13
Salonnières Left and Right
Reinach’s first declaration of Dreyfus’s innocence was apparently made at the salon of the Geneviève Straus in October 1897.1 The detail gives a hint of the importance of such institutions for conveying news and organizing political networks. The opposing factions of ‘intellectuals’ and ‘anti-intellectuals’ were supported and, in some degree, shaped by the salonnières’ incisive commentary, passionate engagement, financial subsidies and institutional influence. As heiresses to a venerable seventeenth-century tradition, they illustrate the important role some women played in French political culture.2 Their intimate gatherings and private letters were not grand public gestures in the style of Zola’s ‘J’accuse’, but without them the Affair would never have been transformed into a cause célèbre. Above all, their ability to connect personally – through their love affairs and friendships – revealed many of the central emotional dynamics that powered the Affair.
Women were omnipresent in the Affair: there was the tear-stricken Berthe Henry and the stoical Lucie Dreyfus, who, more than anyone else, kept her husband alive during his imprisonment. But for the most part they seem merely to add feminine spice to an otherwise very male story. Mme Marie Bastian, charwoman-turned-spy, collected the rubbish from Maximilien Schwarztkoppen’s bin; Marguérite Pays and Mme de Boulancy became embroiled in the Affair through their love affairs with Walsin Esterhazy. The shadowy Veiled Lady, a figure who seems to have sprung from the pages of a second-rate adventure story, added a touch of melodrama to the espionage intrigue, while the medium Léonie Leboulanger offered Mathieu her aid during his early, isolated search for the real culprit.
The salonnières were a case apart, however. Unlike the women just mentioned – who tended to reinforce stereotypes of women as wives, servants and mistresses – they figured prominently in the social and political networks they helped to sustain.3 They provided a crucial venue for opinion-makers and members of the French political class to interact with one another and offered the elite a useful way to keep in touch with the tempestuous politics of the masses. Drumont, for example, was never highbrow, but his presence at the salon of Mme de Loynes made him respectable, and gave him access to men of higher social standing and literary reputation. He, in turn, provided them with a conduit to the inchoate populism of mass anti-Semitism that they hoped to mobilize and exploit.
Bringing these men together from their varied worlds took hard work. The salonnières had to be charming, witty, welcoming, severe, critical and informed, as the situation required. They had to oversee kitchens, menus and wine-cellars, attend to the décor and watch out for new talent.4 The salonnières needed deep emotional resources and a firm grasp of social choreography.5 Sometimes they acknowledged the strain; in her memoirs, Mme Steinheil, the mistress of the president of the Republic, Félix Faure, wrote proudly of her role as a conduit of information between political and ministerial factions. At the same time she occasionally recoiled from the punishing demands of the social whirl required to maintain her position and occasionally yearned to be free of it: ‘Sometimes you receive less than you give, and you return home exhausted…I wear myself away for others, and when I come back and cry out to my heart for admittance, I find that I cannot enter and be alone with myself.’6 She recalled how once she dreamed of dropping everything and spending the day with her beloved daughter. But when she saw the pile of correspondence awaiting her, she gave up the idea and got back to work. Despite the emotional toll, she knew she was addicted to the dizzying pace of Paris society.
The salonnières did more than create a context. As the Affair broke up friendships and strained alliances, they plunged into the maelstrom. The Affair became all-consuming, erasing boundaries between public and private: dinnertime conversation blended with work and ideological campaigning. In the process it revived, even if only temporarily, the significance of the salon as a political tool.
The Affair’s impact on the salonnières themselves was profound but also double-edged. Denied the vote and access to the centres of political decision-making, they never engaged in the Affair on terms of equality with men. Although often as extraordinary as those they patronized (and who patronized them in return), they suffered cruelly from their inability to act openly or directly. They tended to compensate by idealizing the political, literary and artistic ‘great men’ whose careers they fostered, so that their own sense of achievement precariously depended on the accomplishments of the men they groomed and sparked into action. The salonnières could never join the masculine club and only rarely could they envisage working in solidarity with other women. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that they lived in a kind of gender turmoil, their emotions often bursting out in bouts of exhibitionist anger, moments of despair or periods of invalidism.
One intimate salon drama that played out in the shadow of the Affair was the falling out between Mme de Loynes and Mme Arman de Caillavet. Their rivalry began when Mme de Loynes poached Jules Lemaître, a former habitué of Mme Arman’s salon.7 Once he was in her ‘orbit’, Mme de Loynes transformed his politics and he became, at her instigation and urging, one of the pre-eminent anti-Dreyfusards of the era, heading the Ligue de la patrie française, the right-wing group founded at the very beginning of 1899 that drew thousands of men into its ranks. Mme de Caillavet responded by concentrating her attention on Lemaître’s old friend and fellow Academician Anatole France; her influence and encouragement turned him into one of the nation’s most famous and eloquent Dreyfusards.
No salonnière was more important to the anti-Dreyfusard cause than Mme de Loynes. Born Marie-Anne Detourbey in 1837, she began her working life as a wool-picker in a factory and was employed as a bottle-washer in a champagne house.8 She was rare among the great hostesses of the era in passing from the demi-monde of courtesanship into the monde, an achievement made possible by her beauty, native charm and sexuality – captured in the Second Empire portrait by Amaury-Duval now hanging in the Musée d’Orsay.
