All the News Unfit to Print

A FEW YEARS BEFORE THE MAINE EXPLODED, THERE WAS AN explosion of a different sort in France, one that the French had been building up to for many years and which resulted in perhaps the most shameful episode in the nation’s history. The principal villains were the military and the press, especially a newspaper called La Libre Parole—the free word. We know the episode as the Dreyfus Affair.

At the age of thirty-five, Captain Alfred Dreyfus looked like a soldier even when he wasn’t in uniform. He might have been strolling with his wife, Lucie, for whom his love never wavered; might have been playing with his children; might have been enjoying the company of his brother—he still carried himself almost as if at attention: head back, shoulders back, chin jutting forward proudly, some would say haughtily. And he spoke in crisp tones, as if he were addressing one of his superiors. He was not an unapproachable man, just brusque on the surface; the warmer man beneath the surface was known only to those closest to him.

As an artillery officer in the French army, Dreyfus had a spotless record and a great deal of promise. Especially impressive was his grasp of military strategy. So too was his dedication; he had joined the army in the first place because he was “saddened and angry” about a previous French defeat by the Germans and wanted to do his part to see that nothing like that ever happened again.

It could not, then, have been more ironic. For in 1894, with no warning whatsoever, the exemplary Captain Dreyfus, this man who could have modeled for a recruiting poster, was arrested and charged with passing military secrets to the very same Germans.

Dreyfus was aghast, sad, and angry. He had not passed military secrets to the Germans or to anyone else and could not believe that anyone who knew him would believe such a thing. He was completely dedicated to the interests of his homeland, where his family had long lived and prospered in the textile industry.

Yet there were people who could not help but wonder: what really was his homeland? The Dreyfus textile factory was located in the hard-to-categorize province of Alsace, which over the centuries had been ruled by both France and Germany and whose citizens, at present, were officially governed by the former despite speaking primarily the latter’s tongue. Perhaps young Alfred had somehow managed to develop the wrong allegiance and had intended to be a spy all along. And then there was his father, who upon retiring from the textile business had moved to a village that because of recently rearranged borders, was now in Germany.

In terms of evidence, there was nothing against Dreyfus worthy of the name. The prosecution’s case was based largely on a type of document called a bordereau, which contained information that would in all likelihood have been helpful to the Germans. The bordereau was found in a wastebasket by a cleaning woman who was also a French spy, and the specific information it contained, about a new howitzer the French had developed called the Modèle 1890 120mm Baquet, seemed to implicate an artillery officer. That was one reason to suspect Dreyfus, although numerous other artillery officers possessed the same intelligence. Another cause for suspicion was that he paid yearly visits to his father, who was now dying. Who knew what else the captain did in Germany, what he said and to whom he said it?

But no one had ever seen Captain Dreyfus in the company of a German, in either country. No one had ever heard him utter a word that indicated his loyalty to France was anything less than it seemed. No Frenchman had ever had any reason to doubt his loyalty. And there was widespread disagreement about whether the handwriting on the bordereau was in fact Dreyfus’s. Most experts thought it probably was not. No matter. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of treason by a military tribunal in December 1894, a mere two months after his arrest. He was sentenced to solitary confinement for the rest of his life on Devil’s Island, which was little more than a big, inhospitable rock measuring thirty-four square acres and located less than ten miles off the coast of French Guiana.

Upon hearing the verdict, Dreyfus did not move. He could not move. He could barely breathe. Members of his family in the courtroom began to sob, but it is doubtful that Dreyfus heard them. It was all he could do to remain conscious.

