Joseph Reinach, in his article in Le Siècle, had demanded an immediate pardon ‘before the ink could dry’ on the verdict delivered by the court martial in Rennes. Alexandre Millerand had said he would resign if Dreyfus was not pardoned the next day. President Loubet, however, procrastinated; he wanted, as a fig-leaf to cover the implicit repudiation of the authority of the army, a week’s delay during which a doctor would report on Dreyfus’s state of health. A thirty-eight-year-old physician at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, Pierre Delbet, was sent to Rennes to examine Dreyfus – a man, Dreyfus judged, of high intelligence and goodwill.63 Delbet’s report was duly submitted to the Minister of War. ‘It is clear from the information obtained that the health of the prisoner has been seriously affected and would not endure, without great danger, a prolonged period of detention.’ This was enough for Loubet. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers, held on 19 September, the President of France acceded to the request made by the Minister of War and signed the decree pardoning Alfred Dreyfus for the crime of treason.
At two in the morning of 20 September 1899, Dreyfus left the military prison in Rennes wearing a navy-blue suit, a black overcoat and a black felt hat in the company of the Director of the Sûreté, Léopold Viguié, and four plain-clothes policemen. A car took Dreyfus and his escort to a small station at Vern, ten kilometres outside Rennes. Here they caught a train to Châteaubriant and then to Nantes, the first leg of a long journey to Carpentras in the south-east of France and the home of his much loved elder sister, Henriette, and her husband Joseph Valabrègue.
Mathieu Dreyfus and the Valabrègues’ son Paul met Dreyfus at Nantes. The two brothers embraced and for a while held each other without saying a word.64 Paul, too, embraced his uncle: it was Paul who had been subjected to du Paty de Clam’s rant about adultery and treason back in 1894. With Mathieu and Paul was a reporter from Le Figaro, Jules Huret, who joined them for the rest of their journey.
‘How beautiful the countryside is! Look at that little village, the cockerels, the chickens, the lovely trees in the mist! Can you believe that for a year all I saw was the sky and the sea, and then for four more years, the sky alone: a square of bright blue sky, hard, metallic and always the same, completely cloudless!’65 If Dreyfus had had any doubts about accepting a pardon, they were now dispelled by the joy of freedom. He smoked one cigarette after another. ‘You smoke too much,’ Mathieu said to him.
‘Let me smoke. Let me talk. Give me at least twenty-four hours of debauchery!’
Dreyfus talked while he smoked, and Huret, whom Dreyfus found ‘a pleasant travelling companion’, took notes for his exclusive story. How sad he was, said Dreyfus, to hear that Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, his great champion, had died on the very day of his pardon but without hearing the good news. How encouraged he had been by the 5,000 letters of support that he had received since returning to France – and this was not counting those sent to Lucie. ‘Oh, that did me good. Even officers on active service sent me short notes: “Happy to see you back. Happy at the thought of your rehabilitation.”’
When it came to his enemies, Dreyfus judged Mercier to be ‘a bad and dishonest man’, too ‘lucid and perspicacious’ not to be aware of what he had done. ‘But if he is mentally aware, he is morally oblivious. He is amoral.’ Dreyfus found excuses for his former comrades who had given evidence against him. ‘I am sure it was not out of antagonism towards me. No, it was simply a low calculation of how to please their superiors. These are people who have a very strange idea of duty!’
When the travellers reached Bordeaux at half-past four, they ate a late lunch in the Hôtel Terminus, Dreyfus’s first meal as a free man. The news of their arrival had leaked out and a crowd of journalists and the general public were held back by the men from the Sûreté. But unlike the throng that had bayed for blood when he had disembarked from the train at La Rochelle on his way to the Île de Ré five years before, the passions expressed were now mixed. As they went from the hotel to the platform to catch an overnight train to Narbonne and then Avignon, one man shouted ‘Bravo!’ and another ‘Down with Dreyfus!’ ‘They cancel one another out,’ said Dreyfus. ‘Cela se balance.’
