First there were the clergy’s strictures about dancing. In the course of the nineteenth century, traditional dances in which there was little physical contact between the sexes had been replaced by the waltz and the polka which placed a man and woman in one another’s arms – effectively a lingering, perambulatory embrace. The moral dangers of such an ‘occasion of sin’ obsessed the nineteenth-century clergy. Girls were made to sign pledges not to dance, which alienated the young, ‘particularly young men in the countryside who deeply resented the curé’s role in cutting off the supply of girls for the village bal’.41
Secondly, among married Frenchmen, there was widespread resentment against the Church’s teaching on birth control. The principal method employed by married couples to avoid conception was withdrawal prior to ejaculation – the sin of Onan42 – a practice which was confessed by women but blamed on men.* Many French husbands deeply resented not just the Church’s ruling but also the prying of the curé into the intimate details of their conjugal life. They themselves refused to submit to such an interrogation and abandoned the sacrament of confession; they were therefore barred from Easter communion and so effectively excluded from the Church. The Bishop of Le Mans, Jean-Baptiste Bouvier, in a letter to Pope Pius IX, asserted ‘without hesitation that the prying by confessors into sexual habits and their prohibition of birth control was producing protests and driving people away from the Church’.43
It was, then, not so much the indifference to justice shown by so many French Catholics during the Dreyfus Affair that had made the Church unpopular as the widespread perception that it was the ally of the rich, the enemy of progress and a prurient killjoy when it came to sex. A majority of Frenchmen voted for the anti-clerical agenda of the Bloc des Gauches in the general election of 1902; Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s strategy was vindicated. But, in his moment of triumph, he resigned on grounds of ill-health, exhausted after running the government for three momentous years – a longer period than any other in the history of the Third Republic. He was replaced as Prime Minister by Émile Combes.
Combes, born in the Tarn, had studied in a Catholic seminary for the priesthood but had been rejected because he was judged ‘too proud’.44 Spurned by the Church, Combes lost his faith, joined the Freemasons, studied medicine and practised as a doctor in the country town of Pons in the Charente-Inférieure. Here he espoused ‘all the ideas, prejudices, hates, and principles of the small town anticlerical’.45 He was typical of those in the French provinces who worked to ensure that the village priest was ‘banished from the school, excluded from the committee directing official charities, regarded with malicious distrust or jealous hatred by the mayor and the school-master, kept at arm’s length as a compromising neighbour by all the minor officials employed by the commune or the state, spied on by the innkeeper, exposed to the anonymous denunciations of the local newspaper’ and left to spending ‘his mornings reciting prayers to empty pews and his afternoons planting cabbages and pruning roses’.46
What had been done on a small scale in a provincial town, Combes now enacted for the whole nation. He formed a cabinet which included ten fellow Freemasons, and in his first days in office signed decrees closing down more than a hundred Catholic schools.47 His provincial roots, and his disdain for the moderating blandishments of the metropolis such as a seat in the Académie Française, endeared this ‘obstinate and self-satisfied little man’48 to his admiring disciples, who called him the ‘little father’. One of his few excursions into society was to attend the soirées of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, where other regulars were Joseph Reinach and Alfred Dreyfus.49
On 1 July 1901, a new Law on Associations was passed which obliged every religious order to obtain ‘a legislative authorising’ act which would determine its function. All but five of the religious orders that applied for authorisation were refused.* The unauthorised orders were either dissolved or forced to move abroad. There were in France at that time 159,628 members of religious orders living in 19,424 establishments of one kind or another. Of these 3,126 were run by men, 16,298 by women. There were 30,136 members of male religious orders, of whom 23,327 taught in schools and colleges.50
However, it was women who were particularly affected by the new laws. As Katrin Schultheiss observed, ‘membership in an active religious congregation afforded single women of all classes the opportunity to perform a vast array of social services, including nursing and teaching’.51 As many as 100,000 girls and single women were employed in enterprises in the silk and clothing industries run by religious orders; these were now closed down. In Catholic Brittany, there was popular resistance to the closures: 1,500 colonial troops were sent to deal with three convents in the province, and 3,000 laid siege to a monastery near Tarascon.52 Expelling the nursing orders from French hospitals was particularly unpopular. The extraordinary expansion of active rather than contemplative religious orders in France in the nineteenth century – the congrégations – had met a growing demand for social services that the penny-pinching republican politicians had been unwilling to satisfy.
