All that is telling criticism; though to-day it reads a bit antiquated in view of the revolt everywhere against both these catch-phrases and the anarchist chaos which they connote. But here again Clemenceau, with all his acuteness and brilliancy, displays the need for a guiding historic and economic theory—the sociologic theory which scientific Socialism supplies. It was not justice or liberty which created slavery, or destroyed slavery, but economic development and social necessity. The cult of abstraction leads to social revolt but not to material revolution.
Holding the opinions he did, it was inevitable that Clemenceau should put the case of the Anarchists such as Vaillant, Henry, Ravachot. They were the victims of a system. They could not rise as a portion of a collective attack against the unjust class dominion and economic servitude which crushed them and their fellows down into interminable toil with no reward for their lifelong sufferings. So they made war as individuals for anarchy. Vive l’Anarchie! were the last words of Henry. The man was a fanatic. “The crime seems to me odious. I make no excuse for it,” says Clemenceau, but he objects to the capital penalty. “Henry’s crime was that of a savage. The deed of society seems to me a loathsome vengeance.” Clemenceau compares, too, the anarchists of dynamite to the would-be assassin Damien, so hideously tortured before death. “My motive,” said he, “was the misery which exists in three-quarters of the kingdom. I acted alone, because I thought alone.” The anarchist, asked by his mother why he had, become an anarchist, answered, “Because I saw the suffering of the great majority of human beings.” Vaillant, Henry, Caserio and their like are overmastered by the same idea as Damien. They kill members of the king caste of our society of to-day in order to scare the bourgeoisie into justice. There is no arguing with honest fanatics of this type. Whether society is justified in guillotining or hanging them is another matter. That their method is futile, as all history shows, gives society the right if it so chooses to regard it also as criminal.
The above is all argument and criticism put with almost savage vigour. But Clemenceau used likewise the lighter touch of French irony. Thus a wretched family of father, mother and six children, tramping along the high road near Paris, found some coal which had dropped from a wagon long since out of sight. They pick up these bits of chance fuel as a godsend. They have gleaned after the reapers. Straightway, the story of Boaz and Ruth occurs to Clemenceau, of Boaz and his descendant of Nazareth, who is the God of Europe to-day. The Hebrew Boaz, the landowner of old, gladly leaves the wheat-ears to be gleaned by Ruth and marries her into the bargain. The Christian Boaz, the coal-owner of our time, gets the males of the distressed family of coal-gleaners six days’ imprisonment. Such is progress through the centuries! The moral of the whole story is brilliantly touched in.
So again in his comment on the catastrophe at the Charity Bazaar. It was the rank and religiosity of the persons burnt alive which rendered the tragedy so much more terrible than if the crowd thus incinerated had only consisted of common people! It was the cream of French piety that was there sacrificed. Quite an ecclesiastical and political propaganda was developed from their ashes. The spirit of class made these accidental victims of gross carelessness martyrs of Christian heroism. Yet “if I go to dance at a charity ball, paying twenty francs for my ticket, and expire on the spot, I am not on that account a hero. . . . These gatherings are not exactly places of torture. People laugh, flirt, and amuse themselves, it is an opportunity to display fine dresses, and the charity sale has supplemented the Opéra Comique for marriage-provoking interviews superintended by good grandmothers. . . . Here is class distinction in action. Observe these aristocratic young gentlemen beating with their canes and kicking their frightened womenkind in their cowardly attempt to get out of danger. Then see the servants rushing in to save them! Look also at the workmen by chance on the spot risking their lives with true heroism, the plumber Piquet, who saved twenty people and, though much burnt himself, went back to his work-shop without a word.” The contrast is striking. It is not drawn by a Socialist.
Then the criticism on the German fête in commemoration of the victory of Sedan. “William II is obliged to keep his people in training, to militarise them unceasingly, body and soul. . . . In spite of the handsome protests of most of the Socialist leaders, we may be sure that it is in very truth the soul of Germany whose innermost exultation is manifested in these numberless jubilations which have be-flagged every village in the Empire. . . . It is the curse of the triumphs of brute force to leave room in the soul of the conqueror for nothing but a blind faith in settlement by violence.” Then follows a prophetic summary of what must be the inevitable consequence of this consecration of brutal dominion inspired by the hateful instincts of barbarism, which together prepare to use in Central Europe the most efficient means of murder at the disposal of scientific civilisation. The ethics of the nation are being deliberately corrupted for the realisation of the Imperial policy!
Thus Clemenceau, like others of us who knew the old Germany well, and had watched its sad hypnotisation by the spirit of ruthless militarism, foresaw what was coming more than twenty-five years ago. And thus anticipating and reflecting, he chanced to see on one of the monuments of Paris illumined by the sun, “The German Empire falls.” It was dated 1805! “Short years pass. What remains of these follies? If law and right outraged, reason flouted, wisdom contemned must blight our hopes, as your warlike demonstrations too clearly prognosticate, then for you, men of Germany, the inscription of the Carrousel is patient and bides its time.
“And yet two great rival peoples worthy to understand one another could nobly make ready a nobler destiny.”
There you have the statesman and idealist as well as the clear-sighted journalist. Clemenceau saw the storm-cloud ever menacing and ready to break upon France. He warned his countrymen of their danger, bade them prepare to meet it, but hoped continuously that his forecasts might prove wholly erroneous. Jaurès unfortunately, with all his vast ability, was too idealist and far too credulous. Hence his great influence was thrown against the due preparation of his own country; he did his utmost to support the anti-navy men even in Great Britain, and only began to recognise how completely mistaken he had been just before he was assassinated by the modern Ravaillac of religionist reaction. To anticipate fraternity in a world of conflict is to help the aggressor and to court disaster. This Clemenceau the Radical knew: to this the French Socialists shut their minds.
It was natural that the Vendéen by birth, the Parisian by adoption, should feel himself drawn rather to the ideals of the French capital, which in matters of intelligence and art is also the capital of Europe, rather than to the narrow spirit of the Breton countryside which he has so vigorously sketched. In his writings as in his political activities this preference, this admiration find forcible expression. From the days of Julian the great Pagan Emperor down to the French Revolution and thence onwards, Clemenceau briefly traces the development of the City by the Seine, the French Renaissance and the University of Paris, by the influence of the writings of Montaigne—“this city in right of which I am a Frenchman”—and Rabelais: this meeting-place of Europe, this Central Commune of the planet proposed by Clootz, the Prussian idealist, becomes in the words of the same foreign enthusiast “a magnificent Assembly of the peoples of the West.” We may forgive the French statesman his unbounded enthusiasm for the Paris where he has spent the whole of his active life. “One phrase alone, ‘The Rights of Man,’ has uplifted all heads. Lafayette brings back from America the victory that France sent thither and straightway the great battle is joined between Paris of the French Revolution and the coalition of things of the past.” “True, we have measured
| A la hauteur des bonds la profondeur des chutes, |
“but at least we have striven, and we abate not a jot of our generous ambitions. Thus decrees the tradition of Paris . . . that Paris which now as ever holds in her hands the key to supreme victory.”
