Apologie pour notre passé
Apology for Our Past
Daniel Halévy
I
Ten years have passed since the year that divided us, ten short years, long in our lives. We knew, while young, both combat and victory. They are fine memories: they leave us without joy. A few years ago, we could not meet without talking of our struggles, as old soldiers talk of their campaigns. It is a subject we neglect today, and perhaps we avoid it. Whence comes this? Whence comes it that, having been so happy in our Dreyfusism, and better than happy, so proud, whence comes it that today it inspires in us so feeble a stirring? That year 1898, of which the young men of today know nothing, will doubtless have marked us for life; we regard it with a sort of weariness, and our minds are not entirely satisfied by the memory of those passions which, raised at a single stroke, but surviving even their causes, persist after so long a time, and preoccupy us still.
Our lives henceforth will be short. We have passed the age at which the soul is supple, our memories are already our masters, we shall have no further occasion. Our great-grandfathers had 1789, 1793, the wars for liberty; our grandfathers had 1815 and the conquests, 1830, 1848; our fathers had 1848, the war and the commune. We have had this single affair — four years, less still, three, two years, in which to choose our friends, our enemies, to affirm within us those necessary partis pris, those hatreds, those instincts, which now govern our thoughts. One single and formidable crisis took us and marked us.
Victors, our voices are discreet! But here is something singular: those very men whom we vanquished today speak loudly. At first they were humble, they abstained from writing; we alone were heard. Then (the Mexican affair was perhaps the cause), we lowered our voices, hushed our memories, and for three or four years, victors too victorious, vanquished too vanquished, all humble, seemed embarrassed at having had to make their irrevocable choices, and embarrassed with good reason: for they had committed themselves to the hilt, and in such a manner that, in case of error, they remained disqualified. But now for two years the attitudes have changed. The silence is once again broken, and it is our vanquished who alone speak, who insult us.
What anniversaries are ours! Everything is a pretext for gatherings, banquets, memories of our memories. Look at our adversaries: they commemorate what they call (how humble they are!) national victories: Dreyfus condemned, Dreyfus degraded, Dreyfus a second time condemned. A paradox, no doubt; it remains to explain why this paradox, impossible five years ago, succeeds today; it remains to explain why we let these challenges pass without venturing a word of reply.
Why do we no longer meet, do our glances avoid each other? Why do we no longer talk, does a truth embarrass us? Let us know it. May this hard affair, which for too many of us was a dubious school, remain at least for us what it was at first, a school of veracity. Let us remain, if it can be done, such as we were, and let us celebrate our anniversaries by defining our thoughts, despite our weariness and even our reticences.
II
So then, we shall have been somewhat in the wrong. The novelty of such a doubt astonishes us; never were we so sure of our right as in those days still so near. But this dimming of our memories, what then is it, in the end, if not the sign of an unavowed regret, the effect of the feeling of a wrong? Let us accept the problem: soon it will surprise us less. For we recognize it and it is familiar to us.
How often we heard it, this question of defeated armies, of unhappy peoples: who is at fault? All the French liberals, from Madame de Staël to Prévost-Paradol, to Renan, have constantly pursued this search for our wrongs. They did not have the revolutions, yet they were always making them, their destiny directed them thus. Then, emerging from those crises, never sought, always endured, observing life more bitter and more brutal around them, ever debased, the culture lowered, they grew anxious, they examined the past: We ought to have defended the old monarchy better, say Madame de Staël, La Fayette, Camille Jordan. We ought not to have overthrown M. de Martignac, say Guizot, Barante, the duke Victor de Broglie, ill-reassured servants of Louis-Philippe. Louis-Philippe falls; Renan accuses himself of having been happy on the morrow of February 1848. 1848 is the date of a crime, says he; our chastisements will no longer cease… Prévost-Paradol compares liberal France, “a touching creature filled with sublime instincts,” to the Sisyphus of Virgil.
… Et semper victus tristisque recedit.
“It is this sadness,” he says, “which we all breathe, young and old, crossing this century, and it is in proportion to our patriotism and to our enlightenment that we feel it weigh more or less upon our hearts.”
On the morrow of the war, when it was so justifiable, if not so just, to accuse the Empire, and to accuse it alone, what clear-sighted energy animates these liberals and constrains them against themselves! They take a passionate interest only in their own faults. Renan publishes his Intellectual and Moral Reform of France, Taine conceives the terrible indictment which governs our thoughts, whether they consent to it or not. The grave conversations stirred up by these books — they touched our childish ears so many times — make in us as it were a noise that cannot die out, an incessant murmur whose melancholy renders us uncertain of ourselves, inclines us to every regret. Let us listen to that sad and sure voice, let us leave for it our pale certainties.
III
So be it! But the separation is difficult. From the first instant, we are tempted to write: the Dreyfus case is not a banal case; it is a particular question, and one of fact. Was the man innocent, or guilty? Such was the question that presented itself to us, and it had to be answered.
No, the question that troubled us was not such a one, or we should live in a constant trouble, for there are always in our prisons innocent men of whom we think but little. If by chance we have followed their trial, we grant them the alms of a doubt; if the sentence is pronounced against them, very well, we do not tire ourselves struggling against a legal decision. We scarcely retain the memory of their names. Let us recall, however, one Brière, who was accused of having murdered his children; no proof was brought against him; yet he was condemned, some ten years ago. Who concerned himself with it? A member of the League of the Rights of Man, not overwhelmed but surprised, wrote to a considerable personage in the League to ask him for a study of the affair and an intervention. “No doubt,” replied the personage, “the proofs against Brière are slight; but his crime is explained by the love of the land, the source of all peasant vices and of all peasant virtues.” Is it not in the same way that the nationalists said: “No doubt, the proofs against Dreyfus are slight; but his crime is explained by the love of traffic, the source of all the fortunes and misfortunes of Israel…”? This manner of judging, which had seemed weak against the one, did not persuade against the other. But what could our isolated protester do? He filed away his curious document, and lived in great peace. Months passed; once, twice, the newspapers printed a few fragments of the letters which Brière sent from the penal colony to his kin. These humble protestations of an illiterate man were touching; we happened to talk of them among friends. “This would be an affair worth studying,” we said; and we did not study it. — Some time ago, the newspapers announced that Brière was to be pardoned. The news was not confirmed. Doubtless someone is working and intervening for him. Who? We do not know. It would be interesting to know whether this, or these beneficent persons, were once Dreyfusards. It is probable; it is not certain. The man is still in the penal colony, and we do not think of it.
Let us retain from this incident that we are neither just enough, nor good enough, nor sufficiently provided with leisure, to let ourselves be overwhelmed by the idea of a particular injustice. We have, it is true, regarding a Brière, only doubts. But it is by doubt that all inquiry begins, and we attempt none. There remains then an unexplained difference between our ordinary attitude, which is inertia, and the fact that we sacrificed for Dreyfus two years of our lives, our whole lives perhaps; why this difference?
Let us not take the trouble to seek the answer, our adversaries propose one to us: These obscure condemned men whom our prisons guard, they say, are poor folk, simply peasants, French workers. And their judges are poor folk too, functionaries at four thousand francs a year. But Dreyfus was the man of a race, and with him his judges the men of a caste; for that race, against that caste, you went off to war. Justice was your mask, you were following your passions.
No, we do not feel those motives within us, we do not accept this explanation. The answer is too simple, and the question, as we had posed it, too simple as well. The Dreyfus Affair, as soon as one studies it, appears immense and perilous. It is comparable to no other. Dreyfus is a condemned man of exception, and what there is of the exceptional in him justifies the exceptional interest he inspires; the hatred of a people is upon him, he undergoes an extreme physical and moral chastisement; he is a Jew, his infamy is taken as a symbol, his defamed person defames an entire race. His case is different, it commands another attention, and thus we were right when we were moved on his behalf.