When they finally arrived at Avignon, on the morning of 21 September, two landaus awaited Dreyfus and his companions. Here Jules Huret left them to return to Paris. Dreyfus, with his brother and nephew, got into the first landau; his escort from the Sûreté into the second. They then set out on the twenty-kilometre journey to Carpentras, the road passing through a landscape of olive trees and vines with Mont Ventoux in the distance, pink in the light of the morning sun.
The human landscape was equally benign: the mayor of Carpentras had been able to reassure the Prefect of the Vaucluse that there was no need to take special precautions to protect Dreyfus. The Valabrègue family were highly esteemed in a city that, governed by the popes until the French Revolution, had an ancient Jewish community and the oldest synagogue in France.
The Valabrègues’ house, Villemarie, was outside the city, set in ten hectares of fields, orchards and vines, and surrounded by white walls. Dreyfus knew it well from his youth. Just as his sister Henriette had been a mother to him, so Villemarie had been a home. When he arrived at the end of the avenue leading to the house, he got down from the landau and was greeted by two of his sisters, Henriette and Louise. After them came their husbands.
Lucie was on her way from Paris, and reached Villemarie at midnight. ‘This was the first real moment of reunion,’ Dreyfus wrote later, ‘because the situation in the prison at Rennes had been too agonizing, too sad, for us to be able to say what was in our hearts. Now, at last, after five years of the most cruel and unmerited martyrdom, we could speak freely.’ The two children, Pierrot and Jeanne, arrived the next day with Lucie’s parents, the Hadamards. It was the first time that Dreyfus had seen them since the day he had left his home on the avenue du Trocadéro in October 1894. He was apprehensive: ‘My feelings were overwhelming in seeing once again these dear little creatures for whom I had kept myself alive, whose memory had enabled me to summon up such strength. I was afraid of that moment of astonishment, of their surprise, at finding themselves before a father whose face they no longer knew. But they immediately threw themselves into my arms and hugged and kissed me. Their mother had made sure they remembered their absent father. These few moments of joy helped me to forget so much sadness, so much grief.’66
* Colonel de Villebois loathed the British because of Fashoda and died fighting for the Boers.
* Sandherr had told Paléologue that Demange ‘was an unpleasant, very unpleasant character, who had made a speciality of defending spies; he was in the hands of the Jews. At the intelligence department we have a file about him which might take him a long way.’
* Dreyfus was later told that 25,000 francs had been withdrawn from the account of the Intelligence Department at the War Ministry at just the time Czernuski appeared at Rennes.
* ‘The Butcher of the Communards’ (see p. 20, above): appointed Minister of War by Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau to gain support on the right.
* This complacency was premature. In Britain an Indian solicitor, George Edalji, was wrongfully convicted in 1903, as was a Silesian Jew, Oscar Slater, born Leschziner, in 1909. ‘Racial prejudice, arbitrary judgement, and the corporate solidarity of corrupt and/or incompetent officialdom thus proved not to be exclusively cross-Channel phenomena’ (Robert Tombs, ‘“Lesser Breeds without the Law”: The British Establishment and the Dreyfus Affair, 1894–1899’).
15
The Last Act
1: Amnesty
On 17 November 1899, the French Prime Minister, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, introduced legislation into the Senate that would enact an amnesty for all crimes and misdemeanours connected with the Dreyfus Affair. This ‘silent, stooping, myopic’ man with ‘the glazed look of a dead fish in his eyes’1 had, the day before, been reconfirmed as Prime Minister in the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 317 to 211. Given the narrow majority with w
hich he had been first elected in 1899, this was a political triumph but one that had been achieved at a cost. The government now relied for its support on the Socialists: ‘you have brought the enemy into the fort,’ said the former Prime Minister Jules Méline, ‘on the pretext of defending it’.2
The purpose of the amnesty was to remove the poison of the Dreyfus Affair from the body politic once and for all. It meant that the legal proceedings against Émile Zola and Georges Picquart would be dropped, as would the suit against Joseph Reinach by Berthe Henry. It would prevent any actions being taken against officers on the General Staff or Statistical Section for forging documents and telling lies. The legislation ‘was not a matter of judging or absolving acts already accomplished’, said Waldeck-Rousseau, ‘but merely of making it impossible to revive a painful conflict’.