CHAPTER XI
CLEMENCEAU AS A WRITER
M. Clemenceau had a ready pen as well as a very bitter one, and he did not confine himself to articles on politics and sociology. Besides La Mêlée Sociale, of which I have given some account in the previous chapter, he published the following books in order within eight years: Le Grand Pan, a volume of descriptive essays; Les Plus Forts, a novel; Au Fil des Jours, and Les Embuscades de la Vie, which were, in the main, collections of sketches and tales. At the same time he did a great deal of ordinary journalism, including his articles on the Dreyfus case, which make in themselves four good-sized volumes.
Le Grand Pan followed close upon La Mêlée Sociale, and came as a delightful surprise to M. Clemenceau’s readers, a piece of pure literature. In this book he no longer writes as a citizen of Paris, a man of the boulevards and pavements, but as one country-born and bred, knowing the hills and the sea. Although he describes his own Vendéen scenery with loving familiarity, making the “Marais,” the “Bocage” and the “Plaine” live before us, he does not cling to them with the monotonous affection of some French writers, who are, as it were, dyed in their own local colour. Without elaboration, without the detailed building-up of a scene which is the careful habit of some others, he conveys in two or three lines the feeling of a countryside and that elusive but immutable thing, the character of a landscape. This belongs really to the poet’s art, and gives, I cannot tell why, a deeper impression, a far more lasting pleasure than all the abundance and detail of prose. Clemenceau’s neighbour, and almost fellow-countryman, Renan, had this gift. All the grey waters of the rocky Armorican shore seem to sweep through the first lines of his essay on the Celtic Spirit; and the influence of Renan is marked in Le Grand Pan. The first article, which gives the book its title, sets the reader’s fancy sailing among the Greek Isles, steered by poetry and tradition, in the light of the golden and the silver age. Clemenceau, like Heine, mourns for the overthrow of the Greek gods in the welter of quarrelling priesthoods and fierce Asian ugliness that flooded the Mediterranean world. “Pan, Pan is dead!” But in the Renaissance—“the tumultuous pageant of Art hurrying to meet the classic gods reborn”—he welcomes the magnificent restoration of the ancient and eternal Powers. And he claims for the nineteenth century the honour of beholding another re-birth of the gods of Nature in the development of science, and the labour that has brought some of the secrets of earth within our ken.
But science, as we know, has revealed the horrors as well as the wonders of earth. It troubles us; man has shed rivers of needless blood, but we shrink from recognising Nature as she is, “red in tooth and claw.” It did not trouble the ancient Greeks; their gods, developing from the rough deities of place or tribe into the embodiments of the natural forces of matter or of mind, were outside human ethic, although they were cast in human form. They might take the shape of mortals, but only Euripides and a few other hypersensitive moralists thought of blaming the gods when, as often happened, they fell below the standards of human conduct. But we are creatures of another era; and man, criticising and even condemning the Powers that rule his little day, has, for good or ill, reached out to a level that is above the gods, whose plaything he still remains.
And there is another change. Man—some men, that is to say—have taken the animals into their protection and fellowship: and M. Clemenceau is truly one of these. Not only those charming, kindly essays, La Main et la Patte and Les Parents Pauvres, in Le Grand Pan, but the history of the two pigeons in the Embuscades de la Vie, and a hundred little touches and incidents throughout Clemenceau’s books show him to be a man of most generous sympathies, looking at animal life from a far higher and finer point of view than the majority of his countrymen.
There is much else in Le Grand Pan that it would be pleasant to dwell upon: a delicate classic spirit, a certain ironic grace, humour and mockery, but everywhere and above all keen indignation at needless human suffering and a sympathy which is poles apart from sentiment, for human pain. M. Clemenceau might well be called “a soldier of pity,” as, in one of the Near Eastern languages, the members of his first profession, the doctors, are termed. But I must pass on. Le Grand Pan is, as it deserves to be, the best known of M. Clemenceau’s books, and no one who has overlooked it can form a complete idea of this remarkable man.
It is said that anyone who has the power of setting down his impressions on paper can write at least one good novel, if he tries, for he will draw with varying degrees of truth or malice the individuals he has met, liked, or suffered from, and the main circumstances of his life. What a Homeric novel M. Clemenceau might have written if he had followed these lines! But Les Plus Forts is unfortunately no such overflow of personal impressions and memories; it is merely what used to be called “a novel with a purpose.” That is to say, it is one of the many works of fiction which not only record the adventures of certain imaginary yet typical characters, but also contain severe criticism of contemporary social conditions and life. Such novels were much more common in England during the nineteenth century than in France. In English fiction the sequence is unbroken from Sandford and Merton to the earlier works of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s venerable pen. But in 1898 there were still not many French novels concerned with the serious discussion of social conditions, and M. Clemenceau’s early work stands out among these for sincerity and simplicity of intent. However, in spite of the excellent irony of some passages—notably the description of the Vicomtesse de Fourchamps’ career—Les Plus Forts is to modern readers a trifle tedious and a little naive. It is of the same calibre as Mr. Shaw’s two first novels, but less eccentric and not so amusing. M. Clemenceau himself would probably write upon it “Péché de jeunesse,” and pass on. Yet it deserves more attention than that; for Les Plus Forts unconsciously reveals the central weakness of its author’s criticism of modern life. The situation is a good one, although the actors are not so much characters as types.
Henri de Puymaufray, a ruined French gentleman, who has lost the world and found a kind of Radicalism, and Dominique Harlé, a rich paper manufacturer, live side by side in the country as friendly enemies or, rather, close but inimical friends. Their views of life are as the poles asunder, but for the purposes of the story they must be constantly meeting in conversational intimacy; and they have each an almost superhuman power of expressing themselves and their attitude towards the world they live in. The chief link between them is Harlé’s supposed daughter and only child, Claude, whose real father is Puymaufray. Both these elderly gentlemen are deeply concerned about Claude’s future; each wishing, as parents and guardians often do, to make the child’s career the completion of their own ambitions and hopes. Here Harlé has the advantage; he knows what he wants, that is, money and power, and he means his daughter to have plenty of both. He is the ordinary capitalist, with a strain of politician and Cabinet-maker, who ends by founding a popular journal that outdoes Harmsworth in expressing the “Lowest Common Factor of the Mind.” Society, the Church, and a particularly offensive form of charity all serve him to increase his own power and the stability of his class. All is for the best in the best of bourgeois worlds. Such is the theory of life which he puts before his supposed daughter, together with a prétendant who will carry out his aims. Unhappily, Puymaufray has nothing positive to set against this very solid and prosperous creed. He and Deschars, the young traveller whom he wishes to give Claude for a husband, can only talk pages of Radicalism in which the words “pity” and “love” would recur even more frequently if M. Clemenceau’s fine sense of fitness did not prevail. What do they really want Claude to do? The best they can offer her appears to be a life of retired and gentle philanthropy, inspired by a dim sense of human brotherhood, which might, under very favourable circumstances, deepen into a sort of Socialist mood.