But let us take care, the difficulties press upon us: if such an unfortunate condemned man is Dreyfus condemned, under different species, these differences are not attenuated, on the contrary they are aggravated, if we consider Dreyfus rehabilitated, such an unfortunate man rehabilitated. To rehabilitate Jacques or Paul, that is an infinitesimal act, of no consequence. Who will have condemned him? Not even a magistrate whose advancement might be hindered, but a vague jury. An individual suffered the injustice, a few individuals with unknown names committed it; if we set aside pity, rare in our hurried lives, it is nothing. To rehabilitate Dreyfus — an immense trouble is determined. Who arrested him, judged him? Who willed his punishment? The General Staff of the army, a minister of war, the passionate will of the people. To rehabilitate Dreyfus is to strike French society, it is perhaps to diminish its patrimony of honor. Thus, in such an ordinary case, the motives for acting are less strong, the motives for not acting almost nil; we ought to act, and we do not act; in the case of Dreyfus, the motives for acting are very strong, the motives for not acting stronger still; both the one and the other, we shall say, imperious in differing degrees: we ought to have been prudent, and we were the ones who showed the utmost energy, the most intemperate ardor. Doubt should benefit the accused, says the maxim, and it is wise: here we are, in the present case, with two accused who must both be considered, the one, Dreyfus, the other, French society; if Dreyfus is innocent, French society is guilty; if French society is innocent, Dreyfus is guilty. How is the maxim to be applied? Dreyfus, France, the doubt is upon them both, which of them will benefit from it? ”…The doubt should have benefited the tricolor accused,” writes M. Charles Maurras, who poses the problem as we do here, that is, the author of the condemnation that was suspected, and that is again, society. The judgment rendered by French society ought to have been respected.” So be it, we hear these words, they indicate a duty of wisdom which we should not wish to ignore. — What does this mean, and what did we do?
IV
Let us go over this history again. Absorbed as we were by the labor of producing it, we lived it very intensely; it is not certain that we perceived it very clearly.
The books are not lacking, and it is a joy to read, for the Dreyfus Affair, at least (this prejudges in its favor), enlarged our best writers. The Histoires contemporaines are the masterpiece of Anatole France; the articles of the Aurore, gathered into six volumes, the masterpiece of Clemenceau, one of the masterpieces of journalism; the Letters of Zola, his masterpiece again; and the truest, beautiful in its haste, of the Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, one of the best things M. Barrès has found.
We possess two books by M. Joseph Reinach, in six volumes. It is a rare fortune to have such an instrument for studying years so near. It is remarkable for the spirit of justice and of goodness that animates it, for the firmness and the honesty of its documentation; it is considerable for the mass of facts patiently ordered. The other is the work of M. Dutrait-Crozon, wholly opposed in spirit and in style. M. Reinach composed a history, M. Dutrait-Crozon writes a précis, and he prefers, to the ample manner of his adversary, that of the Civil Code. He offers us a collection of dry pieces of information. Perhaps he hopes to suggest to the reader: “This one speaks truth, who uses so bare a language…” But we know that there are several sorts of prestige, the prestige of eloquence, the prestige of aridity; others still, for gapers of every kind. M. Dutrait-Crozon cultivates aridity. His Précis is convenient, and the alphabetical table that follows it, indispensable.
This library, which is not overwhelming, will suffice. Let us add to it, however, the pamphlets of Bernard Lazare, and let us say that one must at least leaf through the newspapers, Aurore, Débats, Libre Parole, the chronicles of the Revue des Deux-Mondes; the Temps (first quarter of 1898) is an admirable collection of conversations and open letters.
V
What does this mean, and what did we do? — Let us not undertake to recount the Affair in its details, multiplied to infinity, to the point of absurdity, by two years of polemics; let us not undertake to prove the innocence of Captain Dreyfus, the question no longer arises. Let us limit our essay to making precise the manner in which the doubts and the problems presented themselves to us, at the various instants of the crisis, and the manner in which they were by us either set aside and suspended, or accepted and resolved.
Let us carry ourselves back to the months of November and December 1894. It was then that the name of Dreyfus was given up, that he could be examined and judged. What happened then? What did we know? Of the trial, nothing; of the brief event, we received only one impression: too much hatred, too much secrecy; too much passion in ignorance. But the matter was grave and justified the procedure. Dreyfus was condemned. The judges answered for the verdict; we accepted being thus discharged, and subscribed to the sentence.
What was our state of mind? Let us take an example. (1) This affair, all of opinion, receives some light only if one can follow its effects in the limited field of an individual thought. On the evening of the day on which Dreyfus underwent the degradation, Zola was dining at Daudet’s. The young Léon Daudet was returning from the parade, let us write rather, from the festival, for it had been a festival for many. He described with a ferocious verve the fine military spectacle, the man held stiff, protesting in a toneless voice; the crowd, behind the railings, jostling the police, howling: “To death!” Zola had come back from the country and the air of Paris was new to him. He believed Dreyfus guilty, but the young man’s account affected him. He did not like the scene that was being told to him, still less the evil enthusiasm of the teller. They said: that this riot against a condemned man was without dignity, that the crowd should be kept away from executions, from procedures of justice; that its unhealthy presence authorized doubts. They said more, they made manifest, he doubted. He admitted, it seems, that the security, the repose of a nation could recommend the acceptance of an error, and he conceived an anxiety, writes M. Joseph Reinach, “the history of an innocent soldier who immolates himself for the peace of his country, so as not to unleash war by his revelations.” — Let us retain this: when Zola first grew anxious, the certainty of a young man and of a crowd, not the possible error of the judges, was the cause of it. We think that in our less prompt minds similar feelings tended to form.
Let us leave Émile Zola. He was unaware of the revisionist action which, from these first weeks, the same men who directed it to the end were carrying on. Our object is to know it, to analyze their initiatives.
Here is the brother, Mathieu Dreyfus. His case is too clear for us to pause to analyze it. “You are doing your duty,” says M. Judet to him, who receives him then and turns him away without brutality. Who surrounds him, who takes an interest in his effort? Five or six persons, a strange assemblage: the two prison directors who had guarded Alfred Dreyfus: these two men have seen the man and his kin persecuted, a wholly human pity has touched them; Maître Demange, the lawyer; then, a few Jews, moved by an impulse whose justness the sequel proved: a historian, Arthur Lévy, who soon afterward died; Théodore and Joseph Reinach; finally, a Protestant, Doctor Gibert, of Le Havre, who obtained from Félix Faure, his friend, the admission of the illegal procedure, and at once grew indignant.
This little troop soon grew. Let us learn how.
The friends of Gambetta are accustomed to lunch together, on certain days. Joseph Reinach in this way met Ranc and Scheurer-Kestner. Ranc, an old conspirator, the only radical of the party named radical, believed Dreyfus innocent and wished energetically to work for him. Ranc and Reinach together spoke to Scheurer-Kestner. Scheurer-Kestner had been ill impressed by the conduct of the investigation, reassured by the condemnation; yet he remained accessible to doubt. A man of Mulhouse, the last representative of Alsace in the French parliament, accustomed to follow and to serve all the Alsatian causes, he felt himself bound to Captain Dreyfus by a sort of moral protectorate; vice-president of the Senate, member of one of the families that have instituted, constituted, the Republic, he had rights and duties that were not everyone’s. He questioned Freycinet, who at once informed him that the judges had been convinced by the secret document shown to them alone. Scheurer-Kestner was neither indignant nor persuaded by these words. But he felt that the affair was very obscure, very grave to raise, and, without explaining himself further, told Reinach and Ranc that there was no thinking of attempting anything.
Dreyfus leaves France, and everything seems finished. An absolute silence, which does not suppress the anxieties, deadens them. Doubtless, in the high governmental personnel, the error was suspected (what should one write, error, iniquity? there reigns between these words a sort of space where the pen hesitates); the error was suspected and people were troubled by it. Ribot doubts; Bourgeois doubts; some embarrassing unknown is near them, they feel it. Trarieux enters the Ministry of Justice. He wishes first to be informed about this affair. He is told that Maître Demange has not seen the decisive documents, that the judges judged on secret documents. He accepts, like Scheurer, these affirmations. —
Other men, informed about politics, but distant from it, believed Dreyfus innocent and said so on occasion: Léon Say, writes M. Joseph Reinach; Galliffet too, it seems.
