1
Degradation
On 14 October 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, his wife, Lucie, and their two young children, Pierre and Jeanne, spent the evening at the Paris home of his in-laws, Monsieur and Madame Hadamard. The young family lived in a huge and sunny apartment on the rue du Trocadéro, with servants, expensive clothes and fine food. Alfred kept two horses, rode every day in the bois de Boulogne, and was even a bit vain about his talent as a horseman. When in the capital on military business during the summer, he could send his wife and children to the seaside at Houlgate without thinking of the cost.1 The family knew how to enjoy its fortune, which came from textiles on Alfred’s side and diamonds on his wife’s.2
Despite the opulence of their lifestyle, Lucie and Alfred lived for more than their social position. When she first met her future husband at her parents’ home in 1889, she was struck above all by the young soldier’s idealistic devotion to his country. Alfred strived for excellence in his military career because of a fierce patriotism, which Lucie shared. When the Germans occupied Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War, their families left their regional homeland and migrated to the French ‘interior’, where they took French citizenship. The two shared the memories and ways of their Mosello-Alsatian Jewish world, even though they epitomized the desire to acculturate into wider French society.
The months before Alfred’s ordeal began were the happiest of his life. He had settled into marital and domestic bliss, slowly relinquishing his flirtatious involvements with femmes du monde in favour of the deep affection that Lucie provided.3 When she gave birth to their daughter Jeanne on 22 February 1893, Alfred feared for Lucie’s life, and took leave from the army to be at her bedside until she recovered. Although Alfred’s father had died the year before, the couple saw only a rosy future before them – beautiful children, a happy home and a satisfying career. The Sunday at the Hadamards’ was in fact the last evening of an existence in which, as he said, ‘everything in life seemed to smile on me.’4
1. Alfred Dreyfus, 1884
At nine the next morning, 15 October, Alfred was summoned to an inspection at the Ministry of War on the rue St-Dominique; unusually, he had been told to come in civilian clothes rather than in uniform.5 Commandant Armand du Paty de Clam showed him a gloved hand and asked him to take a dictation, as an injury meant he could not write himself. In mid dictation du Paty suggested Dreyfus’s trembling hands were an attempt to disguise his handwriting. Dreyfus replied that in fact it was simply because his hands were cold, not realizing that the exercise was designed to see if his handwriting matched that on the incriminating bordereau, which had been recovered from the German embassy in Paris. To no avail: du Paty stopped the interview and accused Dreyfus of high treason.6
After interviews lasting two hours, during which Dreyfus repeatedly protested his innocence, he was carted off to the central military prison, a converted convent at the angle of the boulevard Raspail and the rue du Cherche-Midi. There he was interrogated seven times between 18 and 30 October, and prevented from talking or writing to his wife.7 During these sessions du Paty and the archivist of the intelligence unit, Félix Gribelin, accused him of using his frequent visits to Alsace to meet his spymasters, and portrayed him (wrongly) as a womanizer and a gambler – this supposedly providing the motive for treason. Dreyfus admitted only one contact with the German embassy: when he had requested a permit to visit Alsace and was refused. He never asked again. He had gone illegally, like many Alsatians, but only to maintain links with his homeland, not with any clandestine business in mind.8
During the interrogations he was forced to do repetitive handwriting exercises, sit and stand as ordered and, above all, answer questions without knowing what the charges were about. They had him copy excerpts from the bordereau in the hope that his handwriting would match that of the document, but he was not allowed to see the whole thing. When he insisted on his innocence, his interrogators tried to startle him into a confession by shining bright lights into his eyes. Commandant Ferdinand Forzinetti, the prison governor, protested and banned such techniques, but Dreyfus none the less remembered the interrogations as a torture, during which the ‘great memory’ that had served him so well when he furthered his studies at the Ecole supérieure de guerre ‘disappeared sometimes totally’.9
He kept calm during the interviews, but when he returned to his cell he shrieked in agony and banged his head, mindless of any harm he might inflict on himself. He defended himself by pointing to a spotless career and by asserting that he had no reason to spy on the country he had sworn to defend. Isolated from his wife and children, Dreyfus was overwhelmed. Forzinetti, the first soldier to doubt his guilt, now began to voice his concerns to ‘members of parliament, journalists and prominent people’.10 On 27 October he also warned the minister of war, Auguste Mercier, that there was a risk Dreyfus might go insane or kill himself:
This officer is in an indescribable mental state. Since his last interrogation, undergone Thursday, he has fainting spells and frequent hallucinations; he cries and laughs in turns, and never stops saying that he feels his mind is going. He always protests his innocence and shrieks that he will become mad before it is recognized. He constantly asks for his wife and children. It is feared that he will commit a desperate act, despite all the precautions taken, or that madness will ensue.11
The bordereau that set off the drama had been found in late September by a charlady, Marie Bastian, who regularly fished out discarded correspondence and reports from the waste-paper bin of Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen, the military attaché at the German embassy. The suave Schwarztkoppen was the confidant of the German ambassador, the Count of Munster, and, despite official denials, was also responsible for gathering intelligence.12 This is what he threw away:
Being without news indicating that you want to see me, I am none the less sending you, sir, some interesting information:
1. A note on the hydraulic brake of the 120mm cannon and on the manner in which this part has performed;
2. A note on covering troops (some modification will be brought by the new plan);
3. A note on the modification of artillery formations;
4. A note concerning Madagascar;
5. The plan for a firing manual for the field artillery.
The last document is extremely difficult to get hold of and I can have it at my disposal only for a very few days. The minister of war has sent a fixed number of copies to the regiments, and these regiments are responsible for them. Every officer holding [a copy] is obliged to return it after manoeuvres.