But “mere emotional Socialism cuts no ice.” This has often been said, and means that a vague fraternal purpose and a perception of the deep injustice of our present social system, even when sharpened with the most destructive satire, will never change this world for the better, unless they lead up to some theory of construction that is based on economic facts. Pity and brotherhood may move individuals to acts of benevolence, but they cannot alone recast the fabric of society, or even bring about fundamental collective reforms. Besides, when young people are asked to give up certain definite things, such as money, pleasure and power, they must see something more than mere renouncement ahead. They must be shown the fiery vision of an immortal city whose foundations they may hope to build. Clemenceau’s own knowledge of human nature works against his two heroes, and he says:
“Deschars was the child of his time. He had gone about the world as a disinterested beholder, and he returned from voyaging without any keen desire for noble action. . . . Perhaps, if he had been living and working for some great human object, Deschars would have carried Claude away by the very authority of his purpose, without a word. . . .”
And Madame de Fourchamps observes:
“It is very lucky for the poor that there are rich people to give them bread.”
To which Claude replies:
“My father’s factory provides these workmen with a livelihood; where would they be without him?”
Then, instead of a few plain words on labour-value, Puymaufray can only reply:
“Well, they give him something in exchange, don’t they?”
The old capitalist fallacies here uttered in their crudest form cannot be refuted by mere injunctions to pity and goodwill; and even the magnificent words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity are no adequate reply. To the successful profiteer and all who acquiesce in his domination they mean: Liberty of Enterprise, Equality of Opportunity, and Fraternity among Exploiters. Facts and the march of events alone can persuade Dominique Harlé and his like to use their ingenuity in serving their fellow-creatures, and not in profiting by them. And only collective action, guided by some knowledge of the direction in which our civilisation is tending, can hasten the march of events.
It is remarkable how greatly the “novel with a purpose” has developed during the last twenty years in England and, to a less extent, in France. The characters are creatures of their conditions; and it is these conditions, not the characters, that do the talking. Some novels to-day are such careful and withal highly interesting guides to the sociology of England towards the end of the black Industrial Age that we cannot wonder if their authors take themselves too seriously as politicians and reformers. Yet these works show, after all, the same defect as Les Plus Forts, they have no constructive theory of life to set against the very well-defined, solid, and still apparently effective system which they criticise. All their most ironic descriptions, their most penetrating satire are negative, and, in the end, the utterances of men “wandering between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born.”
Au Fil des Jours is an interesting collection of pieces in which the author has not made up his mind whether he will write short stories or articles upon social conditions. There is no harm in that; some people may even say that M. Clemenceau has produced a new variety of readable matter; but, curiously enough, the substance of the story is often so telling that one quarrels with the writer for not having put it into the best shape. Take one of the pieces in Au Fil des Jours—La Roulotte. Briefly, a weary old gipsy drives in a covered donkey-cart into a country hamlet, and stops by the riverside, where all the gossips are washing. He is received with hostile and watchful silence, because gipsies are always the scapegoats in a peasant district, and anything and everything that may be lost, stolen or strayed—even if it turns up again—is always laid to their account. In the night he dies, unnoticed; and, after some further time has passed, the villagers inspect his cart. Finding him there, dead, with a very small grandson living, they fetch the local constable and the mayor. The arm of the Law begins to function, the child is sent to the workhouse, the moribund donkey is “taken care of” by one of the villagers, and the dilapidated old cart, which only contained a few rags, is left by the riverside.
But the French peasant knows how to turn every little thing to profit: nothing is useless in his eyes. Gradually handy fragments of the donkey-cart begin to disappear. Bits of the iron fittings vanish, the tilt-props go, a shaft follows, one wheel after another slips away and is no more seen. In fact, the donkey-cart, as such, disappears from mortal sight. Then, one fine day, a gipsy-woman comes swinging along the road, where she had followed the traces of the donkey-cart, and asks for news of her old father and her little boy. The authorities of the village tell her of the old gipsy’s death and burial: they do not require her to pay for his obsequies only because they see it would be no use. She goes to fetch the child from the workhouse, and then asks for the donkey and cart. The former, they tell her, died in the hands of the villager who “took care of him” (and sold his skin for a fair sum). She accepts this loss with resignation; but the cart, as she says, cannot have died: where is her father’s “roulotte“?—Ah, well, nobody in the village knows anything about that! It was here, no doubt, since the old gipsy died in it—but since then——The Law, once more represented by mayor and constables, can only shrug its shoulders in the finest French manner and disclaim all responsibility for a vagabond’s goods. But the gipsy-woman persists: she begins even to clamour for her rights. “Rights, indeed!” The village, hitherto indifferent, becomes hostile; and the old cry that meets the gipsy everywhere is raised, for someone on the edge of the crowd calls out, “Thief!” It is a mere expression of disapproval, not a direct accusation, but the whole village takes it up joyfully: “Thief! Thief!” So the gipsy-woman, who, as it chanced, has stolen nothing, is hounded out of the commune with sticks and stones and objurgations by those who had themselves appropriated her old donkey-cart piecemeal. “A bit of rusty iron whizzed past her as she crossed the bridge. It may once have served as her donkey’s shoe.”
Such is the tale: a sample of many in Au Fil des Jours. Irony and realism are not wanting, nor yet the grimly picturesque, but the reader is left thinking: “What a little gem this would be if it were told by Maupassant, or some other master of the conte!” Certainly M. Clemenceau has something else to do than tell contes! But his literary material is so fine that it is his own fault if we expect the very best of him. As it is, he does not take the trouble to cut the story out clearly from the matrix of thought and memories which enfolded it in his own mind. The effect on the reader is, one might say, a little vague and murmurous, like some tale half-heard in a crowd.