The public sentiment, in those Parisian societies where Dreyfusism was strongest, was wholly other. The analysis of it is difficult, for it was a negative sentiment, a consent to know no more than is exact, unique in those circles, a firm desire not to be troubled. Even “desire” is not exact. It was an inertia whose causes one neither knew nor desired to know. One never spoke of this affair: moreover, no fact being published, the very matter of a thought or a doubt was lacking. One was ignorant, and a prudent instinct counseled always to remain ignorant. The sentence was rendered, it was held to be good. This too, it seems, weakly, being little practiced in believing. It is probable that a number of Jews, better practiced in knowing the blows of antisemitism, thought differently. They said nothing of it, sparing friends, even intimate ones, the expression of an opinion that would have annoyed, displeased. The Dreyfus trial was excluded, by a very curious, wholly silent accord, from those Parisian conversations which exclude nothing. Two things surprise still more: Rochefort and Drumont favored such a silence. From January 1895, they knew — how, one does not know, but the fact is certain — that the affair was dangerous. It was fitting that an order should be passed to them: “Do not insist, make people forget…” “The name of the traitor disappears from their polemics,” writes M. Joseph Reinach;… To a woman (1) who questioned him, Drumont sharply forbids her ever to speak to him of this affair “which must be buried.” — Is this not a piece of gossip? But it is confirmed by the reading of the Libre Parole. Dreyfus is degraded, Dreyfus is jeered by the fishermen of Ré; no headline, no article in the first column announces or comments on this news. Drumont writes every day, speaks of many a thing, never of this affair.
This silence, this instinctive restraint, which the fear of finding, instead of the fault of an individual, the fault of an institution and of a society determined in us, was probably the wisest attitude. We observe it. M. Joseph Reinach was from then on pursuing his pious and cruel design, pressing Scheurer-Kestner, working to have the two Chambers vote the very broad law that facilitated the revision of the Dreyfus trial: he was alone with his friend Ranc.
Let us continue our inquiry; the secrets were at last divulged; let us learn by whom. Colonel Sandherr, head of the intelligence bureau in 1895, had said to Mathieu Dreyfus: “You wish to be informed about your brother’s trial? You will not succeed, unless all my officers are placed at your service.” That is what happened. The soldiers were the first divulgers. They were ill prepared for their new estate of Venetian politicians, silent and prudent sacrificers of men. To succeed in this trade, one must bring to it a mind very practiced, clear and sure. Such was not the case with our soldiers. Some among them, Mercier no doubt, Boisdeffre perhaps, suspected, as early as 1895, that Dreyfus was innocent. We think they let themselves come to believe that he was “a little bit guilty,” as we heard it supposed in these recent times by an old lady of indulgent nature. At the least, they obscured, set aside any conversation on an important subject. This weakness was fatal to them. It would have been necessary to pass a clear order to the civilians of the service, and above all to choose them well. But Paris is so large, Venice so small! They chose badly: an independent man, humane and truthful, an antisemite by taste, soft of soul, the opposite of a fanatic: Picquart. And the order was passed to him in unintelligible terms: “The Dreyfus affair is not finished,” Boisdeffre tells him, “it is beginning, the dossier must be strengthened…” Colonel Picquart did not very well understand what his chief signified to him by these words. He attended to his service, and remained ignorant of the Dreyfus affair until the day it was imposed on him by a circumstance of his work.
What chance, or what will, determined this circumstance? This torn petit bleu, not stamped by the post, stolen from the German embassy by a servant whom our agents paid and which, addressed to Commandant Esterhazy, denounced in clear terms, as if for pleasure, his commerce of treason — what then is it, this strange paper? A sincere document, truly torn, or a doctored document, directed on purpose toward the offices of the rue Saint-Dominique? The German military attaché, Schwartzkoppen, had known, since 1894, that people were watching his very table. Is it likely that he should have written, then torn up, so grave a note, then thrown the pieces into an insecure basket? It is not even in his own hand, we are told, but in the disguised handwriting of a woman, his friend. Is it likely that he should have entrusted such a secret to a woman who, by her connections, it seems, could talk? There is something wavering and unintelligible in all this. We would be inclined to think that Commandant Schwartzkoppen, knowing what game of little papers he was playing with a French comrade, did him this very bad turn of putting him, willy-nilly, onto an undesired track.
But all frivolities are possible, and we shall not write that, if a second fact, clearer, did not determine us in the same sense. And indeed, what other interpretation is to be given to the approach of Cuers, a German agent, who goes to find the military attaché of France at Berlin, and says to him: Dreyfus is innocent, another has betrayed… The arrival of the petit bleu, the approach of Cuers, are simultaneous facts (spring 1896). Picquart summons this Cuers to Basel, who repeats under interrogation to the French officers, then returns to Berlin, accepting no money other than the expenses of his journey. Some years later, Cuers was named at the Rennes trial, did not appear at the hearing. The fault, if it was a fault, was grave; yet he kept his employment. Why this impunity?
If the intentions behind the petit bleu are doubtful, the meaning of Cuers’s approaches is not. The German government knew the anxieties of a few Frenchmen. A Schlumberger of Alsace had questioned M. de Hohenlohe, who had answered, or had had it answered: “We have, in due time, declared that Dreyfus was unknown to us. The Emperor cannot rise up against a regular sentence.” Doubtless, he could not do it by regular means. But he could, by following irregular paths, satisfy an easy humanity that did not ill serve the interests of his people. He did not fail to do so.
What was Colonel Picquart going to do? He had sought nothing, he held everything. He had in his hands the handwriting of Esterhazy: it was exactly that of the bordereau on which the trial of 1894 was founded in law. That secret dossier, that envelope which he himself had carried to the judges, that last recourse of the accusation, he opened it (August 1896), and found nothing in it.
Will it be said that, even according to our own hypothesis, Colonel Picquart had fallen into a German trap? That would be to err heavily. He had the misfortune to be the cause of a chance which his chiefs had created. What power over Germany had they thereby acquired! It knew the innocence of the condemned man, the name of the true culprit. It could, at the minute of its choosing, weaken its adversary by a scandal. Was it not evident that an injured family, an offended race, that the whole party of the Revolution, would unite against the military judges? If our hypothesis is to be retained, it must be admitted that the minute was then well chosen: the Czar was about to come to France to salute the allied army. To discredit the chiefs on the eve of such a day, that was a fine partisan stroke.
Colonel Picquart at once discovered the whole extent of this affair, with an admirable promptness, an admirable calm of mind and heart. He felt the injustice, he foresaw the disorder, and it seemed to him that the surest course, which was found to be the most honest, was to outstrip all the agitators in speed, and to act. He said so to his chiefs.
I believe I have done what was necessary so that the initiative may come from us,
he writes to them.
If too much time is lost, the initiative will come from elsewhere, which, setting aside higher considerations, will not give us the fine role. I must add that those people do not seem to me as well informed as we are, and their attempt seems to me bound to end in a mess, a scandal, a great noise, which will not bring clarity. It will be a vexatious, useless crisis, and one that could be avoided by doing justice in time.
Never were chiefs better served than the generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse, the day they received this letter. They disgraced, by way of all reply, the man who had written it.
From then on, hypocrisy and feverishness mark their acts. Their sole resource, since they will not clear everything up themselves, is an obstinate silence. But they will not know peace, knowing, or suspecting, the truth of things, and this fear agitates them. They ill measure the power of opinion that approves them, a power of fanaticism or of inertia. They do not know that the trouble is in themselves alone, and they wish to bring back, or at least to reassure, a public that desires to remain ignorant when it has not faith. On 14 September 1896, the Éclair publishes an article in which the procedure of 1894 is related in its details, the secret document divulged. Some officer, some agent of the minister, had communicated it.