Thanks to liaisons with journalists and men in the theatre, Marie-Anne was attuned to spectacle and populism.9 She also ventured into the world of the political and intellectual elite of the Second Empire, had a brief liaison with Prince Napoleon, and became friends with Alexandre Dumas fils, Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. In her late twenties she fell in love with Ernest Baroche, who had made a fortune in mining. When he died, he left her more than 800,000 francs. She met the Vicomte de Loynes at a sugar refinery and they were soon married. His parents were so appalled by the match that they forced an annulment, but Mme de Loynes now had money and a title, good prerequisites for her chosen role.10
53. Eugène Amaury-Duval’s portrait of Madame de Loynes, 1862
She first encountered Jules Lemaître at a costume ball – given by their mutual friend Arsène Houssaye, a novelist and director of the Comédie-Française –– when he was only thirty-three and she was over fifty. They apparently spoke for hours, she behind a mask, he captivated by her conversation and voice. Decked out in a Venetian tricorne and a purple domino that matched the violets that she always wore, Mme de Loynes was a fascinating enchantress.11 The next day Lemaître went to her salon in the avenue des Champs-Elysées and was impressed by the company, which included Barrès, Ludovic Halévy and the aged Ernest Renan, her old friend of Second Empire days.12 What astonished him – and many others – was the way she sat tranquilly beneath the Amaury-Duval portrait, almost inviting the comparison between her youthful beauty and her ageing charms. For the next twenty years she and Lemaître saw each other every day; she converted her salon into a vehicle to promote his career, and he adored her with a steadfastness that surprised those who knew him. In a way, Mme de Loynes ‘invented’ Lemaître, ensuring that he would be the ‘illustrious writer’ of her dreams and planning his political future.13
At her home on the avenue des Champs-Elysées, she kept up an exhausting routine, personally supervising the kitchen, and going far and wide in search of specialist suppliers. Her salon was a place where ‘political questions were decided, literary reputations were made, members of the Academy were elected’.14 When the Affair broke out, she made sure to invite men from the whole spectrum of the right, assuring that no anti-Dreyfusard political tendency was excluded. Charles Maurras and Paul Déroulède both attended; Drumont too was a guest, admired for his private charm, though this is contested in other accounts, and applauded for his hateful ramblings. Mme de Loynes also advised Gabriel Syveton, a notorious misogynist and the rising star of the nationalist right, who later committed suicide after embezzling the funds of the Ligue de la patrie française.15 The ‘new’ men attended her ‘at homes’ and dinners because they could learn about the latest events and hone opinions that would appear next morning in the columns of the major nationalist newspapers.16
Like the Jesuits who so alarmed the Dreyfusards, Mme de Loynes acted as a ‘confessor’: ‘she possessed that gift so rare…of inspiring not only absolute confidence, but also the desire to unburden oneself.’17 She knew that the key to power lay in projecting a reassuring and intensely feminine trustworthiness: ‘The most remarkable [aspect] of her manner, one of her secrets in the art of friendship, consisted in staying in the background and annihilating herself, in becoming for those who were in her circle an infinitely understanding listener and a level-headed counsellor.’18
Lemaître had been a Dreyfusard until he came under Mme de Loynes’s influence, but then he moved steadily to the right.19 She ‘gave him ambition and formed his mind for a great deed’, and at the start of 1899 he was named head of the Ligue de la patrie française.20 Since its statutes were so vaguely drawn up, it was not immediately clear that the Ligue would become a vehicle for anti-Dreyfusard feeling. For example, the editor of the monarchist Le Soleil, Hervé de Kérohant, published the Ligue’s manifesto and applied for membership, even though he was a Dreyfusard. He was, however, rejected.21
It soon became clear that the wish to strengthen ‘the spirit of solidarity that must unite, across time, all generations of a great nation’ meant support for the anti-Dreyfusard cause.22 The Ligue’s statutes were signed by twenty-two Academicians, members of the Institut de France, university men, distinguished lawyers and physicians, as well as many novelists, critics and artists. Artists such as Degas, Renoir and the caricaturist Caran d’Ache joined its ranks,23 and men such as General Cavaignac rushed to become members of a body dedicated to fostering the patriotism that all French men and women should feel.24 The Ligue gathered together not only the liberal professions and civil servants, but also the lower-middle classes, and the reference to ‘all generations’ hinted at the wish to recruit the growing cohort of anti-Dreyfusard students who opposed the normaliens on the other side.