Initially, Dreyfus had thought he was the victim of circumstance or some sort of terrible misunderstanding. But the manner in which the tribunal had acted against him, its refusal to admit exculpatory evidence, the unwillingness of the judges even to meet his eyes on the few occasions when they condescended to speak to him, confirmed his worst fears; he was in truth the victim of a conspiracy. The bordereau had not only been written by someone else, but had been planted in the wastebasket for the specific purpose of being found to implicate him. Perhaps it was supposed to have been turned up by the cleaning lady who doubled as a French spy and would hand it over to the proper officials, who would identify Dreyfus as the author. Perhaps it was to have been discovered by a fake agent for the Germans, who would have been arrested and, as part of the sham, would claim that Dreyfus had left it for him.

But why? Why had Dreyfus been chosen as the victim of so insidious a scheme when he was such an exemplary soldier? Not because he knew about the specifications of the howitzer. Not because he was now an annual visitor to Germany. Not because his father’s textile business had made him wealthier than his fellow officers, rousing envy among many of them. Not even because he had a “reserved, highly controlled public manner seeming, at times, like arrogance.” No, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was, to the majority of Frenchmen, military and civilians alike, guilty of something much worse than any of the previous offenses: he was a Jew.

He was, in fact, “an agent of international Jewry,” according to the Catholic newspaper La Croix. Two other papers, Le Temps and Le Matin, claimed that he had been seduced into treason by an Italian noblewoman, who in fact Dreyfus had never met or heard of. And La Libre Parole was one of three papers calling for his execution, this before he even stood trial. It wrote that Dreyfus “entered the army with the premeditated plan of committing treason against it. As a Jew and as a German he detests the French. . . . German by taste and education, Jew by race, he does their work and nothing else.”

Tending goats and picking wild tomatoes and coconuts, the community of eighteen lepers had been housed in a small complex of ramshackle huts. Dreyfus, “whose hideousness,” according to Commandant Bouchet, the prisoner’s warden, “was a thousand times more frightening than that of the wretches who had preceded him” on Devil’s Island, had to wait for colonial officials to transfer the lepers and burn the remnants of their colony—to “purge it of its vermin.”

In addition to Bouchet, there were five guards assigned to Dreyfus duty. They were not needed. There was no way to escape from Devil’s Island except to tumble down the sheer cliff walls and smash oneself to death in the descent, or to leap into the ocean and drown. Even if there were a survivable means of escape, Dreyfus was not in any condition to try. While incarcerated in Paris, awaiting his transfer, he had lost weight, becoming pallid and listless, his eyes not always able to focus, his mind—perhaps in self-defense—not able to grasp the dimensions of the tragedy of which he was now in the midst. He was no better when he arrived at the former leper colony. In the diary that he kept beginning his second day on Devil’s Island, he wrote, “Until now, I made a cult of reason. I used to believe in the logic of things and events. Finally, I used to believe in human justice! Whatever was bizarre, out of the ordinary, penetrated my brain only with the greatest difficulty. Alas, what a total collapse of all my beliefs, of all my sound faculties of reason!”

Even so, the French colonial minister thought Dreyfus to be a threat of significant proportions and, at the urging of the anti-Semitic press, issued an order to Commandant Bouchet. If the prisoner tries to escape, he said, “Blow his brains out.” Not taking any chances were the Frenchmen, so concerned were they with how a single, virtually paralyzed man might compromise the security of their nation.

The only way Dreyfus could get through his days was to sink himself into the mindlessness of routine. He woke up most mornings at five-thirty and boiled the dried vegetables he would eat later for breakfast. At eight, a guard would bring him the food for his other meals. He would do so with saying a word to the prisoner. The guards never spoke to him. They were under orders not to. If Dreyfus asked them a question, they were not even to shake their heads yes or no. Once in a while Dreyfus asked anyhow, just to hear his own voice. It began to seem less and less familiar to him.

Dreyfus would do whatever he could to protect the food he had been given from turning rancid in the tropical heat. It was not easy. Usually he put it on the stove so that it would not spoil as quickly, but there was no way to slow the spoilage for more than a few hours.

At nine he ate his vegetables, making of the water in which he had boiled them an odd-tasting tea. Then he cleaned his quarters, chopped wood for the next day’s fire, and did his laundry. He wrote in his diary and wrote a letter to Lucie.

