The conclusion of a second report requested by the court from three leading academics on Bertillon’s expertise was that ‘the absurdity of his system is self-evident’. The bordereau was not a careful forgery; it had been written spontaneously by a ‘fluent hand’. On 19 November, 1904, the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Cassation forwarded the case to the Combined Chambers in accordance with the law of dispossession that had been passed five years before. The presiding judge of the Combined Chambers, Alexis Ballot-Beaupré, appointed as rapporteur Judge Clément Moras. The full rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus seemed imminent. But then the political situation changed and a final judgment was delayed.
5: L’Affaire des Fiches
On 17 January 1905, Émile Combes resigned as Prime Minister, compromised by another scandal, L’Affaire des Fiches – the card-index affair. This was a covert system that had been set up by the Minister of War, General André, to purge the army officer corps of its ‘Jesuits’ – those officers who, republicans believed, owed their positions to the old-boy network established in the Jesuit school on the rue des Postes and later at Saint-Cyr. Despite the fact that General Mercier had been a staunch republican, and that there was a larger proportion of Jewish officers in the officer corps than in the population at large, it remained a republican idée fixe that the influence of these aristocratic Catholic officers meant that ‘a good Republican, above all a good Republican who was also a Jew or a Protestant, had little chance of rising in the army’.67
How was General André to change this state of affairs? High-ranking promotions were now in the hands of the Minister, but lower down the scale they remained the prerogative of the promotion boards which were themselves composed of just the kind of clericalist officers that André abhorred. Of course, the boards, too, could be abolished and all promotions reserved for the Minister, but how could he hope to know the political and religious sympathies of so many men?
The solution was to seek information from outside the army – from civilian officials such as the departmental prefects or republican activists on the ground. General André delegated this task to his personal adjutant, Captain Mollin, who was the son-in-law of the great Dreyfusard author Anatole France. Mollin, like André, was a Freemason, a member of a notably political and anti-Catholic Lodge, the Grand Orient, with its headquarters on the rue Cadet in Paris. Here was a ready-made network of informers and a building where the information could be assembled and, in the person of the secretary of the Grand Orient, Narcisse-Amédée Vadecard and his assistant, Jean Bidegain, a staff to co-ordinate and collate the research.
The information, as it came in, was entered on cards or fiches. These would be marked either ‘Corinth’ or ‘Carthage’ – the Corinthians being the sheep who should be promoted and the Carthaginians the goats who should be held back. An officer reported to be ‘perfect in all respects; excellent opinions’ would be marked as a Corinthian; another who, ‘though a good officer, well reported on, takes no part in politics’ would nonetheless be designated a Carthaginian because he went ‘to Mass with his family’ and sent his six children to Catholic schools. A bachelor officer who went to Mass was by definition of a reactionary disposition. Officers loyal to the republican ideals were encouraged to report on the opinions voiced by their colleagues in the mess.
Despite the clandestine methods of the Grand Orient, such an extensive network of internal espionage could not be kept wholly secret, if only because it quickly became clear that atheist officers were being promoted while Catholic officers were not. Mollin was delighted to see ‘an officer who in 1901 had his sons at a Jesuit school and openly displayed sentiments hostile to the Government, in 1902 sending his sons to the lycée, and in 1903 displaying his respect for our institutions’. However, a system that led to military matters being affected by civilian informers disturbed some of those who became aware of what was going on. General Alexandre Percin alerted the former Prime Minister, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, who then raised the matter with his successor as Prime Minister, Émile Combes, saying that the practice was both politically hazardous and morally wrong.
Combes did nothing: he felt confident that the practice, should it be exposed, would meet with the approval of his Radical supporters. It was a miscalculation. It turned out that Jean Bidegain, the assistant to Vadecard, the secretary of the Grand Orient, was not as loyal a Mason as Vadecard and Mollin had supposed. In 1904 he made contact with Gabriel Syveton, the secretary of the still active Ligue de la Patrie Française, and sold him a selection of the fiches for 40,000 francs. The most damning were read out in the Chamber of Deputies by Count Jean Guyot de Villeneuve, a former protégé of General de Boisdeffre, driven out of the army for his nationalist affiliations. In two dramatic interventions, on 28 October and 4 November 1904, he exposed a Masonic influence over the army – as real as that of the Jesuits had been fictitious. In the Chamber Combes was evasive, while General André lied about what he had known. In a vote of confidence on 17 January 1905, Combes’s majority was reduced to six. Technically it was a victory but morally a defeat. The ‘little father’ resigned.