The congrégations hospitalières . . . rapidly developed their own paramedical establishments (pharmacies, sanatoria, home nursing, etc.) and then moved into a bewildering variety of social services: old people’s homes, orphanages, homes for the blind and deaf-mutes, lunatic asylums, homes for ex-prostitutes, prison services, soup kitchens, job placements for domestic servants and so on, almost ad infinitum . . . They were prepared to take on the repulsive, the incurable, and the financially unrewarding in a way that doctors were often not.53
Now anti-clerical zeal overrode republican parsimony. ‘It is the strict duty of every republican’, said the Parisian doctor and politician Désiré Bourneville, ‘to remove from the priests and nuns every means of action accorded them in civil society of which they are the implacable adversaries.’ Bourneville led a protracted campaign to replace nuns with lay nurses in French hospitals and succeeded thanks to the anti-clerical majority on Paris’s Municipal Council. Katrin Schultheiss estimates that there were, at the turn of the century, approximately 20,000 Catholic nuns providing nursing care in French hospitals. Sacking them was not popular. In both Paris and Lyon, ‘anti-clerical doctors, hospital administrators and politicians – many of whom unequivocally supported the laicization of the nation’s schools – rallied in the defence of the congregational nurses’.54 On 15 January 1908, several thousand Parisians, among them doctors, councillors and politicians, assembled outside the historic Hôtel-Dieu hospital to take leave of the Augustine Sisters who had served there as nurses for more than a hundred years.55
However, the prime target of the anti-clerical legislation was the Catholic schools. By a law of 7 July 1904, members of religious orders were prohibited from the ‘teaching of every grade and every kind in France’. The members of the few authorised congregations came under this ban. Every religious, man or woman, who wanted to continue to teach children had to renounce their religious calling, and it was left to the courts to decide whether such a renunciation was sincere. Henri de Gaulle, the father of Charles de Gaulle, lost his job as the lay headmaster of the Jesuit school in Paris and sent his son Charles to be educated by the Jesuits in Belgium.56
Here, for French Catholics, was the persecution which they had feared: it might not be as cruel and sanguinary as that of the Jacobins, but it was, all the same, a determined effort by a government of atheists and Freemasons to prevent the education of French children in a faith that had flourished in France since the baptism of Clovis 1,400 years before, and to root out significant aspects of Catholic practice from the life of the French nation. Many devout customs were now criminalised. Monastic life was unlawful and religious processions, dating from the Middle Ages, were banned by anti-clerical local authorities.57
What could the Catholic Church do in the face of this persecution? In 1901, Pope Leo XIII was ninety-one years old. With a government in Paris led by a Freemason and dominated by Freemasons, all that he had foresee
n in his encyclical Humanus Genus had come to pass. He had held out an olive branch to the French republicans but they had rejected it: his policy of ralliement had failed. Leo died in 1903. His successor, Giuseppe Melchiore Sarto, the son of a village postman and a seamstress, took the name Pius in honour of the two popes, Pius VI and VII, who had been bullied and mistreated by Napoleon. If they had stood up to the military genius and Emperor of the French, Pius X was unlikely to retreat before the little doctor from the Tarn.
Disputes between the French government and the Vatican on a number of matters led to a diplomatic rupture and to the disestablishment of the Catholic Church in France. There was no formal denunciation of the Concordat, but a motion was passed in the Chamber of Deputies on 10 February 1905 declaring that ‘the attitude of the Vatican’ had rendered the separation of Church and state inevitable; and on 11 December 1905 the Separation Law was passed and published in the Journal Officiel.