Should we not have been from then on justified in protesting? Yes, it seems. Secret documents were placed before our eyes, documents from which we had kept our curiosity away. Was this not to incite us, even to authorize us, to take up this whole trial again and to investigate it ourselves? There are two moralities, we are told, the one for the use of chiefs, which authorizes crimes, the other for the use of peoples, which condemns them. So be it, and more still: three, four, ten moralities, as many as one likes; but let them remain distinct! And if the chiefs let the irregularities, the forgeries whose accomplishment is one of their privileges, be divulged, if they claim to impose the defense of them on their peoples, it is clear that the natural thing, in the full force of the term, the normal and due thing, is that those peoples, judging according to their morality, which is simple, which is single, which recommends on every occasion veracity, justice, should grow indignant against those chiefs, rise up and strike them down?
We did nothing of the kind. Quite the contrary: as in other days Scheurer and Trarieux, we let ourselves be reassured by the allegation of a secret document. M. Reinach does not mention a single protest against the illegal procedure of which a first admission had just been given. Zola, even Mirbeau, solicited from then on, refused. Our prudent dispositions were not shaken.
Meanwhile, Mathieu Dreyfus, in despair at the waiting, wished to act. He published at last, he distributed the first pamphlet of Bernard Lazare. This vigorous piece of writing produced no effect.
It reached me from then on, my memory of it is clear. I took it in hand, I still feel its contact and its weight. I opened it, I ran through a few lines with a sad presentiment, the presentiment of all the hatreds with which those formidable pages were charged. Then I set it down on the corner of the piece of furniture where I had found it, and I turned away. Many people, no doubt, made, in those same days, these same silent gestures.
We turned away in vain: we were, unawares, encircled by the Affair. The newspaper directors, less inert than their publics, had been made curious about documents by the article in the Éclair. On 10 November a facsimile of the bordereau appeared in the Matin. For this new indiscretion, it is again, it is always the frivolity of the men of the General Staff that is responsible. That document for whose examination a rigorous closed session had been required, that secret document which Mathieu Dreyfus himself did not possess, a photograph of it had been carelessly left in the hands of M. Teyssonnières, an expert, and M. Teyssonnières communicated it to the Matin.
The handwriting of the bordereau was that of Esterhazy, familiar to many people. On the very day it was published, two persons, whose names are known (without doubt, many others), identified it, and held their tongues. How to explain, how to qualify, so grave a reticence? Is it not the evident sign that everyone was afraid? — Mathieu Dreyfus had this facsimile reproduced. He held at last an instrument for his researches, the discovery of the culprit could no longer be long delayed.
How did it come about? It is Colonel Picquart whom we must follow here. All the difficulties of the Affair then weigh upon him alone. Sent, from mission to mission, as far as the dangerous confines of those Tripolitan deserts where Morès had been assassinated, he divines what destiny is desired for him. His situation is poignant and delicate. Two duties claim him, the one human and personal, the other social and professional. “I shall not carry this secret to my grave!” he had said to General Gonse. And his death is being sought. How will he be able to explain himself? In what form, to whom? The documents he knows belong to the State. He knows everything, what can he do? He decides, however, he writes, seals up, to be handed to the President of the Republic after his death, a confidential report, a very simple exposition, very clear and very short, well in keeping with his mathematical lucidity, of an affair which seems to him the simplest in the world: Captain Dreyfus was condemned on a bordereau which is Esterhazy’s and a secret dossier in which there is nothing.
He would attempt more, if many signs did not warn him of a plot, either woven or tolerated, by his chiefs. His correspondence is watched, menacing letters are written to him. It becomes evident to him that preparations are being made to dishonor his testimony, if he lives, or, more conveniently, if he dies, his memory, by a calumnious accusation. This is more than he can accept. — He is going to spend a few days in Paris, and confides in his friend Maître Leblois, not as in his friend, but as in his lawyer. He arms him for his eventual defense, then rejoins his post.
He had authorized Maître Leblois to warn, if the occasion presented itself, a member of the government. Maître Leblois remained much embarrassed by his secret and his mission, when a chance informed him of the doubts of Scheurer-Kestner. He judged that he was within his rights to speak to the vice-president of the Senate, and asked him for an audience.
The publication of the bordereau had rekindled the zeal of Scheurer-Kestner; but he had discovered nothing and was beginning to weary of his ever vain inquiries. “I shall search until the holidays,” he said to Ranc and to Reinach, in the first days of July 1897; “and if I have found nothing by then, I give it up.” His two friends protested: “I am certain that you will, without any doubt, search,” said Reinach. A few days later, on 13 July, he received, he listened to Maître Leblois. He had suspected only an error, and discovered a triple injustice: the punishment of an innocent man, Dreyfus; the impunity of a traitor, Esterhazy; the disgrace of an officer without reproach, Picquart.
General Billot, the minister of war, had for more than thirty years been his comrade and his friend. Could he forbear to inform him? Should he hesitate? The idea of such a duty, of such a silence, did not so much as graze this honest man. Did he know the immense prospects that were opening before him? Did he measure the upheavals that his initiative was going to determine? That is doubtful. Scheurer was a good mind, not a great mind; his political instinct was weak, his views, in this regard, very limited. What was he envisaging? An act, no doubt difficult, of elementary pity and uprightness: “To tell you the joy with which I think of the happinesses to be reconstituted is impossible,” he writes to Reinach; “my heart leaps.” Reinach calls him “My dear Arouet…” Scheurer sets things straight with the noblest simplicity: “I am only,” he writes, “an honest bourgeois against injustice… It is not at all the same thing to have a heart, when the others have none, as to have a heart superior to that of the men who have one. I am only in the case of the former.” (26 July 1897)
Let us cite, by contrast, a letter from Maître Leblois, written at the same moment (14 August 1897): “One must strike only when sure,” writes this militant, “after having gathered all the weapons, having made sure of all the alliances… Those people will defend themselves; they will be without scruple. It is a whole world that will collapse on the day our affair has received its solution.” It is to Scheurer that Leblois writes thus. Does it not seem that two different affairs occupy these two men? “Here,” writes M. Joseph Reinach, “Leblois penetrates to the bottom of things.” What, in truth, is the bottom of things? Is it a matter of saving a man, or of working at the destruction of a world?
Scheurer therefore spoke to Billot, who asked him for twenty days’ wait. And while he honestly observed this order of silence, the entire Parisian press, or almost entire, was rousing itself.
And what then was our situation? The period of researches, of obscure progressions, was about to close. The trouble was public, it was coming as far as us. It was not the Dreyfus affair, of which we knew nothing, that arose first, but, before it, with no possible elision, that of old Scheurer, whose intervention, were it slight — and it was not — in any case generous, deserved respect. Were we to let him be overwhelmed? Were we not bound to show him, however little, our sympathy and our attention? Meanwhile, many a rumor was instructing us, we were learning the history of Colonel Picquart. He had been in Africa. In Paris, the police, directed by Henry, were forcing his furniture, seizing his papers. What blow was being prepared? It was another and different affair, the third; were we to ignore it? We had a presentiment that it was time, high time, to interrupt a sequence of unknown misdeeds which our long, too long reserve had so well, too well, favored. The aide-de-camp of General de Boisdeffre was asking aid of Rochefort. The demagogues were calling up the crowds. “Never,” M. Millevoye wrote in the Patrie, “never have we felt ourselves so much masters of the great popular currents.” What were they announcing as they cleared the decks for action? Did the insistence, the rule of silence hold good for us alone? The Dreyfus affair, the Scheurer affair, the Picquart affair, that was enough to move us. A fourth supervened, in that month of November 1897 when France suddenly broke apart. We came to know Esterhazy, the man, his life, the style of his letters; he was prosecuted, acquitted in closed session, acclaimed by the spectators, and a young prince of the House of France judged it opportune to throw his arms about his neck. Was the scandal of acclamations to the unworthy man to be tolerated, after the scandal of insults to the just one? We looked at those documents which the newspapers published: three specimens of handwriting, that of the bordereau, that of Dreyfus, that of Esterhazy. We could not ignore them, every day they struck our eyes. The handwriting of the bordereau, that of Esterhazy, were one and the same handwriting; we said so, and this simple saying was the cause of our being called traitors. From that instant our liberties were suspended, by public opinion in a mass. We had to let ourselves be excommunicated, or to humble ourselves before the fanatics and profess with them the religion of a savage patriotism of which Dreyfus guilty symbolized the faith.
