11

Anti-Dreyfusard Movements and Martyrology

Central to anti-Dreyfusard persistence was their belief in the army and its authority. Because they viewed the military as the nation’s greatest institution and as a symbol of national grandeur, they preferred to believe the generals rather than a pornographer, a renegade soldier and a Jew. While ‘militarism’ became a term of abuse hurled against Germany and its heel-clicking Prussian elite – a symbol of the bellicose authoritarianism that threatened French survival – France too had its own militaristic ethos. Many French regarded the barracks as the best means of uniting a diverse nation; the military connected memories of monarchical power, the revolutionary ethos of the levée en masse and the glories of Bonapartism. The military was thus an important source of continuity, an institution that seemed to stand above the political disputes that had marred France’s recent history.¹ For men and women on the right, the army embodied the nation in a way that the Republic could not. The dominance of the Dreyfusard interpretation of the history of the Affair makes it difficult to understand why the right continued to insist that Alfred was guilty despite the overwhelming evidence of his innocence. But, in this light, it is much easier to understand why so many were affronted by the charge that the military leadership was corrupt, and were ready to believe that the Dreyfusards were in reality trying to promote the interests of Jews, Protestants and Freemasons at the expense of more honest and patriotic men. When they saw Joseph Reinach and Georges Clemenceau, who had also been tainted by the Panama Scandal, running the Dreyfusard campaign, they were appalled that such politicians should now claim the moral high ground. Brunetière became an anti-Dreyfusard not because he was an anti-Semite, but because he believed that the ‘intellectuals’ would undermine his conservative, yet democratic, vision of France. Some tried to tread the same path – eschewing Jew-baiting but retaining anti-Dreyfusard beliefs – but many on the right did embrace anti-Semitism as a unifying passion, and saw it as a justifiable response to attacks against an institution that embodied the very soul of the nation.

The politics of the right were fragmented and constantly shifting, multifaceted and vociferous. Assumptionist priests galvanized Catholic piety and anti-Semitism during the 1898 elections, while Paul Déroulède, a famous national poet and revanchist politician, re-emerged as an idealized chef at the Affair’s height to steer wounded patriotism into the anti-Dreyfusard cause. Charles Maurras, Edouard Drumont and Henri Rochefort fostered a right-wing martyrology in their newspapers that exalted the forger Joseph Henry and his wife as saintly figures. And just when the judicial case against Dreyfus seemed on the verge of collapse, the right reconsolidated, so that the Affair grew in intensity in the last months of 1898 and the first months of the new year.

 

Catholic ‘anti-intellectuals’ such as Brunetière, du Lac, de Mun and even Drumont were all central to the war of ideas, but theirs were not the only voices on the anti-Dreyfusard right. The Assumptionists, a highly motivated, influential band of activist priests, provided a different perspective. As clergymen, they spoke with godly authority, and combined religious zeal, popular piety and political opposition in a package that horrified Dreyfusards and even intimidated fellow Catholics. They were omnipresent during the Affair, promoting their anti-Semitism in their daily newspaper, La Croix, acting as propagandists during the election campaign of May 1898 and toying with the idea of supporting Déroulède’s coup d’état in February 1899.

Throughout the Affair the Assumptionists were convinced that their struggle against the Dreyfusards inside France was a blow struck for international Catholicism and sought Vatican approval for (or at least acquiescence in) their activities. While the Reinach brothers and other leading Dreyfusards held fast to the myth of the Jesuit conspiracy, their real clerical enemy was the Assumptionist order, who considered anti-Semitism as vital to national rejuvenation.

Founded under the Second Empire, the order was militant from the very beginning, soldered together under the charismatic leadership of Père Emmanuel d’Alzon. Born in 1810 to a patrician family in Nîmes, d’Alzon was raised to combat Protestantism, the enemy of Catholicism in south-western France since the seventeenth century.² Initially, d’Alzon supported the Second Empire, as Bonapartism seemed to accommodate Catholic interests, but when Louis Napoleon fostered Italian Unification in 1859,³ the tensions between the Church and the imperial regime burst into the open. Like the Republicans who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Second Empire, the Assumptionists also hated Louis Napoleon and asserted their fidelity to Pius IX, who became a ‘prisoner’ in the Vatican when the rest of the papal states, including Rome, were ceded to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870.

The Assumptionists’ religious and political convictions grew out of the ultramontanism of Pius IX, which rejected the rise of liberalism, socialism and scientific inquiry, and promoted instead Eucharistic and Marian piety. They reinvented medieval and baroque devotions, and supported pilgrimage as well as the cults of the Immaculate Conception and the Sacred Heart.⁴ The order was very much part of the post-war Catholicism that built the basilica of Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre to atone for French sins.⁵ The defeat of 1870–71 and the anticlerical bloodthirstiness of the Commune had terrified them, and they blamed these disasters on the corruption and meretriciousness of the previous regime.⁶ The 1870s brought a fleeting moment of hope for a reunion of Throne and Altar through a Bourbon restoration,⁷ but when this possibility was decisively closed off after 1873 the Assumptionists began to model themselves on the soldierly clerics of the Jesuit Counter-Reformation, the embattled champions of a programme of reconversion.

The threat they perceived was real enough, for the late seventies and early eighties saw the first wave of anticlerical legislation and ‘de-sacralization’, with the laïcisation of primary education and the removal of crucifixes from classrooms and hospital wards.⁸ In 1880 and 1884 religious communities lost their financial privileges and the Republican agencies seemed bent on invading their charitable domains. Then, in 1887, the law of ‘priests with knapsacks’ made the clergy liable to conscription. The Assumptionists and other religious orders opposed the legislation because it attacked clerical privilege and ‘corrupted’ priests by subjecting them to barracks life.⁹ This rejection of the Republic’s attempt to integrate clerics shows that the association of army and Church during the Affair – ‘the sword and the aspergillum’ [the priest’s vessel of holy water]^* – was neither a long-standing nor an inevitable alliance.

Throughout the 1880s the Assumptionists responded to anticlericalism by mobilizing massive crowds for the national pilgrimage to Lourdes. First established in 1875 in the aftermath of the failed Bourbon restoration, this annual ritual became a means of combating the reigning positivism of the Republic.¹⁰ Père François Picard, who took over when d’Alzon died in 1880, promoted the droits de Dieu against the sacrilegious pretensions of the droits de l’homme;¹¹ in praying for miraculous cures, the Assumptionists wanted to demonstrate the superiority of religion over science, of Catholic solidarity over the ‘hubristic’ individualism of Republican ideology. The priests considered themselves the standard-bearers of a religion of love, and regarded their virulent anti-Semitism as a crucial weapon in the war against the materialism threatening Christian values. They also positioned themselves as the natural enemies of Republicanism, and were hence ready for battle when the Affair began.

