15

Alfred Returns

At the end of 1898 Alfred Dreyfus himself reappeared as a significant figure in the Affair. Ever since his first trial in 1894, the two had followed different trajectories, the campaign ebbing and flowing in France while Dreyfus struggled to survive, in squalor and isolation, on Devil’s Island. Communications with him had been fitful and heavily censored; his family had wanted to tell him of Henry’s suicide and the growing public pressure to have his case reviewed, but the government had blocked all attempts to keep him informed. He began to get news about the Affair only in the middle of November, when he was allowed to read a summary of the case delivered by the venerable jurist Jean-Pierre Manau to the Cour de cassation. Through this he learned for the first time about Mathieu’s accusations against Esterhazy, and about Henry’s suicide.¹

Soon the conditions of his imprisonment began to change. On 28 November he was given more space to move around and was permitted a precious glimpse of the sea. On 3 January 1899 he was able to send Lucie a telegram, in which he told her once again of his love and of his conviction that he would ultimately be exonerated. He was also taken before a group of judges from the appellate court of Cayenne to deny Lebrun-Renault’s claim that he had confessed in 1895.² With touching naivety, Dreyfus believed that these changes in his circumstances were due to letters he had written to his superiors and the president of the Republic.³ He had no notion of the Dreyfusard campaign, or of how much he owed it; he could not have imagined that in the past year ministries had come and gone over the issue of his guilt or innocence.

On 3 June the Cour de cassation annulled Dreyfus’s earlier conviction for treason. After four and a half years of imprisonment, he was suddenly no longer a convicted criminal and became a defendant once more. He eagerly said goodbye to his jailers and took leave of the mayor of Cayenne, Eleuthère Leblond, who gave him a few items of essential attire and wished him well. But this moment of greater dignity was brief: within a week, he was on board the Sfax, where a cabin had been converted into a prison cell with an armed guard. Landing in France in secrecy, he was transferred in an open cutter on a stormy sea in the middle of the night. When he arrived at the tiny village of Port-Haliguen on the Quibéron peninsula, he was escorted, again under armed guard, to the train station and deposited at 6 a.m. on 1 July at the military prison at Rennes.⁴

Lucie was already waiting for him there, overwhelmed with excitement. Describing their reunion, Louis Havet wrote to Joseph Reinach:

you would have been truly happy to see, as I did this morning after the first interview, her face lit up by a great and irrepressible happiness, the sort one feels when one is convalescing or indeed resurrecting.

As for Alfred he is, so it seems, old, thin and white, but his will remains indomitable; he avoids all occasions [where he might] grow emotional, and wants to wait till later to talk about the children. Last night on the boat he had a fever, and he feels very cold after leaving the tropics, but they call him ‘captain’ and he has received letters from people who express their esteem for him. He is acquainted with the admissable documents [of his case] and knows many little facts which he cannot yet coordinate.⁵

Havet’s account of Dreyfus’s ill-health was too hopeful, and underestimated his weakened state. The anti-Dreyfusards also played down his fragile condition, reporting that he had a good appetite. Mathieu, who, like Havet, was struck by Alfred’s calm, noted that ‘he has not yet completely recovered the habit of speech’. After almost five years of solitary confinement, Dreyfus’s ability to talk had atrophied, a handicap made worse by the ‘the loss of several teeth’ that provoked ‘a light whistle’. Alfred was also ‘very thin, very pale with sudden flushes’ he could not ‘digest solid food and was reduced to taking only milk and dry biscuits’.⁶ Mathieu worried whether his brother would survive the ordeal of the upcoming court martial.

Mathieu was outraged by the suffering Alfred had endured, but believed that mistreatment had, paradoxically, helped to keep him alive.