The Ligue’s cautious politics reflected its adherents’ moderation and their relatively wide range of ideologies: its members included many Republicans as well as more radical right-wing ideologues. The phalanx of Academicians showed Mme de Loynes’s importance in grooming new members of the nation’s conservative elite; their public profession of faith was designed to counterbalance the Dreyfusard ‘intellectuals’, who had grouped together in the Ligue des droits de l’homme by presenting an equally distinguished group on the other side.25 Brunetière would later deliver one of his Discours de combat, entitled ‘La nation et l’armée’, to a Ligue meeting in 1899, while Barrès used it to reach a mainstream audience for his traditionalist vision of ‘the soil and the dead’. At its inception he saw the organization as a means of uniting diverse strands of anti-Dreyfusard sentiment, of tying ‘Déroulède’s patriots with regionalists and with all those who, Catholic or positivist, want social discipline’.26 The novelist Paul Bourget, although unwilling to take a public role, wrote to Barrès enthusing over the way the Ligue kept the ‘hot flame of patriotism’ alive.27
To begin with, at least, the Ligue was enormously successful, and its message of national unity, social solidarity and the defence of traditional values touched a chord. While the Dreyfusard Ligue des droits de l’homme attracted 8,000 members in its first year, the Ligue de la patrie enrolled 21,000 in 1899. It claimed between 400,000 and 500,000 the following year,28 although this seems to have been a wild exaggeration: historians have estimated that active members never surpassed 40,000.29
The reasons for its initial success also explain its ultimate failure. Because it joined Catholics and agnostics, regionalists and étatists in apparent unity, a platitudinous conservatism was necessary to veil the many divisions that still existed. Despite Mme de Loynes’s constant aid, Lemaître was not able to balance the personalities and the politics that underpinned the organization.30 A number of members – including the treasurer, the young Gabriel Syveton – were violently anti-Semitic, but the leading lights were wary of emphasizing a creed associated with populist rabble-rousing. For this reason Lemaître stressed an anti-Masonic message, which failed to produce the same passionate commitment as Jew-baiting.31 Even if Lemaître had been more forceful, it would have made no difference: the Ligue had not been designed for a radical purpose, and became merely a talking shop for men such as Barrès and Brunetière.32 Those who wanted to subvert the regime or trumpet anti-Semitism would have to look for groups that encouraged greater political adventurism.33
Mme Arman de Caillavet, Mme de Loynes’s major counterpart on the Dreyfusard side, was born Léontine Lippmann in 1844, the daughter of a Jewish banker. Her Jewish origins were central to her reputation. The early nineteenth century in France had been awash with philosemitic stereotypes, such as Walter Scott’s Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1819), who became the most popular subject in genre painting in the 1820s and 1830s.34 Rebecca was idealized as the self-sacrificing, intelligent and virtuous Jewess who tends to the wounded knight but never abjures her faith. The immensely successful opera La Juive by Fromental Halévy reinforced this theme by idealizing its martyred heroine, Rachel, who also refuses to convert even though she has fallen in love with a Christian nobleman.35
These romantic visions existed alongside depictions of ‘bad’ Jewish women – exotic courtesans, actresses and singers (the most celebrated opera divas were often of German-Jewish origin) – who were portrayed as rapacious and corrupting. La Païva, or Esther Lachmann, became the richest courtesan of the Second Empire, famed for her mansions and jewels but loathed for her greed.36 By 1878 she was accused of being a spy and was exiled from France.
During the Affair, Mme Arman was seen as embodying both stereotypes: intelligent and virtuous but also manipulative and dangerous. After the publication of the intellectuals’ petition, Gaston Méry in La Libre Parole referred to her romance with Anatole France and blamed her for his ‘defection’ to the Dreyfusards. France had been the only member of the Académie française to sign Herr’s petition:
54. Mme Arman de Caillavet
It is Jewish women that they [the Dreyfusards] have put into action first. There is a celebrated author – whose presence in this sorry lot has caused some stupefaction among the public – who has been dragged into it only by the beguiling eloquence of a graceful Jewess, to whom, besides, he has no longer anything to refuse. Fortunately there are still some Frenchmen for whom the beauty of Jewish women (overrated beauty in any case) has no appeal.37
Despite such scurrilous attacks, Mme Arman created an essential venue for the Dreyfusard campaign. Famous for her ‘masculine good sense’, she was able to gather around her men and women of outstanding intellectual ability and fame, including Marcel Proust, Joseph Reinach, Georges Clemenceau, the actor Lucien Guitry, Sara Bernhardt and many others.38
Her husband, Albert Arman de Caillavet, was not among these outstanding men. She had turned away from him because he was ‘impetuous, a gambler and a dreamer’39 and signalled the fact by using her own name. She called herself Mme Arman, while her husband was known as M. de Caillavet because he insisted on advertising his aristocratic connections. In their home on the avenue Hoche, she relegated him to the kitchen, on the grounds that ‘while he is kept busy with all those silly trifles, he leaves me in peace’.40
Her husband’s insignificance allowed her to bestow her attention on Anatole France, whom she first met in 1883. He was timid, stuttered when nervous and ultimately left his wife for Mme Arman, attracted by her cultivation (she spoke four languages) and intellect. As France absorbed her tastes and grew more confident, she imbued him with her drive, so that he, a notorious procrastinator, began to work to a more demanding timetable: ‘She had but one goal, the work and glory of France,’ wrote her daughter-in-law Jeanne Pouquet. ‘She noted tirelessly all that the master said when he was chatting or just idling the time away, and thus created ample dossiers from which he could then draw.’41 Under the pretext of showing off her books, she led the young Daniel Halévy to her library to gaze upon her ‘love trophy, the manuscripts of France, France…France. She had only this name on her lips.’42 And there was even talk that Mme Arman did some of France’s writing for him. On one occasion Jules Lemaître challenged France at Mme Aman’s table about a friendly article that none the less contained critical remarks about Lemaître’s work. France did not respond, and Lemaître riposted: ‘It is well written, but it is not yours.’ He wondered who had enough ‘style and intelligence’ to make France ready to claim authorship. Mme Arman only admitted that she ‘often helped M. France when he was in a hurry’.43