Their religious campaign was spearheaded by a successful venture in Catholic publishing: Vincent de Paul Bailly established the publishing house of the Bonne Presse in 1877, livened up the Assumptionists’ weekly, Le Pèlerin, with a peculiar mixture of piety, sentimentalism and vulgarity,¹² and relaunched their monthly La Croix as a ‘respectable’ daily in 1883. In the left-hand corner of La Croix, Bailly emblazoned a picture of Christ on the cross, in defiance of those bien pensant Catholics who were shocked by the use of such a holy image as a logo. Bailly’s instincts were good: readers identified with the affirmation of Christ’s suffering as an accurate reflection of their own plight.¹³ The paper sold in the hundreds of thousands, and its influence was extended by numerous regional editions. With La Croix, Le Pèlerin and a range of books and pamphlets, the Bonne Presse became the largest and most influential Catholic publishing house in France.¹⁴

But in 1892 the new Pope, Leo Xlll, demanded a reassessment of Assumptionist policy. Persuaded that the Republic was a permanent fixture after Boulanger’s failure, the Pope encouraged Catholics to accept reality and to work within the system, to ‘rally’ to the Republic by joining conservative and moderate political alliances. Instead of insisting on an immediate repeal of anticlerical legislation, he hoped to decrease the Church’s dangerous isolation by joining moderates to fight the rise of the left. The Assumptionists feared that such a tactic would concede too much, that if Catholics did not ‘insist on a rapid quid pro quo for their support’, then the ralliement would give all advantage to the government.¹⁵

By the time of the Dreyfus Affair, therefore, divisions existed between the Vatican and French Catholics, as well as between the various Catholic movements within France itself. In the realm of high politics, socially conservative grandees such as Jacques Piou and Etienne Lamy (hand-picked by the Pope to organize electoral campaigns) sought to promote candidates in elections who would be able to work with Republican moderates and conservatives to safeguard religious interests. The more radical abbés démocrates identified with the Catholic working poor, and resisted Lamy’s economic and political liberalism, even if they took his money to finance their publications. Although they saw themselves as Republicans, their social vision was sometimes deeply anti-Semitic,¹⁶ exemplified by the harsh rhetoric of Abbé Garnier, head of the Union nationale.¹⁷

The Assumptionists, for their part, disdained Lamy’s timidity and detested the Republic, but they agreed with the anti-Semitism of the abbés démocrates. To promote their particular political vision, in 1896 they founded the Comités Justice-Egalité, organizations designed to mobilize notables in the regions, and to deploy La Croix’s local affiliates as campaigners in departments across France; they often distributed copies of the newspaper in churches with the collusion of sympathetic bishops. The Assumptionist Jean-François Adéodat was active in these committees and promoted a range of ‘Catholic’ financial practices, such as mutual aid societies, Catholic syndicats and rural savings banks, to oppose the power of ‘Jewish money’ in the countryside.¹⁸ The high point of the Comités’ influence came in the hotly contested elections of May 1898, so much so that the government worried about its activities opposing even moderate Republicans.¹⁹ Although the results did not live up to the Assumptionists’ ambitions, forty anti-Semitic deputies were elected, and in places such as the Gers the order played a key role in their success.²⁰

Recognizing their power of this organization, the Pope sent Picard and a Cistercian priest on a diocesan tour of France in 1897 to encourage a moderate vision of the ralliement. Picard accepted the commission as a mark of papal favour, but used the opportunity to report that, while the bishops were supportive of the policy, the clerical rank and file were not.²¹ He insisted that the Assumptionists’ defiant, and anti-Semitic, approach, not Lamy’s elitist economic liberalism, was the only way to galvanize the masses of the Church. Indeed, Picard’s interpretation of the lower clergy’s views was probably accurate: many priests had dutifully accepted papal policy on the ralliement, but were Republicans for form’s sake only, resenting the encroachments of the state and detesting its ideology.²²

 

The Affair marked the zenith of Assumptionist power and notoriety. From a small group of militant priests under the Second Empire, the order had grown into an organization with over four hundred²³ members by 1899, with sister orders in France and abroad. They shared with monarchists, Bonapartists and emerging nationalists many right-wing economic and social attitudes: fear of class conflict, disgust with Republican party politics and often protectionist budgetary policies. The Assumptionists were only one strand of a disunited anti-Dreyfusard coalition, but all of these groups had a distaste for parliamentarism and a fear of French decline in common. Anti-Semitism was also central to almost all of these various elements.²⁴

Many on the right defended the Church, but for the Assumptionists  all other policies were subordinate to this aim. They inherited anti-Protestantism from d’Alzon, and extended it to condemn British commercial and imperial power. Even the American triumph in the Spanish-American War of 1898 was interpreted as proof of the growing ascendency of Protestant powers over Latin, Catholic states.²⁵ They viewed Freemasonry as an occult power, a secular religion devoted to satisfying the corrupt ambitions and passions of Republican politicians. They swallowed Taxil’s fraud without hesitation as proof of the deep sinfulness and licentiousness of the Lodges.²⁶ Like Drumont, they believed that the Jews were a ‘cursed race’,²⁷ and condemned them for their perceived role in the failure of the Catholic Union générale, the bank that had collapsed in 1882.²⁸ Again, like Drumont, their anti-Semitism intensified during the Panama Canal Scandal.²⁹

They saw Jews as predators: ‘good’, ‘Catholic’, ‘French’ businesses grew slowly though investment and hard labour; Jews profited quickly from frenzied speculation. While the Panama Scandal revealed the extent of the conspiracy between finance-capital and the state, the Assumptionists were equally concerned about the union between Jews and socialists, who, in the ‘Assumptionists’ fantasy, conspired to take over the government and make the Jews ‘all powerful’.³⁰ Like Drumont, they published lists of Jewish army officers and condemned Jewish teachers in the education system. They praised the Russians, France’s new allies after 1894, for keeping Jews under constant surveillance, recommending that the French adopt similar measures.³¹

For the Assumptionists, Dreyfus’s conviction in 1894–5 was almost providential, for at last a Jew had been caught in the act. They regarded the anti-Semitic riots in France and the upheaval in Algeria as hopeful signs of a French renaissance that would combat the Jewish ‘sickness’. There was no room for complacency, however, as the Dreyfusard campaign was the greatest proof of the power of the Jewish syndicat.³²

Articles during the Affair demonstrate how the Assumptionists put together the pieces of a vast conspiracy theory that linked internal decadence and external weakness. Since Jews fostered German espionage, they circulated rumours that Mathieu Dreyfus’s house on the German border had a cistern that would somehow allow him to blow up a vital French fort near by.³³ They believed that internal dissent was fomented by the Jews, and that strikes in Paris were funded by British money channelled through the Rothschilds.³⁴ When the French were humiliated by the British at Fashoda in 1898, the Assumptionists lamented that French disunity had profited Britain.³⁵ Jewish responsibility for this malaise was exemplified by a cartoon of a pedlar weighed down with a mass of parcels and scrolls: with one arm he carries the enormous burden of the Dreyfus Affair, and his pocket bulges with papers entitled laïcisation and ‘Fashoda’ with the other he balances packages labelled ‘War against the Church’, ‘War in Cuba’ and ‘Philippines’ (a reference to Catholic Spain’s recent humiliating defeat by Protestant America). With a German accent he remarks with satisfaction, ‘I have not been idle this year of 1898; I’ve brought back some little curios.’³⁶

The Dreyfus Affair brought to the surface all these simmering fantasies, and they explain why mere fact was unable to shift the Assumptionists’ conviction of Dreyfus’s guilt. The Assumptionists covered the Affair obsessively in La Croix but almost never spoke of it in their letters to each other. For them, his guilt was so self-evident that the revelations of the Dreyfusards caused not a ripple of anxiety. They dismissed Scheurer-Kestner and believed that Bernard Lazare was a liar because ‘one knows that lying costs Jews nothing, that the Talmud authorizes it in cases analogous to that of Dreyfus.’³⁷ Zola was an Italian extravagant and a coward, while the stonewalling army officers at his trial were honourable men seeking to protect France against Germany. Zola’s trial was punishment for his 1893 novel about Lourdes in which he portrayed the Virgin’s intercession as little more than the result of mental suggestion. Significantly, the date of the trial – 11 February – was the anniversary of the day the apparition of the Virgin Mary had appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, the shepherdess of Lourdes, evidence of a divine plan designed to exact retribution.³⁸

