Under the provisions of the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt, residents of Alsace and Lorraine were given the choice of remaining as subjects of the Kaiser or retaining their French citizenship and going into exile. Raphaël Dreyfus, though his mother tongue was German and his mills were now in Germany, did not hesitate in choosing to remain a citizen of France. He was, as his grandson Pierre would later describe him, one of ‘those Alsatian patriots who preferred exile to German domination’.12 Raphaël therefore moved with his wife and younger children to Basel in Switzerland, only forty kilometres from Mulhouse, and left his eldest son Jacques in Mulhouse to run the factory. This meant that Jacques, who had fought in the Alsatian Legion throughout the Franco-Prussian war, was obliged to adopt German nationality. Raphaël and Rachel’s eldest daughter Henriette now married a textile manufacturer, Joseph Valabrègue, and went to live with him in Carpentras, the capital of the former Papal State of the Comtat Venaissin in the south of France. Jacques, too, was married soon after the family’s dispersal, to Louise Wimpheimer, the daughter of an industrialist from Philadelphia in the United States. Alfred, now thirteen, was sent as a boarder to an elite private school in Paris, the Collège Chaptal.
Although this abrupt removal of a boy of this age from a doting family to the cold corridors of a boarding school was common in England, it was not in France and may have contributed to an Anglo-Saxon reserve in the young Alfred – what the French call le flegme anglais. Even before leaving home, ‘his sisters had noted his reserve . . . when visitors called at the home . . . Later that shyness bordering on timidity became a reserved, highly controlled manner that at times came across as arrogance. He had difficulty “opening up”.’13 However, he excelled at his studies and it quickly became clear to his teachers, to his family and to Dreyfus himself that he could legitimately aspire to enter one of France’s elite Grandes Écoles. Alfred had in mind the École Polytechnique, established at the time of the Revolution, and a military academy under Napoleon I, and now once again France’s leading educational institution for scientists and engineers.
The École Polytechnique was the portal through which Dreyfus hoped to enter the officer corps of the French Army. The other acknowledged route was the military academy of Saint-Cyr, but, though ‘Jews were not formally excluded [from the academy] . . . the prevailing conservatism and above all the methods of recruitment in reality prevented them from getting in. The preparations for the entry exams were in the hands of religious establishments, especially those run by the Jesuits, in particular the famous school on the rue des Postes in Versailles.’14 The École Polytechnique, by contrast, was republican in spirit – combining ‘perfectly the republican ideology with intellectual ideology to combat the obscurantist forces of the ancien régime and the Church’.15
Competition for a place was intense and, after gaining his baccalaureate at the Collège Chaptal, Dreyfus spent two years preparing for the entrance exams to the École Polytechnique at the École Saint-Barbe where the fees were 4,000 francs a year. He was intellectually able, hard working and good at exams. The results of the entrance exam taken in 1878 placed Dreyfus 182nd out of 236. He graduated two years later from the École Polytechnique, 128th out of 235. He was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant, and enrolled in the army’s school of artillery at Fontainebleau.
Over the next ten years, Dreyfus applied the talents he possessed to furthering his career. He became an expert horseman and was deemed ‘extremely qualified’ to teach horsemanship to squadrons in Paris.16 He was assiduous in performing his duties and even went beyond what was expected of him, seeking out difficult work and demonstrating his newly acquired scientific knowledge and his quick understanding. Some of his studies on financial resources and mobilisation in time of war were praised by his superiors but provoked jealousy in his peers. He had unconventional views on military matters, which he defended vigorously, even vehemently, in debate with senior officers. These were qualities that appealed to the modernisers in the High Command but not to the traditionalists. To apply terms that might have been used by the English equivalent of the Saint-Cyrians, Dreyfus was ‘pushy’, he ‘tried too hard’ and was ‘too clever by half’.
Dreyfus saw no active service; he never served abroad. He was appreciated by his superiors for his ‘very lively intelligence’ and ‘excellent memory’ and was only marked down in routine appraisals for his awkward manner and monotonous voice. This sometimes came across as arrogance: Dreyfus did not suffer fools gladly and felt ‘he had little in common with his garrison colleagues’ in Paris or Le Mans.17 He was also set apart from his fellow officers by a private income of 20,000 francs a year – ten times the basic salary for a lieutenant at that time. Two-thirds of French officers had no private income.