6: Vindication
Émile Combes was replaced as Prime Minister by Pierre Maurice Rouvier, a politician who had been out of office for the previous ten years because of his links with Baron Reinach and Cornelius Herz during the Panama scandal. His cabinet was unstable. With the Catholic religious orders now dissolved and the Church disestablished, anti-clericalism was no longer proving sufficient to hold the left-wing coalition together. Increasing industrial unrest set the Socialists against the bourgeois Radicals, and a visit to Tangiers by the German Kaiser, hoping to frustrate France’s plans to incorporate Morocco into its North African empire, meant a renewed threat of war. It was not a time to alienate the army or its natural constituency on the right by pursuing the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus.
Moreover, skirmishes continued between the Catholics and the anti-clericals. It was now that the government started its inventory of Church assets, including the sacred vessels reserved in tabernacles. There were riots; a Catholic was killed in northern France; support for Rouvier ebbed away and his government fell on 7 March 1906. Ferdinand Sarrien, the former Minister of Justice, took his place and appointed Georges Clemenceau as his Minister of the Interior.
Now sixty-five years old, it was the first time that this arch-Dreyfusard had held office. In contrast to his indecisive Prime Minister, Clemenceau took to power with an exceptional zest. He used the gendarmerie to subdue striking coal miners in the Pas de Calais; and when the postal workers went on strike in Paris, Clemenceau sacked them and made clear that he would not allow organised labour to challenge the state. To shore up support on the right, he instructed the departmental prefects to suspend the inventories of Church property: ‘Knowing how many chandeliers there are in a church is not worth a human life.’
With Clemenceau moving to the right and Jaurès still of the left, the Dreyfusard alliance was falling apart. The general election of May 1906 confirmed the realignment. The Socialists did well, but the Radicals did better and could now form a majority without Socialist support. All the Dreyfusard candidates were returned thanks to the surge of support for the left.
The Affair itself was hardly mentioned in the course of the campaign; but if it was absent from the minds of the voters, it remained the pre-eminent cause of those now in power. The political climate was finally favourable for justice to be done. On 15 and 16 June 1906, the Combined Chambers of the Cour de Cassation met in camera to consider their verdict. On 18–22 June, in open session, it heard the report of Judge Clément Moras. The atmosphere was calm, almost boring. There were no angry crowds surrounding the Palais de Justice, no need for troops or gendarmes to keep order. Once again, but now for the last time, the case against Dreyfus was laid out, analysed and shown to be without substance.
Moras was followed by the public prosecutor, Baudouin, who addressed the court for eight consecutive sessions. It was he who tackled the dif
ficult question of whether Dreyfus should be retried by a third court martial or be declared innocent by the court. Baudouin argued forcefully against a retrial. So too did Henri Mornard, who spoke on behalf of Dreyfus. He argued that with Henry dead and Esterhazy beyond the reach of French justice, crucial evidence would be unavailable; and, more importantly, that the court’s reasons for annulling the verdict meant not just that Captain Alfred Dreyfus might be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, but that he had no case to answer.
The judges of the Combined Chambers withdrew to consider their judgment. On 12 July 1906, the presiding judge Ballot-Beaupré – surrounded by the other judges, all dressed in black and gold robes with ermine capes – delivered their ruling. The verdict of the court martial held at Rennes was annulled and ‘given that, in the final analysis, nothing remains of the charges made against Dreyfus’, he was declared innocent. An announcement of their judgment was to be posted in Paris and in Rennes and was to be inserted in the Journal Officiel as well as in fifty Parisian and provincial newspapers chosen by Dreyfus. Finally, after five years of incarceration, and a further seven years in a legal limbo, any taint of treason had been removed from his record, and the honour that had meant more to Alfred Dreyfus than life itself had been restored to him.