It is a strange thing that the countryside, Nature, the pure and never-failing spring of inspiration for poetry and human delight, should turn so different a countenance towards those who live with her, year out and year in, winning sustenance for us all from her broad and often ungenial breast. Our Mother Earth is an iron taskmaster to the tillers of the soil grinding out their youth and strength, bowing their eyes to their labour, so that all her beauty passes them by unseen. Either Nature keeps her charms jealously for the untroubled mind and the leisured eye, or else all the beauty that we see in her is borrowed, a glamour lent by some immaterial force— not ours, perhaps, but certainly not her own. Be this as it may, in the Embuscades de la Vie M. Clemenceau beholds and describes the careless, endless, natural beauty amid which the peasant-lives that he sketches for us are set; but these themselves are often as ugly as bare stone, and the men and women are hard and close-fisted with one another mainly because the earth is so grudging to them. These stories are the most clear-cut of all Clemenceau’s essays in fiction. They are not exactly contes, either: they are the discoveries, one might say, of Clemenceau in his ancestral character as the descendant of a line of doctors and landowners who worked for generations among the small bourgeois and the tillers of the soil. How he knows them! and—if French fiction is to be believed—how unchangeable they are! Since the bourgeois gained his freedom in the great Revolution by using the arm of the sans-culotte, what a grip he has kept upon his possession! and how much dearer to him his property is than anything else in the world! Clemenceau does but take up the theme of Balzac and others when he describes provincial France and its twin gods, money and the land—money which compels loveless marriages, envy, fawning, bitterness, perpetual small cheating or endless insect-like toil; and the land, in whose service men work themselves and their kindred to the bone, and grudge a pittance to old age.
The bourgeoisie and their customs vary with their nationality, but peasant life is much the same all over Europe. Clemenceau found similar traits of life and character in Galicia to those of La Vendée; and others will tell us that from Ireland to Russia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the peasant and the small farmer conduct their lives upon the same lines: hard work, dependence upon the seasons, family authority, tribal feuds, and a meticulous social system of comment and convention, under which the individual finds himself far less free than in the unhampered, unnoticed life of the towns.
Yet many of the “ambushes of life” are to be found in the cities; and about a third of these tales are laid in the towns and among the well-to-do middle class. M. Clemenceau’s satire plays freely upon the “marriage of convention,” by which two families agree, after a certain amount of haggling and mutual sharp practice, to bind two young strangers together in the closest of relationship, for time, and also, we are told, for eternity, in the interest of property alone. Still, human nature adapts itself to anything, and even such marriages have their compensations, as our author lightly and ironically points out. Being a genuine sociologist, he does not handle these tales of the bourgeoisie and their vagaries within what is, after all, an artificial and exclusive form of existence, as seriously as he does the great plain outlines of peasant life.
Whether he writes of town or country, of Fleur de Froment and Six Sous, or of a ménage à trois; whether he calls up a Greek courtesan to theorise about her profession, or describes a long-standing bitter, and motiveless peasant feud, his style is always fluent and charming, vivid with irony, and graceful with poetic thought. Yet the defect as well as the merit of M. Clemenceau’s fiction and essay-writing is just this admirable, unvarying ease and fluency. One feels that he writes with perfect unconsciousness, as the thoughts come into his head. And, after a while, the ungrateful reader is inclined to ask for some kind of selection in the feast before him, where all is good, very good, even, but nothing is excellent. Like a far greater writer, Clemenceau—on paper at least—“has no peaks in him.” His literature was an admirable “by-product” of his almost limitless capacities; his actions and not his writings are the achievements of his life.
CHAPTER XII
CLEMENCEAU AND THE DREYFUS AFFAIR
In December, 1894, Captain Dreyfus, a member of the General Staff, was found guilty of treason by a Court Martial. The Court was unanimous. He was condemned to be sent to the Ile du Diable, there to expiate his offence by the prolonged torture of imprisonment and solitary confinement, in a tropical climate. It was a terrible punishment. But the offence of betraying France to Germany, committed by an officer entrusted with the military secrets of the Republic, was a terrible one too. It seemed so incredible, especially as Captain Dreyfus was a man of considerable means, that up to the last moment the gravest doubt as to the possibility of his having committed such a crime prevailed. When, however, the Court declared against him as one man, and without the slightest hesitation, there could no longer be any question of the correctness of the decision. For the trial had lasted four whole days, and Dreyfus had been defended by one of the ablest advocates at the Paris Bar. “What need have we of further witness?”
That was the universal feeling. Nearly a quarter of a century before, Marshal Bazaine had betrayed France to her mortal enemy, and had escaped the penalty which was his due. Common soldiers were frequently condemned to death and executed for impulsive actions against their superiors. High time an example should be made of a man of higher rank. Dreyfus was lucky not to be shot out of hand. That an Alsatian, a rich man, a soldier sworn to defend his country, an officer employed in a confidential post, should thus sell his nation to Germany was frightful. The thing was more than infamous. No punishment could be too bad for him. Permanent solitary confinement under a blazing sun is worse than immediate death. All the better. His fate will encourage the others.
And Captain Dreyfus was a Jew. That made the matter worse. Powerful as they are in politics and finance, Jews are not popular in France. By Catholics and sworn anti-Semites they are believed to be capable of anything. Even by men of open mind they are regarded with distrust as citizens of no country, a set of Asiatic marauders encamped for the time being in the West, whose God is a queer compound of Jahveh, Moloch and Mammon. There was thus the bitterest race and religious prejudice eager to confirm the judgment of the Court Martial. The case was decided. Dreyfus was sent off to the Island of the Devil.
Clemenceau shared the general opinion. He accepted the statement of the president of the Court Martial that “there are interests superior to all personal interests.” And these were the interests which forbade that the court martial should be held in public, or that the secret evidence of treason should be disclosed. Given the honour, good faith, capacity and freedom from prejudice of the judges, this was a reasonable contention on the part of the chief officer of the Court. But there was that to come out, in this very Dreyfus case, which should throw grave doubt upon the advisability of any sittings behind closed doors of any court that deals with matters into which professional, personal or political considerations may be imported. Secrecy is invariably harmful to democracy and injurious to fair play.
Three years later Clemenceau began to understand what lay behind this veil of obscurity which he then allowed to be thrown over the whole of the Dreyfus proceedings. He took upon himself the full burden of his own mistake. When he had distinguished his fine career by the vigorous and sustained effort in favour of justice to the victim, he reprinted at full length his articles denouncing the man about whom he had been misled. “I cannot claim,” he writes, “credit for having from the first instinctively felt the iniquity. I believed Dreyfus to be guilty, and I said so in scathing terms. It seemed to me impossible that officers should lightly inflict such a sentence on one of themselves. I imagined there had been some desperate imprudence. I considered the punishment terrible, but I excused it on the ground of devotion to patriotism.” Nothing was farther from Clemenceau’s thoughts, even at the close of 1897, than that Dreyfus should after all be not guilty. He laughed at Bernard Lazare when he said so. Meeting M. Ranc by accident, this politician and journalist confirmed the opinion of Lazare and declared that Dreyfus was innocent. Again Clemenceau smiled incredulously, and was recommended to go at once and see M. Scheurer-Kestner, Vice-President of the Senate, the famous Alsatian whose high qualities he many years afterwards proclaimed in a funeral oration.
