfus’s first counsel and loyal supporter, wanted to avoid any kind of confrontation with the army and its General Staff and persuade the judges to acquit Dreyfus on the grounds of reasonable doubt. Fernand Labori, on the other hand, wanted to expose the monstrous conspiracy that had first led to Dreyfus’s conviction and subsequently kept him on Devil’s Island.
The two men differed in style as well as tactics. Whereas Demange spoke courteously to the judges, putting his questions ‘with the solemnity of a head waiter passing the turbot’,29 Labori was pugnacious and argumentative, more than willing to confront the presiding judge, Colonel Jouaust. ‘Maître Labori, I would ask you to speak with moderation,’ Jouaust said to Labori after one of his flamboyant outbursts.
‘I have not uttered a single immoderate word.’
‘But your tone is immoderate.’
‘I am not in control of my tone.’
‘Well, you should be. Everyone is in control of his person.’
‘I am in control of my person but not my tone.’
‘I shall withdraw your right to speak.’
‘Go ahead and withdraw it.’
‘Sit down.’
‘I will sit down, but only because I choose to.’
The antipathy between the two defence lawyers was all too apparent. Labori undermined Demange by revealing that the Statistical Section had a file on him because he specialised in the defence of foreign agents.* Labori himself was considered suspect after defending the anarchist Vaillant who had thrown a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. However, Labori was the bête noire of the nationalists not for acting for Vaillant but for defending Zola. On 14 August 1899, at six in the morning, while he was walking with Picquart from his lodgings on the Place Laënnec towards the court along the banks of the River Vilaine, Labori was shot in the back at a distance of three metres. The young man who had fired the shot fled; Picquart pursued him but he escaped. Labori was taken to the house of Rennes’s leading Dreyfusard, Professor Victor Basch, where it was found that the bullet lodged in his back had missed his spine and done no serious damage.
Despite the deployment of hundreds of soldiers and gendarmes to search for the would-be assassin, he was never found. Paléologue’s secretary, the Breton Vicomte du Halgouët, predicted correctly that ‘the gendarmes and the police will come back empty-handed for the attempted murderer will have the whole population on his side. I know our peasants. They never denounce each other any more than they ever agree to give evidence against each other. They have remained exactly as they were at the time of the chouannerie’ – the uprising of the Catholic royalists in 1793.
Barrès wrote cynically that the defence would be better off without ‘the impetuous lawyer’. Colonel Jouaust refused to suspend the proceedings and so Henri Mornard was brought in to replace Labori; but, after only eight days, Labori returned to his place in court. The week of recupe
ration had exacerbated his paranoia: he suspected that what Barrès had said was true – that the Dreyfus family felt that Alfred’s cause would be better served without him. Conspiracy theories entered his head. Hearing that Joseph Reinach had met the Jesuit Père du Lac at the house of a salonnière, Mme Dreyfus-Gonzales, he felt that some deal between the clericalists and the Dreyfusards had been done behind his back.
Mathieu Dreyfus, the co-ordinator of his brother’s defence, regretted that the man who had so ably and eloquently defended Zola should now be sidelined, but Labori’s policy of confrontation with the army was proving counter-productive. Mathieu understood how the judges, middle-ranking officers in the army, ‘must find it difficult to believe in so much villainy, in so many perjuries on the part of people they esteem’,30 and agreed with Demange that the defence had to be conducted with this in mind.
It was clearly the most propitious line to take. Two weeks into the trial, three of the judges told Paléologue of ‘their inability to see any light about the crime of 1894’ and asked him if there was not some way in which conclusive evidence could not be obtained from the Germans. The same possibility had been mooted by the Prime Minister, Waldeck-Rousseau, in Paris; and it had been suggested to Schwartzkoppen by his former chief, Graf Münster von Derneburg, back in December 1898 that perhaps he, Schwartzkoppen, should intervene – to help not Dreyfus but Picquart when he faced a court martial and five years in prison: ‘for you must not forget that what is at issue is the liberty and future of an officer whom you, be he French or German, must always regard as a brother officer’.31 Schwartzkoppen had replied that he had been ‘forbidden to make any admission’ by his superiors, and added: ‘For that matter, the unfortunate Captain Dreyfus should be as close a concern of mine as officer and comrade as Colonel Picquart, and nothing was ever done for the former on our part to free him from his tragic situation.’32
Six months later, the situation remained the same. The German government felt that the formal statements already made by its Ambassador and the Chancellor himself that it had had no dealings with Dreyfus sufficed, and that if these were doubted then why would the same protestations by lesser officers be believed? The only intervention from abroad came when Major Carrière, the prosecutor, produced as a witness an Austrian officer, like a white rabbit out of a hat. This was a Lieutenant Eugen Lazare von Czernuski who gave evidence through the clerk of the court (he could barely speak French) that a friend who served as a section head in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna had told him that there were four persons spying for the ‘Germanic powers’ in France, and Alfred Dreyfus was top of the list. A high-ranking officer on the German General Staff had confirmed this information.