Although he was very ill with fever in September 1896, they put him in irons for two months, and yet his conduct had not warranted such a cruel measure. This infamy saved him; he thought that they meant to let him die, so he steeled himself, and resisted, saying to himself again and again: ‘I do not want to die.’⁷

Mathieu was flabbergasted to learn that no one had told his brother of the massive movement on his behalf. By 3 July, Alfred had begun to learn more about the details of his case, and had seen Mathieu, Demange and his new attorney, Labori. He also read the full judgment of the Cour de cassation, which had ordered the new court martial on the grounds that, among other things, the ‘scoundrel D’ letter had been used without the knowledge of the defence, and hence had not been subjected to proper scrutiny. For the first time he understood why he had been convicted.

As he began to assimilate the many facts, Dreyfus learned too of Zola’s trial and the testimony given there by the Chartistes Meyer, Giry and Molinier, who had argued that he had not written the bordereau. Without naming Esterhazy, the judgment of the Cour de cassation stated that another officer had been the bordereau’s author and, as that officer’s handwriting matched two other letters from 1892 and 1894, he must have been spying for Germany for some time. The court also dismissed Lebrun-Renault’s report of Alfred’s confession as mendacious.⁸ As Alfred read the depositions of older court proceedings and more recent ones, and learned the details of Henry’s forgeries, he began to realize the scale of the conspiracy that had engulfed him.⁹

 

The choice of Rennes for the retrial had been the parting anti-Dreyfusard shot fired by the outgoing premier, Charles Dupuy. The city, a clerical and military stronghold, conjured up distinctly unpleasant historical associations for the Dreyfusards, for whom Rennes and the west of France in general evoked the violent Catholic Leagues of the sixteenth century and memories of counter-revolutionary Chouans, the royalist guerrillas opposed to Enlightenment precepts.¹⁰ The right applauded the choice for the same reasons that the Dreyfusards criticized it: to them, Rennes was the essence of Brittany and of the true France. If anything, men such as Barrès sought to reinforce the historical connections by celebrating Brittany as the centre of counter-revolution, Catholic renewal and regional rootedness.¹¹

For Victor Basch and Henri Sée, local devotees of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, Rennes was an inhospitable, narrow-minded world from which they longed to escape. The 35-year-old Basch, a Jew who had been born in Budapest and who now taught German at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Rennes, embodied intellectual cosmopolitanism.¹² He saw himself as a foreign emissary in a hostile land and provided regular reports on the local situation for Reinach, who had stayed in Paris acting as the intermediary between the government and the Dreyfusard campaign, often on his telephone. Basch always responded politely and honestly to Reinach, though he did not share Reinach’s view that the Dreyfusards had to create, above all, a moderate image to contrast with right-wing fanaticism.¹³ For example, rather than cancelling a socialist banquet planned for Bastille Day, as Reinach wanted, Basch carried on with the celebration. He had evangelized the workers of Rennes and felt that his first duty was to the new recruits, as well as to a large and radical vision of the Affair that should not be tempered by Reinach’s tactical calculations.¹⁴

Basch’s personal and political involvement in the Affair illustrates the birth of a provincial activist, and the increasingly leftward and populist leanings of the rank and file in the Ligue des droits de l’homme. Some, such as Charles Richet, who had joined the organization specifically to belong to an elite, were disenchanted by this trend.¹⁵ But for Basch the Affair offered an initiation into both elite and mass politics. The Dreyfusard creed appealed to his Kantian moralism and his socialist visions. Basch had suffered, and continued to suffer, from alternating cycles of depression and excitement, mercurial emotions that the Affair’s twists and turns seemed to intensify.¹⁶ With his dutiful wife, Illona, away on holiday with their children, he opened his home for the duration of the trial to such Parisian luminaries as Jaurès, Giry, Psichari and Paul Meyer.¹⁷ The house, with its tranquil garden, also provided a refuge for Mathieu and Bernard Lazare when they did not want to converse at Les Trois Marches, the nearby auberge that became the Dreyfusards’ eatery.

