2
Family and Friends
Alfred’s conviction, degradation and transportation left his family in a desperate state. At this point the Dreyfus and Hadamard clans were mostly alone, isolated and shamed in their misfortune. Almost everyone believed Dreyfus to be guilty, and few were prepared to come to their aid. The group of early supporters that did emerge was uncoordinated and marginal; far from the popular image of mainstream Republicans taking a stand against nationalist bigotry, the only people who initially rallied to Lucie and Mathieu were fairly obscure men with heterodox loyalties. Demange was a lawyer of conscience and integrity, a Catholic conservative;1 Forzinetti, a loyal officer appalled by the Dreyfus family’s predicament; Joseph Gibert, a Protestant doctor from Le Havre with an Alsatian wife; Bernard Lazare, an anarchist man of letters of Jewish origins with political views way outside the mainstream.
Before the Affair, Lucie and Alfred Dreyfus had lived in warm intimacy, chiefly preoccupied with career and children.2 After the deportation, Lucie changed from modest wife and devoted mother to a sacrificing heroine who swore to wear black until her husband’s return and to fight unremittingly for his release. Accepting that her brother-in-law should front the campaign, she receded into the background to hover uneasily between the public and private spheres. Her life became consumed by correspondence and meetings with supporters, while her private energies went into writing letters to her husband and hiding his plight from the children. Mathieu recalled in his memoirs how family and well-wishers gathered at the Hadamards’ home on the rue de Châteaudun, and how they reacted when Pierre and Jeanne came into the room:
Everyone fell silent. These fatherless children, this was the brutal vision of the tragedy that weighed upon the house…When Pierre asked if his father would be back soon, tears dampened our eyes, sobs rose in our throats and choked us.3
We can only imagine what this effort cost Lucie. Perhaps keeping the secret was easier than divulging the truth, for she could not bear to think that Alfred might never come back. As she refused even to consider this possibility, her children were kept away from playgrounds and tutored at home. Mathieu hired detectives to protect them on the journey to their grandparents’ villa in Chatou or to the Lévy-Bruhl family in Le Vésinet.4 The children must have sensed that around them there was something heavy and unspoken; still, when Dreyfus did finally return, Pierre said he had never guessed the reason for his father’s absence, a testimony to his mother’s steeliness in protecting them.5
Like Lucie, Mathieu did his best to help keep his brother Alfred alive. He vowed to him in May 1895:
Banal consolations are not what I want to offer; there are none in your situation, but tell yourself that the contempt and shame that attach themselves to your name, to our name, for a crime that you have not committed, must not make you bow your head…You must be alive, amongst us, on the day of reparation. Light shall be shed and it will be blinding, I promise you.
I have taken upon myself the task of solving the enigma of this frightful story, and I will never give up, no matter what happens.
And I have the certainty, the most complete and absolute belief, that I will succeed.
But you must live; you must fight against discouragement…6
11. This photograph shows the brothers in Carpentras, c. late 1899– early 1900, after the return of Alfred (right) to France. The two were very close
Mathieu never wavered, for he knew Alfred nearly as well as he knew himself. Raised to speak French and to exemplify Frenchness, the two were different from their elder brothers, who chatted to the Catholic labourers at the family textile mill in the Germanic dialects of Alsace. They were almost a generation younger (Alfred’s eldest brother, Jacques, was fifteen when he was born) and had been raised by their eldest sister, Henriette, in the fashionable new French quarter of the German city of Mulhouse, on the quai de la Sinne.7
They were thus the furthest from the Yiddish-speaking world of their father, Raphaël; this had centred on Rixheim, a polyglot village just outside Mulhouse populated by itinerant pedlars, livestock dealers, bandits and healers. These poor Jews had regularly crossed frontiers, making their way to Basel in Switzerland, to the Vosges Mountains and across the Rhine into Germany,8 their cultural and geographical horizons shaped by Jewish communities rather than by national borders. Although not restricted to certain areas like the shtetl Jews of Russia, they were attacked by Catholic peasants who despised them as moneylenders.9 Jewish pedlars and butchers were taunted with signs of pig’s ears, pursued by catcalls of ‘hep hep’ and blamed for calamity when children sickened or lifestock died.
