European History in Perspective General Editor: Jeremy Black Published Benjamin Arnold Medieval Germany Ronald Asch The Thirty !ears' War Christopher Bartlett Peace, War and the European Powers, I8I4-I9I4 Mark Galeotti Gorbachev and his Revolution Martin P. Johnson The Dreyfus Affair J. L. Price The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century A W. Purdue The Second World War Francisco J. Romero-Salvado Twentieth-Century Spain Brendan Simms The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779-I850 David J. Sturdy Louis XIV Peter Waldron The End of Imperial Russia, I855-I917 Forthcoming Nigel Aston The French Revolution Nigel Aston Frederick the Great N. J. 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Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of ditliculty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England THE DREYFUS AFFAIR Honour and Politics in the Belle Epoque Martin P. Johnson Northern Illinois University MACMILlAN © Martin P Johnson 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims fi)J" damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-68267-8 ISBN 978-1-349-27519-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27519-9 A catalogue record for this book is available fi·om the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 0 I 00 99 Editing and origination by Aardvark Editorial, Mendham, Suflolk CONTENTS Chronology Vll Preface IX 1 In Search of a Traitor (1894) 1 2 A Trial, an Exile (1894-1895) 18 3 The Petit Bleu (1896-1897) 39 4 A Successful Collusion (Autumn 1897) 66 5 The Grand Affaire (1898) 87 6 In the Balance (1898-1899) llO 7 Rennes and Rehabilitation (1899-1906) 129 Conclusion 150 Notes 159 Guide for Further Reading 165 Index 167 v CHRONOLOGY 1894 Late September: Henry brings the bordereau to the Statistical Section. 15 October: Du Paty interrogates and arrests Dreyfus. 22 December: Dreyfus convicted. 1895 5 January: Ceremonial degradation of Dreyfus at the Ecole Militaire. April: Dreyfus arrives at Devil's Island. 1896 Mid-March: Henry brings the petit bleu to the Statistical Section. Late August: Investigating the petit bleu, Picquart determines that Esterhazy wrote the bordereau. September: Picquart informs Gonse and Boisdeffre of his discovery; Mathieu plants a false story in the press that Dreyfus has escaped; Dreyfus placed in chains. October: Picquart sent from Paris; Henry begins wholesale fabrications. 1897 June: Picquart confers with his lawyer Leblois. 13 July: Leblois convinces Scheurer-Kestner that Dreyfus is innocent. October: Scheurer-Kestner meets with high officials; Du Paty warns Esterhazy, beginning the 'collusion'. 15 November: Mathieu publicly denounces Esterhazy as the author of the bordereau. 1898 Mid-January: Esterhazy acquitted; Zola publishesj'arruse; riots and demonstrations across France. 23 February: Zola found guilty of libel. July: Minister of War Cavaignac reads the 'false Henry' to the Chamber; Picquart denounces it as a forgery; Picquart arrested; Zola flees to Britain. 13 August: The 'false Henry' is discovered to be a forgery. Vll Vlll The Dreyfus Affair 30 August: Cavaignac interrogates and arrests Henry who then commits suicide. 1 September: Esterhazy flees to Britain. September: Cavaignac resigns; Brisson government refers Lucy Dreyfus's request for revision to the appeals court. 1899 23 February:. Deroule:de's attempted coup. June: Appeals court annuls Dreyfus's conviction and remands him for retrial; President Loubet attacked at Auteuil racetrack; Zola returns to France; Picquart freed. 22 June: Waldeck-Rousseau forms government of 'Republican defence'. 9 September: Dreyfus found guilty by court martial at Rennes. 19 September: Dreyfus pardoned. 1900 December: Amnesty law passed. 1903 April: Jaures revives the Affair in a speech to the Chamber; Minister of War Andre begins a new investigation. November: Dreyfus requests revision of the Rennes verdict. 1904 March: Appeals court undertakes review of the Rennes verdict. 1906 July: Rennes verdict annulled without remand for retrial; Dreyfus reinstated to the army with promotion and awarded the Legion of Honour. PREFACE In January 1998, at the centenary of Emile Zola's }'accuse, an article that inaugurated the most turbulent period of the Dreyfus Affair, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin upbraided his opponents in the Chamber of Deputies for the historical misjudgements of their party. 