If you would like to take from it what interests you and hold it at my disposal afterwards, I will take it. Unless you want me to have it copied in extenso, and then send you the copy.
I am off to manoeuvres.13
In fact, Schwarztkoppen had had no dealings with Dreyfus at all, but had hired the real spy, Commandant Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, who had supplied the bordereau to pass on the confidential (though low-grade) intelligence probably towards the end of September 1894.
Although torn into six pieces, the bordereau had been easily put back together by Commandant Joseph Henry, an officer in the military’s Statistical Bureau, a small organization chiefly concerned with counter-intelligence.14 He had recognized its importance and showed it to Captain Jules Lauth and Félix Gribelin, who in turn informed Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Sandherr, an anti-Semitic Alsatian who ran the bureau. The three men together concluded that the General Staff – the so-called arche-sainte, or ‘holy of holies’ of the army’s high command – had a spy in its midst. They believed (wrongly) that the references to field artillery and the ‘new’ manual pointed to an artilleryman as the likely culprit. The head of the General Staff, General Charles de Boisdeffre, was away, so the bordereau was sent directly to the Ministry of War.
2. The bordereau, evidence that a spy was in the pay of the Germans
The torn-up note outraged Mercier, who became one of the pivotal figures in the Affair. Of Catholic upbringing but with an English Protestant wife, he was known in military circles for his liberalism and brilliance – he had graduated from the elite Ecole polytechnique second in his class. His appointment as minister of war in May 1894 was greeted with enthusiasm by the military, who were glad to have one of their own in charge. The right, however, disliked his Republican inclinations and the fact that he did not go to mass.
Before long Mercier, like his predecessors, was criticized for weakness in confronting the ever-present German threat.15 Edouard Drumont, the editor of the anti-Semitic La Libre Parole, returned to the theme of linking military unpreparedness with Jewish subversion. He had unleashed a campaign against Jews in the army in 1892, citing their ‘preponderance’ as officers as one of the reasons for France’s military unpreparedness. Drumont’s vilification had tragic consequences when the Marquis de Morès, a notorious anti-Semite, killed the Jewish Captain Armand Mayeur in a duel. The outcry and the mourning generated by the funeral forced him to suspend his campaign.16 But the rumour of a Jewish spy allowed him to reopen the attack.
Mercier was thus under tremendous pressure to demonstrate his own firmness and the army’s ability to respond to a threat by catching the traitor as quickly as possible.17 Copies of the bordereau were quickly sent out to the section heads of the General Staff,18 and Lieutenant-Colonel Albert d’Aboville, newly arrived as head of the Fourth Bureau, developed a theory that directed the Statistical Bureau to Dreyfus. He reasoned that the bordereau showed someone familiar with work being done across the General Staff, in the First, Second, Third and Fourth bureaux, each of which was responsible for different aspects of strategy, logistics and supplies. He deduced that this could only be a stagiaire, one of the privileged young trainees from the Ecole supérieure de guerre who were given a rounded training by moving through the various offices. Formed between 1876 and 1880, the Ecole supérieure de guerre borrowed self-consciously from German models and was part of the package of reformist measures to reinvigorate the army after the defeat of 1871. Dreyfus was one of these rising academic stars.
When they began to focus on this much smaller circle of suspects, Aboville and his superior, Colonel Pierre Fabre, saw a resemblance between Dreyfus’s handwriting and that on the bordereau. From that moment no other suspects were seriously investigated, and no one else was interrogated, even though the final line of the bordereau mentioned that the writer was about to go on manoeuvres. Dreyfus had never gone on manoeuvres, but Aboville and Fabre decided that this phrase had to refer to a General Staff expedition to the Eastern frontier in June and early July. Dreyfus had distinguished himself during this trip because of a knowledge of artillery that he had gained at a special training school at Fontainebleau earlier in his career. General Charles Le Mouton de Boisdeffre had singled him out for a private chat because of his expertise.19
Aboville and Fabre told the deputy chief of staff, General Arthur Gonse, of their conclusions. De Boisdeffre was visibly upset, since he had esteemed Dreyfus’s ability and diligence, but Sandherr, the head of the Statistical Bureau, was merely surprised that Dreyfus’s guilt had not struck him earlier, and reportedly remarked about Jews in general: ‘It was really shrewd of me not to want any of them in my section.’20 He also claimed to have seen the young officer lurking around asking prying questions. From the very beginning, therefore, suspicion fell on Dreyfus both as a Jew and as an outsider who had been foisted on the General Staff as part of the ‘Germanic’ military reforms.