55. Anatole France in 1906 in one of his studies
Mme Arman was well aware of the political power of the artistic weapon she had forged. When Zola’s award of the Légion d’honneur was revoked on 26 July 1898, France returned his own and participated in the foundation of the Ligue des droits de l’homme. He displayed his commitment in the four novels of his L’Histoire contemporaine, which examined both the events and the reasons behind the Affair. In L’Anneau d’améthyste (1899), for example, he analysed the psychological dynamics of aristocratic anti-Semitism, paying particular attention to the sad plight of Mme de Bonmont, a Jewish convert, obliged to flatter the nobles of her set in order to secure a place for her wastrel son. In Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901) he described the protagonist’s personal and social liberation, observing the many motivations that stirred individuals to become Dreyfusards or anti-Dreyfusards. The works were studded with his vast erudition, biblical and classical references jostling with analyses of ecclesiastical and contemporary history, as well as philosophical and political observations.44 But they displayed a lightness of touch that brought France the admiration of his contemporaries.
France and Mme Arman also used literary institutions to campaign for Dreyfus. As the Académie increasingly became an anti-Dreyfusard stronghold, they pushed their candidate, Paul Hervieu, to even the balance. Rather than hiding his Dreyfusard sensibilities to ensure his election, Hervieu put himself forward with France’s support. The campaign went well and Hervieu was elected. However, Mme Arman’s pleasure was diminished when Hervieu wanted to assert his independence and asked France not to be his parrain, the ‘godfather’ who eased the transition into the Académie. Even though Hervieu apologized and reconsidered, France was wounded and remained estranged from the institution until 1916.45
*
Mme Arman and Mme de Loynes were not the only salonnières to have an impact on the course of the Dreyfus Affair. Geneviève Straus was the widow of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen, and the daughter of Léonie and Fromental Halévy, who wrote La Juive.46 She was thoroughly familiar with the theatrical and musical world and knew well the philosemitic stereotypes that her father had done so much to create; she was also accustomed to salon life. Eventually she created her own, in Paris on the boulevard Haussmann and in her Normandy villa, Le Clos des Mûriers.
Born in 1849, Geneviève was famed for her dark hair and eyes, which exemplified the exotic orientalism that Europeans expected from Jewesses. Witty and elegant, she and her sister Esther – noted for her singing – knew what it was to be on show, and to share their parents with others. She detested her deranged and self-absorbed mother, who had been treated in a private mental asylum. On one occasion, her mother tried to drown herself, but was rescued by Esther, who in turn died in the aftermath of this episode from a chill. The tragedy plunged Geneviève into a deep depression, and thereafter she sought to avoid her mother at all costs. Bizet tried to mend relations between the two women, but when they finally met in Bordeaux in 1871, Geneviève had a complete nervous breakdown. In the course of her illness, she developed facial tics that never left her.47
56. A portrait of Geneviève Straus by Jules Delaunay, 1878
Contemporaries often mentioned this mark of nervousness, which some thought part of her charm. Her recurrent bouts of neurasthenia were in line with fin de siècle neurology, which saw Jews as especially prone to this kind of fragility. Bizet died after they had been married for only three years, leaving Geneviève with a small child, but the proceeds from Carmen kept her comfortably well off. She had many suitors (including the eccentric musician Elie-Miriam Delaborde, who travelled with two apes and more than a hundred cockatoos), but she ultimately married Emile Straus, the banker who later bailed out Labori when his Revue du Palais almost collapsed. With eyes that were always half closed (an odd condition that he contracted during the Commune), Straus had a hooded look, and seemed an unlikely husband for such a beguiling woman.48 But he adored her, was himself a highly distinguished art collector, and understood her ambition to create an unsurpassed salon. From the start of their marriage she devoted herself to gathering politicians, theatrical people and intellectuals, later becoming famous for an enduring intimacy with Marcel Proust, the dilettantish friend of her wayward son, Jacques. She was witty and vivacious, skilled at bringing diverse people together, from the beautiful Comtesse de Greffuhle to caricaturists such as Jean-Louis Forain. She was a ‘Parisian Jewess, that is to say, a Parisian twice over’, having a double dose of sophistication, elegance and cosmopolitanism.49 A man such as Barrès could lament that the Dreyfus Affair denied him the soirées of these enchanting Jewesses, even as he thought their husbands were plotting to subvert the country.50
Geneviève was well known for easygoing and delightful frivolity, so her circle was stunned when she took a serious stand during the Affair. In letters to Georges Porto-Riche, a Jewish playwright, she comes across as an indolent, even mindless, woman with little more in her head than complaints about the useless cures she took in Swiss spas.51 There was not a whisper about intellectual matters, very little about politics. But she was also closely linked to Joseph Reinach, who called her ‘My dear lavender muse’ in reference to the colour of partial mourning that she wore in memory of her bereavements.52 One moment she begged him not to call her the ‘goddess of wisdom’, but the next she offered advice on politics.53 With Reinach, at least, the Affair altered her tone.
