4

The Alsatian Connection

The Dreyfus Affair is unimaginable without the ubiquitous involvement of Alsatians on both sides of the struggle. G. W. Steevens, a journalist from the London Times who reported on Dreyfus’s second trial at Rennes in August 1899, recognized that there would have been no Affair without them:

But I ask you to give your attention for a moment to the extraordinary prominence of Alsatians in this trial that involves France. Dreyfus has less achieved his greatness than had it thrust upon him; yet Dreyfus is certainly a man capable beyond the average Frenchman. Dreyfus, Picquart, Lauth, and Junck were the clearest-headed men in the place – all Alsatians. Freys taetter…the fighting soldier, the only quite honest man in the place – is an Alsatian. Zurlinden, the most soldierly of generals, Bertin-Haurot, the most soldierly of the witnesses – both Alsatians. Colonel Sandherr, whose secret agent brought in the bordereau, and M. Scheurer-Kestner, whose action led to its first public attribution to Esterhazy – both Alsatians.¹

Steevens’s list showed Alsatians both for and against Dreyfus; the Affair was almost a battle among them, one about their identity and their place in a France to which their province no longer belonged.² They flooded the French army because they wanted to regain their homeland, or because the Reich distrusted them and made access to a military career difficult. Dreyfus and Picquart, as well as those mentioned above, were not only displaced and fiercely patriotic, but also angry at the nation they loved for ‘deserting’ their homeland after 1871. Their regional background had been fragmented into a mosaic of confessional, social and linguistic differences.³ At the same time, their front-stage presence in the Affair underscored for the rest of the nation the contest between the nation’s ‘Gallic’ and ‘Germanic’ tendencies. The Alsatians insisted on their Frenchness, but they were often seen as the embodiment of Germanness. They thus had to position themselves against the prejudices and storms that such polarized categories created both in their inner lives and in the public arena.⁴

 

Georges Picquart, present when Alfred was first ‘inspected’ before his arrest, was an Alsatian career officer who became one of the most important figures in subsequent events. He took over the Statistical Bureau in July 1895 and, at forty-one, became the youngest lieutenant-colonel in the army’s history, a reward for a promising combination of intellectual talent, linguistic prowess and efficiency. Aware of the deficiencies of the bureau under Sandherr, from 1896 onwards he sought to gain greater control over the litter that Mme Bastian collected at the German embassy, debris normally handed over to Major Henry and then pieced together by another conscientious Alsatian, Captain Jules Lauth. Although of low quality, it had continued to turn up after Dreyfus’s conviction, which proved, at the very least, that leaks were still taking place.

Picquart was put in charge of investigating these leaks; he also had to ‘supplement’ the dossier against Dreyfus in case of Jewish counter-attack. He took on this role with his usual flair and efficiency, but in the process discovered the real culprit. Although less naive than Dreyfus about the micro-politics of the military world, Picquart also found it difficult to accept that his superiors might be willing to keep an innocent man in prison. When it turned out that they were not only willing but eager for Picquart to help them, he resisted and was relieved of his command. He was first arrested on 13 January 1898, released, and rearrested the following September on trumped-up charges of revealing military secrets; he stayed in jail until 9 June 1899. He was finally freed just days after the legal decision was taken to grant Dreyfus a retrial.

Given this story, it is not surprising that the Dreyfusards saw Picquart as a hero obeying his conscience rather than bowing to military pressure, possessing a true Republican morality and personal integrity. The Dreyfusards idealized him, while Dreyfus himself was often pitied as a mere victim.⁵

Like Dreyfus, Picquart had chosen the military because it provided an opportunity to participate in the revanche and to build an army on Republican principles. Patriotism and Republicanism went hand in hand: those who chose France rejected the authoritarianism of Prussia to embrace the liberty and egalitarianism of the Republic.⁶ Also like Dreyfus, Picquart had chosen to hone his skills at the Ecole supérieure de guerre. Alsatians were more aware than most of the superiority of German universities, then considered the finest in the world.⁷ Men such as Picquart wanted to marry Republicanism to professionalism, an attitude that undermined the older system based on camaraderie, aristocratic connection and feats of arms.

Unlike Dreyfus, however, Picquart was more aware of the tensions within the General Staff and had partially fuelled his meteoric rise by exploiting them. He won the respect of the old guard by serving for four years in Algeria and in Tonkin (northern Vietnam), thereby establishing his credentials as a campaign officer.⁸ And again unlike Dreyfus, who had begun his military training at the Ecole polytechnique, the Catholic Picquart had started his career at the more traditional St-Cyr, where his reflexive anti-Semitism blended into the general ambience. Because of these attributes, Picquart was an improbable supporter of the Dreyfusard cause, in the same way that General Mercier – a polytechnicien and supporter of military reforms – was the least likely of senior officers to become a leading anti-Dreyfusard. Even within the military, the choices that individuals made were often not predictable.

Picquart also knew how to manoeuvre among senior officers. General Gaston de Gallifet, the notorious ‘executioner of the Commune’, was one of his patrons, and when General Miribel took over the General Staff in 1890 Picquart turned down the chance to push Sandherr aside for fear of generating resentment among traditionalists. Instead he waited patiently for Sandherr to die before he took over the Statistical Bureau. Interestingly, the military governor Saussier, who later doubted that Dreyfus was guilty, initially blocked the appointment, assuming Picquart must be Jewish because of his brilliance and expertise.⁹

At the time of the court martial Picquart had no inkling that Dreyfus might be innocent and instead mediated between the events in court and the General Staff. His first doubts began to emerge only at the beginning of March 1896, when a particularly bulky bag of diplomatic rubbish was delivered to his desk. Among the debris was a petit bleu, a telegram on light blue paper of the kind that criss-crossed Paris through pneumatic tunnels. Addressed to a certain Commandant Esterhazy, it was signed with the letter ‘C’, which both Picquart and Lauth knew to be the code initial that Schwartzkoppen regularly employed. The text read:

16. The crumpled and reconstructed petit bleu that convinced Picquart espionage links were still in place, despite Dreyfus’s conviction

Monsieur le commandant Esterhazy, 27, rue de la Bienfaisance

Sir:

I am waiting first of all for a more detailed explanation [than that which you have given me] on the question outstanding. Consequently I ask you to please give it to me in writing so that I will be able to judge whether or not I can continue my relations with the house of R.

C.¹⁰

Amidst the latest batch of rubbish there was also a later letter that expressed Schwartzkoppen’s irritation with Esterhazy for the weakness of the information he was providing and claimed that the German military attaché’s superiors were exasperated by the large sums he had been paid for so little. This time it was Lauth who put the pieces back together and Picquart who realized he had uncovered a case of espionage. The colonel began an inquiry into the recipient of the petit bleu that he kept from his superiors for four months.

On 5 August, Picquart went over the head of General Gonse, his direct superior, and reported his findings to de Boisdeffre and then General Jean-Baptiste Billot, who had recently replaced Mercier as minister of war. De Boisdeffre ordered him to continue with his inquiry, and Picquart next examined letters written by Esterhazy to support his quest for a job at the Ministry of War. At the very end of August, Picquart asked the archivist of the Statistical Bureau, Gribelin, to fetch the ‘secret dossier’ that was mouldering in Henry’s safe. As Picquart was examining the ‘scoundrel D’ document and the other pitiful gleanings that had been responsible for convicting Dreyfus, he decided to place Esterhazy’s letters and the bordereau side by side. He was horrified to discover that the two hands were identical. He asked du Paty and Bertillon to compare them as well (without giving them details), and they also concluded that the handwriting on each was indisputably the same.