Then a fifth affair appeared to us, and of this one France was the object, which took up again, which summed up in itself all the others, the Affair at last. The chiefs of the General Staff, who had not been able to keep their secret silent, claimed that the country should naively do what they had not known how to do, and these great orators kept themselves in the illusion. A frivolous and disastrous enterprise! The error and the injustice, divulged, producing their effects, were dragging the entire country toward stupidity or wickedness, toward stupidity and wickedness.
For in every injustice there are two victims to be considered: the one, the one who undergoes it, is perceived first; yet his misfortune is humble, it is short, it is but a misfortune and there are so many. The other victim is the one who inflicts it; his misfortune is not so visible, yet it is more formidable, for it is a fault, error or crime, a fault of the mind or of the heart, or of both, when both are complicit.
Doubtless, when we began to act, Dreyfus was far away, very far away. But he was far from it, very far, down there, on that little island where his soul, his miserable flesh, were tortured. Another victim claimed our care: it was France, whom a small number of men were poisoning with fear, with hatred, were ruining of honor; France, innocent, bruised through their fault.
The dilemma of M. Charles Maurras, which might have been exact in 1895, in November 1897 was no longer anything but a sophism. It was no longer a question of choosing between the repose of Dreyfus and the repose of France, for a prodigious chain of consequences already existed, determined at one instant by the human gesture of an old man. It was a question of something else altogether, of the salvation of the French spirit. The cause of its alteration was, we knew it, this Dreyfus affair, all obscure, and from which unhealthy gusts arose. Antisemitic anger, antimilitarist anger; fanaticism of affirmation, fanaticism of criticism; hatred of all free thought, hatred of all mystical adhesion; humanitarian fury, patriotic fury; hatred and fanaticism of every kind, all of it nothing but anger, fanaticism, hatred, intoxication or fury. What remedy for this evil? We saw but one: to go to the source, to purify the very depths. People did not know: that is the source of all the violences. It was necessary to know: not to take vengeance nor to punish, but to restore clarity, and, through it, in the masses some peace, in the elites some serenity.
Let us put ourselves back, by the consideration of an example, into the reality of those times. Here is Émile Duclaux, who had so great a heart, so great a mind. From November 1897, he experiences an emotion whose motives he scarcely grasps. “It must be very grave,” he says to a friend, “for I no longer sleep.” Scheurer-Kestner asks his aid: could he not express, as a man of science, his opinion on the manner in which the facts are presented in the act of accusation that was brought against Dreyfus? Duclaux does not refuse, he writes his first letter. “I think quite simply that if, in the scientific questions we have to resolve, we directed our investigation as it seems to have been directed in this affair, it would be by sheer chance that we arrived at the truth…” Duclaux recounted in a familiar letter the instant of his decision. Let us transcribe these intimate details:
I still see myself going back up, toward the noon hour, the rue d’Assas, with in my hand my letter to Scheurer-Kestner, which has mixed me up in the affair, and saying to myself all along the way: “My friend, you are putting it in the post, this thing you are undertaking, and which you cannot interrupt, will lead you perhaps, once done, very far.” I did not, however, take a step backward, and I had a sigh of relief when my letter was in the hands of my friend Appell, to whom I was going to carry it. (1)
This step did indeed lead him very far, as far as exhaustion and death. — Thus began, in many a peaceful house, by a letter dispatched, an invitation declined, a hand held out and not clasped, that singular revolution, the most exactly religious, perhaps, of all the wars of religion, in which so many men, without shedding their blood, gave their lives.
VI
And let us say it, for it is so well forgotten that we should risk forgetting it ourselves; let us repeat, let us protest, that we were surprised in the sweetest part of our youth, our lives turned aside, ourselves forever altered, robbed of that calm which every civilized country owes to its children, while we were resting, listening, working, in excellent dispositions, in the most entire wisdom, tolerance and good will of thought.
For this outrage of which France, with us, is the victim, we hold responsible the high bourgeoisie complaisant to the Jesuits, indulgent to the fomenters of antisemitic demagogy; and, whatever the wrongs of which we may, upon examination, confess ourselves guilty, we shall not forget that one. It is not ours, it comes first.
Let us try to retrace those vanished dispositions.
M. Charles Maurras, when he speaks of those times already ill grasped, denounces a grave trouble, stirred up by Tolstoy, Ibsen, Maeterlinck. No doubt, such a trouble existed, but we did not feel it, in ourselves, around us, as either intense or fatal. Whatever it seemed, these contributions interested, they did not draw us along; Nietzsche, the last of the foreign masters, opposed himself to Tolstoy and led one back, himself, toward the classical disciplines.
Ibsen instructed M. de Curel, but did not prevent M. Donnay from writing Amants. Tolstoy taught the young Romain Rolland the art of telling a story grandly and simply, but did not persuade him to be a sectarian. And when our poor Charles-Louis Philippe grew exalted in discovering Dostoyevsky, he cultivated, he did not deform, that admirable sensibility just now broken. France was beginning to give us his most beautiful books; Barrès, master of his language after hard work, was publishing his definitive works: such were our masters. The first verses of Fernand Gregh, measured and charming, signified the break with the decadent and symbolist fancies. Charles Guérin was writing his poems. We read the essays of Maurras, by whom we loved to let ourselves be led behind the walls of Antibes. And was it not then, on the eve of our crisis, that we recited among ourselves, or copied one for another, the verses of two young women today illustrious?
The boatman who took from me the obol for the crossing And who never speaks to the shades he conducts…
Those were not barbarous times, the times in which one met a young woman to write in such a style, a young woman to admire it. What words did we listen to? The word of a Degas, vehement, wise; the word of a France, light, robust. The renaissance of French taste, today manifest, was announcing itself from then on, not spoiled by a pernicious stiffening of formulas. All rumor of civil war being absent, we were preparing to collaborate in the maintenance of a culture which was our heritage, our passion, our happiness; and we believed ourselves sure of living without hatred.
The separation took place in an instant. Within the Parisian bourgeoisie, alone capable of grasping promptly an affair so numerous in its details, so subtle in its nuances, each family was, within a few days, at its post, sure of its maneuvers and entrenched behind its closed doors. For Paris has its families as Florence had hers, and its houses uncrowned by towers shelter no less warlike factions. The French spirit resumed with an unheard-of rapidity its classical formations, the one authoritarian and the other libertarian, that one believing and this one critical. The dead speak: M. de Vogüé gave this title to a novel he wrote then. All spoke suddenly, the living obeyed. The word is weak: the most exact obedience could not have produced gestures so prompt, so just. Men of the right, men of the left, their movements seemed to forerun their thoughts. They rose, they found one another again, they knew one another for the first time and lived without a doubt.
This resurrection of all the pasts of a people was a very grandiose event, but very inconvenient for many of those who were seized in it. The reactionaries had the easiest task: for twenty years, if not fifty, French intelligence had been working for them. Taine, Renan, Flaubert, Bourget, Brunetière, Barrès, such had been their masters — our masters; they had forgotten, we had forgotten with them, the history of the Revolution; but they possessed, we possessed with them, the criticism of it. They were not at a loss for arguments; formulas, commonplaces, nothing was lacking to them to confound this little band of men of letters, of Protestants, of Jews and of anarchists suddenly in revolt against a sentence of a court-martial, against traditional sentiments.