In the ensuing crisis she lost Forain, who became the most important anti-Dreyfusard caricaturist; Arthur Meyer, the royalist editor of Le Gaulois; and Edgar Degas, who fell out with his old friend Pissarro over the Affair.54 Geneviève’s principled stand took courage, especially since, with her Jewish looks and her banker husband, she became something of a target herself: ‘We have here that frightful Rochefort [the right-wing editor of L’Intransigeant],’ she wrote to her cousin Ludovic Halévy, ‘who keeps giving me nasty looks.’55
Although her letters mostly continued to be full of thanks for little attentions, acceptances or rejections of invitations to the theatre and the like, Geneviève’s correspondence with her cousin Ludovic Halévy, an Academician, playwright and man of letters, showed how the Affair shook her world. The Halévys were a clan famous for their religious tolerance, who had married Protestants and Catholics according to their romantic preferences, and who raised children in all the major religious confessions. Their name declared their Jewish origins, but their French identity was based on an openness towards religious and artistic freedom, a stance that condemned them in anti-Dreyfusard eyes.
Geneviève’s correspondence with Halévy during the Affair is a chronicle of anxiety and suffering. Halévy recorded his many illnesses, which tended to increase with disappointments for the cause, while she described the migraines that kept her from writing.56 When she wrote to his wife Louise on 28 August 1898, she referred to ‘the vomiting provoked by Esterhazy’s release, which consequently is now a clean and sacred vomiting’.57 As they lived through Zola’s trial58 and worried over Picquart,59 they had a sense of their own vulnerability. Talking about the weather as ‘changeable and unhealthy’ in late June 1898, she also seemed to describe in the next sentence the way the Affair had unsettled her: ‘I myself feel very distressed, and I am again overtaken with malaises at every instant…nobody feels very cheerful.’60
Unlike Reinach, who never admitted to being affected by the abuse, Geneviève and Ludovic acknowledged that they experienced the Affair as persecution. Ludovic wondered if violence might befall the Dreyfusards, and Geneviève worried about what might happen to her son when he attended Dreyfus’s second trial in Rennes, where, she believed, every right-wing fanatic and plotter lurked.61 ‘I am always afraid of quarrels,’ she wrote before Rennes.62 Her letters show the salonnière’s desire to please, the watchful urge to facilitate and ingratiate, as well as her special talent at doing so without obsequiousness. For Geneviève, fighting was profoundly dangerous – her confrontation with her mother had nearly killed her –and yet, during the Affair, it was something she could not avoid.
If Geneviève Straus was a model of charm and social grace, the Marquise Arconati-Visconti – passionate to the point of melodrama – discomfited her Dreyfusard colleagues. Although she was central to the Affair, she is rarely discussed, and then only in relation to her activities after 1899, when her salon fostered the extreme anticlericalism of the left.63 As is true of all the great salonnières, she possessed influence by virtue of the money she bestowed and the people she gathered around her. There is no question of her importance for Republican educational institutions: she gave money to the Sorbonne, history prizes to the Ecole des chartes, and endowed professorships and libraries. At her risotto suppers served at the rue Barbet, she gathered both academics and politicians, straddling both worlds while helping those present to forge unaccustomed alliances during the Affair. At her salon Joseph Reinach met the Chartists who had testified on Zola’s behalf, and Jean Jaurès came to converse about the political, moral and historical projects that the Affair had catalysed.
She wanted to be a muse, hovering like an inspirational allegory over her court. But her courtiers sometimes found her a bit unsettling. She stilled her nervous crises by taking laudanum, consulted her father’s spirit at his graveside when in need of advice, delivered coarse insults in Italian and fantasized vividly about massacring and dismembering her enemies. She was also famously misogynist, remarking to the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont: ‘Do not think, Monsieur, that many people are invited to my home; first I never receive women.’64 At times she displayed the most clichéd femininity, dressing in the sumptuous robes, frills, corsages and jewellery of a fin de siècle grande dame. On other occasions, she revelled in a theatrical boyishness, and her favourite photograph showed her at around sixty as an androgynous Renaissance page in clothes made by the costumier to Sarah Bernhardt.
The marquise’s intellectual patronage, political engagements and flamboyant personality were all of a piece. Her advocacy and academic interests cannot be severed from the theatricality of her person; she loved to invite her ‘court’ to the restored sixteenth-century château in Gaasbeek in Belgium, where she named the allées of the gardens after the most illustrious Dreyfusards.65 Her creativity centred on constructing a more impressive Republican pedigree, one that she imaginatively connected to her restored castle. Its Renaissance owner, Lamoraal, Count van Egmond, was, she believed, a representative of Republican beliefs in embryo: he was martyred during the Dutch Revolt of the 1540s and was thus a hero of national independence and Protestant freethinking in the struggle against Spanish absolutism and Catholicism.