Picquart’s parallel investigation of Esterhazy’s life and character revealed almost a caricature of a fin de siècle villain. While Dreyfus had no obvious motive for treason, Esterhazy’s was all too clear. Born in 1847 in Paris with a distant link to ancient Hungarian nobility, he had progressed through the ranks despite absenteeism, dishonesty and being sent down from the military academy at St-Cyr. While Dreyfus’s ascent owed everything to meritocratic reform, Esterhazy’s had flourished through corruption and nepotism. In the 1870s he had set himself up in style, using an inheritance and the generosity of mistresses to cut a dash in the cercles, or clubs, where he associated with men much richer than himself. He added the title of count to his name and put on devil-may-care airs. But he was not unintelligent. He read widely, and was interested in aspects of his military career; during the Franco-Prussian War he had fought valiantly but felt for ever cheated of the rank that he believed his efforts merited.

17. Walsin Esterhazy

After failing to win a post on the General Staff, he had worked in North Africa and married an aristocrat of moderate means.¹¹ But he squandered this windfall through speculation and gambling, and turned to increasingly unsavoury expedients to supplement his dwindling income. Despite his anti-Semitism, Esterhazy had acted as a second to a Jewish officer called Crémieu-Foa, who had challenged Drumont during the journalist’s campaign against Jews in the army. In 1894 he used this deed to extract money from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a former classmate, from whom he borrowed 2,000 francs, using the chief rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, as an intermediary. Esterhazy even managed to obtain a further 4,000 francs from de Rothschild and Baron Maurice de Hirsch later the same year, suggesting that the loan was a kind of compensation for ‘the wrong that was caused to him by the role he had played in the…duel’.¹² For whatever reason, these Jewish grandees felt that they should accede to Esterhazy’s requests, though they had had no role in the duel.

He tended to view those who opposed him as rascals or imbeciles, but disguised his opinions well. While his letters to Mme Gabrielle Boulancy, his last mistress, betrayed his contempt for his superiors and his disdain for the French, he was none the less able to win their sympathy and esteem for years. Their reports praised his judgement and the correctness of his private life. All his skill at deception, however, was not enough to keep him afloat financially, and as his fortunes deteriorated, he stooped to ever lower expedients, eventually justifying treason by casting himself as a victim of the military hierarchy. He went to Schwartzkoppen for the first time on 20 July 1894.¹³

Picquart realized that his discoveries were so incendiary that they might damage his career. So he compromised: on 1 September 1896 he wrote a so-called ‘secret note’ recommending moving rapidly against Esterhazy and correcting the mistake made against Dreyfus.¹⁴ He went first to General de Boisdeffre, who criticized him for bypassing his immediate superior, General Gonse. When notified of Picquart’s findings, Gonse insisted that the Esterhazy and Dreyfus affairs be kept separate. Picquart immediately interpreted this order not just as an attempt to suppress the truth, but also as an effort to draw him into a cover-up. As the bordereau was the sole evidence against Dreyfus, he could be cleared only if someone else was proven to have written it. When officers and ministers later began to refer to new evidence which conveniently named Dreyfus directly, Picquart knew, without even seeing it, that it had been forged.

At the same time pressure from Mathieu and the Dreyfus family was finally beginning to have an effect even inside the General Staff. While Picquart was trying to convince Gonse of the need to admit a mistake, Mathieu was hatching his plan with Cook’s agency and planted the Daily Chronicle story about Alfred’s ‘escape’. After the commotion this caused, L’Eclair published an article on 10 September, followed by another on 14 September. The second proved that the newspaper was well informed: it quoted (inexactly) the text of the bordereau and described the ‘scoundrel D’ letter as the ‘secret document’ that had sealed Dreyfus’s fate during the court martial in 1894. The leak, which seems to have come from the General Staff, was a risky tactic on its part: it traded the admission that illegal evidence had been used in exchange for a new line of defence, should the bordereau be discredited as evidence.¹⁵

But Picquart read the various manoeuvres differently. Believing that the Dreyfus family was behind these revelations, and was well on the way to discovering the rest of the story, on 15 September he tried to persuade Gonse of the dangers that such revelations might cause. In their meeting Picquart wanted Gonse to avoid a potentially disastrous trap and urged his superior to act first and arrest Esterhazy, or risk being overtaken by events. Gonse’s response stunned him:

‘What can it matter to you,’ said the General, ‘whether this Jew remains on Devil’s Island or not?…’

‘But he is innocent!…’

‘That is an affair that cannot be reopened; General Mercier and General Saussier are involved in it…’

‘Still, what would be our position if the family ever found out the real culprit?…’

‘If you say nothing, nobody will ever know it…’

‘What you have just said is abominable, General. I do not know yet what course I shall take, but in any case I will not carry this secret with me to the grave…’¹⁶

Whether Picquart did actually speak in such a noble and high-minded manner cannot be determined, of course, as we have only his account of the meeting. Letters that Picquart later gave to Louis Leblois, his childhood friend and fellow Alsatian, revealed that Gonse was probably aware that Dreyfus was innocent.

Picquart was right to worry, for three days later Lucie Dreyfus threw down the gauntlet by petitioning the Chamber of Deputies to reopen her husband’s case. She asked that the Ministry of War produce the secret document in question so that the world could know what had convicted her husband. How, she asked, could someone be condemned without knowing the evidence against him?

The men in the General Staff reacted not by taking Picquart’s advice but by seeing him as a possible weak spot in their defences. They tried to get him out of the way: Gonse signed the order on 27 October to pack him off to the provinces on a useless mission to inspect regional intelligence operations.

Distancing Picquart from the Statistical Bureau was only a temporary solution, however. Realizing that he might not be permanently silenced, Henry decided to soothe his chiefs, to show his loyalty and to get back at Picquart, whom he detested, by forging a document, later known as the faux Henry, to provide the definitive ‘proof’ of Dreyfus’s guilt.¹⁷ Between 30 October and 1 November 1896 he took a letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen written in the second half of June of that same year. Saving the heading and the signature, he added a date (14 June 1894) in his own handwriting and inserted several lines of text in the middle:

I have read that a deputy [of the National Assembly] is going to ask questions about Dreyfus. If someone asks in Rome for new explanations, I will say that I have never had any dealings with this Jew…If someone asks you, say the same, for no one must ever know what happened to him…¹⁸

It was a grotesquely amateurish effort. Henry’s handwriting differed greatly from Panizzardi’s, and, more importantly, he had stuck together two different kinds of paper, which under later inspection would provide the conclusive proof that the document was a forgery. Finally, the text he had invented ineptly caricatured the Italianisms that Henry thought Panizzardi might have employed.¹⁹ On 2 November, Henry delivered the document to Gonse who, with Boisdeffre, informed the minister of war of Henry’s ‘discovery’.