By midafternoon, not permitted to be out of his hut alone, he would stroll around the tiny island in the company of a silent guard. He might exercise in an area set aside for that purpose, but barely large enough to accommodate his movements. Afterward, he would sit for a while on a bench and stare across the ocean in the direction of France, watching the perpetual motion of the waves, listening to them slap against the rock he could not bring himself to call home. Then it was back inside the hut for dinner, another entry in the diary, and another letter to his wife. He received mail in return twice a month, although none of it was allowed to refer to his “affair,” and if for some reason the correspondence was delayed, his desperation, always close to the surface, reached a peak. On one such occasion, when a ship unloaded some goods at Devil’s Island without any mail from Lucie, he wrote in his diary, “My heart bleeds so that everything is a wound for me. Death would be a deliverance.”

Sometimes before going to bed he would read Shakespeare or the essays of Montaigne. The editions were so old and tattered that he had to turn the pages carefully so they would not rip. There were nights when tears fell on the pages, making them even more fragile.

The routine kept him from completely losing his sanity, but it did nothing for his physical health. Still pale and listless, he now began to suffer from a fever that did not allow him to sleep and robbed him of what little energy he had left. “When occasionally he did sleep,” writes biographer David L. Lewis, “it was only because of immense exhaustion, and when he awakened, the dreams of the night—of Lucie and the professional triumphs of the past—pursued him cruelly.”

It took more than a month for his fever to lift. His spirits did not. Sometimes as he sat on his bench in the late afternoon and looked out at the ocean, he would not just watch the endless expanse of water but would hope it would begin to roil. “When storms stirred up the sea and the waves thundered against the rock,” writes another biographer, Nicholas Halasz, “he took advantage of the sound to give vent to shrieks of despair. He waited for the storms because he did not want anyone to hear him.” The guards and their commandant might not have. They would not have cared if they did.

But at other times, sitting in the same place, Dreyfus would keep better control of himself. He would wonder about his family and friends at home. Had they given up on him, or were they still working to clear his name and earn his release?

The answer was the latter, and no one was working harder than Mathieu Dreyfus, who had begun to think about what role the newspapers might play in vindicating his brother. Perhaps the press could do more to free Alfred than either the military or the judicial system. Mathieu was about to make a terrible mistake.

By this time, Dreyfus had been a prisoner on Devil’s Island for a year and a half, and Mathieu was afraid that people had forgotten him. There was no longer conversation about the Dreyfus Affair in coffee shops and salons, no longer stories about it in the newspapers. Paris hummed with activity, with elegantly dressed ladies and refined gentlemen going to the theater and concerts, with garish displays of electric light along the Champs-Elysées and other boulevards, with the constant bump and rattle of carriages proceeding to and fro, clogging those same boulevards. Emile Zola had not yet written “J’accuse,” his brilliant and widely circulated polemic against Dreyfus’s mistreatment, but his novels were the talk of some Parisian circles. Paul Verlaine’s poetry was the talk of others. Alfred Dreyfus had become old news, and until he was once again on the minds of Parisians his chances for vindication were nil.

Mathieu was distraught. He had found new evidence that he believed would exonerate his brother and was trying to persuade French authorities to order a new trial. But he was having no luck. The authorities, who had once been willing to meet with him, would no longer do so. Nor would they admit the possibility that the military tribunal had made a mistake. The French army was, after all, the nation’s pride, and many of those refined gentlemen stepping out of their carriages into the Parisian night-life had once served in it, or still did.

Mathieu, then, had to find a different way to pressure the government. He had to get his brother back into people’s minds, back into the public discourse, and hope that this would provide the necessary momentum for a second trial.