47. Caricature of Jewish pedlar from La Croix, 27 December 1898

Père Adéodat’s unpublished memoirs provide a rationalization of the Assumptionists’ political philosophy, a diatribe against politicians who opposed them and a harangue against their enemies inside Catholicism. For Adéodat, the political world demonstrated an insuperable Manichaean division: because ‘Catholic and French is all one’, opponents were by definition both religious and political heretics.³⁹ He particularly hated the anarchists, who, like Jews and Protestants, belonged to occult international organizations with headquarters variously in Paris, Brussels and Basel.⁴⁰ Socialists were hardly any better; he saw Jules Guesde, the head of France’s Marxist party, as promoting an internationalism that only furthered German interests,⁴¹ while ‘Jaurès and Co’ were merely ‘great windbags’.⁴² Because the socialists would benefit above all from reopening the Dreyfus case, Adéodat was adamant it should never happen.⁴³

But he was shrewd enough to make distinctions among the different strands of left-wing thinking. He praised those Blanquists whose anti-Semitism, despite their revolutionary politics, made them instinctively patriotic;⁴⁴ he also approved of Henri Rochefort, the editor of L’Intransigeant, whose political peregrination from left to right during the Boulanger Affair in the 1880s was emulated by many others.⁴⁵ Although such people were not devout, Adéodat believed that, in the end, ‘there are a lot of sincere people among them; they are much less dangerous than the knaves who use the liberal label to dupe honest people and to subjugate them to Protestantism and juiverie.’⁴⁶

The Assumptionists reserved their greatest hatred for the ruling centre of the Republic, whose rise was due, in their view, to the secret power of the Masonic Lodges and Jews: ‘One went to the Rothschilds as in the past one went to Court; old French society, ruined by the blows of the stock exchange and Panama, flung themselves at the feet of their highwaymen.’⁴⁷ Waldeck-Rousseau, who came to power in 1899, was portrayed as a good Catholic corrupted by money, ambition and Jews such as Reinach. ‘Reinach prepares the strikes in the shadow and Waldeck-Rousseau executes them in broad daylight.’⁴⁸

Their dislike for the regime at times pushed the order dangerously close to subversion; indeed, on 23 February 1899, Pierre Darby, an abbé démocrate who championed social improvements among Catholic workers in obedience to Pople Leo XIII, accused the Assumptionists of participating in a plot to undermine the regime. The president of the Republic, Félix Faure, who had resisted reopening the Dreyfus case, had died the previous week and was succeeded by Emile Loubet, known to be keen to reinvestigate. Déroulède sought to exploit right-wing anger at the turn of events by overthrowing the regime. On 23 February he met the general who was escorting Faure’s funeral procession and urged him to march with him to the Elysée palace and bring down the Third Republic.⁴⁹ It seems that the Assumptionists were aware of the plot, but resisted the temptation to become involved: after a sleepless night Bailly decided not to fund ‘an insurrectional movement in order to be loyal to the spirit of Leo XIII’s directions’. He held back, but still admired the plotters, those ‘ardent youths’ who itched to topple by force a democratically elected government.⁵⁰

 

The Assumptionists’ political vision was solidly grounded in their religious universe. One police agent, for example, reported Bailly’s apparent dismissal of Drumont’s anti-Semitism as ‘superficial’.⁵¹ Bailly believed that Drumont’s embrace of ‘scientific’ racism suggested that he was not sincerely Catholic and he concluded that without true religious devotion he could not hate Jews with sufficient ardour. This remark underscored Bailly’s conviction that Catholic teaching was the source of anti-Semitism, but it misjudged Drumont’s promiscuous borrowings across the religion / science divide.⁵²

Integral to the Assumptionists’ faith was the view that Jews were Christ-killers; the Good Friday service asked all Catholics to pray for the ‘perfidious Jews’, whose guilt derived from their calling for Christ’s execution and mockery of him on the cross.⁵³ Catholics were enjoined not to genuflect during this prayer precisely because the Jews had done so in jest. The irony was that the term ‘perfidious Jews’ was a mistranslation from the Latin: in its original context it denoted not treachery but a lack of faith. But such niceties were alien to Assumptionist ideas. Vincent de Paul Bailly’s credo was summed up in a tripartite exposition.

God’s people were formed to give to the Universe a Saviour.

This people of God was radically divided when Our Saviour was put on the Cross.

One part became the Church; another part became the deicidal people.⁵⁴

This vision downplayed the element of Catholic teaching that sought Jewish conversion. The First Vatican Council in 1870 had portrayed Jews as victims of rabbinical teaching and recommended their salvation through conversion,⁵⁵ with orders such as Alphonse Ratisbonne’s Notre-Dame de Sion dedicated to this enterprise.⁵⁶ Their desire to convert demonstrated a belief in the possibility of Jewish salvation and showed how they differed from those who endorsed scientific racialism, for whom nothing could erase the biological taint. The Assumptionists, however, mixed both strands of anti-Semitism, blending an incoherent racialism that saw Jews as a separate ethnic ‘type’ with theological hatred. During the Affair, Jewish ‘obstinacy’ meant that any residual support for conversion among the Assumptionists evaporated.⁵⁷

Although there was no necessary link between anti-Semitism and Marian piety, the Assumptionists seemed sometimes to suggest there was. A reading of Le Pèlerin shows how the Jew became the antithesis of the Virgin in the Assumptionist imagination. As one historian has suggested:

One gave birth to the Saviour, the other condemned him to death; one looks towards the heavens, the other towards the earth; one stands straight, the other creeps (like the serpent that crushes the Virgin of the Apocalypse); one receives and obeys, the other takes and wants to exercise power; one is generosity, the other is cupidity; one is transparent with light and grace, the other is ungracious and dark.⁵⁸

The more the Virgin became radiant and celestial, exalted and transfigured, the more the Jew became obscure and repugnant, detestable and disfigured.

Again like Drumont, the Assumptionists maintained that Jews practised black magic, despite the protests even of members of their own congregation.⁵⁹ The Oblates de l’Assomption, one of the communities that the Assumptionists directed, was led by a pair of converts known as ‘Les Mères Franck’, cultivated German-Jewish sisters noted for their energy, dedication and success.⁶⁰ Miriam Franck wrote to Père Picard and protested at the way an article in Le Pèlerin affirmed that ‘Jewish ritual crimes were required by the Talmud, which prescribed the use of Christian blood in order to fabricate matzos.’⁶¹ As much as Théodore and Salomon Reinach, she protested against Catholic ignorance of Jewish beliefs and the fantasies the Assumptionists popularized. She told Picard that if he believed such things he had evidently ‘never had the Talmud between his hands, that he did not know Hebrew, and that he did not bother…to examine the veracity of this capital accusation, which must revolt readers and give birth to feelings of hatred and vengeance in all who believe it.’⁶²

Her protest had no effect. While La Croix reported non-committally in 1883 on the famous ritual murder case of Tisza-Eszlar in north-eastern Hungary,⁶³ the weekly Pèlerin published ‘Les Mystères talmudiques’, which asserted that ‘a great number of rabbis would not hesitate, in these mysterious ceremonies, to butcher Christian children while uttering horrible blasphemies.’⁶⁴ The article gave credence to the accusation of a six-year-old boy who claimed his Jewish father had bled a little Christian girl to death, and reproduced medieval and early-modern German images showing live babies being bled, and the bodies of children strewn around the floor. In 1892 Le Pèlerin reproduced a seventeenth-century German engraving illustrating Jews in 1345 slaughtering ‘The Blessed Henry, bled and then stabbed seventy times by the Jews of Munich’ and collecting his blood in a shallow metal bowl to make matzos.⁶⁵ Later articles in the 1890s publicized other accusations from Central Europe.⁶⁶ During the campaign to reopen the Dreyfus verdict, La Croix recounted how a Jewish ‘ogress’ tried to kidnap a blonde Christian girl in Palestine to bleed her,⁶⁷ while in late October 1897 Bailly reported on Jews literally stabbing the Eucharist and buying consecrated hosts to desecrate them.⁶⁸