Less than a week later Bernard Lazare published his pamphlet and a few days after that Le Matin published a facsimile of the bordereau, allowing outsiders for the first time to compare it with Alfred’s handwriting and to draw their own conclusions. Picquart was unjustly suspected of having had a hand in these revelations, and was once more under pressure from his superiors. The conspiracy moved to yet another level when, on 18 November, Jean-Baptiste Billot, the minister of war, read a statement by Gonse to the Chamber of Deputies reassuring them of Dreyfus’s guilt. The deputy André Castelin railed against the Jewish ‘syndicate’ for impugning the court martial,²⁰ and the chamber voted to affirm its confidence in the conviction and to encourage the government to search out any other traitors. Around this time Gonse and Henry discovered errors in Picquart’s findings, which suggested that he had tampered with the petit bleu. In fact, Picquart had altered some dates, but only to conceal the fact that he had conducted a secret inquiry against the wishes of his superiors. This none the less undermined his case against Esterhazy.²¹

Picquart was courageous in standing up to the forces ranged against him, but he also tried to protect his career, fudging dates and holding back the truth from the public even after the publication of the bordereau. He wanted to serve his conscience and his ambition simultaneously and knew that one mistake could bring his career in the army to an abrupt end. By acting in this way, he also became a hostage to fortune: the delays in coming forward with the evidence, and the accusations that he had manipulated documents, contributed to the view that Esterhazy was set up as a ‘fall guy’ by the Jewish ‘syndicate’ to take the blame for Dreyfus’s treason. Picquart, it was argued, was the accomplice of the Dreyfusards.²²

Picquart took the posting to Tunisia, but he was increasingly uneasy and confided his fears to a close military colleague in the army. He was also afraid that unorthodox measures might be taken to be rid of him: when back in Paris on leave on 2 April 1897, he added a codicil to his will laying out his part in the Affair, his discovery of Esterhazy’s guilt and his conviction that Dreyfus was innocent. He sealed the document in an envelope, noting on its cover that in the event of his death it should be given to the president of the Republic.²³

The following month he wrote Henry a note protesting about the lies circulating about him. Henry’s reply, on 31 May, was long and angry, accusing Picquart of various misdeeds, and insisting that he now had new and irrefutable proof of Dreyfus’s guilt. Picquart realized the struggle was about to come into the open and went to his friend Leblois, this time to tell him the whole story.²⁴

 

There remains something surprising about Picquart’s stand, given his belief in military discipline and his dislike of Jews. His attitude seems to have come from a tangle of personal, social and political beliefs. Born in Strasbourg in 1854, he was from a Catholic family of regional officials, a staid bureaucratic milieu very different from the entrepreneurial world of Raphaël Dreyfus’s Mulhouse.²⁵ Strasbourg was a frontier town and regional capital where university, scientific and musical societies existed alongside breweries, tanneries and barracks, and elegant French architecture stood cheek-by-jowl with half-timbered houses that recalled the city’s Germanic heritage. Confident and prosperous, it had been a Republican city that voted against Napoleon III in 1870.

Picquart went to a lycée that produced many eminent Dreyfusards, among them Louis Leblois, the eldest son of one of Alsace’s most famous Protestant ministers. Their friendship showed the kind of affiliations that could exist across the confessional divide, for the two shared a similar pull of conscience, critical judgement and fascination with science.²⁶ Leblois’s grandfather had been a Catholic who wanted ‘to shield his children from clerical influence’.²⁷ His father, Georges-Louis, was a mathematician and polytechnicien who later became a ‘scientific’ Protestant theologian, opposing the authoritarianism of the Lutheran Church in Alsace while also resisting the Pietism that periodically swept across the region.²⁸ He was, moreover, a serious Hebrew scholar, saw the Bible as a human document and admired the moral grandeur of the Prophets in the Old Testament. Jews, for Leblois’s father, were praiseworthy predecessors to the rational Protestantism he espoused.²⁹

18. Taken at the second court martial after Alfred Dreyfus’s return to France in August 1899, this photograph shows Picquart without uniform because he was still suspended from the army; the illustration gives some sense of the jaunty charm that captivated his Dreyfusard collaborators

Other graduates of the school included the Catholic mathematician Paul Appell, as well as Moïse Netter, a distinguished rabbi. Jewish pupils went to school on Saturday, but did not write, so as not to contravene Sabbath observance; instead they begged notes from their Christian schoolmates to catch up later. In Appell’s memory, solidarity and admiration coexisted with mockery and prejudice.³⁰ ‘The Jews [were] teased for their caution and their love of gain’ at the same time that they were ‘esteemed for their loyalty to the prescriptions of a severe religion as well as their respect for their parents’.³¹ Picquart shared both the respect and the prejudice.

Appell remembered how their youth was infused with the ideals of the novels of Erckmann-Chatrian, the romans nationaux from the Eastern frontier that were the biggest bestsellers of the Second Empire. Emile Erckmann, another son of a Protestant pastor, and Alexandre Chatrian, a teacher of rhetoric and later an office worker, set their jointly written stories among the daily lives of the people of Phalsbourg, a fortress town in eastern France twenty-five miles north-west of Strasbourg. They celebrated the grander historical moments of revolution, revolutionary wars and Empire; Erckmann in particular retold the soldiers’ tales of his youth and described for the French of the ‘interior’ the unique psychology of frontier patriotism, grounded in loyalty and conviction rather than in language and religion. The novels placed Alsace and Lorraine firmly within the culture of the Rhine, but contrasted the beauty and light of the French side with the melancholy mistiness and philosophical heaviness of the Germans across the river.³²

Through vivid first-person accounts, the books depicted the daily preoccupations of the peasantry and linked events in the borderland to a metahistorical narrative. Their vibrant anticlericalism and egalitarianism assured readers of the imminent triumph of their Republican dreams. During the Third Republic the novels became almost canonical texts, invading classrooms and school libraries in unprecedented numbers.

For young Alsatians such as Picquart they had an even greater significance. Erckmann opted for French nationality after 1871 and never recovered from the loss of his homeland. This tragedy mirrored Picquart’s own plight when, at sixteen, he witnessed ‘the shells that mutilated the cathedral, burned the library, which took so many innocent victims’. He felt ‘rage in his heart, at the entry of the triumphant enemy in the city of his birth’, and it was this calamity that led him ‘to dedicate himself to the service of France, and to serve under its flag’.³³

Many young Alsatians saw their own lives through Erckmann-Chatrian’s words. Picquart, after his acceptance at St-Cyr, urged his friends to tour the sites of the war during a holiday. They all shared a passion for the pine forests and villages of the now occupied Vosges Mountains, and Picquart, admired for his map reading (another quality that distinguished him in the army), led the expedition, which Paul Appell described as a kind of epic.

We had to walk quickly to be at the forester’s house of Nideck by noon…But we had to walk till night, guiding ourselves by the stars, like the sailors of the Odyssey…The next morning we climbed the Donon, a mountain in the annexed territory, right against the then border, from which one can see the two sides of the Vosges. On the summit, we met a German general, a sad image of the occupation of Alsace by our conquerors.³⁴

They were wounded patriots, profoundly nostalgic for both their lost youth and homeland. In a letter to Joseph Reinach, one of the key campaigners on Dreyfus’s behalf, Picquart recalled how, at twenty, he was still able to drink a bottle of Alsatian wine all on his own, how he ‘worshipped sauerkraut, beefbrawn’, how he adored knockwurst and would face ‘any test for a dish of liver dumplings or pickled turnips’.³⁵ Although his stomach and his head were no longer up to such feats, the memory of his youth and his love for the flavours of his petite patrie was something that he yearned for still.