Although Mercier was convinced, others wanted expert confirmation. They turned to du Paty de Clam, whom the Dreyfusards would later portray as a monocled robot, an intellectual dilettante and a dangerous fantasist – the epitome of the mad Catholic aristocrat. But the view of his colleagues was different. Du Paty spoke several languages and was omnivorous in his interests (he loved adventure tales) and was related to General de Boisdeffre. He came from a family of magistrates, and fancied himself to be seriously knowledgeable about the law; it was because of his interest in graphology that he was given the bordereau.21 He examined it and on 7 October 1894 reported back to his super iors that they had correctly identified the traitor.
Mercier wanted to move against Dreyfus and on 11 October called a small meeting with a few fellow ministers – the prime minister, the minister of foreign affairs and the minister of justice – to keep them informed. Gabriel Hanotaux, the foreign minister, worried about the general’s haste and the possible diplomatic consequences of revealing that French Intelligence had stolen material from the German embassy.22 Jean Casimir-Perier, the president of the Republic, also advised caution, fearful that the bordereau might not be enough to convict, while revealing the story could easily cause a political scandal. But, relying on the erroneous deductions of his officers and wishing to fend off critics, Mercier refused to change course. What is more, he never backed down, and instead became the leading figure in what would become a far-reaching military conspiracy. He signed the arrest warrant on 14 October, and Dreyfus was taken into custody the next day.
3. Commandant Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam, 1900
When he finally saw the bordereau on 29 October, Dreyfus was reassured: he had not worked on covering troops, knew nothing about Madagascar, was completely unaware that a new shooting manual was proposed and was unfamiliar with the 120mm gun. So pitiful was the army’s case against him, in fact, that he believed that his fellow officers would soon enough realize their mistake and let him go. On 15 October, du Paty searched the Dreyfuses’ apartment on the rue du Trocadéro with the head of the Sûreté nationale, Commissioner Armand Cochefert, but they discovered nothing of interest. All they did find was Alfred’s meticulously kept accounts, which indicated an annual income of 40,000 francs and a permanent credit of several hundred thousand francs from the family’s textile business. Moreover, his father’s death meant that he had recently inherited another 110,000 francs.23 Dreyfus, in other words, was hardly short of money, the most usual motive of the spy.
Even du Paty was worried by the lack of evidence and warned de Boisdeffre on 29 October that Dreyfus might be acquitted.24 Nor was there much chance that a confession might solve the problem: in every interrogation Dreyfus protested his innocence and reiterated his lack of motive: ‘Nothing in my life, nothing in my past could have led me to believe that one could possibly lay such an accusation against me. I sacrificed my situation in Alsace to serve my country, which I have always served with devotion.’25 In a letter to his wife on 6 December he was even more categorical, reminding Lucie of the anguish that German triumph and occupation had caused him.
Do you remember I told you that, finding myself in Mulhouse about ten years ago in September, I heard passing under our windows a German band celebrating the anniversary of Sedan? I felt so very distressed that I cried from rage, bit my sheets in anger and swore to dedicate all my strength and intelligence to serve my country against those who thus insulted the grief of all Alsatians.26
The only substantial evidence against him was the bordereau itself, and so the investigation turned to handwriting experts to make the connection with Dreyfus more certain. On 11 October, Mercier asked Alfred Gobert, an expert at the Banque de France, to examine the document, but two days later rejected his conclusion that Dreyfus had not written it. Subsequently the army sought to discredit Gobert as both ‘defiant’27 and suspicious for asking the name of the accused: as a man accustomed to civil justice, he had been discomfited by the military’s secretive approach.28
Even before Gobert delivered his report, Mercier had contacted Alphonse Bertillon, the head of the anthropometric service at the Prefecture of Police, who had made his name by developing an index of cranial and bodily measurements to identify repeat offenders. Although Bertillon had no official standing as an expert to the judicial system, he maintained that the discrepancies between the two handwritings were the result of a clever ‘auto-forgery’ designed by Dreyfus to disguise his own hand. His report was presented with all the technical fanfare of late nineteenth-century scientism and was accepted with enthusiasm by the military, but ultimately would severely tarnish the credentials of forensic science just as anthropometrics and fingerprinting were taking hold as genuinely valuable fields.29 Three more experts were called before the first court martial, but Bertillon spoke to two of them before they looked at the bordereau; thus directed, they followed his conclusions, although the third, Eugène Pelletier, worked independently and agreed with Gobert.30
4. ‘Signalement anthropométrique’, from Alphonse Bertillon, Identification anthropométrique: instructions signalétiques, 1893. Bertillon’s system was effective for discovering offenders who sought to hide their identity; Francis Galton’s use of fingerprinting soon superseded his system
The brunt of du Paty’s investigations was borne by Lucie Dreyfus. Only twenty when she and Alfred were married on 21 April 1889, Alfred’s young wife showed exemplary self-possession and courage when du Paty searched their apartment the day of Alfred’s arrest. Not for an instant did she believe her husband had betrayed his country, nor did her parents, whose home was searched the day after.