The editor of l’Aurore called upon that courageous and indefatigable champion of Dreyfus; and comparison of the handwriting of Esterhazy, the chief witness against the captain, with that of the bordereau attributed to Dreyfus and decisive of his guilt, convinced Clemenceau, not that Dreyfus was innocent, but that the judgment had been quite irregular. Therefore he resolved to begin a campaign for a revision of the case. He did not share Scheurer-Kestner’s view as to the enormous difficulty and danger of such an undertaking. Trouble and misrepresentation he anticipated. Bitter opposition from the members of the court and of the General Staff—Yes. Virulent misrepresentation due to priestly hatred—Yes. Unceasing malignity of anti-Semites—Yes. Strong political objection to any reopening of a “chose jugée,” on public grounds—Yes. But, in spite of all, the truth in modern France would easily and triumphantly prevail! “Events showed me how very far out I was in my calculations.”
As on more than one occasion in his stormy life, therefore, Clemenceau underrated the strength of the enemy. He had to contend against a combination of some of the strongest interests and passions that can affect human life and sentiment. There had been from the very commencement a bitter feeling among some of the most powerful sections of French society against the Republic. As was shown in the rise of Boulanger, Clemenceau, by exposing the drawbacks of successive Republican Governments, had done much to strengthen this feeling among its opponents and to weaken the loyalty of its supporters. There was, in fact, nothing in the Republic itself to be enthusiastic about. It was essentially a bourgeois Republic, living on in a welter of bourgeois scandals, unbalanced by any great policy at home, any great military successes abroad, or any great personalities at the head of affairs. The glories of France were dimmed: the financiers of France—especially the Jew financiers—were more influential than ever. All this helped the party of reaction.
Religion, too, had come in to fortify finance and build up the anti-Semite group. The Catholics, to whom Jews and Free-Masons are the red flags of the political and social bull ring, had not very long before challenged the former to deadly combat in that Field of the Cloth of Gold on which, to use the phrase of one of their less enlightened competitors, they “do seem a sort of inspired.” It is possible that had the Catholic Union Générale listened to the advice of their ablest and coolest brain, who was, be it said, neither a Frenchman nor a Catholic, the great financial combination of the Church, with all its sanctified funds of the faithful behind it, might have won. Even as it was, it drove a Rothschild to commit suicide, which was regarded as a great feat at the time.
But M. Bontoux was too ambitious, he did not possess the real financial faculty, his first successes turned such head as he possessed. The Jews, therefore, were able to work their will upon the whole of his projects and groups, and the devout Catholic investors of Paris, Vienna and other places had the intolerable mortification of seeing their savings swept into the coffers of the infidel. This had happened some years before the Dreyfus case. But losers have long memories, and here was a sore monetary grievance superadded to the previous religious hatred of the Hebrew.
Dreyfus was a Jew. Nay, more, he came of financial Jews who had had their pickings out of the collapse of the Union Générale as well as out of the guano and other concessions malignantly obtained in the Catholic Republic of Peru. Monstrous that a man of that race and name should be an officer in the French Army at all! Still more outrageous that he should be placed by his ability and family influence in a position of military importance, and entrusted with serious military secrets! Something must be done.
Now the persons forming the most powerful coterie in the higher circles of the French Army at this time were not only men who had been educated at the famous military academy of St. Cyr and imbued with an esprit de corps cultivated from their school-days upwards, but they were officers who believed heartily, if not in the religion, at any rate in the beneficent secular persuasion of the Catholic Church. They were, as was clearly shown, greatly influenced by the Jesuits, who saw the enormous advantage of keeping in close touch with the chiefs of the army.
Then there were the monarchists and Buonapartists, male and female, of every light and shade, who were eagerly on the look-out for any stroke that might discredit the new studious but scientific and unbelieving class of officers, whom the exigencies of modern warfare were making more and more essential to military efficiency. Their interest was to keep as far as possible the main higher organisation and patronage of the army and the General Staff a close borough and out of the hands of these new men.
All this formed a formidable phalanx of organised enmity against any officer who might not suit the prejudices or, at a critical moment, might be dangerous to the plans of people who, differ as they might in other matters, were at one in disliking capable soldiers who were not of their particular set. And here was Dreyfus, who embodied in his own person all their most cherished hatreds, who could be made the means of striking a blow at all similar intruders upon their preserve, in such wise as greatly to injure all their enemies at once. Unfortunately for him, Dreyfus was at the same time an able officer—so much the more dangerous, therefore—and personally not an agreeable man. Not even their best friends would deny to clever Jews the virtue of arrogance. Dreyfus was arrogant. He was not a grateful person to his superiors or to his equals. They all wanted to get rid of him on their own account, and their friends outside were ready enough to embitter them against him because he was a Jew.
This is not to say that there was an elaborate plot afoot among all who were brought in contact with Dreyfus, or that, when the charge against him was formulated, there was a deliberate intention, on the part of the members of the Court Martial, to find him guilty, no matter what happened. But it is now quite certain that, from the first, the idea that he was a spy was agreeable to his fellow-officers in the Ministry of War; and, being satisfied as to his responsibility for the crime that they wished to believe him guilty of, they did not stick at trifles, in the matter of procedure and testimony, which might relieve their consciences and justify their judgment. Knowing, then, the powerful combination which would oppose to the death any revision of Dreyfus’s trial, Scheurer-Kestner, resolute and self-sacrificing as he was, might well take a less sanguine view than Clemenceau of the probabilities of certain victory as soon as the truth was made known.
But when once he began to doubt whether Dreyfus had had fair play, Clemenceau immediately showed those qualities of personal and political courage, persistence, disregard of popularity, and power of concentrating all his forces upon the immediate matter in hand, indifferent to the numbers and strength of his opponents, which had gained him so high a place in the estimation of all democrats and lovers of fair play long before. “If there are manifest probabilities of error, the case must be revised.” That was his view. But the National Army and the National Religion, as bitter opponents of justice put it, were one and indivisible on this matter. Militarism and Jesuitism together, backed by the high society of reaction and a large section of the bourgeoisie, constituted a stalwart array in favour of the perpetuation of injustice. There was literally scarce a crime of which this combination was not capable rather than admit that by any possibility a Court Martial on a Jew captain could go wrong.
The Minister of War, General Billot, the Prime Ministers Méline and Brisson, generals of high standing such as Mercier, Boisdeffre, Gonse, Zurlinden and others, officers of lower rank and persons connected with them, were gradually mixed up with and defended such a series of attempted murders, ordered suicides, wholesale forgeries, defence and decoration of exposed spies, perjury, misrepresentation and false imprisonment that the marvel is how France survived such a tornado of turpitude. Clemenceau little knew what it would all lead to when, by no means claiming that Dreyfus was innocent, he and Scheurer-Kestner and Zola and Jaurès, and all honest Radicals and Socialists, demanded that, even if Dreyfus were guilty, he could not have been legally condemned on false evidence and forged documents: the latter never having been communicated to his counsel. It was on this ground that Clemenceau demanded a revision of the trial.