 

Picquart’s stance, however, cannot be attributed solely to his Alsatian heritage. Credit must also go to a singularity of character and tastes that distinguished him even from his technocratic colleagues. When he landed in prison, he still managed to be philosophical, even humorous, about his predicament. As he wrote from his prison cell in July 1898:

My independence of mind revolts terribly against the procedure – obligatory in a prison – of the preliminary opening and reading of letters by the administration; [but] it does not spoil my happiness too much…As for me, I travel…in imagination…At the moment I pretend that I am in Venice…³⁶

Comfortably ensconced with books, cigars and flowers provided by supporters, he knew not to fret. In one letter he wrote about men who too readily toed the line, asserting that it was only those who enjoyed their liberty who could be called true men:

Do you know the anecdote of the Russian general, in love with the parade ground, who wanted to turn his soldiers into perfect machines? One day, he was showing an elite company to one of his friends and was making him admire their perfect immobility. ‘It’s not bad,’ says the friend; ‘none the less, it seems to me that I can perceive a certain movement of their chests that …’ ‘Ah,’ interrupts the general, ‘I know what you mean! It’s their breathing; it does make me rather unhappy, but I have never been able to make them stop.’ And there you are! Just as the good general was never able to stop his grenadiers from breathing – to the great detriment of the alignment – so one will never be able to prevent a good-natured man – no matter how well locked up – from living with his thoughts.³⁷

Picquart was, moreover, an ‘intellectual’ himself, a rare type within the military. While in prison he read Tolstoy in Russian; wrote sadly about having to miss an exhibition in Basel of symbolist paintings by Arnold Böcklin; and begged his friends to report on the Rembrandts in Amsterdam. Before his imprisonment he made extraordinary efforts to go to Oberammergau or to listen to Wagner in Bayreuth, and concluded that ‘it is pure barbarism that the cult of beauty is no nearer to being established than that of truth and justice; and yet, how happy the world would be in the adoration of this Trinity.’³⁸

Picquart was as comfortable in a literary salon as in a military staff room. Indeed, he was paying a visit to his friend Gustav Mahler in 1906 when he heard that Clemenceau had made him minister of war.³⁹ The Dreyfusards, both men and women, adored him as the ‘ideal’ combination of chivalric panache and cultural refinement.⁴⁰ Most important of all was his resistance to authority, seen as an essentially ‘French’ characteristic that expunged all taint of Germanness from his Alsatian background. Picquart would not abdicate his responsibilities because of orders; he was valuable because such men protected France from the ‘Prussianization’ of their army. If his testimony in court was clear and precise, his expositions a model of analysis, he was also a frondeur, full of Gallic wit, as his story about the Russian general suggests. The butt of this tale was a misguided dream of autocratic control; for the Dreyfusards, the military’s seeming willingness to impose such restraint on conscience undermined the very raison d’être of the Republic.

Marcel Proust’s Jean Santeuil (written between 1895 and 1899) portrays what some see as a fictionalized Picquart, a languid, elegant, even narcissistic figure at odds with his military career.⁴¹ The depiction hints at the aspects of his persona that the right would exploit. Where Dreyfusards saw moral strength, the anti-Dreyfusards saw an arrogant individualism.⁴² Barrès described him as an ‘impertinent spirit…that has fun – like a coquette slipping her rings on and off – playing with the thread of his thoughts’.⁴³ Because he was a bachelor, there were persistent rumours of homosexuality, which the right hinted at by calling him ‘Georgette’.⁴⁴ Although it is certain that his sister’s efforts to persuade him to marry were unsuccessful, the rumours have never been confirmed; the constant insinuations may have been nothing more than another right-wing slander of the type that frequently characterized Dreyfusards as ‘cerebral’ and effeminate.⁴⁵

 

After his meeting with Picquart, Louis Leblois’s instinctive reaction was to consult the elder statesman of the Alsatian cause, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.⁴⁶ Now sixty-two, Scheurer-Kestner was a chemist and industrialist, as well as an eminent Republican who had landed in jail as a youth for his opposition to the Second Empire. He was also senator for life for Alsace, a position that honoured both him and the Frenchness of his homeland, even though it was under German occupation. He was widely respected and elected vice-president of the Senate at virtually the same time that Dreyfus was degraded.

Because of his reputation Mathieu had approached Scheurer-Kestner as early as 7 February 1895 and later Bernard Lazare did the same. The senator was troubled by Mathieu’s obvious sincerity and promised to investigate, but fundamentally believed in the army’s sense of justice.⁴⁷ However, although he had no particular regard for Jewish Alsatians, he was troubled by the lack of motive and felt that Alfred’s treason made little psychological sense. His doubts increased when Ludovic Trarieux, justice minister until 1895, alerted him to the possibility of judicial irregularities,⁴⁸ and Demange suggested that secret documentation might have been used to win the conviction.⁴⁹ Billot, a trusted, old associate who now held the war portfolio, reassured him in July 1897 that Dreyfus was guilty. But, just when Scheurer-Kestner was about to relax, the Italian ambassador, Count Luigi Tornielli – Panizzardi’s superior at the Italian embassy – told him that evidence had been forged to uphold Dreyfus’s conviction.⁵⁰

Scheurer-Kestner first learned about Esterhazy on 13 July in a meeting with Louis Leblois,⁵¹ during which the lawyer showed him letters from Gonse to Picquart admitting that Dreyfus had been illegally convicted in 1894.⁵² However, to protect Picquart, Leblois insisted that Scheurer-Kestner had to find another source before he said anything.⁵³ And this he failed to do: not even a senator had right of access to the archives of the Statistical Bureau. So Scheurer-Kestner remained silent, but did at least organize a meeting with the president, Félix Faure, on 29 October. Far from finding an ally in his old colleague, however, he was met with an irritated head of state who sensed only that the whole business was going to cause him trouble.⁵⁴

Scheurer-Kestner’s approach to Faure, which he had sought through the intermediary of Faure’s daughter, typified the way he liked to work.⁵⁵ He believed – almost naively – that once men of good faith discovered their error, they would wish to make amends. As he witnessed former associates lying to him without compunction, he slowly came to realize that the Republican fraternity in which he had put such faith no longer existed. He was one of the best-connected men in France, but was now isolated from old friends by a yawning gulf of moral incomprehension. As the summer of 1897 faded into autumn, he had no idea that the worst was yet to come.

 

Of all the Dreyfusards, Scheurer-Kestner was perhaps the one whose illusions were most brutally destroyed by the Affair. As Frenchman, scientist, industrialist and Republican, he represented – and for a time was seen as representing – the best of Alsace. Scheurer-Kestner (he added his wife’s name when he married, as was the custom in the Mulhousian patriciate)⁵⁶ had an immaculate Protestant and Republican pedigree.⁵⁷ His family boasted Freemasons and Saint Simonians inspired by philanthropy and nearby Swiss models of direct democracy. The Mulhousian industrial class were inclusive, if dirigiste, in their social dreams, building workers’ housing and introducing the most progressive labour conditions in Europe.

19. Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, 1897

Throughout his life, science and technology enchanted him. His early memories focused on the marvels of matches, gas lighting and the arrival of the railway in Thann, his native town ten miles north-west of Mulhouse.⁵⁸ He joined the Société industrielle de Mulhouse, which fostered new techniques in engraving, dyeing and machine tools that made the city’s textiles the most intricate in the world.⁵⁹ Even though he craved a career as a research chemist, he returned to his father’s factory, and then to the factory of his father-in-law, Charles Kestner, where he built a laboratory to continue his own investigations. While he refused the Légion d’honneur when it was offered, he always embraced the prizes the Société industrielle awarded him.

Although French-speaking at home (a rarity in Alsace), Scheurer-Kestner received his secondary education from highly cultivated, German-speaking pastors. So terrible was the accent of the French master, however, that the school had to find a replacement in far-away Montauban.⁶⁰ Children learned the Bible in the Lutheran or Calvinist versions used by Swiss and German co-religionists. In 1869, when Marshal François Bazaine – soon to be famous for surrendering at Metz in the Franco-Prussian War – visited the province, he castigated the pastorate for preaching in German. One responded: ‘We may well, Monsieur le Maréchal, deliver sermons in German, but our hearts are French.’⁶¹ Their patriotism was sentimental, all the more tenacious for being independent of language.⁶²

Scheurer-Kestner abandoned Protestantism at twenty-two and never baptized his children. Freethinking and dedicated to the Enlightenment, he embraced instead Emile Littré’s sceptical positivism.⁶³ But he never tired of reminding the world that Protestantism surpassed Catholicism, a religion dedicated not to morality and ethics but to obedience and blind superstition. He venerated his deeply Protestant mother for her hatred of cant and hypocrisy. When he deserted the faith, she told him: ‘My child, you are making me suffer a great deal, but I would esteem you less if you submitted hypocritically to ideas that your conscience cannot accept.’⁶⁴ Although no longer a believing Protestant, he had a sense of himself as a member of the ‘elect’, as a man of conscience, and these qualities were an essential part of his Dreyfusard creed. When he was under attack in December 1897, his sister Berthe reinforced this view:

You are doing something so great, so noble, so strong for the good of our country that you cannot appreciate it yourself. Your courage…is going to be the cause of the regeneration of our dear country. All of us who have faith and who believe in the efficacy and inspiration of prayer were waiting for this moment. It is you, the good and loyal son of our venerated parents, who has been chosen for this immense task, and though you do not know it, it is God who guides you. ⁶⁵

Scheurer-Kestner’s outlook was shaped by Alsace’s tri-confessional world. He was not surprised that Protestants and Jews defended Dreyfus against an obdurate clericalism, and he feared the return of the religious wars of the early-modern world, which set Catholic against Protestant and Christians against Jews. For him, Protestants represented progress and Republicanism, while the Catholic peasantry and working classes remained loyal to priests and tyrannical Bonapartism. When strikes erupted in Alsace right before the War of 1870–71, he saw them as a Jesuit-led attempt to nullify economic and social progress, not as the protests of a dispossessed class and impoverished religious group.⁶⁶

As with so many others, the Franco-Prussian War transformed his life. He became part of Léon Gambetta’s entourage, admiring the ‘dictator’ for his efforts to drive out the Germans. Although elected twice as representative for Alsace, Scheurer-Kestner found politics disillusioning and was shocked when Adolphe Thiers, as provisional president and the man responsible for the bloody suppression of the Commune, ceded Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. In early 1871 Scheurer-Kestner was among those Alsatians who walked out of the Provisional Assembly in Bordeaux (then the capital) in protest. Events had broken his heart:

20. ‘L’Oncle Hansi’ (the pseudonym of Jean-Jacques Waltz, 1873–1951), a French Alsatian nationalist, produced classic images of a romanticized Alsace subjugated by the Germans. Shown here are Alsatian townsfolk in traditional costume gazing at a stork, the symbol of the province. From Mon Village. Ceux qui n’oublient pas, 1913

21. ‘Alsace. She waits’ (1871) by the Alsatian painter Jean-Jacques Henner. The woman appears in Alsatian dress but with a French tricolore pin on her hat. The picture was commissioned in 1871 by the women of Thann on the initiative of Scheurer-Kestner’s wife and presented to Gambetta. He had it engraved to ensure it became widely known as the visual symbol of the lost province

Sad return to a country definitively occupied by the Germans who tread with their big boots the soil of the country where I was born and where my ancestors lie. Anyone who has not experienced this humiliation, this heart break, does not really know grief…Now I know how much patriotic grief a man can bear without dying of it.⁶⁷

Scheurer-Kestner’s plight exemplified the dilemmas of many French Alsatians. Although he saw himself as the truest of Frenchmen, for Catholic France he seemed nothing more than the German ‘within’, his much vaunted Protestant integrity the offspring of an alien and divisive religious creed supported by international ‘syndicate’ of commerce and kin. Scheurer-Kestner wanted his French compatriots to distinguish between Protestant Alsatians and Prussian militarism, between the civilized gentleness of Alsace and the barbarism of its new overlords. He wrote of his region as a picturesque land of peasant villages with storks nesting in chimneys, of strong, pious and generous womenfolk tending hearth and home, of fields with wild berries and flowers. This idealized vision of Alsace – which also figured in Picquart’s letters and in the drawings of Hansi – had little to do with the world of textile and chemical factories that resembled those on the other side of the Rhine.

While Scheurer-Kestner idealized France as Civilization and Germany as Barbarism, the Republic’s compromises offended him. He reversed the usual question: instead of ‘Is Alsace as loyal as France’, he wanted to know whether ‘France is as loyal as Alsace?’⁶⁸ Once Scheurer-Kestner knew Dreyfus was innocent, the captain’s loyalty as a symbol of Alsatian fidelity – and by extension his own – was very much a personal issue.⁶⁹

 

Scheurer-Kestner was urged on by Joseph Reinach. Although born and raised in Paris, not in Alsace, Reinach was also of German stock, the eldest son of the fabulously wealthy Frankfurt banker Hermann-Joseph Reinach. Bernard Lazare first contacted him in August 1896, and he quickly became one of Dreyfus’s most energetic supporters. But, while Scheurer-Kestner was eulogized, Reinach was slandered. From the moment of Dreyfus’s arrest, Drumont reminded his readers of the central role Joseph’s father-in-law and uncle, Baron de Reinach, had played in the Panama Canal Scandal: ‘At the risk of surprising some people, I declare that Captain Dreyfus’s abominable action shocks me barely more than the presence of the nephew and of the son-in-law of von Reinach in the French parliament.’⁷⁰

Reinach was a parliamentary deputy, but association with the scandal had destroyed his chances of ministerial office; he was able to throw himself into the Affair because he no longer needed to make the political calculations necessary to protect his career. His family connection, however, meant that he could not front the movement – hence his approach to Scheurer-Kestner and determination to make this establishment politician take on the role he could not adopt himself.