Our situation was different. Those ideas which we admitted, or believed we admitted with them, when we expressed them, it was with another accent. We read, more willingly than Taine, Renan. The one and the other have the same thought: they criticize the moral and political rationalism of the French. Everything that is of the soul, says Renan, remains unresolved, and the myths are our recourse. Everything that is social, says Taine, is likewise unresolved, and the traditions are the recourse of peoples. Renan approves him. But Taine never lets himself be seduced by it. He had crossed the four months of eighteen hundred and forty-eight in a movement of sympathy, reading Marcus Aurelius and trying to calm his friend Paradol. A Jansenism without Grace, a Calvinism without God, a rationalism without Revolution, such was his instinctive attitude. He expected nothing from men. Renan, on the contrary, had let himself be touched by the hope of a humanity governed by reason, enlightened as to its destinies. He could modify his thoughts, but his heart did not change. From the Essais de critique to the last discourses, his work is an attack on the revolutionary procedures, on the Jacobin destructions; but as for the spirit of the eighteenth century — no. Taine seems above all impatient to preserve, by the force of his indictment, the old order which perpetuates in a small number of families a certain elevation of taste and of manners, a certain restraint of acts, some decency. His efforts seem sometimes more modest still: he prizes order for order’s sake, material security, and his work would have succeeded less, had it not drawn inspiration from passions sometimes rather base, that is to say, very commonly acting upon souls, and, to name the ugliest, fear. The Réforme of Renan is a book as strong as the Origines of Taine, as vehement, but purer. Taine is, by his ancestry, a petty bourgeois of the provinces; Renan is of an adventurous and poor family, of noble race and as it were over-ennobled by the long-respected disciplines of the faith. When he considers the degeneration of his country, Renan grows sad but is not frightened; Taine experiences at once the sadness which is a pure sentiment and the fright which makes him lose his head, whence the greater force, the better assured direction, but the, to our taste, inferior authority of the warnings he gives.
If Renan wishes to reform this France in disorder, if he comes to set in order the unhappy people, it is in order to perpetuate in its order the ideal which is, in the end, that of the eighteenth century: the generosity of the heart, the clarity of ideas. He writes, almost at the same time as his severe Réforme, his utopia (Taine never conceived one), and it is scholars whom he proposes for the conduct of humanity. No doubt, they are neither elected by the people, nor, it seems, loved; but at least they reign, and through them reason. Montesquieu, Turgot, d’Alembert, those encyclopedists who fashioned the soul of the eighteenth century (Rousseau only heated the end of it), never does he denounce their mastery. As a historian, an observer of the past, Renan is inflexible. He does not cease to perceive and to show the hierarchies succeeding the hierarchies, the dynasties, the military and sacerdotal castes founding the empires, and the civilizations bending when they bend. As a philosopher, a poet and a collaborator in the work of his century, he is less clear-cut. It does not displease him to think that the scholars will one day succeed in modifying the old politics, in ruining the ancient hegemony of the instinctive and believing aristocracies. Should a cruel event — the war and the commune — show him the tragic foundation, perhaps unreformable, that bears the work of men, he does not resist the lesson. Scorning his dreams, he speaks with severity. Let the event recede: another man appears, all indulgence to his desires. He lets things go, he crowns Caliban.
Let us recall those very meditated phrases which he pronounced at the French Academy in 1889. The orators of State were then solemnizing the anniversary of our Revolution; Renan undertook to judge it. M. Darlu read this page to his pupils at the Lycée Condorcet; for the University is not so official and narrow as one would wish to have it believed by those whom it has not formed:
You are young, said Renan to Jules Claretie whom he was to receive; you will see the solution of this enigma, monsieur. The extraordinary men for whom we have grown impassioned, were they wrong, were they right? Of that unheard-of intoxication, reduced to the exact balance of profits and losses, what remains? Will the fate of those great enthusiasms be to remain eternally suspended in the void, victims of a noble folly? Or have they, on the whole, founded something and prepared the future? It is not yet known. I judge that, in a few years, all will be decided. If, in ten or twenty years, France is prosperous and free, raised to legality, surrounded by the sympathy of the liberal portions of the world, oh! then, the cause of the Revolution is saved; the sorcery will have gathered the fruits, without having savored the bitternesses. But if, in ten or twenty years, France is still in a state of crisis, backward abroad, feverish at home, exposed to the menaces of the sects and to the enterprises of low popularity, oh! then, it will have to be admitted that our enthusiasm of artists has made us commit a political fault, that our audacious innovators, to whom we showed some weaknesses, were absolutely wrong. The Revolution, in that case, would be vanquished for more than a century. In war, a captain always beaten could not be a great captain; in politics, a principle which, in the space of a hundred years, exhausts a nation, could not be the true one.
This language has some severities in form, but in form alone. Renan asks for a lapse of ten or twenty years to pronounce a judgment which will be only suspensive. He will adjourn his own along with the legitimate reawakening of revolutionary ideas; never will he call them chimeras, nor, as has been done since, intellectual errors.
Let it be judged a soft manner of thinking, so be it; we say only that it was, at that period, the manner of many, and ours.
Thus armed by such a master, laden with so many doubts and so feebly armed with doctrine, what would we do in the brawl? We found ourselves suddenly ranged with the republicans, and the revolutionaries at our elbows. What was the true name of this companionship? Accord, alliance, league, chance encounter, necessary friendship? We did not know it, and the moment was not favorable to analysis. What were we combating? We scarcely knew. The army? That was not our desire. The illegality of a judgment? No more than that, we had tolerated it. What then, in the end? We refused to ratify a verdict imposed by the crowds, we revolted under the terror dictated by the demagogues. “If Dreyfus is on Devil’s Island,” Duclaux wrote in one of those intimate letters of his which we have already cited, “it is because the government listened to the cries of the crowd and leaned on the majority instead of leaning on the minority, alone capable of imposing silence on the human beast and of making the convention triumph over the natural.” To struggle thus against the basest revolutionary forms, was that to act as revolutionaries? We could say: in no way.
But that would be to plead, and we shall not plead. No doubt, this nuance of Dreyfusism, so well defined by Duclaux, existed, it had its very clear manifestations, for example when fifteen hundred young revolutionaries acclaimed the most aristocratic tragedy of Ibsen, An Enemy of the People. But the necessities of action were the cause of its disappearing into a vaster, more emotive Dreyfusism. The idea that an innocent man was being tortured, martyred in the face of the world, became for many of us a veritable suffering. The puerile lies which the important generals, the grave ministers, propagated or let be propagated to save the honor of a caste, filled us with horror. Thus the general expressions of our movement very soon merged with the traditional expressions of the French Revolution, of the humanitarian rationalism which is as old as human thought: The true determines the just, says the Socratic maxim; we followed it after twenty-four centuries.
The movement was powerful, we opposed no resistance to it. Was it weakness, aberration? Were we mistaken in that instant when we gave ourselves with certainty and joy? There is no appearance of it. If we were there, it is because we ought to have been there, and the repose of the day before was the illusion. The Revolution is vast, its traditions numerous. Here is Rousseau, Voltaire; Montesquieu, Condorcet; La Fayette, Danton; which, among so many families, is ours? Let us not doubt it, it is one of them. But we shall seek it later. Comradeship above all is necessary in a combat, and we bound ourselves very firmly to our own, to those who offered themselves, Protestants irritated against a symbol, jurists exacting about forms, women weeping over the martyr, good Catholics whom their own audacity frightened, Jews shuddering over their race, logicians revolted against so many paralogisms, skeptics exasperated against so many beliefs, anticlericals smelling the odor of the priest, anarchists the odor of the soldier, men of honest taste refusing their concurrence to too many dishonesties. And how, and why choose? What did the ideologies, the origins, matter? We were grouped on the occasion of a fact, and we had this great pleasure of having to attach ourselves to no one, for our band, scarcely formed, offered to every blow, did not follow the road of the prebends.
We experienced a great happiness, whose reasons were all very sound, if not all very sure. We were excited by the action, the waiting; rejoiced by the perpetual success of our dialectic; raised in our own eyes by the event in which we were mixed up.
“This has a tragic grandeur,” Duclaux wrote in an intimate letter; (1) “do you remember a like drama, played before a nation, with that liberty of the press which makes it that it is the whole nation that takes part in the drama? They are two choruses of Tragedy that insult one another. And the scene is France, and the theater the world. Truly, my friend, it is something in a life to have been present at this drama of a heroic grandeur, for, whatever the end it shall have, we shall be enlarged or crushed.”