Zola returned to France in June, feeling safe enough from the law while all attention was focused on Dreyfus. He decided to stay away from Rennes, lest his presence at the trial prove a distraction, but virtually every other member of the Parisian elite was in town. The Hôtel Moderne lodged Octave Mirbeau, Bernard Lazare, Forzinetti and the journalist Séverine, as well as – perhaps uncomfortably – the royalist anti-Dreyfusard Arthur Meyer. The Hôtel de France provided rooms for Demange, but was otherwise mainly occupied by the anti-Dreyfusard camp. The trial at Rennes was a great social event, where friends embraced and shook hands, while enemies wondered how to address each other. Forzinetti found himself ‘nose to nose with General de Boisdeffre’, who had the audacity to offer his hand and ask for news. Everywhere, Forzinetti wrote, ‘There is a great mix of friends and enemies. Everybody looks at everybody else a little askance, but that does not last long. None the less, one feels that it would not take much for people to come to blows, using their walking sticks as weapons.’¹⁸

61. ‘Les Trois Marches’, the Dreyfusard eatery at Rennes

Notables from both sides spread out across the city centre in private homes and institutions. Mme du Paty de Clam and her daughters took refuge with the Religieuses de la sagesse; Barrès was at 9, rue Le Bastard; Lucie lodged with Mme Godard, a Protestant woman whose large house was close to the military prison. Basch disapproved of Lucie’s decision, however; Mme Godard had a slightly suspect reputation, and was ‘common’ and ‘indiscreet’. He warned Reinach that she would need an homme de confiance because Mme Godard’s concierge was unreliable.¹⁹

62. Much of the ‘action’ at Rennes took place outside the courtroom, as this 1899 gathering of Bernard Lazare ( centre ) with colleagues Lertagna ( left ) and Leymann ( right ) demonstrates

As always, Lucie sought to avoid the limelight. Still clothed in her widow’s weeds, refusing the flowers sent by well-wishers, she had finally arrived in Rennes on 29 June, after journalists had spent days roaming the town on bicycles in search of her.²⁰ Three hundred people were said to have been there when she arrived. One local nationalist newspaper reported that many of those present refused to take off their hats because ‘a Frenchman does not doff his hat to a Jew’,²¹ but Jeanne Brémontier of La Fronde wrote that ‘all the spectators, whatever opinion they professed, were moved by the solemnity’ of the occasion.²²

The Havets had travelled together with Lucie, and she confessed to them that without the example of Alfred’s ‘always steady serenity’ she ‘would burn with pain’. It was a relief that Alfred could at last understand what had happened to him. She noted, ‘I assure you that he recovers a little more each day. His face now is suffused with great gentleness. He understands the significance and the extent of his case. His abnegation and his disinterestedness are second to none.’²³

Alfred’s torments on Devil’s Island – the chains on his legs, the palisade that cut off the view of the sea, the inability to exercise and his near death from fever and malnutrition – were ‘so atrocious’, Lucie told the Havets, ‘that he himself prefers not to recount them’. But she recommended steeliness: ‘we must not soften, it is necessary that we conserve all our calm for the final test.’²⁴

 

Inevitably, Rennes turned into a media circus. Journalists from all over the country – and the world – poured into the town, as excited as the reading public at the prospect of what was supposed to be the grand finale. The Affair sold newspapers, and newspapers sustained the Affair; indeed, it is impossible to imagine it without the decisive role played by the press. Ever since the accusations against Dreyfus had been leaked in late 1894, the main events had received blanket coverage. Dreyfus’s degradation, with its powerful images of his broken sword and torn epaulettes, had provided a journalistic feast. Drumont’s La Libre Parole had stirred up fears of Jewish conspiracy from the start, and may very well have been instrumental in Mercier’s decision to pursue the case. The early drama was followed by years of virtual silence, but press interest erupted once more with Scheurer-Kestner’s intervention and Mathieu’s accusation against Esterhazy. The furore – both vicious and supportive – surrounding Zola’s intervention would have been inconceivable without the author’s deft use of L’Aurore as his tribunal. Clemenceau’s political career was reignited through his journalistic polemics during the Affair, while Jaurès’s famous contribution exposing the deceits and forgeries of the military – which was ultimately published as a volume entitled Les Preuves – began in La Petite République.²⁵