As with Scheurer-Kestner, Reinach’s background and upbringing epitomized a particular kind of Republican social ascent. Hermann-Joseph Reinach had abandoned Germany in favour of France and the rights of citizenship that the Revolution had promised. He devoted his whole life to gathering a gigantic fortune so that his three sons could contribute to French cultural life without needing to earn their living. He employed a Swiss nurse so that Joseph, Salomon and Théodore would learn French as a first language and hired tutors to drill them mercilessly. All three studied together, and because the younger brothers were forced to repeat Joseph’s lessons as well as their own, Salmon and Théodore surpassed the eldest in academic distinction.⁷¹ They achieved such sensational examination results that a popular song about them did the rounds, with the title, ‘Je sais tout’ (’I know everything’), taken from the initials of their names. Salomon became a member of the Institut de France and a curator of the Musée des Antiquités nationals in St-Germain-en-Laye, while Théodore gained a double doctoral degree (in law and arts) at a very young age, before concentrating on Ancient Greek history. The brothers were either admired or despised for embodying the aristocracy of intellect, their brilliant performance offered as an example to other Jewish boys, but, as the essayist and political thinker Julien Benda pointed out, it also stoked an envious anti-Semitism.⁷²

22. Joseph Reinach at his desk shows the politician and man of letters installed with his massive personal library, array of quill pens and extravagant fin de siècle electric lamps

Of the three, Joseph was the least scholarly and the most politically engaged. Born in 1856, he was part of the first generation that could dream of associating with French elites on terms of relative equality. By 1886, at the age of thirty, he lived like a princeling in an enormous house on the plaine Monceau, 6 avenue Van-Dyck, an edifice he monogrammed with his initials.⁷³ He loved hunting, rose early to fence or ride, and over the course of his political career fought no fewer than thirteen duels. No one dared call him a puny Jew. He worked tirelessly and kept up an enormous correspondence, while somehow finding time to pursue his passion for Latin rhetoric, and especially his love of Cicero.⁷⁴ Famous for his wit and charm, he was a bit of a ladies’ man, which provoked a disparaging description from his right-wing opponent Léon Daudet: ‘He jumped from armchair to armchair chasing women in plunging necklines with the gallantries of a satisfied gorilla.’⁷⁵ Dreyfusards too could be uncomfortable around Reinach’s liveried servants, sumptuous soirées and private secretaries. With his bulk, wit and exuberance, he was a bit de trop. Ernest Vaughan, the editor of L’Aurore who published Zola’s ‘J’accuse’, acknowledged Reinach’s intellect but believed his money and snobbery gave him an exalted view of his powers.⁷⁶ Pierre-Victor Stock, the Dreyfusard publisher, was happy to be invited to dinner, but sourly recalled how his plea for cash went unheeded when his publishing house faced bankruptcy.⁷⁷

Reinach was hard-headed and dexterous, able to work with men of widely different outlooks, and with an almost superhuman capacity to move from bruising press battles to rarefied repartee. His adroitness did not undercut his idealism, however. Unlike many Jews, who did not at first know how to react to Dreyfus’s conviction, Reinach battled early on to defend his vision of Republicanism and patriotism. France, he believed, was the fount of European civilization, the legatee of classical culture perfected by a revolution that had created inalterable civil and political ideals. As he wrote to Scheurer-Kestner in a very rare moment of despair:

It is true that I have encountered these past few days sorrows and humiliations that compare only with those I experienced in 1870, when I was very young, whenever I learned of new defeats. I am foolishly chauvinistic. I cannot admit that France does not embody justice.⁷⁸

He also defended Franco-Judaism, believing that Judaism’s ethical inheritance and the precepts of the Enlightenment were mutually reinforcing expressions of a universal morality.⁷⁹ Anti-Semitism was thus a double enemy to be defeated at all costs.

Scheurer-Kestner and Reinach both adored Gambetta; Reinach paid homage by editing the older man’s works in eleven fat volumes. Gambetta was self-made and appealed to many early Dreyfusards as the man who had spotted the potential of the middling ranks of shopkeepers and peasant proprietors willing to embrace Republican aspirations. They shared his belief in anticlericalism, meritocracy and parliamentarianism, holding that demagoguery could be avoided by inculcating the masses with their version of Republican values.

23. This collective portrait of 1890 shows Joseph Reinach seated at a desk conversing with Republican colleagues. Behind him on the mantelpiece is a large bust of Gambetta

Reinach was fearful that Dreyfus would die on Devil’s Island while Scheurer-Kestner fussed over his promise to Leblois not to compromise Picquart. He thus fabricated a playful fantasy to woo the older and more reticent statesman, addressing him as ‘Arouet’ – the real name of Voltaire – and signing his own letters ‘le comte d’Argental’, an aristocratic correspondent who shared Voltaire’s campaign for religious toleration and the reform of eighteenth-century justice. Voltaire’s anticlericalism and wit touched Reinach’s and Scheurer-Kestner’s hearts and enabled them to enter the Affair as latter-day philosophes. Scheurer-Kestner recalled his schoolboy fascination with Voltaire’s writings as an entrée into ‘Frenchness’, while for Reinach they represented the tradition of Enlightenment toleration.⁸⁰ Voltaire offered a secular French lineage distinct from the complications of their Germanic, Jewish and Protestant heritage, a bridge on which men of diverse backgrounds could meet.

In mythologizing Voltaire’s struggle for toleration, however, they ignored his view of Old Testament Jews as cruel, stiff-necked and primitive. Voltaire had condemned circumcision as barbarity, despised the Prophets and viewed Jews as unregenerate and usurious. He even ignored the ‘Socrates of Berlin’, Moses Mendelssohn, the figure of Jewish Enlightenment who impressed so many of his French compatriots and was one of the Reinach brothers’ heroes.⁸¹

Reinach’s plea to Scheurer-Kestner thus depended on an historical fantasy purified of inconvenient prejudices. He turned to the Calas Affair for inspiration. Calas was a Huguenot textile merchant condemned in 1761 in a biased trial of murdering his eldest son to stop him converting to Catholicism; he was broken on the wheel and his son buried as a Catholic martyr.⁸² Convinced of the injustice of the verdict, Voltaire argued that the affair typified the fanaticism of established religion and the corruptibility of the magistrature, and demonstrated the imperative need for reform. His intervention triggered a public inquiry that led to Calas’s posthumous rehabilitation in 1765 and the promulgation of an Edict of Toleration. In 1762 Voltaire wrote to the Comte d’Argental:

You will ask me perhaps, my divine angel, why I am so strongly interested in Calas, who has been broken on the wheel; it is because I am a man, because I see all foreigners indignant, because all your Protestant Swiss officers say that they will not be that keen to fight for a nation that has their brothers broken on the wheel without any proof.⁸³

Reinach showed instinctive genius when he focused on this episode.⁸⁴ Like Scheurer-Kestner, Calas was a Protestant and a textile manufacturer. As Reinach could have been Dreyfus, so Scheurer-Kestner could have been Calas, identifications that evoked a shared heritage of Jewish and Protestant persecution at the hands of a French, Catholic majority. ‘I give you only one piece of advice,’ he wrote to Scheurer-Kestner: ‘it is to reread the Calas Affair. It is always exactly the same obstacles, the same difficulties, the same arguments. Only the names have changed. The king’s ministers employed the same tricks. And Voltaire’s noble impatience is little different from yours.’⁸⁵

Despite agreement on aims, the two men diverged about means. Reinach believed that a frontal assault on anti-Semitism was crucial, while Scheurer-Kestner was more doubtful. For a man who worried about the corrupting impact of office-holding, Scheurer-Kestner was strangely committed to ‘working the system’ and fearful of opening the case to public discussion. Like Mathieu, he wanted to operate in a semi-clandestine manner and was afraid of humiliating those who had acted wrongly but perhaps in good faith. He warned Reinach against making an Urbi et Orbi, like a Pope pronouncing to the world.⁸⁶