For Charles Péguy, the fact that the struggle of the Dreyfusards should lead to this ‘Combes demagogy’ was a catastrophic perversion of the movement’s ideals. ‘The Dreyfusards who became Combists were already inflated with pride, and did evil.’58 Certainly, the Church itself was partly to blame for its defeat by the French secularists. ‘It was not the arguments that it lacks but charity. All the reasons, all the systems, all the pseudoscientific arguments weigh for nothing in the scales against an ounce of charity.’59
However, the Catholic Church had survived worse bouts of persecution before, and in some ways the persecution by the Combes government had a salutary outcome. Denis Brogan describes the effect as ‘bracing’.60 The disciples of Compte and Michelet, who had assumed that the Catholic faith itself would wither and die, were to be disappointed. In the world of letters there was a Catholic renaissance with authors such as Charles Péguy, Ferdinand Brunetière, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget, Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac, and philosophers and theologians such as Lucien Laberthonnière, Maurice Blondel, Louis Duchesne, Henri Brémond, Jacques Maritain and Ernest Psichari.
Some, certainly, remained anti-Semitic. ‘I am an anti-Semite,’ wrote Huysmans, ‘because I am convinced that it is the Jews who have turned France into a sad country, agitated by the lowest passions, the sad country without God that we now see.’61 But others, such as Péguy, Claudel, Bernanos or Mauriac, abhorred anti-Semitism; and the anti-Semitism of the Assumptionists that had contaminated, by association, the shrine at Lourdes and the message of Bernadette Soubirous was wholly absent in the cult of another Catholic girl, Thérèse Martin, a Carmelite nun, who died of consumption at Lisieux at the age of twenty-four in 1897. Her Story of a Soul, published posthumously, revealed a spirituality far removed from the polemics of Action Française or diplomatic disputes over the disestablishment of the Church. She was, as Ruth Harris writes, ‘no anti-Semite, despite having grown up in an ultra-Catholic and right-wing family’.62 Canonised by Pope Pius XI in 1925, Thérèse became ‘the most widely loved Catholic intercessor of modern times’.
4: The Case Reopened
In a debate in the Chamber of Deputies on 6 April 1903, almost four years after Alfred Dreyfus had been pardoned by President Loubet, the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès ascended the podium to reintroduce the question of his unjust conviction. Taking up the whole session of 6 April, and speaking for two hours on the following day, he yet again presented the overwhelming proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and the guilt of those who had conspired to thwart his rehabilitation. Throughout his address he was heckled by nationalist deputies, but he rose above the insults and interruptions, demonstrating once again his oratorical powers and his ability to rouse the passions of his followers with lofty appeals to justice and truth and ‘accusations against the Church’.63
Jaurès demanded that the case be reopened; his motion was opposed by that most zealous of anti-Dreyfusards, the former Minister of War Godefroy Cavaignac. Dying of liver cancer, and taking his certainty of Dreyfus’s guilt to the grave, Cavaignac’s eloquence might not equal that of Jaurès but his assurance gave a morbid force to what he said. ‘Our conscience is worth every bit as much as yours . . . You are not judges. You are not here as servants of the truth but as the slaves of your passions . . . Your project is to cause chaos and repudiation of the nation.’ Insults were traded between the two sides. Cavaignac called Jaurès a coward; Jaurès said that Cavaignac filled him with contempt.
Cavaignac’s objections were ignored. The Combes government, acting in concert with its staunch Socialist supporter Jaurès, had already decided to accede to his request. ‘The government is eager to facilitate the search for the truth in this matter,’ the Minister of War, General Louis André, announced to the Chamber, ‘and agrees to proceed with an administrative investigation.’ Quite what was meant by this was unclear, but Dreyfus did not wait for the politicians to decide. He immediately applied for a review based on the emergence of new evidence in his case. Combes then charged General André with making a ‘personal investigation’ into the case: the Dreyfus file was taken out and dusted down, and an examination of the evidence started all over again.