48. Jeremias Kilian, ‘The Blessed Henry, bled and then stabbed seventy times by the Jews of Munich in 1345’, seventeenth-century engraving reproduced in Le Pèlerin, 17 June 1892

Bailly, whose Eucharistic piety was renowned – by the end of his life he spent as long as eight hours a day kneeling before the host – wanted desperately to defend the wafer against such sadistic and defiling desires. This is not to suggest that Eucharistic piety and anti-Semitism inevitably went hand in hand: Thérèse de Lisieux, the saint of the ‘little way’, an exact contemporary of Bailly and the most widely loved Catholic intercessor of modern times, was similarly devout but no anti-Semite, despite having grown up in an ultra-Catholic and right-wing family.⁶⁹ But Bailly made different connections. His private notes reveal his spiritual preparation before taking communion, his need to approach God with the correct purity of heart, his vision of Christ during the Passion, and the primacy of the figure of Judas as the symbol of treacherous Judaism.⁷⁰

Others took a similar line, which was synthesized in 1893 by Léon Bloy in his Judaeophobic volume Salvation through Jews. This work ‘modernized’ ancient Church teaching, analysing the Jews’ paradoxical role as the progenitors of Christ and his murderers. As one scholar has recently suggested, ‘Jews were sacred in the double sense of the word, blessed and cursed, victimizers and victims, who must be both persecuted and preserved…as double agents in the Christian drama of redemption.’ Bloy expressed his intense discomfort at this intimate spiritual dependence when he remarked, ‘I eat every morning a Jew who calls himself Jesus Christ’ and was dismayed that Christ’s Second Coming depended on the ultimate conversion of the Jews: ‘I have given my trust to a troop of Youpins [Yids ].’⁷¹

 

If the Assumptionists were inspired by religious fervour, Paul Déroulède’s patriotism and national vision came from a different source. Like Joseph Reinach, Déroulède was one of Gambetta’s devoted disciples, a man who preached the dogma of revanche till his dying day. He was famous as the author of the Songs of the Soldier (1872), a volume of poetry that provided a vision of France as strong and virtuous even in defeat; it sold in the hundreds of thousands and became part of the Republican school curriculum. His personal legend was enhanced by an embellished tale of heroism in battle and audacity in escape from behind enemy lines during the Franco-Prussian War.⁷² He launched the Ligue des patriotes in 1882, a non-partisan body dedicated to recovering the lost provinces. With its marching songs, gymnastic societies and shooting ranges, the Ligue was intended to further the martial preparedness of a defeated nation and was formed with Gambetta’s blessing; the Republican premier wanted to use Déroulède’s ideas to promote military education throughout France.

Déroulède’s looked back to 1848 rather than forward to the militarism of the early twentieth century. Although he detested the Prussians, he appreciated patriotic national movements everywhere. He trained as a lawyer, and remained romantic in tastes and idealistic in temperament. Above all he remained doubtful about the cultural tendencies of the new generation. He was disturbed by Barrès’s trilogy Le Culte du moi, with its moral relativism and decadence, and wrote to the author: ‘it is…very strange and powerful, a little too sceptical for me; by temperament I am a man of convictions, that is to say, a man “not free” at all.’⁷³ More than once in his letters to Barrès, Déroulède tried to come to terms with changing literary and philosophical fashions,⁷⁴ for among the men of the right – as much as for their left-wing opponents – literature and ideas were politics, and Déroulède feared that his inability to adapt to new trends might weaken him politically.

He need not have worried. He was successful precisely because he embodied mid-nineteenth-century romanticism rather than the avant-garde of the fin de siècle. Déroulède sought to re-enliven the political ideals of an earlier generation, not to replace them; indeed he continued to wear his green imperial frock coat as a visual reminder of his links with the past.⁷⁵ He attacked mainstream politicians and their compromises, and maintained a link to the masses by stirring their patriotism through the Ligue. His central beliefs never wavered, and he was adored because his call for revanche and his unbounded love for the army never changed.

When General Boulanger came on the scene, Déroulède saw an opportunity to do two things. First, he made the Ligue des patriotes his personal fief by conducting an internal coup that excluded many moderate Republicans. At the same time he wanted to transform Boulangism into a more radical movement, and sought to use the general to dismantle – by force if necessary – a weak parliamentary system in order to install a more authoritarian regime capable of pursuing revanche. Around the time of the elections of early 1889, the Ligue increased its clandestine operations, as Parisian ligueurs waited in the wings to march. But no word came. The government got wind of the Ligue’s schemes, and Boulanger himself fled the country. Déroulède had gambled and lost, and he paid a high price for his adventurism when the government disbanded the Ligue in 1889.⁷⁶

But Déroulède’s political career was far from over. That same year he was elected as deputy of Angoulême. Four years later, in 1893, he supported Lucien Millevoye when the latter accused Clemenceau of spying for the British. Although Déroulède resigned promptly when Clemenceau’s innocence was proven, these old quarrels and enmities reappeared during the Affair. They were a form of fratricidal confict: Déroulède was one of Gambetta’s ‘favoured sons’ and fought bitterly with his old ‘brothers’, Clemenceau, Ranc, Scheurer-Kestner and Trarieux, who had chosen the other side during the Boulanger crisis. But he bided his time with the Dreyfus Affair and reconstituted the Ligue des patriotes only in September 1898. He saw the Dreyfus Affair as another – even if unpalatable – means of bringing about constitutional reform. He wanted to construct a plebiscitary regime built around a ‘referendum, separation of powers, a single chamber, a president choosing from Parliament his ministers, who would be responsible only to him’.⁷⁷ Déroulède reiterated his belief that greater executive authority would eradicate parliamentary intrigue and permit a more powerful foreign and military policy to be pursued against France’s Prussian enemies.

The resurgent Ligue rallied between 15,000 and 18,000 members, with 10,000 in Paris alone.⁷⁸ His rivals on the radical right were always astonished by his ability to attract crowds; they admired his patriotism and loved the man, but ridiculed his constitutional views. They rejected his call for direct presidential elections, which they feared as a dangerous throwback to a now-tainted Bonapartism. Paul Bourget explained the paradox to Barrès: ‘Politically he is in fatal error, but he is such a generous spirit that he is forgiven everything and he finds in his error itself a kind of truth, through his sheer love of France.’⁷⁹

But, whatever his doctrinal deficiencies, no one doubted that Déroulède was able to gather old supporters into the anti-Dreyfusard camp. One Parisian activist remarked: ‘As with many others, it is patriotism alone that has made me participate in politics since the Dreyfus Affair. I learned the Songs of the Soldier at my village school twenty years ago and I am thirty-two; it is why I am today…with the friends of the League.’⁸⁰

Many of those who wrote to him hoped Déroulède would appreciate their verses, modelled on his own. Louis Ohl, an Alsatian student expelled by the Germans in 1887, was typical in this respect: ‘We returned to France with hatred in our heart: this hatred will disappear only on the day that Alsace-Lorraine is returned to us.’ In 1895, still burning with resentment, Ohl composed poetry to keep the flame of revanche alive.