'Everyone knows that the left was Dreyfusard', he chided, 'everyone knows that the right was anti-Dreyfusard'. He similarly evoked the right's alleged resistance to the abolition of slavery. Shouting 'Shame!' and 'Resign!' several opposition deputies rushed towards the rostrum with raised fists while ushers leapt forward to prevent an assault on the prime minister. Most deputies of the right then walked out, while those of the left applauded Jospin's scolding. One hundred years had passed, yet the Affair sparked by the trial of an obscure army otlicer could still provoke violence and conflict. The Dreyfus Affair comprises attempted assassinations, suicides, perjury, forgeries, invective, stunning reversals, and abortive coups d'etat, involving the honour and destiny of an individual and of France. It is also a fascinating detective story with profound political and social consequences; little wonder, then, that participants, observers, and scholars have often succumbed to the temptation of trying to find some secret key to unlock the enigmas of the Affair. Many contemporaries believed that the case exposed a vast Judaeo Masonic syndicate responsible for the nation's ills; 1 others thought Dreyfus was the casualty of a Jesuitical-military cabal determined to return France to a past of superstition and oppression. In the years since, some have found the key to the Affair in a French army oper ation to mislead the Germans about a new artillery piece, or as a grand hoax perpetrated to fend off a threatened progressive income tax, or as the echo of treason by the highest ranking officer in France. 2 For all sides the Affair became a litmus test of patriotism or republi canism, of rationality or morality. In current scholarship the Affair IX X The Dreyfus Affair has attained the rank of those few historical events (Vichy, Vietnam) about which it is not permitted to arrive at an erroneous conclusion: the oflicer in charge of French army archives was forced from his post in 1994 after writing that Dreyfus's innocence is the 'hypothesis' accepted by most historians. A tale of mysteries and secrets, the Affair reveals the preoccupa tions and divisions of France and Europe at the turn of the century. At the centre is the unjust imprisonment upon Devil's Island of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew convicted of a crime he did not commit, who was in part the victim of an ancient prejudice. As the gravest crisis of the Third Republic the Dreyfus Affair transformed French politics, recasting the struggle between order and movement that has characterized France since the Revolution. As a crucial episode in the history of racial nationalism it marked the transition from traditional to racial anti-Semitism, foreshadowing the horrors of the twentieth century. And as a prolonged and explosive contest for human rights and judicial equity it engaged academics, writers, and artists as self conscious 'intellectuals' in French politics for the first time, opening a new mode of involvement for those who claimed moral authority by virtue of erudition or sensibility. Over the twelve years from 1894 to 1906 the Affair acted as a kind of X-ray, revealing (and aggravating) fractures in French politics and society; it divided families, friends, political groups, and intellectuals. Behind these fissures a set of larger tensions exacerbated the crisis: national insecurity felt by many French when facing an increasingly powerful Germany; economic and social dislocations largely respon sible for the rising tide of anti-Semitism; the threat posed to the estab lished order by 'cosmopolitan' groups such as Jews (held responsible for corrupting France during the Panama scandal, 1892-93), anar chists (who assassinated President Sadie Carnot in 1893), and social ists (beneficiaries of unprecedented success in the 1893 elections). Meanwhile, radical republicans implemented thoroughgoing anti clericalism, culminating with the exclusion of clergy from schools and the separation of church and state in 1905. Against this backdrop a half-dozen spectacular trials associated with the Dreyfus Affair trans fixed public opinion, while numerous duels between partisans expressed the depth of personal identification with the affair. The fundamental question was not in fact the guilt of one man, it was the identity of France: its political form and dominant values. Republic or authoritarian state? Secular liberalism or clerical traditionalism?