This substantial supplement to Dreyfus’s army pay enabled him to avoid the communal life of the barracks and ‘secure the finest lodgings’ wherever he was posted. He made no friends. Was this because he was cold-shouldered by the Saint-Cyrians among his fellow officers? Did they feel that, as a Jew, he did not ‘fit in’? Or was it because Dreyfus preferred to keep himself to himself? There were, after all, many officers who were not Saint-Cyrians but, like Dreyfus, secular-minded graduates of the École Polytechnique: not all of these can have been anti-Semites yet, even among his fellow Polytechniciens, Dreyfus did not make friends. He thought it was ‘absurd to bore oneself with a society of tiresome . . . disagreeable, often spiteful and envious men’.18 He often ‘took long walks alone’19 and spent his leave going to see an art exhibition in Amsterdam or visiting relatives at Bar-le-Duc, Carpentras and even German-occupied Alsace – on one occasion obtaining a visa from the German Embassy, on another entering the territory without one.
2: Lucie Hadamard
Dreyfus preferred the company of women to men – no doubt seeking in his liaisons with the femmes galantes Mmes Dida, Déry, Bodson and Cron the cosseting he had received in childhood from his affectionate elder sisters. Arthur Meyer, the director of the conservative newspaper Le Gaulois, grandson of a rabbi and convert to Catholicism, would later write that Jews were sentimental villains who ‘spend their youth in love with women who are not their race, seduce them, often have children by them, and leave them to wed Jewesses with dowries’.20 In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the Jewish Charles Swann marries his mistress Odette de Crécy, but it seems unlikely that Dreyfus contemplated following his example by marrying one of the easy-going women whose company he enjoyed.*
In this Dreyfus was conforming to the conventions of his class at that time. But it also demonstrates the limits of his concept of assimilation, and his commitment to liberty, equality and fraternity as the pre-eminent ideals of the society in which he lived. Dreyfus was a secularist: he did not believe in the precepts of Judaism, nor did he live in accordance with the law of Moses. Yet there is no evidence that he contemplated looking for a wife from outside the Jewish community† any more than he had looked for friends among his gentile comrades-in-arms. The one fellow officer whom Dreyfus did befriend at the École Polytechnique – they used the familiar form tu21 – was also Jewish, Paul-David Hadamard, and it was Hadamard who introduced him to his future wife.
On 12 September 1889, Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of captain and was appointed as adjutant to the army’s School of Pyrotechnics in Bourges. He was now thirty-three years old – tall, already balding, wearing pince-nez glasses but with a fine moustache. Earlier that year Paul-David Hadamard had taken Dreyfus to a family gathering at the home of his cousins David and Louise Hadamard. David Hadamard, then in his late fifties, traded in diamonds, a business he had inherited from his father. His wife Louise, née Hatzfeld, was the daughter of an industrialist, director of a steel works in Ars-sur-Moselle, who was a graduate of the École Polytechnique and had served as an officer in the artillery. Although David Hadamard had been born in Paris, his family, like that of his wife, came from the lost provinces of eastern France.
David and Louise Hadamard had fi
ve children, among them three daughters, Lucie, Marie and Alice. It was the eldest, Lucie, then aged twenty-five, who caught Alfred’s eye as a possible wife. She was ‘not a stunning beauty’22 but she was attractive – tall and slim, with broad shoulders, dark eyes and thick black hair ‘parted in the middle and pulled back with a bandeau to control her curls’.23 She had been brought up in her parents’ country house in Chatou near Paris and educated largely by tutors in the home. Lucie was a talented pianist and music was ‘her first love’, but like the other members of the Hadamard family she esteemed intellectual achievement. Her mother was related to Adolphe Hatzfeld, who had co-authored the seminal Dictionnaire Général de la Langue Française; and her father’s sister, Lucie’s aunt Eugénie, was married to David Bruhl whose son-in-law, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, was a distinguished philosopher.