The French Revolution, however, had brought legal change and increased civic equality. Under Bonaparte, Jews won the right to trade on an equal footing with Christians for the first time.10 As Alsace moved from artisanal production to full-scale industry in two generations, Raphaël found a place alongside the Protestant giants – the Koechlins, Dollfuses, Schlumbergers and Miegs – who dominated the chemical, textile and engineering factories of the region. He set up a cotton-spinning and weaving company in Mulhouse, building on his father’s textile-trading business. This was so successful that, although his father left only 8,000 francs to his family in 1838, Raphaël left 800,000 to his children on his death.11 He changed the family name from Dreyfüss to Dreyfus, and began to peel away the layers of Judaeo-German culture considered inferior in this Alsatian world by giving his children French names and insisting that only French be spoken at home.12
12. Raphaël Dreyfus in the costume of a successful businessman, c. 1860
Raphaël Dreyfus’s loyalty to France was fierce, founded on a deep belief in the culture and traditions that had enabled Jews to leave poverty and prejudice behind and join the family of the Enlightenment. When, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans occupied Alsace after victory at Sedan, Alfred’s brother Jacques left the factory and volunteered for the Légion d’Alsace-Lorraine, to throw the Germans back across the Rhine. The effort was in vain. The Treaty of Frankfurt was signed on 21 May 1871, and France’s eastern provinces were cut off from France. After the defeat Raphaël determined to save his sons from German conscription and his business from the German customs union. In the crisis, Jacques, exempt from Reich service because he had served under the French flag, stayed in occupied Alsace to look after the family’s interests, while the others left Mulhouse and took French nationality in 1872. Although Mathieu became a French citizen, he later spent much time working with Jacques in Mulhouse and contributing to the prosperity of the family’s firm.13
Alfred’s youth and early adulthood were entirely overshadowed by these epic events. The catastrophe of 1871 was his ‘first sad memory’, a defeat made more stark when he saw five thousand Badenese soldiers occupy Mulhouse.14 He vowed to defend the country he loved and eventually took the competitive examinations for the Ecole polytechnique, later citing his ‘year of laborious effort’15 as proof of his desire ‘to show that a Jew can serve his country quite as well as anyone else’.16
His trial and conviction for treason consequently put the family into an almost trance-like state of depression. But the disaster also awoke other emotions, those of defiance, hope, and a remarkable and unwavering solidarity. Even though the family was disrupted, they seem never to have resented Alfred for what had happened. Mathieu’s reaction was more than mere loyalty, however; as his wife, Suzanne, wrote to Alfred: ‘How right you are to say that Mathieu and you are soulmates. There is not a minute, not even a second, when he does not have before him the image of his adored brother.’17
The family’s early letters set the pattern for the emotional dynamics that infused the Affair, with the private language of suffering, courage and heroism becoming part of public discourse. Absent entirely was any sense of political ideology. It was not until September 1898 that Alfred’s brother Léon and his wife, Alice, used the words ‘Truth and Justice’ in a letter to the prisoner.18 Instead a quasi-religious language of pain and sacrifice – always a significant current throughout – was dominant, specifically employing Christian imagery of martyrdom and Calvary rather than Jewish references. Shortly before his degradation, for example, Lucie consciously equated Alfred’s suffering with that of Christ: ‘You have been sublime, my poor martyr; continue on your Road to Golgotha; terrible days have yet to be lived through, but God will one day compensate and reward you generously for all your sufferings.’19
But the family also saw the situation in military terms, as a campaign with Dreyfus himself ‘the bravest and most courageous of soldiers’.20 Time and again they praised his ‘self-possession’21 and ‘moral energy’22 Mathieu criticized Alfred only when he flagged, demonstrating the resolution that he believed they all needed to get through. When he counselled Alfred in May 1895 to hold his head high, Mathieu may have been speaking as much to himself as to Alfred. In October 1897, when he feared that Alfred was losing heart, he wrote: ‘You have shown until now a moral energy that nothing has destroyed; it must not diminish; if this energy were to lessen, my dear Alfred, I would love you less…To weaken, to let yourself be defeated, my dear Alfred, would be to diminish yourself in our eyes.’23
Even as his family sought to bolster Alfred’s morale, their letters could not help but betray their own grim situation. Throughout 1895 and 1896 they wrote of Lucie’s courage, of his children, of weddings conducted quietly to avoid public attention. Above all they wrote of the need for patience, a patience that they themselves found difficult to muster. Like Alfred, they endured, as Mathieu knocked at every door to find some way to shed light on the mystery. But his path was slowed by the family’s isolation: ‘it seemed to us that we were no longer like other human beings, that we had been cut off from the world of the living, struck in the heart by a mortal evil.’24 Mathieu too felt entombed, a zombie forced to live a half-life like his brother.