General André’s investigation was conducted by a Captain Targe, who claimed an open mind. To find his way through the voluminous and often obscure documentation, Targe enlisted the help of its original author, the archivist from the Statistical Section, Félix Gribelin. Gribelin had been as complicit as any in the conspiracy against Dreyfus, had venerated Henry and had not changed his mind about Dreyfus’s guilt; but he was astute enough to see that the wind was now blowing in a new direction. He co-operated with Targe. ‘He had become truthful with age,’ Joseph Reinach would write, ‘as one becomes obese or bald.’64
With Gribelin’s help, Targe quickly uncovered the numerous forgeries undertaken by Henry to incriminate both Dreyfus and Picquart. Here was the new evidence required to reopen the case. On 19 October 1903, General André presented his report based on the findings of Captain Targe to the Prime Minister, Émile Combes. On 27 November, the cabinet referred the request to the Review Commission, and on 24 December the Commission accepted the grounds for a review with no dissenting vote. The next day, while the clericalists celebrated the birth of Christ, the Minister of Justice referred the judgment made at Rennes to the Cour de Cassation.
Nine years had passed since Dreyfus’s first conviction, and a number of the legal officers involved in the Affair had either died or retired. The presiding judge of the Criminal Chamber was now Jean-Antoine Chambareaud and the public prosecutor Manuel Baudouin – a man with a distinguished legal pedigree and one of the few Frenchmen who had not yet decided whether he thought Dreyfus innocent or guilty.
Examination of the evidence convinced Baudouin that Dreyfus had been convicted by the judges at the Rennes court martial on charges ‘not one of which appears to resist scrutiny’ and on the basis of documents ‘which, after the conviction, were acknowledged to be forged’. His report was presented to the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation in January 1904; public hearings of the request opened on 3 March. The Criminal Chamber accepted the petition and its re-examination of the evidence began on 7 March, continuing until 19 November.
All the protagonists were summoned once again to give evidence and all the old files were reopened; even Mme Bastian made an appearance, and the love letters between Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen and Hermance de Weede were brought back into court. Like a play in repertory at the end of a long run, the same players recited the same lines but many lacked conviction. General Mercier, now that his bluff had been called on the annotated bordereau, fell back on the preposterous ‘proof’ of the expert witness Bertillon that the bordereau had been written by Dreyfus in a forged hand. General Billot was now forgetful; General Roget trimmed his views; Captain Lauth distanced himself from his deceased friend, Colonel Henry; while General Gonse struck Dreyfus as ‘pitiful, a luckless wretch crushed beneath the weight of all the infamies he had committed’.65 Only Captain Cuignet, a recent con
vert to anti-Dreyfusism, and Commandant du Paty de Clam, who had been one from the start, expressed their views with any conviction – though the former, Cuignet, could not conceal his rancour and the latter, du Paty, appeared mentally unstable. Even Maurice Weil was called before the court and harshly questioned by Baudouin, but he bridled at being treated as a suspect and gave nothing away.
When Dreyfus gave evidence on 22 June 1904, he made as poor an impression as he had done at every court appearance since his first court martial in 1894. Maître Mornard had prepared the court for his client’s inability to meet the expectations of others when playing his role. ‘His spirit, described as haughty and imperious . . . is in fact that of a shy man fighting his own timidity; I know what lies behind this allegedly unfeeling heart that has suffered so cruelly in obeying a self-imposed rule not to show its suffering.’ Dreyfus himself complained of how unjust it was to judge by appearances: ‘I believe in reason, I believed that reason in such matters, in which the heart’s emotions can never contribute any explanation, any attenuation, was supposed to be the judges’ sole guide.’66
As in the judiciary, there had been a change of personnel in the General Staff. A report it now submitted at the request of the judges of the Criminal Chamber, drawn up by a number of senior officers including the commandant of the École de Guerre, demonstrated that the bordereau exonerated rather than incriminated Dreyfus. The phrase ‘the way in which it performs’ relating to the hydraulic brake on the 120mm cannon would have been ‘utterly abnormal’ coming from a trained artillery officer; and Proposal for a Firing Manual was not a confidential document: the claim that it was ‘extremely difficult to get hold of’ must have been inserted by Esterhazy to enhance his value in the eyes of Schwartzkoppen.