57. The marquise in her finery
58. The marquise in theatrical costume. She was around sixty at this time
When she looked for her political roots, however, the marquise generally sought ideals closer in time and place to her own. In letters to Joseph Reinach, she wrote about her search for the true ‘fathers’ of the political tradition that defined her life. The Republic was, quite literally, a personal matter: she worshipped her father, Alphonse Peyrat, an insurrectionary journalist during the Second Empire who became famous when Gambetta adopted his slogan: ‘The clergy are the real enemy.’66 She regarded him as a Republican hero on a par with Gambetta, and believed that they died on the same hour of the same day.
59. Château de Gaasbeek. The Marquise Arconati-Visconti constructed a massive forty-metre tower over the entry and installed decorative tableaux in the Salle-des-chevaliers. Executed by the French architect Edmond Bonnaffé, the château was adorned with narrative pictures of its history (replete with historical errors). They looked more like stage sets than like frescoes from an old manor house. Her rebuilding was an incoherent, if imaginative, attempt to create an historical lineage for herself and her idea of freedom
The marquise was often rumoured to be Gambetta’s mistress; though she denied the allegation, she never did so convincingly enough to kill the story. Indeed, she seems to have been not unhappy when anti-Dreyfusards revived the tale during the Affair. In his letters Gambetta did shower her with affectionate nicknames: ‘my snail’, ‘dear cutie’ or the ‘most fragrant of flower girls’, but, in fact, she found Gambetta physically repulsive.67 His flirtatiousness was doubly disturbing because she associated him with her father.
It was not surprising that the marquise fixed on Reinach as the embodiment of her Republican dreams. He was, after all, Gambetta’s heir apparent, the man who had served his political apprenticeship at Gambetta’s newspaper La République française and then compiled the Great Man’s political discourses for posterity. As the living representative of the Peyrat–Gambetta tradition, Reinach became the object of her adoration.
The marquise and he shared a taste for grand homes, objets d’art and above all a certain kind of Republican politics. Both were relatively newly rich, if not nouveaux riches. She remembered her father’s inability to support her, and the single dress and poor shoes that were her only dowry when she married the fabulously wealthy Marquis Arconati-Visconti, an effete, and possibly syphilitic, man who died two years after their marriage. The marquis’s family detested their heir’s Republican and anticlerical bride, and she refused her place at the Italian court, although she adored Italian culture. Despite her Republicanism (and self-professed populism), she was enthralled by the new power that rank and wealth bestowed. She never married again, although it seems she later kept intimate company with an aesthetic collaborator who did not wish to deprive her of her title. With her money, she not only remodelled the castle at Gaasbeek in 1887 but also became a serious art collector (she gave her collection, valued at a million dollars, to the Louvre in 191468) – and, above all, an important supporter of historians and history-writing. The marquise championed the ‘people’, but she meant to shape their vision of the past through elite institutions and the judicious distribution of her considerable wealth.
Through her closeness to Joseph Reinach – as well as her later devotion to Alfred Dreyfus – the marquise was central to virtually all aspects of the Dreyfusard campaign. She also wrote personally to Dreyfusard politicians to urge them to greater efforts and then denounced them as ‘cowards, wretches, ham actors’ for not doing enough after Henry’s suicide.69 Because of her connections in Belgium and Italy (including an Italian residence), she mobilized opinion there with as much dedication as she had done in France.
The constant throughout the campaign was her friendship with Joseph Reinach. Sometimes she saw him as a helpmate, a companion with whom she could discuss antiques and architecture. She allowed him to pay her bills when she was travelling, comfortable in the knowledge that such favours passed between equals.70 In this sense there was a kind of cosy, almost familial dimension to their friendship, though she never once mentioned Reinach’s wife or children. Apparently, their ease with each other did not mean that the marquise wanted to acknowledge Reinach’s home life. But this amicable side of their relationship coexisted with her adoration of him, especially in the early years of the Affair. She worshipped Reinach in the same way she had worshipped Gambetta and her father. She wrote, ‘How I love you, YOU!!! [underlined seven times] I say, like Shakespeare’s heroine: “How beautiful is a man”’71 ‘I kiss you with all the strength of a heart that for quite some time has been beating only for you.’72 She encouraged him with her rapt attention to his journalism and swamped him with letters about his bravery in the face of the anti-Semitic diatribes launched against him.