Dreyfus, his family and his supporters were exultant. ‘I had never doubted that justice and truth would eventually triumph against error, deception and crime,’ wrote Dreyfus. ‘What sustained me . . . was the unshakable faith that France would one day proclaim my innocence to the world.’ A celebratory dinner was held at the Hadamards’ apartment: there were tears and embraces; flowers and telegrams were delivered to the door. Journalists were turned away. ‘Excuse my brother,’ Mathieu said to them. ‘Today he wants to keep for his friends.’
Yet the triumph was not total. ‘I can imagine your joy, and that of those close to you,’ wrote Georges Picquart in a curt response to a note sent to him by Dreyfus giving him the good news. ‘I would have preferred, as you know, a court martial, but I won’t be stubborn. Perhaps it is better like this.’68 Dreyfus, too, had always hoped to be declared innocent by his fellow officers – his peers. The rump of the anti-Dreyfusards were not slow to point out that the decision, strictly speaking, was illegal: the Cour de Cassation only had the power to ‘break’ or quash a verdict of a lower court, not to usurp the powers of the Attorney General in deciding whether or not there was a case to answer. General Mercier, in the Senate, accused the Cour de Cassation of resorting to an ‘irregular’ procedure. To the die-hards the verdict only confirmed what they had always known – that the Jewish syndicate which controlled both the executive and judicial branches of government had ignored legal niceties to save the skin of one of their own.
Dreyfus had renounced the right to claim monetary compensation for wrongful imprisonment, but he expected and was granted by an overwhelming vote in the Senate reinstatement in the officer corps of the French Army with the rank of major – a position he could reasonably have expected to have reached at that stage in his career. He was also awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Légion d’Honneur. However, his promotion was gazetted from the date of the passing of the resolution in the National Assembly, 13 July 1906, whereas Georges Picquart was reinstated in the army as a brigadier-general, his promotion to be backdated to 10 July 1903. ‘I was surprised’, wrote Dreyfus, ‘and so were many of my friends that my promotion to the rank of major was to date only from the day the resolution was passed. In all fairness, they should have applied the same principle to me as they did to Picquart who was given promotion over all those who had been junior to him as Lieutenant-Colonels at the time when he left the army.’69
The fissure among the Dreyfusards had not healed. Émile Zola had died from asphyxiation as a result of a blocked chimney in September 1902, but his widow, attending the hearings at the Cour de Cassation, was appalled to see Georges Picquart ostentatiously turn his back when Mathieu Dreyfus approached him to shake his hand.70 However, Picquart was present when, on 21 July 1906, Alfred Dreyfus was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur. Dreyfus had turned down the idea of holding the ceremony in the main courtyard of the École Militaire, the scene of his degradation eleven years before, unsure of how he would bear up to such painful memories; he chose instead a smaller courtyard in the presence of a select group of invited guests. Besides Picquart, watching from an open window, were Mathieu, Lucie, Pierre and Jeanne Dreyfus; the public prosecutor, Manuel Baudouin, and the great Dreyfusard author Anatole France; but not the lawyers, Demange and Mornard, nor the politicians, Reinach, Jaurès and General André.
At 1.30 in the afternoon Dreyfus entered the courtyard in full military dress – ‘the four-braided black hussar’s dolman and grenade-adorned cap of unassigned officers’ – before two squadrons of cavalry and two mounted batteries of artillery. To a fanfare of trumpets, he marched forward with the same stilted step as at his degradation, his stooped body straining to stand straight. With Dreyfus was Commandant Targe, who had assisted General André in laying the ground for the final rehabilitation; he was also to be honoured. Targe stepped forward first to receive an officer’s rosette. Then it was the turn of Dreyfus. General Gillain, Commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, in full ceremonial dress, with an unsheathed sword, dubbed Dreyfus three times on the shoulders. ‘In the name of the President of the Republic, I hereby name you Knight of the Légion d’Honneur.’ Gillain then pinned the cross on Dreyfus’s breast and embraced him. ‘Commandant Dreyfus, I am honoured to have performed this task.’ The contingents assembled in the courtyard now marched past the podium on which stood General Gillain and Major Dreyfus, the soldiers raising their hands and the cuirassiers their sabres to salute the once despised traitor who had now had his innocence re-established and his honour restored.