The Hadamards were, then, socially superior to the Dreyfus family in a number of ways. The Dreyfuses were rich but the Hadamards were richer, and while the Dreyfuses were provincials with no roots in the metropolis, the Hadamards were part of the Jewish elite with fine apartments in Paris or the suburbs and country houses within easy reach: the Hadamards an apartment on the rue de Châteaudun and a country house at Chatou; the Lévy-Bruhls ‘one of the finest houses in the Parc des Ibis on the avenue des Courses at Le Vésinet’. The Hadamards were friends of the Chief Rabbi, Zadoc Kahn; unlike the Dreyfuses, ‘the family’s private culture was still marked by Jewish practice, no matter how attenuated’.24
What made Alfred Dreyfus a suitable parti for the Hadamards’ eldest daughter was his standing as an officer in the French Army. Certainly, ‘his family were more than respectable’ and came ‘from the same Jewish Mosello-Alsatian background’; he was vouched for by their nephew Paul; he seemed ‘serious and responsible’ and ‘his wealth and his career assured the future of their daughter’.25 But it was the career that singled him out and made him particularly attractive to Lucie. ‘She was a merchant’s daughter, and she . . . loved him for his uniform and his sword.’26 Dreyfus was given the green light and, upon returning to Bourges, courted Lucie by correspondence.
The courtship was successful. Alfred Dreyfus and Lucie Hadamard were married on 21 April 1890. The religious ceremony was performed in the Jewish synagogue on the rue de la Victoire by Zadoc Kahn, the Chief Rabbi, and was followed by a reception in the Hadamards’ apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. They then left for a honeymoon in Italy, staying on Lake Como and in Florence. They returned via Basel in Switzerland, and then Mulhouse, so that Lucie could meet members of her husband’s family who had not been able to attend the wedding.
When they returned to Paris, Alfred and Lucie moved into an apartment at 24, rue François 1er in the 8th arrondissement. It was an area ‘that had attracted significant numbers of affluent Jews whose families had first settled in central and eastern districts’27 but was also a short walk from Les Invalides. A rich man before his marriage, Alfred Dreyfus was now richer still. Lucie’s dowry had included ‘a trousseau of linen, lace, jewelry, and furniture valued at 20,000 francs; interest at 3 per cent on a sum of more than 35,000 francs; and more than 160,000 francs in cash – all of which, under the Code Napoleon, had been transferred to her husband’s name on the day of their wedding’.28 Lucie could expect an inheritance of more than 500,000 francs while Alfred himself had ‘a permanent facility of several hundred thousand francs’.29
This prosperity enabled Alfred to stable two horses which he rode in the Bois de Boulogne. He ‘ordered specially tailored uniforms and indulged his taste for chocolates and small cigars’.30 He and Lucie moved from the rue François 1er to a grander apartment at 6, avenue du Trocadéro in the 16th arrondissement, where Alfred supervised the construction of a wine cellar. On 5 April 1891, Lucie gave birth to a son, Pierre, and soon became pregnant again. After the birth of her second child, a daughter, Jeanne, on 22 February 1893, Lucie was unwell for some time and, while Alfred was anxious and dutiful as a husband, he continued with his extramarital affairs. Vincent Duclert judges that ‘Lucie loved Alfred deeply. Alfred loved her probably rather less, but he admired what she represented and the family into which he had married.’31
There was an element of Jekyll and Hyde in Alfred’s behaviour in the years between his marriage and his arrest. He would return home from his office for a quiet dinner with Lucie, prepared by their Alsatian cook, Mlle Hassler, and then go out to the theatre or a concert or visit his parents-in-law for a rubber of bridge. In summer he would spend the weekends at Houlgate in Normandy where his family were on holiday, but during the week revert to his ‘bachelor life’. Even when he was with Lucie, he was subject to ‘mercurial moods, the abrupt shift from lighthearted discussions to an obsession with work, and a relentless perfectionism that made him appear selfish and insensitive’.32 He acknowledged that he found it difficult to ‘open up’ and agreed ‘that Lucie had a right to know more about the man to whom she was entrusting her life’, but he had good reason to keep some things from her and was temperamentally incapable of breaking his ‘disastrous habit’ of taking everything seriously. He did not have much of a sense of humour.
3: The École de Guerre
Alfred Dreyfus’s obsession with work came from his ambition to rise in the hierarchy of the French Army and gain entry to its General Staff. What might hitherto have been a pipe dream for the son of a Jewish textile manufacturer with a good brain but no connections among the right people had become a practical proposition after the reforms put through by Charles de Freycinet when Minister of War in 1888.
The École de Guerre, founded in 1880 to replace the École Militaire Supérieure along the lines of the Military Academy in Berlin, admitted its pupils strictly on merit and after the most rigorous of competitive examinations.33 This gave an advantage to graduates from the École Polytechnique whose intellectual formation was closer to that of the École de Guerre than to that of Saint-Cyr. General de Miribel, as Chief of the General Staff at the time, had pushed through the reforms initiated by Freycinet. To break the system of co-option that favoured aristocratic officers educated at Jesuit schools, he laid down that the top twelve graduates would go on to serve as interns in the four bureaux with a view to recruitment to the General Staff (see above, p. 31).