Tell me? Which country is your country? Speak to me openly…

My country? Ah! the country that has suffered so much;

Its land has been ruined,

Its towns looted and held to ransom, its villages burned down…

When the time comes, every Frenchman will leave home and family,

His heart filled with sweet hope,

Because there, over there, they are waiting for deliverance.⁸¹

A common theme of the letters was the conviction that an army of ‘good French’, ‘honest French’ or ‘true French’ existed, and that to love Déroulède was also to love France; his correspondents idealized him and worshipped him in an almost religious fashion:

My heart loves yours; my soul and my thoughts, my aspirations, are happy to be a reflection, an extension of your heart.

It is a cult, a faith, a religion that vibrates in all of me – mind and body– and there, in contemplation, in the solitude of my innermost self, I admire and venerate the man who possesses the most beautiful, the purest, the noblest of French souls…

How good it is to live, one’s heart filled with this kind of love.⁸²

Antoinette Foucauld, another admirer, exhibited Déroulède’s offerings – a letter, photograph and book – like ‘precious relics’ in the convent where she taught children.⁸³

Both women and men were stirred by Déroulède’s masculine appeal. Not conventionally good-looking, he had a large nose, one that according to one’s views was either a ‘Yid’s beak’ or – like Cyrano de Bergerac’s – a sign of his emphatic and combative spirit.⁸⁴ But he was admired for the masculinity of his person and poetry – ‘always more male and more glowing with patriotism’⁸⁵ – and came to represent ‘a pure and epic breath coming to our so cowardly, neurotic and corrupt fin de siècle’.⁸⁶ In contrast to the tide of decadence and degeneration washing over France, Déroulède was heroic: one correspondent proclaimed that he was ‘courage itself’,⁸⁷ while another writer thanked him for the photograph of a face that ‘breathes loyalty and energy just as I had imagined it when I read the Songs of the Soldier, the face corresponds to the heart and to the sentiments.’⁸⁸

Déroulède was seen by many as a saviour above political faction and self-interest, a man whose self-abnegating image was heightened by his refusal to marry. He lived with his pious sister Jeanne, who forever remained by his side, and who was hailed as the ‘worthy and devoted sister of the great Frenchman, the angel spreading out her consoling wings!’⁸⁹ Though he was hardly celibate – he was a notorious ladies’ man with an illegitimate son he never recognized – his bride was France, and he was admired for not letting any other interest get in the way of his devotion. Catholic women like Jeanne’s friend Marie contributed to the adulation; she recounted how, on her pilgrimage to Lourdes, she had cried out ‘Long live Déroulède’ when she arrived at the train station of Angoulême. She was gratified when ‘all the pilgrims’ also seemed to think that it was the same as shouting ‘Long Live France’.⁹⁰

 

Although his Ligue outstripped all others in active numbers, Déroulède was not a proto-fascist. Rather, his correspondence shows that in some ways he was out of step with the passions of his rank and file. He did not consider himself anti-Semitic and, in the 1880s, had welcomed Jews into the Ligue. During the Affair he proclaimed that Jews who opposed the reopening of the Dreyfus case were ‘twice French’, a statement that caused an outcry among his admirers. His private papers are full of letters from members of the Ligue who sought to convince him of the value of anti-Semitism. One wrote: ‘You are too generous; allow me to remind you that a door must be open or closed: open for all who are of pure French stock and closed for all foreigners; no doors left ajar, it is through these cracks that Huguenot and Jewish reptiles slip in.’ Writing in September 1898, this correspondent explained that he had resigned as director of the Ligue des patriotes in Perpignan, ‘because a Jew named Dreyfus was admitted’.⁹¹

For many members of the Ligue, Déroulède’s focus on revanche, rather than on ethnicity, was not sufficiently ‘nationalist’,⁹² and they repeatedly sought to open his eyes: ‘Ask a Jew which nation he belongs to! Will he dare to reply: I am a son of France or of Belgium or of elsewhere? If he does, he will be lying, because he is a son of Israel, that is to say from here and from everywhere.’⁹³ In their letters, correspondents often blamed ‘the cowardice of the Jews’.⁹⁴ In later years admirers recalled the anguish of their defeat during the Affair. One Mme Bariller expressed her feelings of shame after Dreyfus’s rehabilitation when he was finally awarded the Légion d’honneur. Her husband, she wrote, was reduced to a state of nerves by the ‘boldness’ of the Jews, who had somehow deviously extorted this honour from the government.⁹⁵

Others, however, remembered the Déroulède of the years after France’s defeat, when he had welcomed men of all creeds, including Jews, into the Ligue des patriotes. An old admirer of Déroulède, who signed his name as J. Mongin, was horrified that he had become an anti-Dreyfusard:

For a long time I believed in your generosity – all empty words; in your patriotism – all show. But after all…when all is said and done I am just a poor devil of a Frenchman lost in the crowd, and my conception of patriot ism is definitely different from yours. Patriotism is the union of all hearts; it is the sacrifice to the nation of one’s pride and of one’s errors; it is the untiring, dogged, tenacious effort towards reconciliation among all French people. But when I see a man who, under the pretence of creating a patriotic league, has created what is only a faction; a faction whose contemptuous brutality immediately transforms struggles between parties into a civil war…I become angry and wish to distance myself from this false patriot who puts in the balance the country against his ambitions, his prejudices, his grudges and his hatreds.⁹⁶

For some old associates Déroulède’s stand was incomprehensible: as a lawyer he knew full well the illegality of denying the defence access to secret documents. In an impassioned letter Théodore Cahu wrote that Déroulède was ‘perpetrating a great wrong’ by promoting division rather than setting himself ‘above passions and parties’. ‘How could Déroulède shake the hand of an Esterhazy?’ How could he listen to the applause of Rochefort, or receive the congratulations of men such as the editor of Le Gaulois, Arthur Meyer, an anti-Semitic Jew known for his monarchism?⁹⁷ Cahu begged Déroulède to examine his heart and his conscience, to stop making any more opportunistic alliances. How, Cahu wondered, could Déroulède not ask for the truth?⁹⁸

The most dramatic encounter was between Déroulède and his cousin Ludovic Trarieux, the only senator to support Scheurer-Kestner when he spoke in favour of Dreyfus and later the head of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. When Déroulède attacked Trarieux and his family for associating with the ‘hatreds unleashed against the French flag’, Trarieux replied that Déroulède had again been seduced by Boulangist adventurism,⁹⁹ and later reproached him for not combating ‘a dreadful judicial error’. He was appalled that Déroulède had joined ‘the fratricidal clamours of anti-Semitism’ and added: ‘If our grandparents are judging us, they can see on which side are the good sentiments and on which side the bad.’¹⁰⁰

Such letters uniformly expressed a sense of betrayal, and the feeling that a man they idealized or admired had fallen from grace.¹⁰¹ But if Déroulède lost these followers, he gained as many if not more among those who placed French pride before every other consideration.¹⁰² He became an anti-Dreyfusard, above all, to protect the military and to stay loyal to the idea of revanche. He inspired people who regarded all criticism of the military as a personal slight. During the Affair one Arthur Delpuy, for example, was ashamed to see newspapers sold on the street with the headline ‘Forgeries and Lies of the General Staff’. For him, such reports were the ultimate insult, which subjected passers-by and, more importantly, French soldiers to the most hideous calumnies.¹⁰³ He believed, with Déroulède, that even to question the army’s integrity was treasonous. Another writer wrote that dragging the military ‘chiefs …in the mud’ put France on the road to ‘downfall and shame’.¹⁰⁴

49. Bob (Comtesse Martel), ‘No more disruption’, from Le Pompon, 26 April 1902. France with Gallic coq on her head shoots a Negroid incarnation of the Dreyfus and Panama affairs. This cowering simian creature represented all that was dark and detestable in French politics

Shame and disaster, the unravelling of virtue, the crumbling of hierarchy, the loss of national esteem – these were the fears that permeated such letters. The correspondents prayed for France to rediscover its grandeur. Jeanne Déroulède’s friend Marie raged against the ‘scoundrels’ who were not able to silence the attacks against the army; she lamented that ‘no one has their sabre ready. Must we believe then that all the sabres of France are rusty and are no longer capable of coming out of their sheath?’¹⁰⁵ Here again was a reference to French impotence, an inability to muster the virility to fight the good fight.