The vibrant illustrated press – Le Petit Illustration reached a million readers a week – constructed the imagery of the Affair, pinning down the bewildering succession of events as a series of striking, memorable moments. Draughtsmen and photographers offered to the public powerful scenes of violence, grandeur, defeat, despair and triumph. A visual lexicon of different ‘types’ quickly emerged from the endless portraits of moustachioed soldiers, statesmen, bearded intellectuals, lawyers en robe, and ladies in their sumptuous or sober toilettes. The main actors became known in a way that few could have ever anticipated, and highlights of the Affair – Esterhazy’s ‘Veiled Lady’ and the trial of Zola – all received sensational coverage.

From the outset the Affair’s unpredictable events had given the press scope for breathless reporting and constant interpretative commentary. At Rennes, however, there was a much greater opportunity to stage-manage the news. The Cour de cassation had handed down its decision in early June, but the retrial was set for August, leaving two full months for preparation. Zola’s trial, in contrast, had given the press a meagre two weeks to get ready.

For many foreign newspapers, France itself was on trial as much as Alfred Dreyfus. As the hearings progressed, correspondents from abroad spent unheard-of sums on telegrams to New York, London, Berlin and other distant cities. Their very presence became a factor in the drama they were reporting: Dreyfusards wished to vindicate French honour before the world, while their opponents bridled at the idea of foreign criticism.

The women reporters of La Fronde were also there, stationed among the other journalists.²⁶ They were sometimes treated merely as a frivolous curiosity, but their contribution was far from negligible. Bradamante excelled in covering the emotional dimension of the trial; as she wrote to Reinach, ‘Since Truth cannot enter minds through reason, one should try to make it enter hearts through sentiment.’²⁷ Like Psichari, who had elevated Picquart to heroic heights, she used her rhetorical gifts to emphasize the primacy of feelings in this ultimate campaign of moral suasion.

63. Louis-Welden Hawkins, ‘Séverine (Caroline Rémy)’, c. 1895. Séverine was one of the most famous of the female journalists during the Affair. She wrote her important ‘Impressions vécues’ during Zola’s trial and remained a key Dreyfusard voice thereafter

The authorities in Rennes would not say when Dreyfus himself was going to arrive, leading to a frenzied game of journalistic cat-and-mouse – a pursuit made more intense by the reporters having little else to do while they waited. Some travelled to Brest to watch for the arrival of the Sfax. As rumours flew that Dreyfus had died on the voyage, the authorities’ secrecy heightened the desperation for information.²⁸ The press split up to cover different sites simultaneously, and to see who would be the first to claim a glimpse of the returning captive.²⁹ But once Dreyfus had indeed set foot in Rennes, a new seriousness emerged. The actors were all in place, and it was time for the drama to begin.

 

Dreyfus had for so long been just an abstraction – whether admired as ‘the martyr’ or reviled as ‘the Judas’ – that his actual arrival required emotional adjustments that many were unable to make. His supporters wanted a tragic hero worthy of their efforts and dreams, but instead got a diminished man whose voice was strangled from disuse and whose legs could barely carry him. His return transformed the Affair. Now that he was present in the flesh, the theatrical took over, and it was precisely because the drama became increasingly staged that, paradoxically, the cause célèbre disintegrated – not least because Dreyfus himself could not live up to the role that dramatic logic required of him.