Later on Mathieu’s prudence would be criticized, even likened to pusillanimity, or seen as a desire to put the interest of the family before that of justice. His early caution derived not from any cowardice, however, but from an acute awareness that the police and the military were trying to trap him. His letters were ostentatiously opened; the concierge was in the pay of the police and entertained police agents in her lodge. His cook and her new lover kept him under constant watch,25 while his wife’s chambermaid, when walking in the street, was pressed to take home documents by an agent masquerading as a postman.26
These attempts at entrapment give some flavour of the world of spies and informers that took over the family’s impeccably bourgeois lives. The encounters with police informers were part of a psychological game that shaped the family’s responses throughout the Affair. Someone calling herself Mme Bernard, for example – ‘a person with a distinguished bearing’ – told Mathieu that she was a spy for the Statistical Bureau, and even produced an unsigned letter from Colonel Sandherr as proof. She claimed that Sandherr had tried to break her daughter’s engagement to an officer by revealing her activities as a spy; in revenge, she offered Mathieu documents that would reveal who had really written the bordereau. He suspected that the offer was ‘an abominable trap’ and that the minute these documents were in his possession the police would search his home so he would be ‘in his turn, condemned for treason’.27 He offered Mme Bernard 100,000 francs to place the documents with a trusted notary, but the woman never returned.
On another occasion Mathieu received an anonymous letter saying that a certain lieutenant-colonel named Léon was in possession of important information. A man with a white beard and wearing the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur told him that one of his friends inside the Statistical Bureau would be happy to photograph the secret dossier that was responsible for Alfred’s condemnation. Mathieu refused the offer and found out later that the ‘so-called colonel was an secret agent of the Sûreté’.28
With the Statistical Bureau and the police tracking him and fraudsters trying to extort money, Mathieu decided to hire Cook’s Detective Agency in London, pitting his family’s resources against those of the state.29 There was a surprising symmetry in the tactics that both sides employed, and a certain irony that his agent in Paris, M. Dubois, had the same name as the ‘scoundrel D’ who had unwittingly sealed Alfred’s fate.
This agent opened new lines of inquiry and shadowed the spies who were shadowing Mathieu. Cook’s also tried to infiltrate the German embassy in the hope that the real spy might be discovered. In order to re-enliven interest in the case, Cook’s also put Mathieu in touch with the Paris correspondent of the Daily Chronicle, the English liberal newspaper, which agreed to run a story that Alfred had escaped from Devil’s Island aboard a boat called the Non-Pareil with the help of one Captain Hunter on 3 September 1896.30 Neither the South Wales Argus (the news paper supposedly responsible for the rumour) nor the Non-Pareil existed, but this sensational fabrication did the trick. Le Figaro began to discuss inconsistencies in the evidence, which led it to express some doubt about the verdict. On 14 December 1896 L’Eclair responded with an article that Mathieu believed was placed by the General Staff; it sought to bolster the state’s case by referring to the hitherto confidential dossier given to the military judges.31
Mathieu’s gambit had paid off: thanks to L’Eclair, it was now known that illegal procedures had been used to convict Dreyfus. There were, however, also unfortunate consequences. As has been mentioned, the authorities responded by tightening security on Devil’s Island, just in case there turned out to be some truth in the stories about rescue attempts.