 

The examination of evidence in Dreyfus’s case continued to stoke political passions. On 13 August 1898 Cavaignac’s investigator Captain Cuignet realized that the two pieces of marked onionskin paper on the faux Henry that named Dreyfus did not match up. The heading and the signature appeared on paper with bluish-grey lines, while the body of the letter was composed on fragments that had pale violet lines.¹⁰⁶ Cuignet showed the document to General Roget, with whom he was investigating the case, and then to Cavaignac. Both agreed that the document was a forgery, just as Picquart had said. Cavaignac decided to interview Henry directly, and summoned de Boisdeffre and Gonse to be present at the interrogation on 30 August.¹⁰⁷ Henry tried to lie but then collapsed under pressure, saying he had forged the document to relieve his superiors of their constant worry about the Affair. The government put out a brief statement to announce the discovery of the fraud; Henry was arrested and taken to the military prison of Mont-Valérien.

The next day, 31 August, Henry wrote two letters from jail. The first went to Gonse, asking him to visit, and the second – which denied the forgery – went to his wife, Berthe. He had spent the day in the fortress drinking and sweltering in the heat; when he wrote again to his wife, he spoke of being overtaken by madness. Around three o’clock that afternoon he slit his throat twice with a razor.¹⁰⁸ An orderly who appeared at six in the evening to give him supper found his body lying on his bed in a pool of blood.

Few events were more important to the shifting nature of the Affair than the suicide of the recently promoted Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Henry. Cavaignac had been convinced that his investigation would assure the nation that Dreyfus was indeed guilty, but instead it had ended in the death of a key participant and the exposure of forged evidence. De Boisdeffre resigned; Gonse was sidelined; du Paty de Clam’s reputation was irretrievably tarnished; and Esterhazy, a fugitive in Belgium after Cavaignac’s attempt to arrest him, gave interviews to all and sundry admitting that he had indeed written the bordereau.¹⁰⁹ Henry’s suicide meant that many who had previously accepted the verdict of the 1894 court martial now began to wonder if Dreyfus’s conviction was sound. For the Dreyfusards, Henry’s suicide was ghastly proof of the Jewish captain’s innocence and the extent of their enemies’ machinations. On 3 September Lucie applied for a review of Alfred’s case, and on the same day Cavaignac resigned as minister of war.

Henry’s suicide put anti-Dreyfusards into disarray. ‘How,’ Jeanne Déroulède’s friend asked, ‘could Colonel Henry, who had such a wonderful attitude during the Zola Affair, end up getting himself arrested? It is the final blow.’¹¹⁰ She was tormented not by the possibility that Dreyfus might be innocent but by the possibility that he might now be freed. For her, this prospect was intolerable. Even though the foundations of their stance had crumbled, the factions ranged against Dreyfus were not prepared to give up without a fight. The army counter-attacked by keeping anti-Dreyfusards in key positions: Cavaignac was replaced by General Emile Zurlinden, who lasted only a fortnight before he too resigned in protest at the decision of the Cour de cassation to send the case for judicial review. During his short tenure he found time to write to the minister of justice making new allegations against Picquart. After his resignation, Zurlinden was replaced by General Charles Chanoine, who rapidly appointed him military governor of Paris.

Barely back in post, Zurlinden immediately began legal proceedings against Picquart, a tactic that signalled the nature of the military response to the revelations about Henry. Picquart was accused of forging the petit bleu, the message that Schwartzkoppen had sent to Esterhazy and signed with his code initial ‘C’. In fact, Henry had doctored this document shortly after the fabrication of the faux Henry, scratching out Esterhazy’s name and then rewriting it to suggest that Picquart had tampered with the evidence. Picquart had been in La Santé prison since July on charges of giving confidential documents to Louis Leblois,¹¹¹ but at this juncture it seemed likely that Picquart would be set free without trial or even acquitted. Zurlinden’s move against Picquart was designed to keep him incarcerated and to remove him to military jurisdiction.

Picquart and his new lawyer, Labori, responded to this manoeuvre as well as they could. On 21 September, Picquart stoutly told the civil tribunal that if he was found dead in his cell in the military prison, then it would not be because he had killed himself like Henry. Picquart briefly returned to the Santé prison, but Zurlinden then signed the order to transfer him to the Cherche-Midi. For the moment it appeared as if the generals had outplayed the Dreyfusards, and Picquart’s court martial was planned for 12 December 1898. His lawyers responded by persuading the high court of appeal to hear arguments about his case on 8 December. The jurists then effectively blocked his transfer by demanding to see the dossier on the case. Picquart remained in prison, but no action would be taken against him until the court deliberated.¹¹²

As important as these legal manoeuvrings was the right’s ideological counter-attack. The arch-polemicist Maurras created a potent mythology of heroic sacrifice around Henry by casting his forgery and suicide as patriotic acts designed to defend a higher cause. Henry had been crucified by the cruelty of the Dreyfusards, who were the first to spill blood – Dreyfus, after all, had been merely imprisoned for a far more serious crime. Henry’s admirers were now taking his portrait and placing ‘this image…which has a sacred meaning, in the most conspicuous spot in their homes’, and Maurras lauded the anti-Dreyfusards for ‘worshipping…this good citizen, brave soldier, heroic servant of the supreme interests of the state’.¹¹³ Henry was thus transformed from persecutor into victim and hero. He had a distinguished military record: he had taken part in ‘colonial expeditions, was wounded several times, [was of ] unblemished reputation, and was renowned for his rigid honesty and perfect tact and consideration for others’. Against all that was one bad deed – ‘a forgery, but only one; a lie, but the first and the last’ – and, like a true soldier, Henry had atoned for it with his life. The contrast with Picquart and Dreyfus could not have been greater.

Maurras even upbraided the commandant of the prison for sponging away the ‘sacrificial’ blood that had ‘flowed all the way to the middle of the cell’ from the camp bed where Henry lay.

You should know that there is not a drop of this precious blood, the first French blood spilt during the Dreyfus Affair, that is not still warm wherever the heart of the nation is beating. This blood is still warm and will cry out until its shedding has been atoned for…and expiated, but indeed by your first executioners, tormenters whom I here name: the members of the syndicat of treason. The coffin, the bloodstained tunic and the soiled blades, should have been paraded in the streets, and the pall borne high like a black flag.¹¹⁴

Henry’s blood was like Christ’s, precious, sentient, smoking with pain, still warm and crying out for revenge; moreover, it was linked to a suffering heart, which in this instance was the ‘heart of the nation’. The Sacred Heart was the symbol of monarchist resistance, the suffering of Christ equated with France’s trials, as the nation dreamed of a holy restoration to counter rampant corruption. Maurras hoped that the ‘bloodstained tunic’ and the ‘soiled blades’ found in Henry’s death chamber would become national relics.