Determined to present a front of valour and uprightness, he appeared before the court martial in his old uniform, padded with cotton wadding to hide his skeletal frame. He walked with a brisk and upright step into the makeshift courtroom, saluting his judges sharply. Mathieu admitted that he could hardly bear to look. When he opened his eyes, he saw a striking scene, with Alfred

seated, straight, stiff, turned towards the judges, his képi on his knees. All eyes are on him. The whiteness of his hair, his complexion, pale but now and then suddenly flushed with red, contrast with the black and the gold of his uniform. And, truly lamentable, the sight of his legs, without muscles or flesh, around which his trousers float, as if around two skinny, long sticks.³⁰

Others felt the same surge of compassion. Forzinetti described his ‘strong emotion’ on seeing Dreyfus’s ‘destroyed, broken body’ he wanted to ‘throw [his] arms around his neck’. Forzinetti had come to despise his military colleagues and regarded the judges presiding over the proceedings as ‘seven Jew-eaters’.³¹

Of all the descriptions, Maurice Barrès’s remarks were the most famous.

His thin and drawn face! His clear look behind the lorgnon! Oh! How young he seemed to me at first, this poor little man who, laden with so much said and written about him, was coming forward at a prodigiously fast pace. At that moment we felt nothing but a thin flood of pain entering into the room. A miserable human rag was being thrown into a glaring light. A ball of living flesh disputed by two camps of players, and who in six years has not had a moment of rest, has arrived…to roll in the midst of our battle.³²

Barrès’s description captured both the horror of the spectacle and the intensity of the political quarrel; he was shocked that such a ‘poor little man’ could have caused such trouble and animated so many. There was some sympathy in his immediate reaction, certainly, but Barrès overcame it soon enough. As much as Lucie or Alfred, Barrès steeled himself to resist any emotional impulse. He saw Dreyfus not as a hero or as Christ suffering on the cross, but as something scarcely human, just ‘a ball of living flesh’ – a figure almost impossible to identify with, a creature who could evoke pity but not fraternity. Moreover, his description was not inaccurate: Dreyfus was a miserable sight, and his appearance and manner did have a marked, and negative, effect.

Time and again, commentators mentioned Dreyfus’s ‘raucous voice’, his ‘monotonous voice’ Barrès described it as a ‘voice without any resonance’. This irritating dullness was accentuated by awkward, unnatural movements. Speaking required a Herculean effort. Unfortunately, Dreyfus’s true state of health was kept secret: what the audience saw, and assessed, was a somewhat wooden, unappealing figure, who spoke without tears or emotion.

The public was not able to respond easily to the quiet stoicism with which Dreyfus presented himself. Later Basch remarked that there was something ‘Alsatian’ about Dreyfus’s reserve, an observation that drew implicit parallels with Scheurer-Kestner, his first eminent defender.³³ Shyness, mixed with a sense of decency and perhaps pride, produced in both what the French call pudeur, a modesty that rejects emotional display as a form of exhibitionism, and which Basch perceived as a kind of unimaginative heaviness. In his memoirs Scheurer-Kestner recalled how the bouquets and flowers sent by supporters had caused him acute embarrassment.³⁴

Both he and Dreyfus showed how alive they were in private – with friends and family in personal letters that overflowed with feeling – but both did everything in their power to hide such emotions from the world. This tactic had undermined Scheurer-Kestner when he addressed the Senate in November 1897, delivering a reasoned speech about facts when his audience wanted to be swayed by a display of impassioned rhetoric. Now it likewise weakened Dreyfus, who came across as stiff, unyielding and formal, rather than as a heroic victim of monstrous evil.³⁵

Dreyfus’s natural reserve had been reinforced at Devil’s Island: isolated but constantly watched, he had survived through concealment. When he came to Rennes, he was determined not to arouse pity. He wanted to be treated with the dignity due to a French officer and sought to prove himself worthy of respect. Rather than being supported on the arms of attendants and whispering wanly, he tried to achieve a military gait and manly voice, but appeared miserably counterfeit on both counts. Given anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as untrustworthy manipulators, such ‘falseness’ was disastrous. Dreyfus seemed somehow artificial and strangely resembled du Paty, whose manic saluting at Zola’s trial had been derided as a burlesque of military discipline.