Mathieu also tried to approach the press directly, but learned rapidly that many journalists were not to be trusted. Ernest Judet, the editor of the sensationalist illustrated newspaper Le Petit Journal, pledged that he would remain neutral, but broke his promise almost immediately.32 Others were similarly duped: when Bernard Lazare took Forzinetti to see Henri Rochefort at the right-wing L’Intransigeant, Rochefort promised to write an impartial article. Instead he penned a denunciation referring to Forzinetti, who lost his job as a result.33
Mathieu’s search led him into some strange worlds. In 1895 and 1896 he went to see Léonie Leboulanger, a Norman peasant woman who enjoyed a certain renown in her region. A Mme Frigard, for example, had hoped that Léonié’s ’second sight’ might help to uncover a buried treasure at the Château de Crèvecœur-en-Auge. People believed that she had the gift of ‘lucidity’, the capacity to see at a distance and through solid objects.
A roll-call of distinguished scientists had beaten a path to her door.34 Pierre Janet, the founder of French ‘psychological analysis’ who began his career in Le Havre, conducted a series of experiments with Léonie in 1885.35 So remarkable were the results that Charles Richet, the future Nobel Prize winner who initiated Jean-Martin Charcot into the world of hypnotism, went to see for himself. Léonie also featured importantly in Janet’s early work on ‘psychological automatism’.36 Another interested academic was Joseph Gibert, a philosophy professor who experimented with hypnosis in Le Havre in the early 1890s.
For all that Léonie had been ‘schooled’ by medical operatives, she was no crank. She stoutly denied having any special abilities and distanced herself from the spiritualism of the era. As a Catholic, she was wary of such practices (the Church regarded spiritualism as a dangerous ‘occult’ activity) and never became a professional, like those who took to performing on stage. Modest, eminently sensible, humble in appearance – the first time Mathieu encountered her she was wearing the traditional bonnet of Norman peasant women – Léonie earned her living as a seamstress, a cook or by tending children.37
Mathieu met her through Gibert, a Protestant whose wife was the daughter of another Alsatian textile manufacturer.38 Gibert was one of the first Dreyfusards and went early in the Affair to speak to his old friend and former patient, Félix Faure, the president of the Republic since early 1895, to express his doubts. But Faure assured him that Dreyfus was indeed guilty by telling him about the ‘scoundrel D’ letter. Gibert was unconvinced, protested against this illegal use of evidence and continued to believe in Alfred’s innocence.
Gibert decided to see if Léonie could provide any useful information. Initially she disappointed because she had been ‘swayed by the lies of the newspapers she had read’.39 But he was so convinced of Alfred’s innocence that he persuaded her to look further, then summoned Mathieu to Le Havre. When she and Mathieu met, a strong connection developed between them. She took Mathieu’s thumbs, ‘touched them in every direction’, and then slowly and with long pauses told him he was the brother of a man who suffered far away. As if she found herself in Alfred’s presence, she next remarked, ‘Why are you wearing glasses?’40 For Mathieu, this ‘revelation’ was significant, because Alfred had always worn a monocle and had started to wear glasses only when on the Ile-de-Ré, a detail his close family alone could have known.
A small discovery, and yet vital for Mathieu, who was subsequently willing to entertain all of Léonie’s suggestions, even those that sent him down the wrong path. At moments she appeared to have an uncanny ability to match a name to an event; at others, the ‘experiments’ seemed so badly controlled that Mathieu believed that she was merely repeating in her trance names she had heard while in a waking state. Later in their association he conducted some successful experiments to see if she could divine a name, a number or a word hidden inside an envelope.41 But she won Mathieu’s loyalty above all because, in February 1895, it was she who told him about ‘documents that they show secretly to the judges’ this was before the meeting on 21 February at which Félix Faure mentioned the incriminating ‘scoundrel D’ letter to Gibert.42
Mathieu trusted Léonie at a time when he could trust few others. She moved to Paris and became his mainstay, someone who offered hope and with whom he could freely consider all possibilities. He needed this servant woman to help him see into a world of shadows and he refused to give her up when others expressed their doubts about such unorthodox practices. Their relationship was a human drama between a wealthy, educated bourgeois and an ignorant woman who sustained and comforted him in his darkest hours. He spoke movingly of the pleasure he took in Léonie’s touch, her sensitivity to his moods and her attentiveness to his physical well-being. Léonie delved into his inner self, and he felt strengthened by her presence:
Often, simply by holding my hands or one of my hands for a little longer than usual – indeed it was her habit to take one of my hands in hers – she was able to discern my physical and moral state (if I was well or badly disposed), sometimes my thoughts, thoughts that did not always have any relation with the Affair but that were worrying me, all of this without my having said a word…Léonie had a receptivity…for thoughts that crossed my mind, the laws of which I am completely ignorant.