In return, only Reinach could keep her spirits up during the bleakest moments of the Affair. When events went against her and against the cause – as they did time and time again – she suffered spasms of hysteria and illness, taking doses of the sedative chloral, ether and digitalis to soothe her frayed nerves.73 Battered by reverses, she wrote that she would rather die than live to witness the destruction of all her political hopes. As she put it to Reinach: ‘You will tell me that I see everything in black – this is true. When I see what has been going on for the last two years, I am like someone who had a religion and has lost it.’74
She retreated to bed, summoned her physician (a Dreyfusard, as she dismissed another who dared to disagree with her on the subject) and studiously read Voltaire, the only ‘tonic’ that could restore her to calm.75 She repeatedly begged Reinach to give her a ‘shot of Panglossism’, referring to the optimistic savant in Voltaire’s Candide.76
But her sense of humour rarely deserted her for long. At the height of the conflict she told Reinach how she regularly posted pro-Dreyfusard placards outside her Paris home, then lay in wait with jugs of water attached to a rope to soak anyone who dared deface them.77 Although French to the bone, the marquise used Italian as a foil – for romance, melodrama, humour and especially for bad language. She always addressed Reinach with Italian diminutives, calling him ‘Beppo mio’, ‘Carrissimo’ and ‘mio Caro’. She described du Paty de Clam as ‘the mortadella of Bologna, half pig and half donkey’.78 In Italian she could be delightfully crude, indulging in a kind of Rabelaisian humour that used the epithets and expressions of the populace to mock the men of the other side.
A vengeful ‘Clio’, rather than a lavender lady in mourning for justice, she also specialized in conjuring up satisfying (and sometimes frightening) fantasies of violence, talking repeatedly about executing, disfiguring and torturing her opponents. She evoked another one of her father’s idols, Robespierre, whom she called by his first name: ‘We were cleaner in the time of Maximilien! I prefer the guillotine to that ocean of mud in which this country, I feel, wants to sink.’79 Occasionally she signed her letters as ‘Maximilienne’ she wrote admiringly about Fouquier-Tinville, the inquisitor of the Terror who refused to hear witnesses and sent hundreds to the guillotine without a thought. In her view, such ruthless men were better than ‘all these bandits and those men senza coglioni [“without balls”] of this good Republic [who] will pay nothing at all!!!’80 She repeatedly instructed Reinach to brand anti-Dreyfusards with a ‘red hot iron’ and she dreamed of erecting gibbets for the officers in the military conspiracy, singling out Mercier, Henry, Lauth and Roger for special attention.81 She was fortunate in that some of her aggressive fantasies could be partially resolved through the history-writing that she hoped to inspire. She applauded Reinach in 1901 after the first volume of his work on the Affair brought her some relief: ‘New Dante, you have marked them on the shoulder, all the Hanotaux, Dupuys and other wretches and miserable cowards! As to Mercier, your book is a gibbet where he will swing for eternity.’82 For her, shaming her enemies through good history was sweet revenge, a metaphorical ‘marking’ that was probably even better than physical violence. When Dreyfus was finally rehabilitated, she also had the pleasure of knowing that Reinach’s history sat proudly as a canonical text on the shelves of the university that she had done so much to patronize.
For the marquise, there could be no higher praise for Reinach than to liken him to Dante, a poet whose work she adored (as had Gambetta), and whose life was yet another story of tormented innocence.83 In her letters to Reinach she elaborated on the parallels between the politics of the Third Republic and the machinations of fourteenth-century Florence, when Dante was forced into exile for his hostility to Church authority. She wrote eloquently of the poet’s sense of ill-treatment and put him in the same category as Voltaire, who had been forced into exile in Switzerland. In one letter she described a gathering of Dreyfusards in Italy during which the Comtesse de Borromeo offered to toast the ‘martyr’. Present at the scene was the Marquis de Malaspina, whose forebears had given refuge to Dante and who now declared his willingness to offer the same hospitality to Dreyfus.84 The similarities between the two ‘victims’ were obvious to everyone present.
Her letters repeatedly referred to Canto 29 of the Divine Comedy, in which the tenth level of hell was reserved for counterfeiters or forgers – a group that she identified with the conspirators at the Statistical Bureau.85 Meanwhile, Dante’s mention of one Enrico, the Italian for ‘Henry’, recalled Lieutenant-Colonel Henry. She wanted the Dreyfusards to learn from Dante, and even fantasized about helping the polyglot Picquart to understand the difficult words.86 Embroidering Dante’s life story to make it relevant to the current crisis, she dug into history as if into a psychic goldmine, helping Reinach to refashion their dreams of Republican revitalization.