The tragedy was that Dreyfus was trying to avoid precisely this effect, but had neither the skills nor the strength to do so. In a letter to Reinach a few days after the trial began, Mathieu wrote that ‘my brother is incapable of histrionics’. Indeed, this inability to adjust his manner to the circumstances was the same trait that had caused Alfred trouble at the beginning of his career at the General Staff, where he had never thought to hide his talent to reassure the envious or less accomplished. In Mathieu’s opinion Devil’s Island had not changed him: ‘it is not in his nature, or in his physical capabilities’ to play a part. Mathieu added that he could not ‘suggest to him that he might exaggerate, as very likely it will come out all wrong; it will sound false’.³⁶ This was, then, the paradox at the heart of Alfred’s behaviour at Rennes. He wanted desperately to present himself as a dignified and worthy officer unwilling to engage in emotional exhibitionism; yet this very attempt was taken as an act of dissimulation.

No matter how hostile or insinuating the questioning, Dreyfus always responded with the same calm precision. Mathieu was one of the few who realized how much painful effort was behind this uninspiring lack of display.

As for me, who knows him so well, who knows that what he lives through but does not show, because he cannot show it, I suffered with him; when his protestations of innocence got stuck in his throat and when his eyes full of tears did not cry, I wanted to shout out for him. And the sight of his legs that shook beneath him, that he tried to stiffen through a supreme effort of willpower, the sight of this body shaken by an emotion that was violent but suppressed – this is a spectacle that I will never forget.³⁷

But Alfred’s lack of public ‘voice’ went beyond unpleasant tones; the public also held against him his almost total absence of eloquence. The first performance of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac had taken place in Paris just a fortnight before Zola’s ‘J’accuse’, while Dreyfus languished on Devil’s Island. Rostand’s protagonist exemplified the qualities – eloquence, rhetorical mastery and fiery emotion – that enjoyed public esteem in France, and indeed encapsulated certain ideas of an elemental Frenchness.³⁸ Dreyfus possessed none of them.

This is not to say that Dreyfus was a man completely outside his time. For example, his obsession with honour – a word that fills his letters to Lucie – was as strong as that of any of the men who lived by the duelling codes of the period. He was determined to relieve him self and his family of the burden of shame that had been unjustly thrust upon them. But his stoicism left the public unmoved. The audience had expected more from him, and were almost outraged by his enfeebled body and damaged voice. Forzinetti felt that Dreyfus’s erstwhile soldierly colleagues had a desire to lash out and hit him, as if Alfred’s pitiable state was an incitement to do him down still further.³⁹ A few onlookers did appreciate Dreyfus’s manner, though they were distinctly in the minority. Edmond Gast, Picquart’s cousin, reported:

His attitude? Excellent in every respect. His gait? Energetic and rapid, but simple. A military salute in front of the judges and he sits on the chair put there for him before the court, and there he remains motionless during the readings. [When he sat down]I could see nothing but a half bald head, partially covered with closely cropped white hair, and all over this head a dryness! A pitiably thin nape of the neck, emaciated by the sun of Devil’s Island. In contrast, a face with [some] colour, surprisingly young in comparison to the hair.⁴⁰

64. Military ritual contributed to Dreyfus’s continued exclusion and humiliation. This photograph shows him leaving the Rennes courtroom in the middle of a double row of armed guards. All the men have their backs turned to him

The Dreyfusards had hoped that public awareness of Dreyfus’s suffering would lead to an appreciation of their own labours and efforts on his behalf. But at the trial Dreyfus’s immobile presence – and his determination to keep to a line of stoical conduct – undermined their sense of dramatic entitlement. For some activists, Rennes began a process of emotional detachment that ended in intense disenchantment.