It is possible that she drew from me, if I can express myself in this way.43
Another person who came to Mathieu’s aid was Bernard Lazare, a journalist, critic and anarchist of Jewish extraction. It was Forzinetti who said that the family needed a polemicist, and suggested as possibilities Edouard Drumont and Bernard Lazare.44 That he should have put these two men in the same category is surprising, because Drumont was a notorious anti-Semite, and hence hardly a likely candidate. Nevertheless, both had a reputation for their ability to stir up public opinion. And, in truth, Lazare shared many aspects of Drumont’s anti-Semitism.
When asked later why he thought the prison governor had recommended him, Lazare suggested that anarchist prisoners at the Cherche-Midi prison might have mentioned him. He had assisted them when they were rounded up following bombings in Paris in the 1890s and the assassination of President Marie-François Sadi Carnot by an Italian anarchist in June 1894.45 Rather than approaching Lazare directly, Joseph Valabrègue from Carpentras – the husband of Alfred’s sister Henriette – asked for a letter of introduction from his parents, as the Lazares were also a Jewish family from the Midi.46 It was a sign of the family’s fear of trusting those who were not personally known to them, and of their desperation. They had never encountered a man like Lazare before, and certainly had never needed one.
‘I am naturally an aggressor,’ Lazare once said, summing up in a line his iconoclasm and mocking severity.47 In his youth he had yearned for a life in literature and had rejected the prospect of a modest but respectable existence in his native Nîmes to try his luck in Paris among the great symbolist poets of his generation: Mallarmé, Hérédia, Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle. For Lazare, literature was politics, although he was also interested in history and studied philology at the Ecole pratique des hautes études. He attacked the mighty Zola, whom he accused of metaphysical reductionism and aesthetic worthlessness. A new literature could come only with a new set of social relations. And, from that perspective, Zola was merely a ‘grocer’,48 a tradesman selling books chronicling ‘solitary passions or the vices of the barracks, whose lamentable twaddle is written in a style that would certainly make a concierge swoon and a trooper blush’.49 A year later, though, he retracted his words and paid homage to Zola; his own political itinerary had shifted away from the latent mysticism of many of his ‘decadent’ contemporaries and towards a ‘social art’ encompassing the naturalism he had once so despised.50
13. Bernard Lazare, c. 1900
Lazare laid out his views on the Jewish people in his L’Antisémitisme: son histoire et ses causes, published in 1894, the year of Dreyfus’s arrest. Because anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism was universal, Lazare concluded that ‘the general causes of anti-Semitism must therefore have always resided within Israel itself and not within those who fought it.’51 The Jews’ national sensibility was diminished by the loss of their homeland, and their religious culture impoverished by a metaphysical vision that equated God with law. This law and the exacting imperatives of Talmudic ritual prescribed rigid rules of hygiene, morality and religious practice that excluded others and made Jews antisocial. Once dispersed, the Jews survived by founding everywhere ‘a state within a state’, enriching themselves through their special ‘facility at trading’ and exciting the jealousy of Christians.52
At first glance there was little to separate Lazare’s volume from any other anti-Semitic text. But his anarchist agenda shone through the clichés, as he attacked Jewish moneylenders of the past but pitied the impoverished majority who bore the brunt of the consequent anti-Semitism. He showed an instinctive sympathy for the forefathers of the Jewish proletariat and an almost instinctive condemnation of the Jewish capitalist, the embodiment of exploitation for both left and right.