Though enforced less rigorously by Miribel’s successor, General de Boisdeffre, this system was still in force and was the obvious path for Dreyfus to take to the top. While still teaching at the artillery school in Bourges, he had swotted for the entrance examination – ‘a three-day marathon of military tactics, topography, history and German’. He was the only candidate from the artillery school in Bourges to pass. He now entered the École de Guerre, and his success showed that Miribel’s strictly meritocratic criteria for entry were still in force – but it was around this time, in May 1892, that Édouard Drumont embarked upon his campaign in La Libre Parole against the presence of Jewish officers in the army which led to the duels between Drumont himself and Crémieu-Foa, with Count Esterhazy as the latter’s second; then that of Armand Mayer – an Alsatian Jew and Polytechnicien – with the Marquis de Morès in which Mayer was killed. Dreyfus did not attend Mayer’s funeral because he was not in Paris, but he was undoubtedly present in spirit among the 20,000 who attended the obsequies presided over by the Hadamards’ friend Zadoc Kahn, the Chief Rabbi.
Having won a place at the École de Guerre, Dreyfus was determined to pass out top in his class. As he studied he was confident that intellectual competence had replaced martial bluster as the qualities required in the leaders of a modern army. Somewhat naively, he ignored the evidence that the French officer corps remained governed by unwritten codes.34 He was oblivious to the ‘tensions between the modernists and the traditionalists’, and failed to realise that the latter’s position had been strengthened by the replacement of General de Miribel as Chief of the General Staff by General de Boisdeffre.
Dreyfus was abruptly made aware that the rules of the game he had thought abolished were still in force w
hen he received the results for his final exams at the École de Guerre. In the course of his studies, he had been commended by the Commandant, General Lebelin de Dionne, for his mastery of military theory and administrative practice, for his ‘good education, work habits and quick intelligence’, and for his ‘very good conduct and deportment’. His horsemanship and knowledge of German were regarded as outstanding – the only drawbacks being his short-sightedness and his monotonous tone of voice.35 These minor failings should not, and did not, prevent Dreyfus from scoring high marks in his final examinations, but his overall score was lowered by a zero given by the examiner, General Pierre de Bonnefond, in an area of appraisal called côte d’amour – which might be translated as team spirit, or an ability to fit in.
As a result of this zero, Dreyfus had fallen from third to ninth place in his class – still an astonishing accomplishment, given that the young Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military genius Dreyfus greatly admired, had graduated from the École Militaire forty-second out of fifty-eight; and it was sufficient to gain him an internship on the General Staff. However, Dreyfus was incensed by the zero for côte d’amour and many of his biographers have shared his sense of outrage and ascribe it, like Dreyfus, to General de Bonnefond’s expressed dislike of Jews. Ruth Harris asserts that Bonnefond’s ‘outrageous “fixing” of Dreyfus’s exam results showed that prejudice was still rife’.36 Vincent Duclert states that ‘Captain Dreyfus became the preferred target for those officers who wanted to thwart the modernist means of advancement and were determined to prevent, above all, the entry of Jews into the “Holy of Holies” of the General Staff.’37
Douglas Johnson, on the other hand, in his France and the Dreyfus Affair, writes that ‘it is important not to exaggerate the extent or the power of anti-Semitism in the French army’, and cites the career of Maurice Weil, who ‘retained the protection of powerful allies, not only Saussier, but a number of other generals’.38 And, as Albert S. Lindemann points out in The Jew Accused, there were ‘a surprisingly large number of Jewish officers in the French army (the figure of three hundred was often mentioned by the early 1890s of whom ten were generals)’. He adds that the percentage of Jewish officers was ‘consistently at around 3 per cent from the 1860s to the eve of World War I. With Jews constituting between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent of the total population in those years, that meant an overrepresentation of between thirty and sixty times . . . Many spokesmen for the Jews in France claimed that the military was unusually open and just in its treatment of Jews.’39 Marcel Proust, who had a Jewish mother, enjoyed his life in the army. ‘It’s curious’, he wrote to a friend later in his life, ‘that you should have regarded the army as a prison, I as a paradise.’40