After the first visit du Paty came back every two or three days to torment Lucie with stories of her husband’s womanizing and gambling, painting a portrait of a double life of libertinage and espionage. But she remained steadfast:31
During his visits, I pressed him with questions. I waited in anguish, in anxiety, and placed all my hopes in the few words that I was able to extract from him either on my husband’s health or on the reasons for his incarceration. Sometimes, he would tell me that my husband was ill. On the second question he was silent [or spoke] of ‘the monster’…that’s the word he used. I protested with all my might against his accusation.32
5. Lucie Hadamard, 1888
Du Paty denounced her husband as a ‘coward’ and a ‘wretch’, and told her he had the absolute proof of Alfred’s guilt in his pocket, even though he had uncovered nothing new. For Lucie the worst aspect was that she, like Alfred, battled in solitude, forbidden to tell his family of his arrest. Through Sandherr, who was also an Alsatian, du Paty knew of the Dreyfus brothers’ closeness, determination and integrity, and wanted to keep them from intervening before he had finalized his case. Only on 31 October did Lucie telegraph Mathieu to come to her aid.33
By then the story had become public. Only two days after du Paty informed de Boisdeffre that the accusation might not hold up in court, a leak from somewhere in the Ministry of War reached the papers. The influential news service Havas announced the arrest of an officer ‘suspected of having communicated to a foreigner some unimportant but confidential documents’.34 La Libre Parole, overjoyed at a new opportunity to attack Mercier, followed up by reporting that the officer in question was Jewish:
La Libre Parole declares that it has received ‘a note’ (without naming the source) that admits: ‘The affair will be suppressed because the officer is Jewish. Look among the Dreyfuses, the Mayers or the Lévis and you will find him.’ No matter how painful this revelation is [i.e., treason], we have however the consolation to know that such a crime was not committed by a real Frenchman!35
The ministers reconvened to discuss the crisis, but the popular outcry meant that Hanotaux’s warnings now went unheard. Mercier was determined to begin the fight against the campaign of vilification against him, and insisted on a court martial.
The order to begin proceedings came from General Félix Saussier, the military governor of Paris and the man in charge of the army’s regiments there. He was Forzinetti’s superior, and had not been informed when du Paty arrested Dreyfus on Mercier’s orders, one of the many irregularities (and illegalities) of the case. Forzinetti had told Saussier his view that Dreyfus was innocent, and Saussier believed that Mercier had bungled.36 He appointed Commandant Besson d’Ormescheville as investigating magistrate on 3 November in the belief that Dreyfus would be exonerated. Indeed, the next day, the Prefecture of Police withdrew its report alleging that Dreyfus was an habitual gambler – the source of du Paty’s remarks to Lucie – when it became clear an agent had confused Alfred with someone else.
Rather than acknowledging the mistake and reconsidering, Mercier suppressed the information and in November d’Ormescheville strengthened the portrait painted by du Paty by collecting remarks from colleagues about Dreyfus’s ‘obsequiousness’ their descriptions fitted a man using every opportunity offered by his position to betray his country: ‘It seems that Captain Dreyfus’s system of ferreting about, of instigating purposely indiscreet conversations and investigations outside those with which he was charged, was mainly based on the necessity to obtain the most diverse oral and written information possible before finishing his stage at the General Staff of the army.’37
If stripped of its dark implications, the picture could be said to be true. Dreyfus had distinguished himself by his curiosity and assiduity, qualities that d’Ormescheville concluded ‘presented a great analogy with those persons who practise espionage’.38 Dreyfus had defended himself against such allegations, saying that, far from being servile in attitude, he was ‘rather reserved’. ‘Contrary to the habits of all my comrades at the Ecole de guerre, I never paid any visits to my chiefs,’ he said to demonstrate that he wanted to succeed on merit rather than on patronage.39 In desperation he exclaimed: ‘Sometimes, you reproach me for doing nothing, sometimes for trying too hard to learn; it’s truly baffling.’40 Occasionally he had indeed hung around, but only because there was not always enough for the stagiaires to do.
D’Ormescheville presented his final indictment to Saussier on 3 December, but when, two days later, Dreyfus learned he would be tried, he was still so convinced of the weakness of the case against him that he even thought about how much compensation he would demand after his acquittal. Although there were moments in the next few years when he feared that he would die before he was released, his belief in the justice of his cause – and his course of indefatigable resistance – never altered. On 5 December 1894, he wrote:
The truth will out in the end. My conscience is calm and tranquil, and does not reproach me for anything. I have always done my duty and have never bowed my head. I have been overwhelmed, crushed in my dark prison, alone with my mind; I have had moments of wild madness; I have even raved and rambled, but my conscience remained alert. It said to me: ‘Keep your head up and look the world in the face. Strong in the knowledge that your conscience is clear, walk straight and get up again.’ It is an appalling ordeal, but it has to be endured.41
When Dreyfus’s younger brother Mathieu received a telegram from Lucie on 31 October telling him what had happened, he immediately left the Mulhouse Stock exchange where he was working and took the night train to Paris. He tried to take in her words ‘prison, crime, treason’,42 and, in the hope of finding out more, sent their nephew Paul to talk to du Paty. Rather than telling them anything of importance, however, the commandant subjected the eighteen-year-old to a discourse about his uncle’s iniquities, suggesting that the best course for Alfred would be to put a bullet through his head, and that a man who ‘commits adultery is capable of betraying his country’. Du Paty seemed unbalanced, pointing to portraits of his father and grandfather, both magistrates, as his guides. The young man returned shaken.43 When Mathieu later went himself to see du Paty, the soldier’s extravagances convinced him his brother had fallen into the hands of a madman.
