The Dreyfus Affair and the Polarization of French Society

Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp.273-279.

Here is a detailed description of the manner in which the Dreyfus Affair tore apart the French political system and helped created the kind of violent right-wing groups that presaged the fascist movements that would plague European politics in the first half of the 19th century. Gildea supplies more detail than you need for our purposes and refers to many political and intellectual figures that are not particularly relevant to our explorations. You will need to carefully pull out the main threads of the affair and ignore some of the details that are not useful for our purposes. Nonetheless this account can provide a sense of how divisive the Dreyfus Affair was and how it sat the stage for a new era in French politics.

In December I894 a General  Staff officer of Alsatian-Jewish  origin, Captain Alfred  Dreyfus,  was  court-martialled  for  passing  French military secrets to the German army. After a ceremonial  degradation in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire  on  5 January 1895, when  his emblems of rank  were  torn from  his tunic and  his sword  broken, he was sent as a traitor to Devil's Island  off French  Guiana.  Little sympathy surrounded  him: writing  in  La Justice  on  Christmas  Day 1894 Clemenceau criticized the lightness of the punishment which would have been much harsher for an ordinary soldier, and demanded the death penalty.

Almost two  years  later  a  small  group of  individuals began  to suspect that  Dreyfus had been framed by his superior officers in order to cover the guilt of a Gentile officer who was much more closely integrated into the patronage system of the army. This group was partly Jewish- Alfred's  brother Mathieu, the former  Gambettist and editor of La  Republique Françaises, Joseph  Reinach,  the anarchist Bernard  Lazare   and   the  lawyer   and   intellectual  Leon Blum. It was also  partly  Alsatian, and thus marginal but keen  to demonstrate its patriotism. [Alsace was the formerFrench province that had become a part of the new German Empire as a result of the Franco-Prussian War] Colonel  Picquart, head of  the  army's Intelligence  Service, who  had  taught Dreyfus at military school, began to suspect Major  Ferdinand Esterhazy, a flamboyant nationalist, and reported  his concerns  to  his superiors and Meline's  war minister, General Billot. Rather  than  explore that  line they posted Picquart to Tunisia in January 1897· Granted a short  leave in June 1897 Picquart returned and  made  contact with  a lawyer who had been his contemporary at the Lycee of Strasbourg, Louis  Leblois. On 13 July 1897  Leblois met the patron of all Alsatian republicans and  Protestants, Auguste  Scheurer-Kestner, who was  immediately converted to the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Scheurer­Kestner went straight to the top, calling on President  Faure, General Billot and  premier  Meline.  None  of them wanted  to have anything to do with his concerns and claimed that he had no evidence warranting a fresh look at the  case.  Meline announced to the Chamber on 4 December  I897, 'There is no Dreyfus  Affair.'59

More than that, the rumour  began to spread in the autumn of 1897 that this troublemaking, designed only to bring the army into disrepute and weaken the nation, was the conspiracy  of a 'Jewish syndicate'. This story was spread not only by hardline  anti-Semites such as Drumont but by Catholic  leaders such as Albert  de Mun who denounced the 'occult  power'  behind the campaign  and by left­ wing nationalists like Henri  Rochefort  . . . The weight of opinion against the 'syndicate' pulled socialists along in its wake. . . .

In fact Esterhazy was  brought  to court  martial  on 10-11  January 1898,  a  ploy  by the  military  to clear the  air, for  he was promptly acquitted. This triggered a second phase of the Affair: an open letter to  the  president  of  the  Republic,  entitled  J'accuse,  penned  by the novelist Emile Zola,  and  published  on 13 January I898 in L'Aurore by Clemenceau who had  changed  his mind in mid-course.  Zola denounced the cover-up  by the  military, naming war  minister General  Mercier,