Although on the opposite side of the political fence, Gyp (born Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riqueti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville) shared many of the marquise’s psychological traits and emotional preoccupations.87 Like her, she also challenged gender norms, vilified her opponents and idealized the men in her entourage. By the mid 1890s Gyp was already a bestselling society novelist, famous for the wit and light-heartedness of her fast-paced novels as well as for her extreme anti-Semitic views. She had a wide political acquaintance, but when the Affair exploded she found she could no longer tolerate anyone with Dreyfusard sympathies.88 She even broke with Anatole France, a friend for fifteen years, and dismissed servants she suspected of Dreyfusard loyalties.89 She paid right-wing thugs to fight with Zola’s supporters during his trial and contributed anti-Semitic articles to La Libre Parole.90 Believing that Picquart’s role ‘had been the shadiest and the dirtiest in the Affair’, she was outraged when Mme Ribot, the English wife of the prominent Republican politician Alexandre Ribot, had the temerity to proclaim, ‘Well, yes, if I had a daughter, I would be proud to offer her to this admirable man!’91
60. ‘Gyp (Comtesse de Martel de Janville)’ by Giovanni Boldini, 1894
While the Marquise Arconati-Visconti cultivated the Dreyfusard centrists, radicals and even the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, Gyp moved ever closer to those who promoted right-wing populism and authoritarianism. She found other loyal friends in legitimist monarchism and even among some renegade anarchists. For such men anti-Semitism was an expression of their anti-capitalism and contributed to the political invective of the extreme right. These connections showed Gyp’s political malleability as well as the novel – and, at first glance, surprising – political alliances of the era. Gyp was a common point among various splinter groups, and her contacts with aristocracy, journalism, literature and politics made her the ‘consummate insider’.92 A friend to generals,93 she was also acquainted with Félix Faure, the president of the Republic.94 She was Déroulède’s conduit for information and helped to keep him in touch with Jules Guérin, the head of the Ligue antisémitique.95
Gyp loved the air of violence that the right promoted and relished the aggression of political quarrels, particularly when they became personal. For example, she telegraphed Barrès to warn him that Octave Mirbeau had bought a ‘light revolver’ after reading Barrès’s threats in a news paper, and was clearly put out when Barrès failed to respond with much interest.96 She was intoxicated by the heady air of conspiracy. During the Affair, Déroulède sent her a ‘gorgeous stylet’ as a gift – a stiletto that she wore on a chain around her neck; a ‘ravishing jewel’, it would also serve her as ‘an excellent weapon’. All around her, she proclaimed to her friend, were ‘bizarre people’ who bothered her, and she claimed to receive anonymous letters threatening her life.97 Even if she was willing to use ‘knives and sticks’ to defend herself against such attacks, she admitted that using firearms frightened her.98
Gyp actively supported nationalist candidates during the elections of 1898, and rejoiced with Déroulède and Marcel Habert (his lieutenant and a mutual close friend) in the victory of right-wing candidates. Although Barrès lost his seat in Nancy by the slightest of margins, she had the pleasure of knowing that the detested Joseph Reinach had also been defeated. With their gains during the Affair, the nationalists believed that they were on their way to establishing a mass movement, and the trouncing of Reinach was the sweetest part of their victory.
Like the marquise, Gyp also constructed interlocking personal and political lineages. The marquise married into the aristocracy but advanced Republicanism; Gyp moved in the opposite direction. Born into the aristocratic Mirabeau family, which later developed close links to Bonapartism, Gyp had a lifelong affinity for Napoleon, even claiming that they had the same birthday, a fib that mirrored the Marquise’s desire to associate her father’s date of death with that of Gambetta. Gyp was nostalgic for certain aspects of her aristocratic inheritance, but her political yearnings centred on men closely associated with Bonapartism: she admired Boulanger, Déroulède and Barrès, all of whom rejected the compromises of parliamentarianism and embraced populist authoritarianism. Her love of ‘strong’ men connected to an important part of her personal history. She explicitly regretted that she was born a woman, a failing that her relatives never let her forget – because of her sex and the lack of any male heirs, she was the end of the great Mirabeau family. She saw herself increasingly in masculine terms, and was particularly proud of her muscularity and sporting prowess. Her fictional alter ego was a boy named ‘Bob’. Immaculately dressed, cheeky in his assaults on authority, Bob was a charming anarchist, animated like Gyp by a sentimental attachment to Bonaparte and an idealization of military valour.99
Obliged to keep up her family house in Neuilly and a second home in Brittany to maintain her social credentials, Gyp sat up nights turning out pages of prose. She topped the list at her Jewish publishers, Calmann-Levy, famous for their ability to reach a mass market and also publish serious works. She wanted to leave these ‘Rothschilds’, especially once they tried to place stricter editorial controls on her anti-Semitic ravings, but depended on their willingness to advance her money.100 When Jewish impresarios turned down her plays, she took their refusals as further proof of the unchecked power of the Jewish ‘syndicate’.
This virulent animosity against Jews mirrored the marquise’s fantasies of aggression against the military conspirators. To a legitimist with Bonapartist longings, Jews were emblematic of the bourgeois parvenus who now crowded into positions once reserved for the aristocratic elite.101 Moreover, they lacked panache, a quality that Gyp, with her lorgnon and provocative clothing, possessed in spades. Like all the anti-Semites of her generation, Gyp both exaggerated Jewish power and despised what she saw as Jewish puniness and effeminacy. But her hatred may also have been fuelled by fears of personal victimization, likely in a woman who depended on the syndicat for her income.
In the end, the marquise’s vicious attack on the military conspirators cannot be equated with Gyp’s anti-Semitism.102 Certainly the marquise saw the army as the vile generator of conspiracy in much the same way that Gyp thought of the Jewish ‘syndicate’ as the fount of cosmopolitan subversion. Still, the attacks on corrupt officers – and also on the Jesuits – were assaults on corrupt institutions, while anti-Semitism was an assault on a people, perceived as deicidal murderers, exploitative capitalists and racial polluters all at once. Although both women were great haters, Gyp won this dubious competition.