He searched immediately for a lawyer to defend Alfred. This was not easy. Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, a conservative Republican politician, refused on the grounds that he was too involved in politics to take the brief. Only with the help of the sociologist and philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – a cousin by marriage – did Mathieu find Edgar Demange, a Catholic conservative noted for his work at the Parisian bar, a man of impeccable integrity who remained for ever devoted to Dreyfus’s case.44 Initially he too was reluctant to defend a man who might have betrayed his country, and he warned Mathieu that he would refuse the case if Alfred did not persuade him of his innocence.
Demange met Dreyfus on 5 December and was convinced. He was also astonished by the fact that the dossier provided no hard proof of guilt. But he had not bargained for Mercier’s determination to ‘supplement’ the meagre haul of evidence to deflect the criticism that he had ‘tolerated’ espionage. That task was given to Joseph Henry, a 48-year-old commandant who was the classic example of a soldier who had risen through the ranks. After serving in the Franco-Prussian War, Henry had joined the General Staff in 1877 and later distinguished himself as a field officer in North Africa and in Tonkin. After his patron General Marie-François de Miribel was made chief of the General Staff in 1891, he returned to Paris and in 1892 joined the Statistical Bureau.45
6. Hubert-Joseph Henry in 1898, after he had become a lieutenant-colonel
While Henry sifted through the papers gathered by Mme Bastian, Sandherr contacted the diplomat Maurice Paléologue at the Foreign Ministry, which had its own sources of diplomatic intelligence. Paléologue had nothing to add, however, and came increasingly to believe that Dreyfus was not the guilty man.46 Neither Henry nor anyone else in the General Staff stopped to consider that perhaps the lack of hard evidence meant that it was time to reconsider the case. Instead Henry redoubled his efforts to find the proof they lacked.
He sifted once again through the hundreds of messages assembled from the debris that Mme Bastian had provided. Henry found a note written by Schwartzkoppen to Major Allessandro Panizzardi, or ‘Alexandrine’, his lover and military attaché at the Italian embassy, whom he addressed as his ‘dear little girl’ and his ‘bugger’.47 These two diplomats were bound together both by their love affair and by their spying. Written in April 1894, the note mentioned a certain ‘scoundrel D [canaille de D]’. In fact, Henry knew that this referred to a low-grade spy called Jacques Dubois, a printer who provided maps that Schwartzkoppen had trouble finding on his own. Dubois was so insignificant that Schwartzkoppen treated him with contempt; hence the epithet ‘scoundrel’ to describe him.48 None the less, Henry placed the letter in a ‘secret dossier’ with two other bits and pieces to aid in Dreyfus’s conviction if the bordereau on its own did not do the job. The first was a memorandum written by Schwartzkoppen to a state intelligence agency in Berlin, in which he alluded to delicate negotiations with a potential French spy. The second was another letter from Panizzardi to Schwarztkoppen, in which a ‘friend’ who knew something about the process of military mobilization in France was mentioned. The information that Panizzardi sought was hardly confidential, and the ‘friend’ turned out to be one of Schwartzkoppen’s own military attachés. Both of these documents were included to cast suspicion on Dreyfus.
Realizing how insubstantial this evidence was, someone within the Statistical Bureau came up with the idea of using other material garnered by François Guénée, a police agent who had worked with the Statistical Bureau. Guénée had had dealings with the deputy military attaché at the Spanish embassy, the Marquis de Val Carlos. This diplomat had supplied extensive information on the activities and personal relations of military attachés in Paris, including Schwarztkoppen and Panizzardi. Guénée introduced new sentences to suggest that an officer of the General Staff had been involved in illicit dealings with Schwartzkoppen.49
The court martial began on 19 December 1894 in a small, overcrowded and sombre room in the Cherche-Midi prison and ended three days later. There were seven other officers present beside the president, Colonel Emilien Maurel: five from the infantry, one from the cavalry and Captain Martin Freystaetter of the marines, who would later change his mind about Dreyfus’s guilt and suffer as a result. No one from the artillery was present to interpret the significance of the bordereau for his fellow officers.50
Demange was a clever tactician who realized that his client would benefit from open proceedings where the meagreness of the evidence could be made clear. But the military had other ideas and argued that public discussion would jeopardize national security. Almost immediately Maurel silenced Demange and the trial continued in camera, with the public obliged to leave. Unsupported by his family and exhausted by his ordeal, Dreyfus cut an unsympathetic figure. During the trial all the sordid accusations in the indictment were reiterated to paint a portrait of an unscrupulous officer waiting to pick up titbits of top-secret information. Dreyfus responded calmly to the witnesses, but his monotonous voice irritated the court, as did his refusal to engage in theatrics. Dreyfus distrusted histrionics; as a soldier and now as a defendant, he set competence over style.51 His reserve did not, however, fit with the popular perception of how a wrongfully accused man should behave. Freystaetter later remarked on his unprepossessing appearance and, like the others, concluded that Dreyfus was a devious traitor.52
Only six of Dreyfus’s fellow officers came to his defence, because most could not imagine that their superiors could possibly have made such a mistake. The other character witnesses were Jews, civilians and relations, rather than trusted military colleagues. J.-H. Dreyfuss, the Grand Rabbi of Paris, spoke in his favour, as did the eminent academic Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who testified to his cousin’s excellence of character.