chief  of  General  Staff  General de Boisdeffre and Commandant du Paty de Clam as the officers concerned, issued warnings about military despotism, and perorated on the inevitable  triumph of truth  and  justice.6'  He was supported by a manifesto of intellectuals, among  whom were Anatole France and Marcel  Proust,  published  on  14 January,  by Charles Peguy, a graduate of  the  Ecole Normale  Superieure, who spread the word from his Bellais  bookshop in the  rue  Cujas, and  by avant-garde journals such as  La  Revue  Blanche,  run by the art-critic Natanson brothers.62 These  intellectuals, however, remained  a small  minority. Of  the fifty-five daily  newspapers in  January and  February   r898, forty-eight  were anti-dreyfusard.63   Zola  as sent to trial on 7 February 1898  for defamation and sentenced to a year in prison, although he managed to escape to England.  Outside the courtyard hostile  crowds  were  orchestrated  by  Jules  Guerin and his newly formed Ligue Anti-Semitique, composed mostly of butchers' boys from the abattoirs [slaughter houses]of  La  Villette.64   . . .  Anti­Semitic riots broke out in the main cities of France, degenerating in Algiers into a veritable  pogrom.66  The only response of note on the dreyfusard side was the foundation of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, primarily by freemasons, Jews and  Protestants, who had themselves been persecuted before the Revolution, in order  to fight for human rights and  tolerance.67

Intellectuals without  electoral  concerns  might  join the highly exposed Dreyfusard camp.  Politicians with elections to fight in May 1898 did not. In those elections the Dreyfus Affair was not an issue: to mention it  was  electoral   suicide.  Any  politician  suspected  of favouring Dreyfus was unceremoniously abandoned: thus not  only Joseph Reinach but also Jean Jaures and Jules Guesde lost their seats . . . The election saw the return of twenty-two self-confessed anti-Semites, notably Edouard Drumont in Algiers, where the Ligue Anti-Semitique had been his electoral agents. The main result of the elections was defeat for Jules Meline as opinion shifted to the left, and a radical [i.e. a member of the Radical Party, which was in fact, not that radical], Henri Brisson, was appointed premier. The move to the left however, did nothing for the case of Dreyfus.  Brisson's war minister, Godefroy Cavaignac, told the Chamber on 9 July 1898  that he had irrefutable proof of Dreyfus' guilt. The son of the republican dictator of  1848, he saw himself as a soldier in all but name, while Reinach  described  him as 'the Robespierre of patriotism', determined  to put the national interest above individual rights.68   His certainty about Dreyfus' guilt was punctured  by the Preuves published by Jean Jaures, and suspicion for framing  Dreyfus now  fell on Colonel Henry of the Intelligence Section.  Arrested and confined in the fortress of Mont-Valerien, Henry  slit  his throat on  31 August  1898, evidence  of his guilt for dreyfusards and of his martyrdom for antidreyfusards.

Antidreyfusards now had  the wind behind  them.  The defeat of the  moderates around Meline  removed the  plank along which  the 'rallied' royalists and Bonapartists sought to return  to power. There had always been royalists and Bonapartists [i.e. supporters of a return to power of Napoleon's family] critical of the Ralliement [Catholic supporters of the Republic]; now the initiative  shifted to them as it seemed that  they would never gain control  of the parliamentary Republic, so it must  be destroyed. In the  autumn of 1898  anti-parliamentary leagues gathered shape and momentum, putting  the parliamentary Republic in danger. The royalist  pretender [i.e. the next in line to be king if the monarchy was restored], now the Due  d'Orleans, saw  the  possibility of using the popular fighting-force provided by the Ligue Anti-Semitique as a route back to power. Jules Guerin and a selection of his butchers' boys were introduced to the duke in his Brussels exile on 24 January 1899, and royalist money for the Ligue was channelled by Boni de Castellane, who had married  the American heiress Anna Gould, and by Andre  Buffet, son of the Orleanist  Louis Buffet, who had  been a Moral  Order  premier  in  I875.69  The Ligue des Patriotes, dissolved after the Boulanger  Affair, was  reconstituted in September 1898  by Paul  Deroulede, who was  elected  deputy  for  Angouleme  in 1898. Resistant to pressure from his militants to embrace anti-Semitism, he was if anything  Bonapartist, and  was  looked to by Bonapartist leaders . . .