But quite early in the fray the defenders of the Court Martial became desperate in their determination that the matter should never be thoroughly investigated. The honour of the army was at stake. Colonel Picquart, a man of the highest credit and capacity, comes to the conclusion in the course of his official inspection of documents at headquarters that the incriminating paper on which Dreyfus was condemned, but which he was never allowed to see, was not in his handwriting at all, but in that of Major Esterhazy, an officer disliked and distrusted by all fellow-officers with whom he had served. Picquart, in fact, suspected that Esterhazy was a Prussian spy and that he forged the bordereau which convinced the Court Martial of Dreyfus’s guilt. But before this, in 1894 when the story leaked out that an officer having relations with the General Staff was suspected of treachery, it was not Dreyfus whose name was first mentioned. His old comrades said with one accord, “It must be Esterhazy: we thought so.” Esterhazy, however, soon made himself necessary to the army chiefs and their Catholics. If his character was blasted publicly, down these gentry would come, and with them the whole of the proceedings against Dreyfus. They therefore suggested to Picquart that he should simply hold his tongue. “You are not at l’Ile du Diable,” they said. But Picquart would persist, so they sent him off to Tunis. However, thanks to Scheurer-Kestner and others, the truth began to come out, and Picquart still refused to be silenced. So instead of dealing with Esterhazy, they arrested his accuser and gave the Major a certificate of the very highest character.
As it began, so it went on. Clemenceau’s daily articles and attacks drove the militarists, the Catholics, the anti-Semites, and the reactionaries generally, into a fury. Colonel Henry, Colonel Paty du Clam, the Jesuit Father du Lac, the editors and contributors of the Figaro, the Echo de Paris (the special organ of the Staff), the Gaulois were in a permanent conspiracy with the generals named above, and the General Staff itself, to prevent the truth from being known. It was all of no use. Picquart under lock and key was more effective than Picquart at large. Slowly but surely men of open mind became convinced that, little as they wished to believe it, something was wrong. But these were always the minority. Few could grasp the fact that an innocent man was being put in chains on the Ile du Diable, virtually because there was an agitation in favour of his re-trial in Paris.
Then came Zola’s terrible letter in the Aurore, which Clemenceau had suggested, and gave up his daily article in order to give place to. He also supplied the title “J’Accuse.” Zola summed up the whole evidence relentlessly against the General Staff and its tools and forgers, Esterhazy, Henry, Paty du Clam and the rest of them.
Such an indictment, formulated by a novelist who was universally recognised as one of the leading men of letters in Europe, quite outside of the political arena, would have attracted attention at any time. In the midst of a period when all feelings and minds were wrought up to the highest point of tension, it came as a direct and heavy blow at the whole of the military party. It is difficult to realise to-day the sensation produced. It had all the effect of a combined attack of horse, foot and artillery for which preparation had been made long before by a successful bombardment. There was no effective answer possible in words. This the military cliques and their friends at once saw and acted upon. They abandoned discussion and forced Zola and l’Aurore into court on a charge of treason and libel. The action stirred all Europe and riveted attention throughout the civilised world. This was due not merely to Zola’s great reputation and popularity, to the political position held by Clemenceau, to the enthralling interest of the Dreyfus affair itself, to the excitement of the life-and-death struggle between freedom and reaction, but to the fact that behind all this lay the never-dying hostility of Germany to France.
All this was too much for the criminal champions of “the honour of the Army.” L’Aurore and Zola must be prosecuted. They were. And Clemenceau conducted his own defence. It was a crucial case, and the famous advocate Labori had previously done his best for Zola, pointing out that the whole drama turned on the prisoner then suffering at the Ile du Diable: perhaps the most infamous criminal, perhaps a martyr, the victim of human fallibility. He had shown, however, that “all the powers for Justice are combined against Justice,” and had called for the revision of a great case.
“After the jury have adjudicated, public opinion and France herself will judge you,” said Clemenceau himself. “You have been told that a document was privately communicated to the Court. Do you understand what that means? It means that a man is tried, is condemned, is covered with ignominy, his own name, that of his wife, of his children, of his father, of all his connections eternally blasted, on the faith of a document he had never been shown. Gentlemen, who among you would not revolt at the very idea of being condemned under such conditions? Who among you would not adjure us to demand justice for you if, brought before a tribunal, after a mockery of investigation, after a purely formal discussion, the judges, meeting out of your presence, decided on your honour and your life, condemning you, without appeal, on a document of whose very existence you were kept in ignorance? Who among you would quietly submit to such a decision? If this has been done, I tell you your one duty above all others is that such a case should be re-tried.”
That was the main point, as Clemenceau saw even more clearly than M. Labori. No man, guilty or innocent, could be justly condemned and sentenced on the strength of a written document the purport and even the existence of which had been deliberately concealed from the prisoner and his counsel. It scarcely needed further argument, not even the direct proof which was forthcoming that Colonel Sandherr, the president of the Court Martial, had a bitter and unreasoning prejudice against Jews. If the validity of the document had been beyond all possibility of question; if witnesses whose good faith had been unquestionable had seen Dreyfus write it with their own eyes: even then the trial was legally vitiated by the fact that it had not been shown to the accused. But if the document was forged——? All the other points, serious as some of them were, counted little by the side of this.
That, therefore, Clemenceau dealt with most persistently. That, therefore, the General Staff, with its coterie of Jesuits, anti-Semites and spies, was determined to cover up. The generals who bore witness in the case against Zola and l’Aurore showed by their threats and their admissions they knew that it was they themselves and the members of the secret Court Martial who were really on their trial at the bar of public opinion.
It was in this sense that Clemenceau closed his memorable defence. He declared against the forger of the bordereau, the Prussian spy, Esterhazy, who was sheltered and honoured by the chiefs of the French Army. “Yes, it is we,” he cried, amid derisive shouts and howls in court, “it is we who are the defenders of the army, when we call upon you to drive Esterhazy out of it. The conscious or unconscious enemies of the army are those who propose to cashier Picquart and retain Esterhazy. Gentlemen of the jury, a general has come here to talk to you about your children. Tell me now which of them would like to find himself in Esterhazy’s battalion? Tell me, would you hand over your sons to this officer to lead against the enemy? The very question is enough. Who does not know the answer before it is given?