Above all, Scheurer-Kestner wanted to dissociate himself from the Jews. He told Reinach not to ‘jewify’ the Affair⁸⁷ and warned against the dangers of his being seen as ‘affiliated to the band’.⁸⁸

I do not want to seem to have an understanding with the Jews. In my view, as I have already told you, it is necessary to avoid meticulously anything that will keep the Dreyfus question in the Jewish domain; it is too much in it (already). Restoring justice is what we are talking about.⁸⁹

As the letters continued through the summer and early autumn of 1897, Scheurer-Kestner’s aims were confined to ‘saving the man, returning honour to his family, and saving the honour of the Republican government’.⁹⁰ He wanted to spare the country further conflict, but his attempt to limit the Affair – to isolate it from the hatreds that were a part of its very nature – was doomed to failure. In arriving at this decision, he also revealed his own mixed feelings about Jews.

During October and November 1897 he hedged himself in with so many moral quibbles that sometimes he did more harm than good.⁹¹ For example, in October he made such ambiguous statements about Alfred’s role to the German press that a distressed Lucie was convinced she had lost his support.⁹² He even used the Calas Affair to defend his  seeming inactivity, telling Reinach that Voltaire had taken three years to secure his triumph:⁹³ history, he argued, showed the need for patience. Reinach constantly sought to smooth his ruffled feathers. Teasing Scheurer-Kestner once again for delaying, he wrote towards the end of October 1897, ‘Christians and Jews were waiting for you today like the Messiah.’⁹⁴ Reinach’s alternately ingratiating and pressing tones showed how difficult it was – even in the intimacy of their developing friendship – to be certain of Scheurer-Kestner.

As Scheurer-Kestner hesitated, others less scrupulous than he were moving to bolster the case against Dreyfus. Henry manufactured a letter to Esterhazy, which was written in a feminine hand and signed ‘Espérance’. This letter warned him of Picquart’s discoveries and the attempt of the ‘syndicate’ to frame him. A few days later, on the evening of 22 October, Esterhazy met du Paty and the archivist Félix Gribelin in the parc Mont-souris. They arrived in civilian clothes sporting false beards and moustaches to disguise their identity, and offered Esterhazy their support.⁹⁵ Esterhazy had already defended himself in a letter to the president of the Republic, citing the Espérance note as proof of a plot to ensnare him. Reassured by the military’s backing, he fired off a second letter on 31 October, in which he referred to ‘Espérance’ as a mysterious woman in a black veil:

The generous woman who warned me of the horrible plot hatched against me by Dreyfus’s friends with the assistance of Colonel Picquart, has succeeded in procuring for me since, among other documents, the photograph of a document that she was able to extort from this officer. This piece, stolen from a foreign legation by Colonel Picquart, is most compromising for certain important diplomats. If I do not obtain either support or justice, and if my name comes to be pronounced, this photograph, which is at this moment in a safe place abroad, will be immediately published.⁹⁶

The imaginative elaborations of the ‘veiled lady’ added a certain melodramatic mystery to the Affair. Journalists sought to identify her, artists produced sketches, and publishers rushed out postcards to capitalize on the public interest. Although a tissue of lies, Esterhazy’s claims compromised Picquart, who was now accused of a security breach in that he had allowed the veiled lady to purloin a precious document from beneath his nose. The document that Esterhazy referred to (and did not possess) was most probably the ‘scoundrel D’ letter from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen. These accusations against Picquart were outrageous, but they had an immediate effect. The president of the Republic asked the minister of war to investigate, and Picquart, rather than Esterhazy, became the object of the military’s secret inquiry.

24. a & b ‘The Veiled Lady’. The minutiae of the Affair excited widespread interest even outside France. These two postcards, produced for the German market in 1898, were part of a series that speculated about the identity of ‘The Veiled Lady’

Esterhazy’s feverish activities were a response not only to Picquart’s discoveries but also to Scheurer-Kestner’s cautious attempts to open up the case. The day after his meeting with Faure on 29 October Scheurer-Kestner lunched with his old friend Billot and asked him to launch an inquiry; the minister of war responded by asking Scheurer-Kestner not to talk to the press until he could write again with more information.⁹⁷ Scheurer-Kestner agreed, but the letter never came, and he realized that the minister’s request was merely a way to win more time to prepare the cover-up. Scheurer-Kestner’s situation became increasingly uncomfortable, as old colleagues in the Senate reproachfully wondered when he would put an end to the divisive rumours and confusion.

Everything changed on 7 November 1897. A stockbroker named Jacques de Castro had chanced to buy one of the facsimiles of the bordereau that Mathieu had distributed and instantly recognized the handwriting as belonging to Esterhazy, one of his clients. De Castro arranged through friends to meet Mathieu, bringing with him letters from Esterhazy in his files that showed the handwriting was indeed identical.⁹⁸ The next day Mathieu went to see Scheurer-Kestner.

At last, Scheurer-Kestner now had the independent confirmation he required, and he finally spoke out in an open letter to Le Temps on 15 November. On the same day Mathieu wrote to the minister of war denouncing Esterhazy, while Picquart too now felt free to point to the guilty man. Letters of encouragement flooded in, but Scheurer-Kestner found the attention overwhelming, even silly: ‘I receive bunches of flowers from anonymous women donors; an immense crown of laurels, which makes me absolutely ridiculous in my own eyes.’⁹⁹

If well-wishers admired him, others did not. The press unleashed a wave of poison: anonymous letters denounced Scheurer-Kestner as a Prussian, a Jew, a bandit, a pimp; as ‘the general agent of the Dreyfus syndicate’ and as a man sold to Germany. One vicious correspondent summed it up:

You must have received a jolly big bribe to defend so relentlessly the friend of the Prussians. In any case you yourself, filthy Huguenot, are you not an enemy of France, and your place in the Palais du Luxembourg with those dear panamistes, you owe it to a whole lot of dirty tricks. You follow that filthy swine of an ex-minister for war who has fiddled with the Panama money.

A Frenchman who would like to see Scheurer-Kestner castrated, him and all his little Yid friends…¹⁰⁰

Although Scheurer-Kestner began to wear a kind of chainmail under his clothing in case he was attacked, the storm he had provoked created momentum for the Dreyfusards. In response to Mathieu’s accusation, Saussier, the military governor, appointed General Georges de Pellieux to head a judicial inquiry. De Pellieux called officers whose testimony tended to exonerate Esterhazy,¹⁰¹ but he was unable to silence Mme Boulancy, Esterhazy’s former mistress, who published Esterhazy’s letters to her. On 27 November this one found its way to the press:

If this evening one came to tell me that tomorrow as a captain of [the] Uhlans I will be killed while cutting down Frenchmen with my riding sabre, I would be perfectly happy…I would not harm a puppy, but I would with pleasure kill one hundred thousand Frenchmen…¹⁰²

Although such remarks did not prove that Esterhazy was the author of the bordereau, they did little to enhance his reputation. Count Tornielli, the Italian ambassador who had warned Scheurer-Kestner about the letter signed by his subordinate Panizzardi, now wrote directly to Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux to inform him that the attaché had disowned the document in which Dreyfus was named and suggested it was a forgery.¹⁰³ Fearful that Panizzardi might say so in public, de Boisdeffre once again vouched for Henry’s forgery and dismissed the Italian’s claims. Panizzardi did not, in fact, speak out.