* Cf. Marcel Jouhandeau in Marcel and Élise: ‘Thus Élise does not confess her sins but mine . . .’
* Those exempt were mostly missionary orders considered useful for the mission civilisatrice in the French Empire.
Epilogue
After his reinstatement, Major Alfred Dreyfus was put in command of the artillery depot at Vincennes. However, he had neither the strength nor the will to resume a military career and the following year he applied to take early retirement. He renounced his pension and, since he had not served as a major for two years, reverted in retirement to the rank of captain in the army reserve.
Dreyfus retreated, in so far as his celebrity permitted, into the family life that he had come to value above all else during his years of suffering on Devil’s Island. His hope was ‘to forget in calm all the sadness of the past and be born again to life’,1 but his health remained frail – he suffered from recurrent tropical fevers and long periods of chronic fatigue. Nor was he able to recover the zest for life that he had enjoyed before his arrest. His son Pierre would recall that during the seven-year wait for his final rehabilitation, ‘the constant tension in the mind of my father . . . weighed upon us all, and lent a certain heaviness to the general atmosphere of family life’.2
My father was not, by nature, very demonstrative. Five years of torture and solitude had made him even more introspective. He lived an intense inner life, but was no longer capable of externalising his emotions. He had lost the habit of self-expression and since, moreover, he loathed self-pity and the display of his sufferings, he seemed very cold and distant to those who did not know him well.3
While at home, Dreyfus would work on a dossier of his Affair, collecting, classifying, annotating and arranging the large number of documents and cuttings. Receiving many letters from outside France, he started to collect stamps, and would help Lucie with her sewing – simple, methodical pastimes that kept his hands busy while his mind churned. He received visits from his family and close friends, and every Thursday would attend, without Lucie, the salon of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti – ‘a change of scenery for a man who had always been restless’, and one tolerated by Lucie who ‘understood his impatienc
e with family gatherings’.4
The passions aroused by the Affair had diminished but were not dead. Politically, the further polarisation resulting from the anti-clerical laws meant that the right would be excluded from government until 1919. The opposition from the right became extra-parliamentary: the Ligue de la Patrie Française was supplanted by the more combative Action Française – a movement which attracted the eloquent monarchist and anti-Semite Charles Maurras, and also his friend Léon Daudet, the son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, who was married to the granddaughter of Victor Hugo and enjoyed a reputation as a great wit and gossip, ‘a more coherent Rochefort, a less solemn Drumont’. Radicalism went out of fashion: it became smart to be right-wing.
In the spring of 1908, the government of Georges Clemenceau announced that the ashes of Émile Zola would be transferred to the Panthéon with all the solemnity of a republican ritual. The ceremony, which took place on 4 June that year, was attended by the Prime Minister, Clemenceau, Georges Picquart and Alfred Dreyfus. Among the spectators was a young journalist, Louis-Anthelme Grégori. He had a revolver which he fired at Dreyfus, the bullet hitting his arm. Dreyfus was taken to a police station. His wound was treated and found to be superficial.
The unsuccessful assassin, Grégori, apprehended and placed under arrest, turned out to be a member of Maurras’s Action Française. He was charged with attempted murder and went on trial in September. Commandant du Paty de Clam and Captain Lebrun-Renault testified in his defence. When, in the course of the proceedings, the judge stated that the proclamation of Dreyfus’s innocence by the Cour de Cassation was ‘formal, definitive, irrefutable’, the editor of the newspaper Action Française shouted that it had been illegal and a fraud. Louis-Anthelme Grégori was acquitted, and left the court shouting triumphantly: ‘it’s a review of the review’.5 Shortly afterwards the die-hard anti-Dreyfusards demonstrated against another Dreyfusard, the deceased Bernard Lazare, at the inauguration of a monument erected in his memory in Nîmes.