The ardor, the pride that these strong lines express, we felt them too. It was an intoxication: everything that was not our cause had gone out of our thoughts. One of us would one day, by miracle, reflect for five minutes, and discover that this Affair was sad, that we ought, for the good of the country, to be afraid of being mistaken, and to wish constantly that a proof might be given against us. Interested by his discovery, he told it to his friends, who at first cast bad looks at him. (How we quarreled among ourselves! our adversaries never knew it.) He explained himself: we heard him, we admitted that he spoke truly. It was only a flash. We forgot, he himself forgot a wish moreover idle in practice, and we continued to be happy.
The confusion of ideologies should have put us on our guard. But we had not the time to be wise. We recall an evening in January 1898. It was at the offices of the Aurore. Toward eleven o’clock, a few anarchists burst in. They brought an improbable piece of news. They had just penetrated into a public meeting given by the nationalists; they had taken the platform by storm and torn the tricolor flags with which it was adorned. They were young men; they laughed as they told us of their skirmish, and we laughed too, far, very far from dreaming that one day, twelve years later, in part because of that exploit over which we triumphed and laughed, a French soldier would throw the flag of his regiment into the latrines. What did we think? Quite simply this, our memories are very clear: they are malleable, those enormous nationalist crowds that oppress us; one can pass through them, thrash and disperse them. Action dominated everything. Clemenceau, who had been called, a fine band-leader, always so gay, laughed, and his laugh was younger still than ours.
VII
Reckless audacity passes for courage; it becomes a need and devotes itself to its friends; prudent slowness for a disguised cowardice; moderation for a pretext of cowardice; great intelligence for a great inertia.
THUCYDIDES, III, 82.
What then, in the end, were we to do? We were young: we needed to be guided in this sudden brawl. What guides offered themselves?
I think of a group of very wise Frenchmen whom we were in the habit of listening to with esteem: Gaston Paris, Émile Faguet, Vogüé, Sully-Prudhomme, the duke de Broglie, the count d’Haussonville, Boutroux, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. They continued well enough among us that manner of thinking which was called, some thirty years ago, Orleanism. In 1835, they would have collaborated with Guizot, Rémusat, Cousin, in that Globe so appreciated by Goethe; in any year of the century, they would have found themselves at the Journal des Débats, with Taine, J.-J. Weiss, Paradol and Renan. Continuing so sure a tradition, we would have taken heed of their counsels; at least we hope so.
But they gave none. Vague remarks let us divine the human dispositions common to all, which led most of them as far as the desire of a revision, and which put the others into a painful state of doubt, of embarrassment and of ill humor. They kept silent, by a silence that would have had no end, had not friends and enemies constrained them, by vehement entreaties, to speak. Short words; memories, familiar letters will one day allow a better penetration of the secret of those intimate deliberations which are the essential of the Dreyfus Affair. Let us content ourselves today with what is given us.
The occasion was this. In December 1898, the Court of Cassation, at last seized of the matter, was investigating, and opinion seemed ready to undergo a solution it did not like. Then, a few nationalist professors founded the League of the French Fatherland. The true instigator, writes M. Reinach, (1) was M. Maurras. That is to say enough that the League was to pursue actively a precise aim. It is probable that it was a matter, from the first instant, of engaging the struggle against the Court of Cassation. But that was not avowed. The Dreyfus affair is over, MM. Syveton and Dausset explained to those they wished to draw in; it belongs to the judges; we ignore it, we rise above it, we want to wage a campaign against anarchy, antimilitarism, internationalism. This maneuver was skillful. It could decide men who desired in good faith to remain ignorant of an affair from which their honesty kept them apart, but who detested the passions it had stirred up. It was the French Academy that MM. Syveton, Dausset and their friends wished to conquer by this prudent road. They did indeed conquer it, and succeeded in showing that if the reasoning intelligence of the professors was with the Dreyfusards, the more delicate intelligence of the men of letters did not follow them.
Paul Bourget, José-Maria de Heredia, the duke de Broglie, the viscount de Vogüé, the count d’Haussonville, Albert Sorel, Ferdinand Brunetière, Émile Faguet, Gaston Boissier, perpetual secretary, whose name seemed to engage the entire company; others, of lesser standing, gave their names. — The management of the Temps had these gentlemen interviewed, and their declarations, illuminated, discussed, completed, by replies, by letters often very fine, constitute a document of the first order (collection of the Temps, first quarter of 1899).
These declarations are very moderate. They almost all repeat one idea whose recurrence doubtless lets one divine the artifice by which those much-desired adhesions had been obtained. “Those who asked for the revision have what they desired,” writes Cherbuliez. “They have no more reason to agitate themselves and to agitate us.” The tone is not amiable, but the substance is acceptable and sensible. “We take no part in the Dreyfus affair,” says Brunetière; “the settling of it belongs to the Supreme Court, we are happy with this solution…” “With regard to the Dreyfus affair,” says the old academic Crouslé, “what I believed the best was silence…” The duke de Broglie does not speak. It seems that he always preferred, even with his friends, on such a subject, silence. But perhaps his thought differed little from that which his nephew the count d’Haussonville expresses, who resembles him in many respects, reactionary by instincts and habits of life, liberal by family tradition, by will of heart and of mind. “This manifesto was, in my mind, above all an appeal to conciliation; the appeal does not seem to have been heard…”
Émile Faguet explains himself more. In the appeal published by the League, there is not a word about the respect due to law, to the magistratures. Émile Faguet knows these gaps, yet he signed. “To strengthen the notion of fatherland is today an essentially useful work,” he says… “You will understand that I have been able to reserve for later the examination of certain other ideas, so to speak accessory, although essential… so to speak, so to speak the master idea of fatherland…” But, he adds, “this delay cannot be long…” In fact, M. Émile Faguet occupied in the League a very effaced place, very ill suited to the activity of his mind. The recent publication of his fine studies on the politicians and the moralists of nineteenth-century France conferred on him then a very great authority. One may say that he did not use it, or that, by his indecisions, he used it up.
M. de Vogüé does not explain himself: presently we shall be able to examine his state of mind. M. Paul Bourget, absent from Paris, does not write. One divines, however, his attitude. Radically hostile to the habitual ideologies of Dreyfusism, but repugnant to all demagogic excitement, he found legitimate the contestation of a sentence suspected of illegality, and continued toward Émile Zola an old esteem and an old friendship. It is not certain that he signed the appeal of the League with good grace; it seems that his adhesion, very impatiently desired, kept itself waiting a few days; having at last given it, he was able to make it felt that it did not go without reservations. The Libre Parole was then collecting subscriptions for the widow of Colonel Henry; a certain Bourget inscribed his name on those lists; M. Paul Bourget had it printed, by the Temps itself, that no confusion should be made between that name and his person.
But the appeal of the League had determined an extraordinary trouble, and those who refused their signature, even more than those who gave it, wished to explain a refusal which seemed to constitute them strangers to the traditions of the French fatherland. Gaston Paris protested for them all. He had long since avowed as his own the revisionist party. We knew that the choice had not been for him without a tearing of the heart, we were grateful to him for his pain. “Paris,” writes Madame Duclaux, (1) “was, by his natural affinities, on the side of the glorious past of France; his nature, which moreover he watched over with so much mastery and irony, was profoundly candid and sentimental, and all his tendencies inclined him toward the party of the nationalists. How many times I heard him recite the prayer of the Chanson de Roland:
Ne placet Diex, ne ses saints, ne ses Angles, Que ja por mei perdist sa valor France!
“During that winter of 1898, hostile and miserable, — when friends quarreled over the futile question: Taine, Renan, present at this Affair, on which side would they wish to range themselves? — many an impatient mind wished to know to which party Gaston Paris would lay claim. And I remember how I saw him one day, seated, his face in shadow, his eyes full of tears, murmuring the word of Pontius Pilate. For Paris, the decisive point of the Affair was a search for truth; for others, it was a question of authority…” His friend Albert Sorel had signed the appeal of the League; Gaston Paris wrote him a public letter: “The omission of all homage to the magistrature, of the name overwhelmed with insults at once the most odious and the most ridiculous, is not the only one that strikes me. It is, again, against justice itself, against the impartial search for truth… Yet the love of justice is the sign at once the most noble and the most essential of civilization.”