Even this small group of supporters was enough to make the men of the Statistical Bureau worry that he might yet escape, so Henry spoke secretly (and illegally) to one of the judges and asked to be recalled to the witness box. In his second testimony he said that as early as March 1894 (a full six months before Alfred’s arrest) an ‘honourable’ informer had warned him of a traitor within the army. Demange was outraged by this use of hearsay, but, when Dreyfus asked to be confronted with this person, the request was denied. Henry’s words, recounted in so many histories of the Affair – that ‘in the head of an officer there are secrets that his képi [French military cap] must not know about’ – suggested to the judges that they too should beware of trespassing into the realm of national security.53 There were things, Henry implied dramatically, that it was better not to know about. The Statistical Bureau was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fear by other officers because of its clandestine operations; Henry exploited these feelings and asked his fellow officers, in essence, to take his word on the matter.
More accustomed to civilian courts, Demange tried to construct a case for reasonable doubt in a three-hour final plea that, despite the innuendoes and slurs, reassured Dreyfus that he would be acquitted.54 However, the soldiers were impressed by Henry, and Demange became increasingly concerned by the agitated comings and goings of the men from Statistical Bureau. He was right to worry. While some of the judges were already inclined to convict, the unanimous guilty verdict they returned on 22 December was secured by the clandestine and illegal use of the secret dossier containing the ‘scoundrel D’ note, which the defence did not even know existed. As the judges deliberated, they were shown the entire file, which clinched the conviction. Mercier had also asked du Paty to prepare a gloss on the dossier to guide them to the required conclusion.55
Dreyfus’s last chance now lay with the German ambassador, the Count de Munster, who stated that his embassy had had no dealings with Dreyfus. This, however, was not believed, on the reasonable grounds that the Germans would naturally try to protect their spy and any others they might have still in place. Schwartzkoppen and Panizzardi, who knew that Esterhazy was the culprit, never spoke, even though Schwartzkoppen apparently remained conscience-stricken by his silence for the rest of his life.56
After the verdict was returned on 22 December, Demange embraced Mathieu when he told him the news. ‘I have just come from your brother,’ he said, ‘and I have begged him not to decide anything until tomorrow, to stay alive until tomorrow.’57 Prison Governor Forzinetti was left to make sure that Alfred did so.58 The concern was real, and the person who saved him from despair was his wife. Lucie’s letters sustained Dreyfus with an uncompromising and invigorating love, even though her shock at the verdict was immense. The next day she wrote ‘What misfortune, torture, ignominy’, but she promised solemnly that everything ‘will be sacrificed in the search for the culprit’.59 In the evening she wrote again, expressing her absolute devotion: ‘the horrible infamy of which we are the object only tightens further the bonds of my affection.’60
Lucie’s love for Dreyfus was boundless and romantic. She could not envisage life without him and, expecting him to be transported to New Caledonia, proposed to take up her right to go with him: ‘I would want to join you immediately. I would come to share exile with you and we would no longer suffer since we would be together.’61 She believed he was a hero and was proud to have such a husband. Alfred, who never prayed, said he owed his fragile faith in life to her alone: ‘It is for you alone, my poor darling, that I am able to fight; it is the thought of you that stays my hand.’62 He wrote to her on 24 December and urged his family to proclaim his innocence to the world.63
As the days passed, Lucie repeated her wish to follow Alfred wherever he went. Once in their ‘place of exile’, she wrote on 25 December, she would make him forget his tortures, and devote herself utterly to making him happy:64
I shan’t let you go there alone, I don’t want to, I shall not be able to live without you; I will go with you, or I’ll join you later, but never, never will I be able to do without you…No, no, don’t tell me that you don’t want me to sacrifice myself. Please understand, my beloved treasure, for me it’s not a sacrifice, my immense affection is my only guide, what I do I do for my own happiness, and my decision is final.65
She felt that she could not live without him, and maintained that the children could easily stay in France and be raised by her parents. On 27 December she returned to the theme once more,66 and he wrote back that he would struggle until his ‘last breath’ and would not give in.67
When Alfred resolved to live, Lucie still had moments of despair and asked feverishly why he never wrote of their proposed mutual exile. Again, on 29 December, she repeated that she could not live without him, and that the children could be brought up by their grandparents.68 In these desperate circumstances Lucie cared little for projecting the image of the perfect mother, which later became so much a part of her popular appeal. A few days later she moved, with the children, to her parents’ and gave up her beloved apartment in the rue de Trocadéro and went to live with the Hadamards on the rue de Châteaudun:69 ‘I took leave of my apartment with a heavy heart; I was so happy there with you that I feel both a pang [of pain] and somehow a feeling of happiness in the midst of such excellent memories.’70
Dreyfus continued to be tormented by the authorities even after the verdict, as General Mercier was sufficiently worried about the weakness of the case to offer better prison conditions in exchange for a confession. Dreyfus refused the deal when du Paty de Clam suggested it. Reports of his continued defiance in turn intensified public calls for his execution, a form of punishment that had been abolished for cases of treason during a time of peace in 1848.