His description of Henry’s death as a form of expiation was redolent with Catholic imagery, even though Maurras had no religious belief himself. He used such language because he believed that France should re-embrace the union between throne and altar so as to recover its pre-Revolutionary greatness.¹¹⁵ He defended Catholicism not as a spiritual system but as a social and cultural institution central to French history and tradition. This position enhanced his intellectual credentials but later earned him papal condemnation: several of Maurras’s works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1926.

In fact, both sides employed the imagery of suffering, redemption and sacrifice;¹¹⁶ despite a frequent loathing for Catholicism, many Dreyfusards likened Dreyfus and Zola to humanitarian Christs. They thus tapped into a tradition that celebrated heroes who expiated the nation’s sins, a tradition that included revolutionaries such as Jean-Paul Marat, who died at the hands of Charlotte Corday, and found monumental expression in the Republic’s mausoleum, the Panthéon.¹¹⁷

Indeed, Maurras’s evocation of Henry’s blood – and especially of his ‘bloodstained tunic’ – also echoed the imagery of Dreyfus’s degradation. The similarity between betrayer and betrayed recalled the Christ story, in which both Jesus and Judas are reviled. But the parallel went further: Jesus was betrayed by a man who, like Henry, kills himself. Henry operated in the Dreyfusard discourse as the Judas figure, a deceitful red-faced Auvergnat; for them, he was as repulsive a ‘type’ as Dreyfus was for the anti-Dreyfusards, with his monotone voice, rigid manner and monocle.

The gospel resonances revealed the Affair’s deep emotional dynamic. Casting Dreyfus or Henry as the personification of evil or goodness enabled participants to focus anger or pity on an individual. In the process, however, the actors in this complex national drama were reduced to symbolic figures, embodying either shame or exaltation. By splitting the emotional universe in two, Maurras’s articles strengthened right-wing loyalty to a cause that Henry’s suicide had made vulnerable; above all, his tactics revealed how the psychology of martyrdom was central to the politics of commitment.

 

It did not take Drumont long to realize the possibilities of this interpretation. He reprinted Maurras’s Gazette de France article ‘Le Premier Sang’ in La Libre Parole and quickly followed his lead by describing Henry’s suicide as ‘an admirable act’. ‘Are not all tricks fair enough,’ he asked ‘against the scoundrels who, for a year, have been employing the gold they have stolen from us to have the chiefs of our army dragged in the mud?’¹¹⁸ Why, he argued, should the right behave honourably when their enemies did not?

The right-wing press celebrated their martyr and unleashed a tide of sentimentality and gallantry over his widow, Berthe, and their son. L’Intransigeant reported that, during their final encounter, Henry kissed his wife and child and remarked, ‘I am an honourable man; I have nothing to reproach myself with.’¹¹⁹ Besieged by journalists, Berthe finally agreed to talk to the editor, Henri Rochefort; she described her ‘despair when [she] learned the terrible news of his arrest’, a remark that echoed Lucie’s words when she learned of Alfred’s incarceration.¹²⁰

The right condemned Dreyfusard journalists for their shameless glee at the turn of events, and needed to exploit the story without appearing to exploit Mme Henry. They solved this dilemma by portraying her suffering in minute detail, but telling it second-hand through the words of an officer who saw mother and child arrive at Mont-Valérien, where the ‘poor woman threw herself, sobbing, over her husband’s corpse’. Rochefort speculated that Henry had committed suicide to guard state secrets and to save his wife’s right to his pension, which she would now still receive since he had not yet been convicted of any crime. He presented Henry as a patriot and a devoted husband, but also hinted at dark secrets that would justify everything if they were but known.

When the military charged Picquart with tampering with the petit bleu, the right rose up to denounce him as the ‘real’ forger and to see Henry’s fabrications as honourable misdeeds in comparison.¹²¹ They also compared the vociferous, and dishonourable, assault of the Dreyfusard press on Henry and his family with the dignified approach of Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant. Drumont condemned the Dreyfusards for engaging in ‘a scalping dance’, and later described them as ‘wallowing in the blood of the unfortunate Colonel Henry’.¹²² A later article in La Libre Parole accused the women journalists of the feminist newspaper La Fronde of hypocrisy, for failing to show ‘feminine solidarity’ with Mme Henry, and berated them for their hard-heartedness. Because they refused ‘to come to the aid of a mother in tears and her baby’, the journalist concluded that these women were clearly in the pay of the youtres.¹²³

The article contrasted the harshness of the ‘shrew’ Bradamante (Mme Constant) – a ‘bluestocking’ who wrote for La Fronde – with the ‘eloquent appeal’ of a ‘real’ woman, Mlle Marie-Anne de Bovet. De Bovet, the daughter of a general and the wife of an aristocrat, was a feminist who had also once written for La Fronde, but she sided with the nationalists during the Affair and began to produce articles for La Libre Parole. Like Brunetière, she hailed the army not as an aristocratic stronghold, but rather as the school of ‘a disciplined, hierarchical democracy, where authority rests on service and merit alone’.¹²⁴

She displayed her ‘feminine’ compassion by portraying Mme Henry as the loyal wife of an impoverished officer, living in ‘low-rent houses’, unable to afford a maid and too poor to go to the theatre or purchase an evening dress. Unlike the male journalists who portrayed the widow as the consummate victim, de Bovet showcased Mme Henry’s combative attitude. Only her circumstances, she implied, kept her from attacking her husband’s slanderers: ‘If I were alone in the world, I would not have needed anybody’s help to take the law into my own hands. But I have my child, who has no one but me, and even to avenge his father, I cannot risk prison, which would separate me from him [italics in original].’¹²⁵

Mme Henry had her chance to hit back, however, when Joseph Reinach, in a series of articles in Le Siècle, alleged a treasonous complicity between Esterhazy and Henry.¹²⁶ Mme Henry sued Reinach for libel, and Rochefort’s newspaper denounced him as a coward: ‘nothing is easier than to dishonour a dead man’, one article noted, ‘especially when this dead man leaves as his only defenders a woman and a four-year-old child.’¹²⁷

Reinach’s accusations prompted Drumont to launch a subscription on 13 December 1898 to help pay the costs of Mme Henry’s case; these funds and the commentaries that flowed in with the money became known as the ‘Monument Henry’ in reference to the public campaigns to erect statues to great men. General Mercier gave 100 francs and Déroulède 50. By 15 January 1899, 25,000 subscriptions worth 131,000 francs had come in, many accompanied by outpourings of hatred for the Dreyfusards, which were later published.¹²⁸ Men and women – from the highest aristocrats to the lowliest workers – joined the campaign.¹²⁹ Jeanne Déroulède’s friend Marie was delighted to see ‘all these young officers and soldiers subscribe for Mme Henry’ and saw the appeal as a morale-boosting counter-assault against Dreyfusard triumphalism.¹³⁰

There was a definite social cachet in contributing to the cause: André Buffet, the man who represented the Orléanist Pretender to the throne, personally called on Mlle de Bovet because of her association with La Libre Parole to make his contribution. On arrival at the journalist’s home, Buffet was received by her mother, to whom he handed over the money:

His Royal Highness the Duke of Orléans is in full sympathy with the subscription opened in La Libre Parole for the defence of the army, insulted in the person of a widow, by a Jew. I know that there is no need for me to consult him on this point. There is no need for me either to consult him as to whether he will want to contribute, not actually under his own name, but yet transparently. Every time HRH subscribes to anything, it is absolutely anonymously.¹³¹