“Gentlemen of the jury, I have done. We have passed through terrible experiences in this century. We have known glory and disaster in every form, we are even at this moment face to face with the unknown. Fears and hopes encompass us around. Grasp the opportunity as we ourselves have grasped it. Be masters of your own destinies. A people sitting in judgment on itself is a noble thing. A stirring scene also is a people deciding on its own future. Your task, gentlemen of the jury, is to pronounce a verdict less upon us than upon yourselves. We are appearing before you. You will appear before history.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR (II)
This trial of Zola and l’Aurore was the greatest crisis in the long succession of crises which centred themselves round Dreyfus. The more serious the evidence against the conduct of the Court Martial and the honour of the army, the more truculent became the attitude of the militarists, Catholics, anti-Semites and their following. Passion swept away every vestige of judgment or reason. There was no pretence of fair play to the defendants. Inside the Court, which was packed to overflowing, inarticulate roars came from the audience when any telling argument or conclusive piece of testimony was put in on the side of truth and justice. Outside, an infuriated mob of reactionists demanded the lives of the accused. The smell of blood was in the air. The likelihood of organised massacre grew more obvious every day. Clemenceau told me himself—and he does not know what fear is—that if Zola had been acquitted, instead of being condemned, the Dreyfusards present would have been slaughtered in court.
How determined the whole unscrupulous and desperate clique were to carry their defence of injustice to the last ditch was displayed when M. Brisson, the President of the Republic, himself a man credited with austere probity and cool courage, was forced by them to authorise proceedings against Colonel Picquart, because he had offered the highest personage in France to help him to discover the truth. Picquart was therefore to be victimised still further: likewise for the honour of the army! He was duly incarcerated and degraded. France herself was being found guilty and cashiered by the persecution of this high-minded and courageous colonel. Esterhazy runs away when his treachery and forgeries are finally exposed. Clemenceau and the Dreyfusards are willing that he should have a safe-conduct back again, if his coming will help to manifest the truth. A very different attitude towards a culprit convicted, not by a secret Court Martial, but by his own public actions and admissions. Yet General Gonse and the General Staff were ready at first to aid and support Colonel Picquart in exposing Major Esterhazy, as only a German spy, in constant communication and collusion with Colonel Schwartzkopfen, acting on behalf of the German Army and the German Government. Esterhazy was no direct agent of the French Staff! When, however, it was discovered that Colonel Picquart’s investigations went far to clear Captain Dreyfus altogether, and proved that he had at any rate been condemned on a forged document, then Picquart himself was to be treated as a criminal, unless he suppressed the truth at once, and held his tongue for ever.
And so this extraordinary case was now being tried in the open street before the public of France and of the world—for every civilised nation followed the changes and chances of Dreyfus’s martyrdom—and so day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, Clemenceau, Scheurer-Kestner, Jaurès and the Socialists fought on for a re-trial. The highest Court of judicature in France, worthy of its history, accorded the right of appeal. A sense of doubt was beginning to creep through the community. Thereupon, the Generals, their Church, their Press, their Mob, their Army, began afresh a very devil dance of organised forgery, calumny, perjury, vituperation, attempted murder and concomitant infamies.
Looking back at that period of desperate antagonism, it seems strange that open conflict should have been averted. It was no fault of the General Staff and its myrmidons that it did not break out. That such a result of their campaign of injustice and provocation would have been welcomed by many of the chiefs of the French Army is beyond question. At more than one juncture the outlook was so threatening that two, if not three, pretenders to the throne of France were in the country at the same time. Things did not take the turn they expected, and they went off again. All this was known, of course, to Clemenceau, who was also well aware that a great deal more lay behind the Dreyfus affair than the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus. Nor did the fact by any means escape him that those semi-occult ecclesiastical influences which had been against him all his life, not for personal reasons, but because he was a Radical, a free-thinker and a champion of free speech, a free press, secular and gratuitous education, and separation of Church and State—that those hidden powers were at work behind the General Staff in the Dreyfus case in the hope of gaining ground on a side issue which they were losing steadily on the main field of battle.
This it was which made the collision between the two opposing forces so critical an event for France. This, too, accounted for the desperation of the losing party.
The Jesuits of the Dreyfus affair had none of the diabolical far-seeing coolness of the type represented by the Père Rodin in Eugène Sue’s Wandering Jew. They were infuriated fanatics whose unreasoning anxiety to torture and burn their heretic opponents was reflected in the blundering mendacity and undisguised hatred of their tools of the military Staff. Hence, in the long run, they delivered themselves into the hands of the Frenchmen of the future—Zola, Jaurès, Picquart and Clemenceau. Clemenceau’s daily articles, which constituted the most formidable barrage on behalf of Dreyfus, make up five closely printed volumes. They are full of life and fire; but they are full also of crushing argument enforced with irony and sarcasm and illustrated by telling references to recent history. Abuse and misrepresentation could not permanently hold their own in a discussion thus conducted. Forgery and perjury when brought home to the real criminals necessarily made their case worse. Nothing is more surprising than the lack of dexterity and acumen on the part of the reactionary forces. They forgot that a bludgeon is a poor weapon against a rapier in the hand of an expert.
Thus it came about that after a long contest, whose interest, even for outsiders, was maintained throughout by tragical incidents such as the suicide of Colonel Henry—the forger for esprit de corps as Esterhazy was the forger for money and power—the attempted poisoning of Picquart and the attack upon Labori, a re-trial was forced from the Government of the day. The names of the chief opponents are already forgotten, such minor actors and apologists of injustice, forgers and spies on the “right side” were never remembered. Who now cares whether the petit bleu was written by Schwartzkopfen or not? Who can recall what Major Lauth did or bore witness to? The trail of the serpent is over them all. That is what the world bears in mind to-day. The broad features of the drama are recorded on the cinema film of history. The faces and characters of the villains of the piece are already blotted out. Only the heroes of the conflict remain. And of these heroes Clemenceau might fairly claim to be the chief. The re-trial at Rennes was, when all is said, mainly his work.
What a re-trial it was! The Court was still a Court Martial. The president of the court, Colonel Jouaust, was still a violently prejudiced officer. The judges behind him were all inspired by that fatal esprit de corps which accepts and acts upon the Jesuit motto that the end justifies the means, where the interests of a particular set of men are concerned. In fact, the combination in favour of military injustice remained what it had been throughout: a body resolved that, come what might, the victim of the forged document and other criminal acts should not be formally acquitted, even if monstrous illegality at the first trial forced a revision.
Nearly five years had now elapsed from the date of Dreyfus’s original condemnation, when, released from his imprisonment, he stood at the Bar after that long period of physical and moral torture. Clemenceau is not a man of sentiment: he had long doubted whether Dreyfus was really innocent: even the outrageous proceedings at the first Court Martial had failed to convince him that there might not be something behind the forged bordereau, concealed from the prisoner, which could in a degree justify his judges: not until the close of the case against Zola and l’Aurore was his mind made up that, “consciously or unconsciously,” a terrible crime had been committed. But now, with Dreyfus himself present, with all the old witnesses contradicting, more directly than ever, one another’s testimony, yet allowed incredible licence of exposition and explanation by the Court; with the evidence of General Gonse, General Mercier, Roget, Cinquet, Gribelin, Lauth and Junck cut to ribands by the questions of Dreyfus’s advocates; with Colonel Picquart brought up short by Colonel Jouaust, who had allowed all sorts of long-winded and irreconcilable accounts to be given by his favourites subject to no interruption—with all this almost inconceivable unfairness going on all day and every day through the Rennes Court Martial, Clemenceau seems to have been really affected, not only by the injustice done, but by the personal sufferings which the prisoner on trial had undergone and was undergoing.