Instead he had to undergo a ritualized and public humiliation. On the evening of 4 January one of the prisoners at the Cherche-Midi prison was told to loosen the insignia on his uniform, leaving them attached by only a few threads to ensure they could be torn off easily. Dreyfus’s sword was broken and then soldered back together again with tin to make the job easier for the officer who was to break it in front of the crowd.71 The ceremony began at nine the next morning in front of an audience of journalists, reserve territorial officers, students from the Ecole supérieure de guerre and two detachments from every regiment garrisoned in Paris. Outside, on the place Fontenoy, a crowd of twenty thousand had gathered, baying for Dreyfus’s blood.
After the judgment was read out, Captain Charles Gustave Lebrun-Renault, who accompanied Dreyfus, sought to silence the prisoner’s attempt to declare his innocence by completing the ceremony quickly. Indeed, Lebrun-Renault told the press that Dreyfus had confessed to him prior to the degradation parade, a self-aggrandizing invention that Dreyfus always strenuously denied. Dreyfus later recounted how he ‘suffered a martyrdom’, how he ‘braced himself to concentrate [his] strength’ and how he sustained himself by evoking the memory of his wife and children.72 The novelist and nationalist ideologue Maurice Barrès described the strange similarity between the military ceremony – with its crowds and vengeful emotions – and an execution. For him, it was ‘a more exciting spectacle than the guillotine’, and he enjoyed being ‘planted at dawn, on the cobblestones, [on the] place de la Roquette’.73 Nor could he resist the comparison between Dreyfus and Judas – or Dreyfus and Christ, all of them Jews cursed by the world: ‘Here was a man who had been one of the fortunate few, now scorned and abandoned by all; “I am alone in the universe!” he might have cried out.’
The jeering crowd revelled in the spectacle of Dreyfus debased, his torn uniform and shattered sword figurative expressions of the deeper desire to tear him apart:
The warrant-officer of the Guard, terrible in size and magnificent in uniform, stripped him so quickly and yet so slowly of his buttons, braids, epaulettes, red trouser stripes, pulling him about, tearing at him, till he finally looked as if in mourning black. The most terrible moment was when he broke the sabre on his knee.74
Barrès identified the reaction as a moral and biological disgust that easily blended treason and race into one:
Judas! Traitor! It was a veritable storm. Is it the fateful power he carries in himself, or the force of the ideas associated with his name? No matter: the poor wretch releases in all hearts floods of intense dislike. His face that marks him as a foreigner, his impassive stiffness, create an aura that even the coolest spectator finds revolting…he was not born to live in any society. Only the branch of a tree grown in an infamous wood offers itself to him – so that he can hang himself from it.75
Now in rags, Dreyfus was led away, his protests of innocence lost in the chorus of hatred that intoned such words as ‘Judas’ and ‘coward’.
One of the pleasures of the spectacle was the time that it took. While the guillotine severed the head instantly, the degradation provided a sumptuous symbolic feast. There was no doubt that, once Dreyfus had refused to confess, Mercier had sought a particularly gruelling ceremony for him. He had even wanted it to be conducted in a square at Vincennes or Longchamps, so that a larger public audience could watch.76 The government decided, however, that the ‘traitor’s parade’ at the Ecole militaire would be sufficient, although there was no attempt to rein in the passions of the crowd. On the contrary, the cathartic power of the ceremony lay in the way it released deep hatreds and evoked primal biblical scenes. For many, the revenge was not only against a modern traitor but against the immemorial Jew, in punishment for his terrible deeds across the centuries.
Although Alfred was spared physical punishment in line with Enlightenment ideas, the ceremony still retained the air of something much older. The front pages of the mass circulation L’Illustration and Le Petit Journal showed Dreyfus’s sword broken and his military finery stripped away. These images conjured a loss of chivalric honour, a symbolic castration in place of the actual violence that would have been his fate under the Ancien Régime.77
The terms of the exile imposed by the government were, in their way, even more cruel. On 31 January 1895 the Chamber of Deputies decided that Dreyfus should be sent to Iles du Salut, off the coast of Guiana, rather than to New Caledonia, a vote that aligned the democratic political system with the decision of the military court. Finally adopted on 9 February, the measure was purely to impose a harsher – even murderous – punishment. Conditions in Guiana were so atrocious that Napoleon III had stopped using it for transportation in 1869 except for colonial prisoners. But the Third Republic reversed this decision: it expanded the system of penal ser vitude and transported a new category of metropolitan recidivists to Guiana, exempting political prisoners from such severity. Thousands of Communards were sent instead to New Caledonia, until they were amnestied in 1879–80. After his court martial, Lucie intended to join her husband there with the other political prisoners, but the new law crushed all her hopes. The authorities sent him to Devil’s Island, chosen not only to prevent his escape but also to isolate him entirely and, in all probability, to put an end to his life.77
7. ‘The Traitor: The Degradation of Alfred Dreyfus’, cover of Le Petit Journal, 13 January 1895
After the degradation Dreyfus began another period of anxious waiting, this time in the Santé prison, where conditions were more humane. But on 17 January he was brusquely moved without his family being told. He had been bundled in the middle of the night on to a train at the Gare d’Orsay and manacled in a wagon, where he had been forced to crouch, unable to stretch his legs.78 At midday the train reached La Rochelle, where he was to embark on his journey to exile. Only a few curious bystanders were at the station when the train pulled in, but the small gathering turned into a mob when Dreyfus’s name was accidentally mentioned. So dangerous was it that he had to stay all afternoon on the train. Finally, at night, he was released to face their violence. As he recalled, ‘blows rained down upon me; around me, scuffles occurred.’79
Dreyfus recounted that he remained ‘impassive in the midst of this crowd’, oddly desirous to ‘deliver up [his] body’. He even hoped his frailty might assuage the ‘pain of these deceived people’ and seemed almost to have accepted the possibility of death at their hands.80 Even more surprising, perhaps, was the way he seemed to echo the sacrificial logic of Christian communion, his body becoming the flesh that would soothe the popular torment.