More  bourgeois  and respectable,  less plebeian and streetwise, was the Ligue de la Patrie Française founded  in January 1899  by two secondary  school  teachers,  Henri   Vaugeois  and  Gabriel  Syveton. Their ambition was  to bring over a majority of  the  Academie Française in  order to demonstrate that  not all intellectuals were dreyfusards, and they began with the poet François Coppee  and  the playwright and critic Jules  Lemaitre.  Maurice  Barres  delivered  a keynote lecture  to them,  arguing  that  France had  been desiccated and divided by a cerebral,  Jacobin [the Jacobans were a radical faction in the original French Revolution] notion  of the  patrie [nation]peddled  by philosophy teachers and that a deep and unifying nationalism had to be generated by a cult of the soldiers of 1870 who lay in graves in Alsace, now  art  of  Germany,  the  cult  of  la terre et les morts [the land and the dead]. The high point  of  the Ligue came  with the  municipal  elections of 1900,  when several  of them  were voted on to the Paris municipal council, which was now captured by conservatives. Even before then Henri Vaugeois had branched off to join the left-bank  journalist Maurice Pujo and Provençal  regionalist  Charles  Maurras to  found an Action  Française  Committee  (April   1898), then an Action Française Bulletin (July I 899 ). Maurras had converted to monarchism during a visit to the eastern  Mediterranean in 1896 when he realized how little influence  republican France had in comparison to the monarchical empires of Great Britain, Germany and Russia.  The Dreyfus Affair convinced  him that  the Republic  had fallen into the hands of the 'four  confederate states'  of Jews, Protestants, free­masons and foreigners, and that only a restored   monarchy could bring  back a strong  state,  a  united  nation  and  national  greatness. His approach to monarchism was theoretical  rather  than sentimental and his relationship with the Due d'Orleans and his staff was decidedly  ambivalent. Unlike the Ligue de la Patrie Française, Action Française had no truck with elections but communicated its ideas through its publications and street demonstrations and put its faith in a coup de force.

The turning point  of the  Dreyfus Affair came  in the summer  of 1899. On 31  May Deroulede, charged  with  attacking state security on 23 February, was acquitted  by the Assize Court  of the Seine. On 11 June Colonel Marchand, who had  confronted  British  forces  at Fashoda  on the Upper  Nile but been recalled by the government, made a triumphant procession through Paris.7 3   On 3 June  the Cour de Cassation decided that the case for revising the Dreyfus conviction had to be answered, and referred the matter  back to the court martial. The next day right-wing demonstrators assaulted  the new president Loubet, who was thought to favour reopening  the case, at the Auteuil races, and knocked  his top hat off. Loubet now summoned Waldeck­ Rousseau to form a government of  so-called  'republican  defence' that would bring together broad support for the regime and  defuse the Dreyfus  Affair. His  ministry of  22 June  1899 was composed  of former  supporters of  Meline  who  now   broke  with  him  over his refusal to deal with the Dreyfus Affair. . . . Most  significantly, to draw  in the left wing he appointed Alexandre Millerand as trade  minister, the first time a socialist had held government office. Waldeck pushed through a raft of reforms including an  Associations Law  of  1901 which permitted trade unions to own property collectively, a factory act which limited the working day first to eleven hours and later to ten, and a pensions bill that did not become law till 1910.

Waldeck's government acted  fast to secure the regime. The arrest of Jules  Guerin  and  his  royalist  backer  ndre Buffet was  ordered for threatening state security. Guerin holed up with his Ligue in their offices in the rue Chabrol, near  the Gare du Nord, and police were sent in for  what  became known  as 'the  siege of Fort  Chabrol'. The retrial of Dreyfus by court martial  was conducted for security reasons outside  Paris,  in  Rennes.  Had  he  been  acquitted General  Mercier and the military  top  brass would have been liable to prosecution for obstructing the course  of justice, and might have resorted to a coup d'etat, but on 9 September the court  again  found Dreyfus guilty, by a  majority   vote, 'with   extenuating circumstances', whatever they might be. This  opened  the way to a pardon being granted  by President  Loubet  on 19  September,  which did  nothing  to satisfy the dreyfusards, who dreamed of a formal acquittal and punishment of the guilty  generals.  'Once  again it is up to us poets', Zola wrote to Madame Dreyfus, 'to nail the guilty to the eternal pillory.'  Only the right-wing civilian conspirators were charged with conspiracy and effectively  dealt  with.  The Senate sat  as a high court from November 1899 till January 19oo, condemning Guerin to ten years in prison and Deroulede and Buffet to five years' exile.  As if to mark this success the final, bronze-cast version of Dalou's Triumph of the  Republic was  unveiled on 19 November  1899 on the  place de la Nation in the presence of President Loubet and premier Waldeck­Rousseau.  Finally, in June  19oo Waldeck secured  the  Chamber's approval  of  a bill  to amnesty all  those implicated  in the Affair, cunningly quoting  what  his first political  master Gambetta had said about  amnestying   the  Communards. "'When  disagreements have divided and torn  apart a country,' he repeated,  "all men of political wisdom understand that the time comes when these need to be forgotten." Messieurs, I think that the hour of which Gambetta spoke has arrived.'