At the end of January 1899 the libel case against Reinach came to court. Labori managed to get an adjournment, a tactic cited as further proof of a ‘Jewish’ approach, which typically tried to win through tricks and technicalities. Drumont’s newspaper used the occasion to contrast the two sides – Reinach, ‘puffy, swarthy, sweaty, stomach bulging’, facing the pure figure of Mme Henry, veiled in mourning, epitomizing pure and fragile womanhood.¹³²

L’Intransigeant also presented Mme Henry in a way that mimicked the Dreyfusard respect for Lucie Dreyfus. The normally obstreperous onlookers, it recounted, were quietened by her presence: ‘the combatants took off their hats with not a single Dreyfusard having protested against this spontaneous homage.’¹³³ Rochefort said that ‘as she passed, the crowd bowed respectfully…[and] Mme Henry indicated with a small gesture that this ordeal was too painful for her.’¹³⁴ Her husband’s comrades came to the rescue, with Colonel Rostand hailing a cab and kissing her hand, while General de Pellieux offered his arm and everyone shouted ‘Vive l’armée’. Emile Driant, Boulanger’s son-in-law, wrote from Tunis to his friend Déroulède to ask permission to insult Reinach so that he could kill him in a duel. Violence, he believed, was the only way to safeguard Mme Henry’s honour.¹³⁵ Lucie, in her widow’s weeds, had been vital for establishing an impression of dignified suffering; now the right had its own exemplar of feminine pain, a ‘real’ widow, whose plight was plain to see.

The manner in which the suicide of Henry was exploited should not blind us to the fact that Henry was an agent rather than an instigator of the conspiracy, jealous of Picquart but very different from someone like Mercier, who orchestrated the cover-up while his underlings did the dirty work. Henry’s wife was left a widow with a small child and an inadequate pension; her suffering was real, even if the right considered it a godsend. The parallels between her and Lucie Dreyfus were not entirely imagined, except for this: for years Lucie Dreyfus had battled alone and with the help of only her family to right an injustice; Berthe Henry was exploited by people she did not know to maintain that injustice.

It is difficult not to be impressed by the sure way Maurras turned forgery into heroism, or by how swiftly Drumont and Rochefort followed suit. The lure of the lie, the audacity of deceit, were central to the sacrificial worldview that infused anti-Dreyfusard ideology. The sentimental effusions surrounding Mme Henry urged Christian France to defend itself against Jewish aggression. When La Libre Parole published, in eighteen instalments, the lists of donors, the amounts of their contributions and anti-Semitic commentaries, word and deed were tied together.

Were these scribblings mere fantasies of cruelty, or an early expression of the emotional logic that led to the Holocaust?¹³⁶ Both have been argued, and both too categorically. One historian has even expressed irritation that colleagues have been fooled by this outburst into exaggerating the presence of anti-Semitism in France, arguing that the commentaries manifest anti-Dreyfusard feeling rather than an anti-Semitism that could be mobilized.¹³⁷ But anti-Semitic fantasies were as important as any political movement, for the Affair revealed their ubiquity as well as the extension of a potent language of hatred.

Pierre Quillard, a close friend of Bernard Lazare, republished the subscription lists from La Libre Parole and accompanied them with a lengthy analysis.¹³⁸ He was already highly attuned both to the reality and the fantasy of religious and ethnic violence, having condemned the Turkish massacres of Armenian Christians between 1894 and 1896.¹³⁹ He also knew that violence against Jews did not always remain on the level of fantasy, that European history had been punctuated by bloody massacres, that pogroms had returned to Russia in the 1880s and that anti-Semitism had now spread to Algeria and France.

Quillard began by categorizing the donors in terms of occupation and class. He recorded the high number from the military and aristocracy, and concluded that the old order was a bastion of anti-Semitism.¹⁴⁰ At the same time, however, he noted the large number of ‘intellectual’ men and women who also contributed – liberal professionals such as engineers, faculty members of Catholic universities, doctors, teachers and students who had sent comments as well as money. He also singled out travelling salesmen, respectable men who believed they were fighting an unfair battle against Jewish competition. In acknowledging that ‘rationality’ could coexist with the ‘madness’ of anti-Semitism, Quillard showed that there could be no simple answers.

The messages themselves were filled with images of exile, purification, mutilation and extermination. There was the concierge of aristocratic birth ‘ruined by the Jews’ a schoolteacher who still wanted revenge against the Jews for the ‘drownings of Nantes’ during the Great Revolution in western France.¹⁴¹ Reinach, as always, came in for special attention; one contributor suggested that his flesh could be used to make the perfect ‘stew…to poison the Yids and the Dreyfusards’. A group of dragoons thought that Reinach’s skin could be used to make saddles,¹⁴² while a young curate dreamed of using his heel ‘to crush Reinach’s nose’.¹⁴³

As the lists continued to come in during the early months of 1899, donors devised ever more extreme tortures. They conjured up Ancien Régime punishments such as clothing Jews in yellow or exiling them, and also more modern violence – such as throwing vitriol into their faces. They repeatedly wrote of hanging Jews, a pre-Revolutionary punishment for thieves. Above all they delighted in transforming the Jewish body into something pleasurable or useful, with one contributor proposing to make violin strings out of Jewish intestines.

In his introduction Quillard acknowledged that there was a Rabelaisian dimension to the insults, suggesting that such anti-Semitic imaginings had some relationship to popular revelry and its rituals. For us in the post-Holocaust age, such a suggestion seems repugnant. We tend to idealize the ‘folkloric’ and to regard it as a regenerating source of festivity, bawdiness and sexuality that orthodox religion and the state seek to repress.¹⁴⁴ But, as Quillard was well aware, the playful elements of the carnivalesque are inseparable from darker, more aggressive imaginings. Such revelry could be subversive and creative, but just as readily become sadistic and destructive. The commentaries on the lists proved how the carnivalesque could degenerate into brutality.¹⁴⁵

Both sides professed chivalry, gallantry and virtuous intent, but the right wallowed longer in homicidal fantasies than did the left. Their syrupy sentimentalism and euphoric rage were two sides of the same coin, which found inspiration in Ancien Régime models. When the donors offered their contributions and condolences to Mme Henry, they were like the knights of old who succoured the weak and defended the unfortunate.¹⁴⁶ When the same people desired to tear Jews apart, they existed in a world that rejoiced in an orgy of violence.

Purity and defilement were the twin poles around which the these extreme fantasies revolved. The words that accompanied the donations demonstrated split psyches unable to differentiate between charity for an impoverished widow and the murderous passions they felt for Jews. Indeed the two impulses were mutually sustaining. Behind each lurked a sense of nightmarish invasion, a world of unspeakable doings that could be halted only by a collective, righteous, even euphoric anti-Semitism.

Indeed, Drumont made an explicit link between the dangers of carnival and of the Dreyfusards. On 10 January 1898, the day before Esterhazy’s court martial, he wrote an article about the ‘Courtille’, or the Parisian Mardi Gras festival, which, from the 1820s, wound its way from the outskirts of the city into the centre, swelling to a drunken, foul-mouthed parade. Although it was by now a shadow of its former self, Drumont still likened it to an overflowing sewer. He conjured up the ‘masks smeared with filth and wine’, ‘the drunks shouting and vociferating, vomiting lewd words and making obscene gestures’, and asked the reader to imagine a motley group of men in the rear. These fictional stragglers were no other than Trarieux, Scheurer-Kestner and, of course, Zola, who tried in vain to ‘light up the crowd’ with his flatulent rhetoric. In Drumont’s fantasy, these agitators were fitting members of the procession because they wanted to turn the world upside down and subvert France. He could not see that the same yearning for chaos and violence could equally well be ascribed to many of those who read La Libre Parole.