Colonel Jouaust’s interruption of Colonel Picquart’s closely knit but passionless statement by the exclamation “Encore!“ was destined to become famous. It summed up in one word the whole tone of the prosecuting judges on the Bench. Yet as the case proceeded and the criticisms of Clemenceau and his coadjutors became still more scathing than they had been before, it was difficult to see how even a suborned court could avoid a verdict of acquittal. But this Court dared not be just. There was too much at stake. The whole of the chiefs of the army had taken sides against the prisoner. They were there to secure condemnation of Dreyfus again at all costs. The Court, headed by Colonel Jouaust, was forced to do the same. It was the “Honour of the Army” backed by Esterhazy, Henry and Sandherr against the character of one miserable Jew. There could be no hesitation under such conditions. Dreyfus was found “Guilty, with extenuating circumstances.” Extenuating circumstances in the dealings of a spy and a traitor who, not being in any pressing pecuniary need whatever, had deliberately and infamously sold France to the enemy! Not one of the five judges who rendered this verdict could really have believed Dreyfus to be guilty. France was more dishonoured by this decision than if the Court had definitely declared against the whole weight of the evidence that Dreyfus was a traitor.
Dreyfus was thereafter “pardoned” and released. That special plot of the anti-Republican clerico-military syndicate of Father du Lac, to use Clemenceau’s phraseology, had after all miscarried. As the result of incredible efforts Dreyfus was at last a free man. The world could judge of the character of his accusers and of his champions. It did judge, and that verdict has never been revised. A gross injustice had been partly remedied but could never be fully obliterated. That Dreyfus was innocent the world at large had no doubt.
Yet, strange to say, there are still men, who certainly had no feeling against Dreyfus but quite the contrary, who were not convinced. I have heard this view expressed from several quarters, but the opinions of two personal friends of the most different character and career made a considerable impression upon me at the time. The first was my friend, the late George Henty, well known as a special correspondent and author of exceedingly successful books for boys. Henty was a thorough-going Tory, but he had no doubt that Dreyfus was a terribly ill-used man and the victim of a foul plot—until he went over to France to watch the re-trial by court martial at Rennes. He returned in quite a different frame of mind. He knew I was entirely favourable to Dreyfus, as he himself had been when he crossed the Channel. Meeting him by accident, I asked him his opinion: “All I can tell you, Hyndman, is that I watched the man carefully throughout and he made a very bad impression upon me indeed. The longer I looked at him the worse I felt about him. I don’t deny for a moment that his first trial was abominably conducted and that he was entitled to fair play. I daresay I may be all wrong, the weight of the evidence might have overborne me as a juryman. But, as it was, I felt that if I myself had been one of the jury I should have given a verdict against him. The man looked and spoke like a spy, and if he isn’t a spy,” Henty went on in his impulsive way, “I’ll be damned if he oughtn’t to be one.” That, of course, is simply the statement of an impressionable Englishman, who, however, understood what was going on.
The other anti-Dreyfusard was a very different personality. It was the famous German Social-Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht. I knew him well. A man of a cooler temper or a more judicial mind I never met. As I have mentioned elsewhere, he and Jaurès, the great French Socialist leader and orator, were staying with me together in Queen Anne’s Gate, just after the Rennes Court Martial. Jaurès had done immense service in the Dreyfus matter, second only to that of Clemenceau. He had studied the evidence thoroughly on both sides. Like Clemenceau, he had been forced to the conclusion that such methods of defence would never have been used, unless they had been necessary to cover up the unjust condemnation of an innocent man, who was known to his judges to be innocent shortly after he had been shipped off to his place of punishment. Jaurès’s articles in La Petite République had helped Dreyfus greatly in one way, though in another they told against him, as the Socialists themselves were unfairly charged with being anti-patriots and even in German pay. There seemed no possibility that he could be mistaken. Liebknecht was just as strong on the other side. He was confident that Dreyfus was a traitor. One of his main contentions rested on the statement that there existed an honourable understanding, never broken under any circumstances, between civilised Governments that, should a man be wrongfully accused of being a spy and be brought to trial for that offence, the foreign Government which he was supposed to be serving should notify the other Government concerned that it had got hold of the wrong man. Now the German Government had never done this in any way, at any period of the Dreyfus affair. Of this Liebknecht affirmed he was absolutely certain. Statements as to Dreyfus’s innocence had been made by German military officers; but the German Government itself, which knew everything, had never moved. Therefore, urged Liebknecht, Dreyfus was a spy. But the German Socialist leader gave his own view too. “Have either of you,” he asked Jaurès and myself, “read carefully through the verbatim report of the re-trial at Rennes?” I admitted I had not. Jaurès said he had. “Well,” Liebknecht went on, “I was where I was in a position to read the whole of the pleading and the evidence day by day and word by word. For I was in prison the whole of the time, and the study of the verbatim report was my daily avocation. I am as certain as I can be of anything of the kind that Dreyfus had disclosed secrets to our Government. He may have done so in order to secure more important information in return. That is possible. But communicate French secrets to Germany, in my opinion, he unquestionably did.”
We debated the matter fully several times. Nothing Jaurès or I could say shook Liebknecht’s conviction. Nor was it shaken to the day of his death. I have heard since, on good authority, that more than one of those who had risked much for Dreyfus never spoke to him again after the Rennes re-trial. That may easily have arisen from personal causes, for Dreyfus was not an agreeable man. But I have no ground for believing that Clemenceau ever saw reason to waver in his opinion in the slightest degree.
I recall this now, when the lapse of years has calmed down all excitement and many of the chief actors are dead, to show how, apart from the mass of sheer prejudice and unscrupulous rascality which had to be faced and overcome, there was also an element of honest intellectual doubt among the anti-Dreyfusards. The presence of this element in the background made Clemenceau’s task more difficult than it would otherwise have been. Even at the present time there may be found capable observers who lived through the whole conflict, certainly not sympathetic to militarism, Catholicism or anti-Semitism, who are still ready to argue that Dreyfus may have been ill-used but that he deserved the fate to which he was originally condemned! This, however, may be said with perfect truth, that the victory of his opponents over Clemenceau, Jaurès, Zola and all they represented would have been a disaster to France, whatever view may be taken of Dreyfus himself.
In 1906 the first report of the Committee appointed to examine into the whole of the Dreyfus case was presented. It exonerated Dreyfus from all blame, declared him to have been the victim of a conspiracy based upon perjury and forgery. This report secured the complete annulment of the condemnation at Rennes and restored him to his position in the army, after years of martyrdom.