He decided to turn to the press, but in an unusual fashion. A friend of his arranged for the publication of a story in a Newport, Wales, paper called the South Wales Argus that Dreyfus had escaped from Devil’s Island. It was pure fiction, as was the name of the ship on which he supposedly escaped, the Non Pareil, and the man in charge of the vessel, Captain Hunter. But news of the escape soon became the “hot word”; Alfred Dreyfus, the Frenchman who had tried to sell his country to the Jews or the Germans or some combination of both, was supposedly free now somewhere in England.

The London Daily Chronicle was next to run the story, and afterward virtually every paper in France carried it. Although many of them, especially in Paris, were to one degree or another anti-Semitic, no paper gave the “escape” more space, darker ink, larger type, or more steaming vitriol than La Libre Parole.

Founded in 1892 by Edouard Drumont to advance the already advanced cause of Jew-hating, the paper immediately became one of France’s most popular and influential. Drumont wanted to make “real” Frenchmen aware of the “savage energy of Jewish invaders.” He referred to them as a “hooknose tribe” and as “dirty kikes.” He wrote of “Galician kikes with their curly forelocks, who, come together for some ritual murder, laugh with one another while, from the open wound of the victim there runs pure and crimson the Christian blood for the sweet bread of Purim.” With notions like this in the background, it is no wonder that La Libre Parole found Jews responsible for most of France’s problems in the present.

Some of the Jews in the service simply ignored the paper. They had been living with anti-Semitism all their lives in France; defamation from Drumont and his ilk was to be expected. Others, however, were so upset about the articles that they challenged their authors to duels. One of them was actually fought; the Jew, a Captain Mayer, was killed, and La Libre Parole rejoiced in so just a settling of accounts.

When the paper’s editors got news of Dreyfus’s alleged escape, they were furious. They blamed it on a cabal of people who, they believed, were the direct descendants of Satan. They indicted every Jew in France, especially those in the army, as a potential Dreyfus. Then they sent their “special correspondent” to get an exclusive interview with the fictitious Captain Hunter. He did. La Libre Parole published it, praising itself for being the only paper in France with the connections to arrange a meeting with the captain. The article no longer exists, but considering the venomous diatribes that the paper printed from real-life human beings, one can only imagine how foul an interview it created with a nonexistent being. Captain Hunter’s words made anti-Semites in France even more enraged at Captain Dreyfus. La Libre Parole could not have been more delighted at the reaction to its special correspondent’s work.

Other French journals joined in the hostilities, one of them revealing details of the plot to free Dreyfus. Reports historian Michael Burns, “‘Stirring up emotions in Paris,’ as L’Éclair reported, it described a sensational scenario that included Lucie Dreyfus (‘obviously well furnished with money’) arranging the escape from her base in Cayenne [the capital of French Guyana].”

Officials of the French government did not believe any of it. To them it was all a misunderstanding of some sort, or perhaps a ruse. Escape from Devil’s Island simply could not happen. They cabled Commandant Bouchet and, learning that the prisoner was still there, still under twenty-four-hour-a-day watch, immediately announced that the story was a lie. Mathieu Dreyfus also denied his brother’s freedom, something he had planned to do all along. All he wanted was the attention, and he knew that the anti-Semitic press would give it to him. For the time being he was satisfied. He believed his plan had worked. His brother was back on people’s minds again, back in the public discourse, and perhaps now momentum would build for a new trial.

To Mathieu’s brother Devil’s Island now became the fiery depths of perdition itself. With the issue of escape having been raised, however unreasonably, the men in charge of guarding Dreyfus became alarmed. Maybe he really could escape. They would have to take greater precautions, to make what was already impossible become even less likely.

Dreyfus was confined to his hut twenty-four hours a day, not allowed to step outside to glance at the ocean for a single moment. Actually, he could not even see it from indoors, as a new wall was built around the hut, rising higher than its roof. When Dreyfus looked out his window, he could see only the wall—not the water, perhaps not even the sky.