He also sympathized with the miserable condition of Jews persecuted in Romania and Russia, a compassion that later evolved into a radical Zionism.53 Even in the 1894 text he rejected the idea of racial purity and held instead that Jews, like all other ethnic groups, came from an incessant mixing of types.54 There could be, therefore, no inherent taints shaping the destinies of peoples, just environmental and social conditions. Equally, he praised the ‘revolutionary’ spirit within Judaism and maintained that the ‘modern’ Jewish willingness to fight tyranny was based on the traditional lack of concern with an afterlife. Jews were focused on relieving misery and brutality on earth rather than working to gain a place in heaven; this ‘worldliness’ was a positive force, with a radicalizing, rejuvenating potential.55
In L’Antisémitisme, Lazare hoped both for the regeneration of the Jewish people and the turning of the Christian world away from its deep-rooted prejudices; he even believed that such a transformation was imminent. When Drumont wrote approvingly about him in La Libre Parole, Lazare responded angrily and praised Jewish activists in Russia who were sent to Siberia to endure far harsher conditions than any political prisoner in France.56 When Drumont then launched a competition to discover ‘practical ways to annihilate Jewish power in France, with the Jewish danger considered from a racial rather than religious point of view’, Lazare tried to take up the call to have a Jew from outside the financial world on the jury.57 But Drumont decided he did not have the necessary ‘sentiments of impartiality’ and, perhaps wisely from his point of view, turned the offer down.58
Lazare first learned of Dreyfus’s arrest through La Libre Parole and was saddened that Drumont now had new ammunition for his campaign against Jews in the army, which he had suspended after the death of Captain Mayer. Certainly Drumont responded swiftly: beginning on 3 November, only two days after the news had first reached the press, he began to lay out a genealogy of Jewish perfidy, a pattern into which Dreyfus slotted with ease:
The captain Dreyfus affair…is only one episode in Jewish history. Judas sold the God of mercy and love. Deutz betrayed the heroic woman who had put her trust in his honour. Simon Mayer tore away the tricolour flag from the Vendôme column and flung it on a bed of dung. Naquet and Arthur Meyer led poor General Boulanger to his downfall*…Jewish butchers feed rotten meat to our soldiers. Captain Dreyfus has sold to Ger many the mobilization plans and the name of the agents in charge of the intelligence service.59
The last accusation, that Jewish butchers profited from selling rotten meat to the French army, had considerable currency after the Franco-Prussian War and was part of the fantasy in which defeat was blamed on the Jews. Drumont concluded that ‘it is the fate of the type and the curse of the race’. He also criticized the French for allowing themselves to become victims of the Jews and urged them to rise up against this subversive tyranny.
In mid November, Lazare responded to the attacks in Georges Clemenceau’s La Justice, arguing that anti-Semitism was excluding Jews from full engagement in European society and forcing them to turn in on themselves.60 Another article in L’Echo de Paris at the end of December stormed against the merging of anti-Semitism with anti-Germanism, anglophobia and anti-Protestantism. Without realizing it, Bernard Lazare was paving the way for his role in the Affair, but at this point he had no interest in Dreyfus’s fate and no instinctive sympathy for the scion of a wealthy Jewish family; his anger focused instead on the social and political damage from anti-Semitism that the case had rekindled.
14. ‘Judas defended by his brothers’. An anonymous illustration in La Libre Parole illustrée, 14 November 1896. As always, the Jews seemed ready to use their money and influence to free a co-religionist, even if guilty
Still, his intervention did not come swiftly: Mathieu visited him in the first half of 1895 to ask that he ‘campaign in favour of his brother in journalistic and literary circles’,61 but Lazare did not begin writing until near the end of the year, using documents that Mathieu provided. This first draft denounced what he was already coming to see as a conspiracy. Indeed, it presaged almost uncannily the arguments and tone of its much more famous successor, Zola’s ‘J’accuse’.62
Even when he had finished, however, little was done with it: Lazare read the draft to Lucie when he met her for the first time, but Mathieu thought the moment was not right to publish such incendiary allegations and it was put aside. While he and Demange were cautious, however, Lazare was gripped by a ‘fever to act’.63 He recast the work, incorporating the information from L’Eclair, and published it as Une erreur judiciaire, la vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus in November 1896.64 Although the result was methodical and reasoned, he did not mince his words, and from the outset insisted that Dreyfus was the hapless victim of a primal religious drama: ‘[Dreyfus] was a soldier, but he was a Jew and it was as a Jew above all that he was pursued…They needed a Jewish traitor fit to replace the classic Judas, a Jewish traitor that one could mention incessantly, every day, in order to rain his opprobrium on his entire race.’65