The amnesty outraged the Dreyfusards. Georges Picquart had demanded a judicial investigation into the conduct of General Gonse and Félix Gribelin, the archivist at the Statistical Section. Georges Clemenceau and Jean Jaurès thought it monstrous that General Mercier, ‘the first of the criminals’, should be exempt from prosecution. ‘Waldeck-Rousseau’s ministers’, wrote Clemenceau in L’Aurore, ‘are turning into the bandit’s accomplices.’
‘No one more ardently than myself wants an end to the tensions whose first victim was myself,’ wrote Dreyfus in an address to the Senate sent from Villemarie. ‘But only justice can allay tensions. Amnesty is a blow to my heart; the only person to profit from it would be General Mercier.’
There were also objections from the right. ‘The amnesty is perfidious and shameful,’ said L’Écho de Paris. ‘It was prepared by Waldeck-Rousseau with the Dreyfusard confederates as traitors-in-chief and the apprentice traitors Picquart, Reinach, and Zola.’ That the anti-Dreyfusards still held sway in some parts of the country was made clear when, on 28 January 1900, General Mercier himself was elected to the Senate for the Loire-Inférieure. He spoke in the debate on the amnesty, finally held on 1 June 1899, saying that it was of no interest to him but insisting yet again that what he had done in 1894 was for the sake of his country.
However, this ‘cold crocodile who never smiled’3 had met his match in Waldeck-Rousseau, a man with ‘the frigid and distant impartiality of an English statesman’.4 ‘To those who think this law too indulgent and that we risk debilitating the Nation,’ said Waldeck-Rousseau in his response to Mercier, ‘I shall limit myself to observing that there are punishments more severe than those meted out by law, and that the justice of the court room is not the only justice. There is another, formed by public awareness, which traverses the ages, is the teaching of peoples, and is already entering into history.’5 Mercier might have the support of the electors of the Loire-Inférieure but he would be condemned in due course by posterity.
The law was passed by a vote of 231 to 32 and the attention of the nation switched from the Dreyfus Affair to the pleasures of the Exposition Universelle. However, for Waldeck-Rousseau there remained unfinished business. Secure in office with the support of the left, he determined to ‘bring the army to heel’ – that army which had humiliated the nation with the verdict at Rennes. Immediately after Dreyfus’s reconviction, on 29 September, General Galliffet had removed the power to appoint generals from the High Council of War and the High Commission of Promotion, and had reserved such appointments for the Minister of War. At the same time the government moved against the men who had attempted to suborn the army to overthrow the Republic: Paul Déroulède and Jules Guérin were once again charged with sedition. Though they had been triumphantly acquitted by a jury in May 1899, new warrants were issued for their arrest in September: Guérin and fifty of his supporters refused to give themselves up and were besieged by the police for five weeks in their headquarters on the rue de Chabrol. After the fall of this ‘Fort Chabrol’, Guérin and Déroulède were brought before the Senate, constituted as a High Court, on charges of sedition. The trial lasted for several months but, with a left majority in the upper chamber, the result was a foregone conclusion. The accused were found guilty: Guérin was sentenced to ten years’ detention and Déroulède to ten years’ exile. Deroulède left France for San Sebastián in Spain.
2: The Divided Dreyfusards
United in their condemnation of the amnesty, the Dreyfusards disagreed on the pardon – a difference of opinion that grew into an enmity that equalled and even exceeded that felt for the anti-Dreyfusards. Bernard Lazare, though he approved the pardon on humanitarian grounds, realised at once that accepting it meant the end of the ‘heroic’ phase of the Dreyfus Affair. In the previous two years, the campaign to free an innocent man, the victim of a miscarriage of justice, had grown into something far greater and grander: it had become a quest to append Justice to the Republic’s three ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The Dreyfusards had become an army fighting not so much for the rehabilitation of one man as for a supremely moral cause. ‘If you recall the years 1897–1899 to a survivor of that period,’ Dreyfus’s son Pierre would write later in life, ‘you will notice his face light up, his voice acquire a new harshness, his whole being tremble at the memory of that fierce struggle.’6
In the spring of 1900, Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus left Villemarie and moved to a villa at Coligny on the Lake of Geneva. Dreyfus had not abandoned his intention to seek full rehabilitation but, on the advice of his brother Mathieu, Joseph Reinach, Edgar Demange and Henri Mornard, he held back from taking any further action in the courts of law. The Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation could review the verdict at Rennes only if there was new evidence that had not been made available to the judges. Even if such evidence was forthcoming, what could it lead to? A third court martial? What reason was there to think that it would return a different verdict from the first two?