The bricks in the wall of conspiracy began to loosen under this assault, but, rather than allowing the edifice to crumble, de Pellieux and his superiors moved to shore it up. Billot, de Boisdeffre and Gonse decided that Esterhazy should insist on a court martial so he would not have to face Mathieu’s accusation in a civilian court.¹⁰⁴ At the same time the premier, Jules Méline, dismissed the whole business and assured the Chamber of Deputies that there was ‘no Dreyfus Affair’.¹⁰⁵ Further, the Catholic deputy Albert de Mun rose on 4 December 1897 to denounce the Jewish ‘syndicate’, making reference to Reinach, who sat in the session. The chamber once more voted, this time by 372 to 126, to confirm the verdict of 1894 and finished by censuring ‘the leaders of that odious campaign mounted in order to trouble the public conscience’.¹⁰⁶ Scheurer-Kestner confessed later that during these proceedings he was overcome by ‘a fit of the giggles’¹⁰⁷ he felt he was in a topsy-turvy world, where slurs were cast on honest men and traitors were celebrated.

Determined now to press on regardless, Scheurer-Kestner stood up on 7 December before a Senate crowded with five thousand people. Rather than providing the fireworks that the audience desired, he calmly recounted the facts as he knew them, delivering a performance not too different in style from that given by Dreyfus at his court martial. Scheurer-Kestner did not convince his compatriots, and the lesson in realism was searing. He wrote later:

I believed naively, as a great number of my fellow citizens probably still believe, that the army was the Ark of the Covenant of honour and virtue. I was convinced that any officer was thrown out for the smallest fault and that, like Caesar’s wife, the army was…invulnerable, that it was, as its defenders have repeatedly told us, a school of discipline and honour.

It was extremely painful for me to recognize that I was living in a fool’s paradise.¹⁰⁸

The greater the storm, the more discreet and stoical Scheurer-Kestner became. The fierceness of his resolve and the serenity of his façade were no doubt reinforced by the brothers, sisters and in-laws who stood by him. While he refused to be ‘affiliated to the [Jewish] band’, he possessed his own remarkable support network in his own family. His brother Albert Scheurer proclaimed, ‘I will never complain of the torments that [the Affair] caused me.’¹⁰⁹ Edward Kestner assured him that ‘your venerated father, your father-in-law, would shake your hand and say to you: fight for justice, whether it triumphs or succumbs; some defeats are more glorious than victory…be firm, persevere, like a true child of Alsace.’¹¹⁰ His sister Catherine told him that the little church where she lived ‘has put us in quarantine’.¹¹¹ She was only sad that the sacristan’s wife, who had been her friend, was married to a man whose opinions Catherine could no longer abide.

Scheurer-Kestner refused the aid of sympathetic journalists, often from abroad, who wanted to put his view to the public: ‘Let the newspapers do their duty as they see fit; I do mine as I understand it and I will not depart from the line of conduct that I have chosen for myself: I shall remain completely uninvolved with press polemics.’¹¹²

These high-minded tactics meant that Scheurer-Kestner missed opportunities to convince the public. Writing to Reinach, he hinted that he also was making political calculations; he had his eye on the elections due in May 1898 and was afraid that the Republicans would be defeated if the Affair was not ‘contained’. While Reinach – reluctantly – fought back against his attackers with court cases, Scheurer-Kestner remained resolutely silent and preserved his ‘line of conduct’. Reinach, ever sensitive to the suggestion that he might have less moral fibre than Scheurer-Kestner, wondered which of them had chosen the right course.¹¹³

As the cover-up intensified, Scheurer-Kestner admitted to Reinach that he wanted to ‘take up again the [clandestine] habits’ of opposition he had adopted ‘during the Empire’ so he would not be so ashamed of the Republic he loved:¹¹⁴

I suffer from what has just happened. What! Under the Republic! The magistrature almost as servile as under the Empire – at least a part of the magistrature; and it is to end up like this that we struggled for forty years! I am speaking for myself! I, [who am] old and ashamed of our work under the Republic, which my youth had seen as the reign of the beautiful and the good!¹¹⁵

Despite an almost existential despair, he urged his friend to continue the struggle as if their mutual illusions were not lost, and as if the Republic’s ideals still stood. Reinach’s mood was also bleak when, in the last days of December 1897, the army showed that they were determined to protect Esterhazy. ‘Men disgust me more and more,’¹¹⁶ he wrote, and complained that France had become ‘the Republic of Venice’, where sinister denunciations and plots abounded.¹¹⁷

Their friendship was an extraordinary, if ultimately only partially successful, collaboration. Scheurer-Kestner was overtaken by events and by men such as Reinach and Zola, who had none of his reserve. He wanted to suppress the Jewish dimension of the Affair and expressed a  kind of unthinking anti-Semitism in disassociating himself from the Dreyfus family and Jewish activists. As the target of anti-Semitism, Reinach, in contrast, clearly understood its significance. He was as stoical as Scheurer-Kestner in bearing the attacks, but even he sometimes felt the need to repress reality to reassure himself, as his idealization of Voltairean ‘tolerance’ revealed.

In his memoirs Mathieu chastised Scheurer-Kestner for not speaking out sooner,¹¹⁸ saying that that the delay had given the army time to argue that Esterhazy was a victim of Jewish machinations. If Bernard Lazare was marginalized for moving too fast, Scheurer-Kestner was flung from the Dreyfusard mainstream for not moving fast enough. When the Senate voted him out as vice-president in 13 January 1898 as a result of his stance,¹¹⁹ he spent more and more time in his native Alsace. There he began his last fight against the throat cancer that eventually killed him. ‘Here I am with a 10-centimetre slash from a razor in my neck,’¹²⁰ he wrote to Reinach, and described himself as an old, rusty machine requiring oiling. No longer was he the Great Man sought by others; instead he was on the fringes, obliged to solicit news from the Jewish politician at the centre of events.

One of the rare moments of pleasure left to him was the thought of a meal he hoped to give his friend. To tantalize Reinach, Scheurer-Kestner wrote to him in a mixture of German and French suggesting a menu that included crayfish soup, local freshwater fish, stuffed goose, liver dumplings, noodles, sauerkraut, green cabbage with bacon and sausage, hare and apple tart, washed down with a petit vin of the region.¹²¹ No one familiar with regional French cooking will be surprised by the munificence of the feast, but it was hardly traditional French cuisine; rather, it incorporated the Germanic inheritance that indelibly marked both men. This encounter was not to be about Voltairean rationality and engagement but about simpler youthful associations. The hare, the crayfish and the wine were taken from the fields, woods and waters of Scheurer-Kestner’s beloved Alsace, and conjured up a landscape and a way of life: trekking in the woods, feasting simply among peasants who spoke not a word of French, a petit pays comfortable in its traditions. Sadly, their final encounter never took place. Scheurer-Kestner died on 19 September 1899, on the very day that Alfred Dreyfus was pardoned, and never knew that the cause to which he had sacrificed so much would triumph at last.