The pamphlet, initially published in Brussels to prevent its seizure by the French authorities, was the first properly argued defence of Alfred Dreyfus in print. It was posted to editors, politicians and a range of notables, such as the historian Gabriel Monod, whom Lazare thought might be interested in Alfred’s plight. Although publication was clandestine, in every other way Lazare acted with an openness that was in sharp contrast to Mathieu’s discretion. When the brochure was reissued by Pierre-Victor Stock at the end of November, it included a facsimile of the bordereau that had appeared in the newspaper Le Matin on 10 November. This document, sold to one of the handwriting experts, who had kept it, finally enabled Mathieu to see the handwriting of the real culprit.66
While Mathieu acknowledged Lazare’s rare courage and devotion, as events unfolded the polemicist’s willingness to seek a fight unsettled him.67 Ever concerned about Alfred’s safety, Mathieu was cautious about doing anything that might jeopardize his brother; he felt he could not afford to make any mistakes. Tracked and spied upon, he continued to act through personal relations, writing to friends of friends and using whenever possible his family’s connections, especially within the Alsatian world. In his memoirs he was still at pains to insist that the small group of sympathizers had worked in parallel rather than in concert, that he had taken no leading or directing role, and that he had pulled no strings. As always, he was concerned to establish that he had not headed a syndicate and had not been part of a conspiracy to save a guilty man from punishment.
This was why the arrival of new supporters in 1897, although welcome, also caused Mathieu much anguish. As he explained: ‘The political turn that the Affair unfortunately took, and which it took even more afterwards, singularly complicated it’, making people think less about Alfred and more about politics.68 There was always a part of Mathieu that regretted the public campaign and preferred more discreet initiatives.
Throughout 1896 and into 1897 Lazare kept trying to widen the campaign, writing letters, going from door to door in search of sympathizers.69 An undated text on blue paper recounts a visit to Zola in November after the publication of his brochure; Lazare realized that he had antagonized the novelist in the past, but now sought a rapprochement on political grounds. Zola admitted that Lazare’s initial letter about Dreyfus had touched him, even though it came ‘from an adversary’, but he was not inclined to involve himself in something about which he knew little. Lazare added – disparagingly but accurately – that the Affair ‘interested Zola only when the melodrama was complete, when the trio of Esterhazy the traitor, Picquart the good genie and Dreyfus the martyr seized his imagination’.70
If Zola was sympathetic but unhelpful, Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader who later took a leading role in the struggle, was ‘very cold, almost hostile’. In Lazare’s view Jaurès was incapable of understanding the ‘social importance of the question, nor even its crucial interest for the socialist cause’.71 But such disappointments – and attacks by socialists such as Jaurès – did not discourage him. Indeed, part of Lazare enjoyed the isolation: ‘From one day to the next, I became a pariah – but because a long atavism had predisposed me to this state I did not suffer morally from it. I suffered only materially.’72
Like Mathieu, he approached people of so many different political persuasions that the only unifying theme could be a plea to their conscience. He called on anyone who might be of use, from Protestant pastors to the Catholic politician Albert de Mun.73 Often enough he drew a blank, but a few were won over – men of letters such as Pierre Quillard, scholars such as Salomon Reinach and the eminent historian Gabriel Monod, as well as some notables in Britain and Germany. Eventually he began to make some inroads into the political establishment, particularly by converting the Opportunist senator Arthur Ranc, who in April 1897 in turn discussed the case with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the vice-president of the Senate. This encounter proved to be momentous, because Scheurer-Kestner, although not convinced, promised to look into Lazare’s claims.74
Lazare crucially laid the foundations of the Dreyfusard coalition, but his aggressive style and political radicalism ultimately limited his influence. As the campaign moved more towards the more orthodox tactics employed by establishment figures like Scheurer-Kestner, he was edged out of the limelight. Even when Zola’s rhetorical fireworks shifted the conduct of the Affair back towards the polemical style that Lazare preferred, he did not regain his previously central role. By then the Dreyfus family had a pool of less controversial figures willing to work on their behalf and, although Mathieu and Alfred remained for ever devoted to their first polemicist, Lazare was almost forgotten by the time he died in 1903.75