Even those predisposed to believe what he said found Czernuski an unconvincing witness. ‘His appearance should have been enough to discredit him,’ wrote Paléologue. ‘His complexion was haggard, there was a shifty look in his rheumy, twitching eyes, his ears were asymmetrical and he was continually grimacing. His face was that of a rogue and vagabond; the man was obviously a social outcast.’33 At a second session, held in camera, Czernuski broke down under cross-examination and subsequently said he was sick and left Rennes; but this introduction of a foreign witness provoked Labori, without consulting Demange, to demand that Schwartzkoppen and Panizzardi be summoned through diplomatic channels to give evidence. He sent telegrams to Kaiser Wilhelm II and the King of Italy to this effect.*
Labori’s request was rejected by the judges of the court martial as being beyond their powers to enforce, and on 8 September an official communiqué of the German government confirmed the position already taken: that previous statements must suffice. ‘Secretary of State von Bülow expressed himself in these terms on 24 January 1898 before the Reichstag Commission: “I declare as formally as possible that between the French ex-Captain Dreyfus, presently imprisoned on Devil’s Island, and any German agency, there has never existed any relation or connection of any sort whatsoever.”’34
The only other intervention from abroad came with the arrival in Rennes of Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice of England, sent to report on the trial by Queen Victoria herself. He was received with the appropriate respect and seated on the platform behind the judges between Maurice Paléologue and General Chamoin. ‘What an unattractive-looking man,’ he whispered to Paléologue when he first saw Dreyfus. He later told Paléologue, who had been told to take care of him, that he was appalled by the patent bias of the judges against the accused and by the total confusion in the evidence between fact, hearsay and opinion; and he said he was amazed that the crucial role of prosecutor, in a trial that had the attention of the world, should have been given to ‘such a grotesque figure’ as Major Carrière. Stung by these criticisms of the French judicial system ‘stated with an entirely British arrogance and abruptness’, Paléologue assured his guest that if he knew the judges as well as he now did, he would accord them his respect and esteem.
However, later that evening, dining with Russell in a country inn, and finding him in a less xenophobic frame of mind, Paléologue came to appreciate ‘the extent to which the French mind, which is so open to the sense of justice, is so closed to the notion of law’.35 But was the French mind open to a sense of justice? On his way to the court martial Lord Russell had told his coachman that he thought Dreyfus innocent. ‘And the generals?’ the coachman had replied. ‘Are they guilty?’36
‘The choice is clear,’ wrote Barrès. ‘Dreyfus or our principal leaders. On the one hand there is Dreyfus’s honour; on the other, there is the honour of all the ministers who have sworn to Dreyfus’s guilt.’ ‘If the innocence of Dreyfus is established,’ wrote Déroulède, ‘there can be no punishments sufficiently terrible for the Ministers who either accused or allowed him to be accused. Every reprisal would be excusable . . . If Dreyfus is innocent, the generals are scoundrels.’37
‘Between the Jew and the General, choose!’ The General was Mercier, the alpha and omega of the Dreyfus Affair, the man who had brought the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus in the autumn of 1894 to secure his position as Minister of War, and who was there in Rennes to stiffen the resolve of those like Boisdeffre and Gonse who had been broken by the Affair – ‘all those’, as Paléologue put it, ‘whom the Dreyfus case has morally killed’. Mercier was not a cadaver in this ‘necropolis’; he was not just alive but vigorous and commanding. He ‘dominated the drama at Rennes and . . . outranked every one of the prisoner’s seven judges’.38 From the home in Rennes of his friend General de Saint-Germain, Mercier had co-ordinated the campaign of the anti-Dreyfusards, insisting upon ‘rigorous discipline’ throughout the camp. Even before the trial opened, he had thrown his own character on to the scales of justice. ‘Dreyfus will certainly be condemned once again,’ he had written in L’Intransigeant on 3 August 1899, ‘because in this affair someone is guilty, and either it is him or it is me.’39
Unwavering in his insistence that Dreyfus was guilty, and as much in command in 1899 as he had been in 1894, Mercier’s political affiliations had changed. As Jean Doise has pointed out, it was Mercier who started the Affair, a man who was said to be inspired by anti-Semitism, but in October 1894 he had been a staunch republican, a free-thinker, married to a Protestant Englishwoman, and ‘had nothing about him of the chouan’ (see p. 298).40 Now he was the hero of the nationalist and royalist anti-Dreyfusards, although among these, as the trial had proceeded, there was a growing impatience at Mercier’s delay in producing the document that would settle things once and for all – the photograph of the bordereau annotated in the hand of the Kaiser and mentioning Dreyfus by name. Was not the letter from Panizzardi, asked La Libre Parole and La Croix, forged by Henry to take its place at a time when revealing the real thing would have led to war? Now the time had come to end all procrastination. Mercier must play his trump card.
There was no trump card. Mercier’s confidence that his view would prevail depended not on evidence but on authority. ‘Nothing has been able to
shake his faith in his own infallibility,’ wrote Paléologue. ‘The ruins that have accumulated round his handiwork, the most categorical denials, the most devastating disclosures, the troubled consciences of many of the most upright and able men, left him unmoved.’41 On Saturday, 12 August, General Mercier took the stand. ‘The hall was all agog’, wrote Paléologue, ‘for the dramatic and devastating disclosure that would end the case once and for all. But nothing came but a commonplace account of the case.’ However, General Mercier concluded his four and a half hours of evidence with a personal statement.
I shall now end my deposition, already very long, in thanking you for allowing me to speak for so long.
I want to add only one word. I have not reached my age without learning from sad experience that all that is human is subject to error. In any case, if I am feeble-minded as Monsieur Zola has said, I am at least an honest man and the son of an honest man. Therefore, when I saw the start of the campaign for a retrial, I followed with acute anxiety all the polemics, all the debates which took place during the campaign. If the least doubt had entered my mind, gentlemen, I would be the first to declare and to say before you, Captain Dreyfus: ‘I made an honest mistake.’
Hearing this, Dreyfus got to his feet. ‘That is just what you must say.’
‘I would say to Captain Dreyfus,’ Mercier went on, ‘“I made an honest mistake, and with the same good faith I recognise that mistake, and I will do all that is humanly possible to make up for a terrible error.”’
‘It is your duty,’ shouted Dreyfus.
‘But no. My conviction since 1894 has not changed one jot, and it has been strengthened by a deeper study of the dossier, and also by the futility of the efforts made to prove the innocence of the man convicted in 1894, despite the enormous effort and the many millions foolishly spent.’42