At night, a double boucle, a kind of manacle similar to what the Puritans used to punish sinners in the public square, was attached to his feet. Further, “an iron band was stretched across the foot of the bed. To it two iron bands were fastened and, when Dreyfus retired to sleep, his ankles were locked into the bands.” In his diary, Dreyfus wrote, “The torture was hardly bearable during those tropical nights. Soon the bands, which were very tight, lacerated my ankles.”

In addition, French officials put an end to mail deliveries to Devil’s Island, and Dreyfus’s guards, as he said, “received orders to report every one of my gestures and even the changes of expression on my face.” If he had so much as uttered the word “escape,” he would have been bound and gagged, blindfolded and beaten.

It would be several weeks before Dreyfus was allowed out of the hut, longer before he could see the Atlantic again. He walked around the island now with a limp, his frame having become skeletal and bent, his clothes ragged. He was losing his hair. He could almost feel his eyes sinking into his head.

The new evidence that Mathieu had uncovered would eventually lead to the arrest of Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, although it has never been clear why he wrote the bordereau. True, he had achieved the remarkable feat of being one of the worst Jew-haters in the late-nineteenth-century French army, but that alone does not seem to explain his actions.

He might have written about the howitzer to distract the Germans from looking into the development of other new French weapons, in which case it is possible that he was acting for the good of his country, if not the good of Captain Dreyfus. But this theory is unlikely. He might have written about it in the hope that German officials would be tempted to offer him money for more details, in which case he was acting as a spy, a more possible explanation, as it is known now that Esterhazy had committed other acts of espionage previously. When they were discovered, as Esterhazy knew they would be, he wanted a Jew already fattened and tenderized to take the rap for him. He never imagined that the Jew’s friends would fight so long and hard and successfully to vindicate him. He never imagined that in the process of fighting as they did, they would shine a brighter, more unsparing spotlight on French anti-Semitism than ever before. He never imagined that he would do far more damage to France’s standing in the world community as an anti-Semite than he had ever done, or could have hoped to do, as a spy.

In 1899, Alfred Dreyfus got his second trial. Had it taken place a century later, it would have been a skit on Saturday Night Live. The judges, civilians this time, would hear no evidence against Esterhazy, nor any new evidence in favor of Dreyfus; the proceedings were even worse than the military tribunal. They simply rehashed the charges that had led to Dreyfus’s initial conviction, and he was convicted again, although this time his sentence was reduced from life to ten years. In that sense it was a small victory for justice.

But too small for French president Émile Loubet. A short and kindly man, proud of his peasant stock, he thought the trial a travesty and the verdict a perversely anti-Semitic joke. Dreyfus had been confined no more than a day or two, awaiting a return voyage to Devil’s Island, when Loubet intervened, granting him a full pardon. Alfred Dreyfus was, as he always should have been, a free man.

The French press protested, denouncing Loubet’s interference, insisting that he change his mind for the good of the republic. He refused. Not until 1906, though, would Dreyfus be officially exonerated. It was then that the Court of Cassation, the French equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned the verdict in Dreyfus’s second trial. He was now officially innocent of all charges. The French press seethed, accusing the court of being a bunch of Jew-lovers.

Dreyfus had long since returned to active military duty, explaining to those who thought him foolish, or worse, that it was a simple matter of his being a soldier and a Frenchman. The army was where he belonged. What could he do? He was not received warmly by his comrades in arms, but he did not expect to be. If he could survive four years, two months, and five days on Devil’s Island, he could certainly survive an indifferent home-coming. After the Court of Cassation’s ruling, Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of major.

In 1918 Dreyfus was promoted again. He was now a lieutenant colonel and, to his great pride, a member of the Legion of Honor. In World War I, he was assigned to command one of the forts that had been erected to defend Paris. He carried out his duties flawlessly and was cited for his valor and strategic brilliance, helping to lead his nation not to defeat, as La Libre Parole and others had predicted, but to victory in battle.