Opposed to this view were Georges Picquart, Georges Clemenceau and Fernand Labori. They believed that Joseph Reinach, a political ally of Waldeck-Rousseau, and Edgar Demange, his old friend, had abandoned the struggle in order to calm the country and so keep him in power. Mathieu was accused of being interested only in ‘saving his brother’s skin’, and that this egocentric attitude was typical of Jews.7 They tried to persuade Dreyfus to send Mathieu back to Mulhouse and dismiss Edgar Demange – even though these were the two men who had come to his aid in his darkest hour. Dreyfus refused.
As the months passed, however, it began to look as if Alfred, by remaining in Switzerland, was somehow lying low; and his self-imposed exile was compared in the press to that of Esterhazy in England. As a result, in November 1900, Alfred and Lucie returned to Paris. With no apartment of their own, they stayed with Lucie’s parents, the Hadamards, on the rue de Châteaudun. When Mathieu sent word to Fernand Labori that his brother was in Paris, Labori replied coldly: ‘You have no doubt told M. Waldeck-Rousseau.’ The amnesty law had not yet been passed and, as tabled, it exempted Alfred Dreyfus from its ban on any further legal action associated with the Affair; he would remain free to pursue his quest for a total rehabilitation. But Labori was convinced that by accepting the pardon Dreyfus had deserted his own cause. He had bartered his freedom for his ‘legal honour’ and in so doing was ‘acting purely as an individual, not as a member of the human collective, in solidarity of his fellow men . . . However great the role he played may have been, he is no longer representative of anything.’8
Labori accused Mathieu, who had secured his brother’s pardon, of being the government’s tool in this ignominious compromise. At a meeting held on 14 December 1900, Mathieu was provoked by Labori’s recriminations to break off relations. ‘All is over between us,’ he said. ‘Au revoir, Monsieur.’ Later, he later expressed regret for calling Labori ‘Monsieur’ when he still considered him a friend. A further meeting was arranged between Alfred, Mathieu and Labori in the presence of Georges Picquart. Nothing was resolved. Labori refused to be reconciled with the Dreyfus family; he would no longer act as their lawyer. Dreyfus pleaded with him to reconsider: ‘Look, that’s not your last wor
d, is it? Look, stay, do it for me, do it for me.’9 He got nowhere. Picquart suggested that they should simply agree to differ. When Dreyfus left, he was in tears. He would never see Labori again.
Losing the custom of the Dreyfus family had serious financial implications for Fernand Labori, whose legal practice had suffered as a result of the Affair – losing him clients and taking up all of his time. In January 1901, Labori received 40,000 francs in fees from Mathieu Dreyfus, half of which was paid through the Chief Rabbi, Zadoc Kahn. Zadoc Kahn asked for a receipt, which enraged Labori: ‘never must an advocate give a receipt for his fee, and never would one think of asking him for one’. Beyond his fees, Labori had also received subsidies, from Émile Straus, Joseph Reinach and Mathieu Dreyfus in the form of a purchase of shares in Labori’s journal La Grande Revue. In the wake of the breach, he sacked a protégé of Reinach’s as political editor of the revue, which in turn led Reinach to dismiss Labori as his lawyer in the case for defamation that he had brought against Berthe Henry. Labori then submitted a bill to Reinach for 90,000 francs.
The squalid aftermath to the breach between Labori and the Dreyfus family was leaked to the press. An anonymous article in L’Écho de Paris attacked Labori for his ingratitude towards those who had paid his fees promptly and made up the losses he had incurred. The article also accused Georges Picquart of cold-shouldering Alfred Dreyfus, refusing a request that they should meet. It was implied that Picquart was now ‘energetically anti-Semitic’. The anonymous author turned out to be Bernard Lazare. When Dreyfus learned this, he asked Lazare to publish a retraction and wrote to L’Écho de Paris to deny that he was behind what had been said.10