And yet, as in the many other instances when he thought death or insanity might engulf him, he had instead to suffer more indignities and abuse. From La Rochelle, he was taken on a launch to the fortress on the Ile-de-Ré and forced to trudge through the snow until he reached the prison, where he was strip-searched. There Lucie came to see him on 13 February, but this time there was no warm-hearted Forzinetti to bend the rules. Left to wait in the courtyard in the perishing cold, Lucie was taken to the ‘depot for those condemned to hard labour for life’ and heard ‘a large iron door…closed and locked’ behind her.81 Dreyfus was not allowed to move close to her, and she was forbidden from telling him where he was going. They were not even permitted a last embrace, even though she offered to have her hands tied behind her back to make sure she could not pass him any messages.
He left on 21 February and arrived on Devil’s Island on 13 April. Despite her petitions, Lucie was not allowed to join him. Although conditions were harsh, they were relatively benign in comparison to what came later. Dreyfus was the only prisoner on the island, and he was allowed to walk a few hundred metres at a time. At night he was locked in a four-metre-square hut, continuously watched by five guards who were not permitted to speak to him. He was frequently ill with tropical fevers, and made nauseous by the rations of hard meat and preserved bacon. He wore clothes that never dried in the dripping humidity and built smoking fires that made his eyes weep.82
8. This picture of Devil’s Island, 1899, gives some sense of Alfred’s claustrophobic confines within the palisade
9. ‘La double boucle’. Dreyfus’s sketch of the manacles that imprisoned him at night
He lived for Lucie’s letters, although they were strictly censored. Fears that the couple might be exchanging coded messages meant that they received transcriptions rather than the originals, a deep disappointment, as they could not see each other’s handwriting. Still, any communication was precious for Dreyfus, who now lived in a world in which no one uttered a word to him and he himself rarely spoke. These letters – some of which were published at the height of the Affair in January 1898 – display his longing for his family and reveal an astonishing lack of bitterness.83 There is no mention of his Jewishness, no suggestion that he is a victim of an anti-Semitic plot. He clings instead to his belief in the Republic, in the need to right the error by contacting his superiors, who might be able to help Lucie in her campaign. There is no approach to God, no prayer offered up to the Almighty, even if they both understood his suffering in sacrificial, even martyrological, terms.84 Above all he asks Lucie and his brother Mathieu to restore his honour, for his sake and for his family’s.
The rigours of his incarceration have been seen as another proof of the ‘modernity’ of the bureaucratic state and its capacity to fine-tune punishment.85 But this was not how the Dreyfusards saw it. Rather, his punishment reminded them of Ancien Régime conditions of penal servitude. Devil’s Island was no dispassionate Benthamite panopticon but a barbaric, anachronistic throwback to earlier centuries. When the Dreyfusards came later to cite Voltaire as their inspiration, they thought of the brutality of Dreyfus’s manacles and the murderous power of the beating sun on the rocky shore. Du Paty even tormented Lucie while searching their apartment by referring to Alfred as the Man in the Iron Mask, who had rotted away in the prisons on order of Louis XIV, his identity erased. Here was the ultimate cruelty associated with the machinations and tortures of Ancien Régime politics.86 Dreyfus himself was well aware of the glaring contradiction between his belief in a humane world and the brutal reality he now sought to survive. He wrote on 19 April 1895:
That they should take all possible and imaginable precautions to prevent escape, I understand; it is the right, I will even say the strict duty, of the administration. But that they bury me alive in a tomb, prevent all communication with my family, even through open letters – this is against all justice. One would readily believe one is thrown back several centuries.87
Despite all his efforts to keep focused on survival, Dreyfus came close to losing his reason in early autumn 1896. This was not surprising, as the terms of his detention were changed on 6 September after rumours of an escape plan rattled the minister of penitentiaries, André Lebon. Dreyfus’s guard was strengthened and a palisade built around his enclosure, so that his view of the world was now restricted to the sky above him. At night he was manacled to his bed and awoke painfully swollen. Through all this, he knew nothing of the efforts being made on his behalf. The letters from Lucie, moreover, arrived only sporadically. Sometimes they came in batches; at others he endured a disquieting silence.88 He did not know that his proclamations of innocence had moved a small group of supporters to begin working on his behalf.89 He was completely unaware of Zola’s interventions in 1897 and 1898, as well as of the riots and demonstrations that his case had triggered across France and its colonies; he heard nothing about the petitions and the vicious polemics; and he was ignorant of Henry’s fateful suicide when his forgeries were exposed. Dreyfus, in fact, was one of the few French alive who knew nothing of the Dreyfus Affair.
10. To keep his mind active, Dreyfus, when permitted, passed the time scribbling mathematical problems and doodling