Albert Sorel could do no less than reply: “I think of the morrow…” he said; and it is thus that they all escaped. “To think of the morrow,” the maxim seems wise. But, if one looks at it closely, it is a scatterbrain’s maxim, which by foolishness stumbles while looking far from its feet. Before the morrow, there is the very day, whose solidity assures all that follows. It is not good to foresee so much, above all in politics, where one foresees so badly. One must resolve the present questions. Now, there was only one in that January 1899, and it was that Dreyfus Affair, so vexatious that its name still rings disagreeably. All grumbled that it existed, all desired that it might be forever liquidated. They were right: for it gave an absolute turn to all our politics. A simple and square question of fact (one had to answer yes or no), bound by a historical chance to the vastest, the most complex ensembles, it gave to some the appearance of an absolute wrong, to others the appearance of an absolute right. It was urgent to rid the country of this affair unduly enlarged. But no: it had been “badly handled,” as said one of the signers of the appeal, who had at first declared himself for the revision; (1) and those gentlemen wished no longer to meddle in it. “Let the Affair pass,” said M. Marcel Dubois; “and we shall see returning to us those whom we have not ceased, despite the present misunderstanding, to esteem and to love…” Let the Affair pass: there indeed is their thought. M. Francis Charmes, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, sighs for its end. What weakness in this thought, in these sighs! Such Affairs do not pass, like storms, over the heads of men; they go, led by men, and have such gaits as are dictated to them by men.
Why did you not help us, or so little, so badly and from so far off, leaving us to be insulted, insulting us sometimes, you who, at bottom, were not far from us, nearer in any case, infinitely nearer than certain others who did help us, and who, by that aid lent at instants so hard, in the entire community of calumnies, of menaces and of blows, became our comrades? Why did the Ribots, the Poincarés, the Aynards, not try to impose on their party that revision which was counseled to them by their principles and by their tastes, which they judged necessary? It repelled them, no doubt, to arm the revolutionaries by themselves uncovering the villainies of which certain chiefs of the army had been guilty. One admits this repugnance; but it had to be overcome. For fear of a tumult which their recent action would have authorized them well to combat, those liberals let rise up a revolutionary movement against which they found themselves discredited by their inaction.
This fault is frequent. — Some forty years ago, on the eve of the war, the duke Louis Decazes (the one who was afterward minister of foreign affairs) put in print that King Louis-Philippe and M. Guizot, his minister, had they conceded an electoral reform in time, would have avoided the catastrophe of February 1848. He sent his article to M. Guizot, who did not reply. The war, the commune passed, that made a long time. The persistent silence of M. Guizot embarrassed the duke Decazes, who resolved to go and pay a visit to the old statesman who was still respected. He saw him, talked of many a thing. After an hour rather laboriously passed, he rose; the abstruse subject had not been broached. And, as he was taking his leave:
— Louis, said M. Guizot severely, Louis! The duke Decazes waited. — I have read your pamphlet. If I had done what you said, if I had conceded the electoral reform, do you know what would have happened? The duke Decazes signified, by his silence and a slight inclination, that he did not know. — Well, we would have had a revolution!
This story was told us by a faithful Orleanist, one of the most intimate counselors of the count de Paris, who knew how to be, from 1897, an energetic Dreyfusard; he is named Eugène Dufeuille.
We shall repeat it to the moderates who would blame us: you would be in poor grace to reproach us our violences, for we reproach you yourselves with the defection of your wisdom. We followed, in the end, the guides who offered themselves: a Zola, a France, a Duclaux, a Pressensé, a Louis Havet.
Appeasement, this last wrote, I desire it as M. Brunetière does, but the true appeasement, the one that would be given to the country by an implacable light and an inflexible severity. The historical bases of the French fatherland, I believe in them as M. Brunetière does; only I would call by that name a frank politics, an effective justice through authority, thoughts that think straight, writers who use the fine words only for fine things, and finally, — for it is part of our military institutions that we love with love and respect, — a lofty army composed of officers without stain. (1)
Let us say, at ten years’ interval, that at least this language was fine, this vehemence pure.
Let us return to Gaston Paris. Much has been said of those crises of friendship which were indeed among the most moving and singular phenomena of that great crisis in many respects moving and singular. They were produced around Gaston Paris in a very perceptible manner.
He received every Sunday. A very old habit gathered the most distinguished men around that mind so rich, that host so noble, who, gifted in the manner of a Taine or a Renan, his departed friends, for the freest creations, had chosen to restrict himself to strict philology. The salon of the Collège de France was one of those delicate organs of culture in which the divergences of opinion find themselves annihilated by the superior pleasure of disinterested analysis and appreciation. From the first weeks of the Affair, a trouble disturbed those fine gatherings. Gaston Paris nevertheless succeeded in making them last. But from January 1899, their future was decidedly in question: those who had adhered to the League of the French Fatherland withdrew. Albert Sorel, Paul Bourget, ceased to appear at the “Sundays.”
One alone remained: M. de Vogüé. No doubt, he had not wished to refuse the presence of his name to the party which, notwithstanding all circumstances, he recognized as his own; he had therefore signed. But, on the other hand, he bore witness, by his immutable presence at the salons of the Collège de France, that one friendship, at least, survived the disastrous ruptures that were then breaking French society. M. de Vogüé spoke of those days in an article which the Débats (1) printed on the morrow of the death of Gaston Paris:
I saw him suffer more than any man in France, he wrote,
and that is to say no little, from the murderous crisis that divided his best friends. He took sides in it with the impetuosity of his native generosity; having taken sides, he put into it a sorrowful ardor. Whatever the opinions of those who knew him well, he grew still greater in their eyes by the touching sincerity of his parti pris, by the courage he put into serving it. Shall one say, if not on the brink of this tomb, what must be cried out for the honor of our country? Above the murky interests and the animal passions, the bravest hearts of France have torn one another, in the night, with an equal nobility in the sentiments that their frightful conflict exasperated. — The grief of those black days has certainly hastened the end of our friend…
Yes, on the brink of this tomb, it was touching to speak thus; but it was elsewhere, and five years earlier, that it would have been beneficent to do so; we mean, in that very night in which the cruel blows were being struck.
An effort was attempted. On 24 January there appeared an Appeal to union which Sully-Prudhomme, and MM. Émile Boutroux, Ernest Lavisse, signed with Gaston Paris. The name of M. de Vogüé does not figure on it. Perhaps people were afraid to ask him for it. In those times, a word could suffice to determine the most painful misunderstandings, the most painful irritations. People kept silent; sometimes that was an evil.
But what could a solitary appeal do, in that Affair every day disputed, renewed? M. Émile Boutroux, who explains himself about it to a journalist of the Temps, says it expressly: “We do not form a league… We sign an appeal together, we separate afterward… We do not constitute ourselves to follow events…” In truth, a fine method, to call people, then to leave them in the lurch! Is it not a conceivable thing, a group of men such as those we have named, uniting to speak to the country, to tell it, as Renan wished and knew how to do on many an occasion, without the sacrifice of a nuance, the truth?
At least it could have been attempted. The benefit, not immediate no doubt, would afterward have been great. And from then on, it would not have been possible to call, once more, great intelligence a great inertia — τὸ πρὸς ἅπαν ξυνετὸν ἐπὶ πᾶν ἀργόν.
VIII
The subscribers of these Cahiers have read the Visit to Pascal, by Suarès. (1) Perhaps they have not noticed the final date: May 1899. It has, however, its importance; the solitude of Suarès stands opposed to the discordant Affair.
One day when the tumult of calumny and of invective had spread most insolently through Paris, and most troubled that injurious city,
writes Suarès at the beginning of his essay,
M. de Séipse, incapable of enduring it any longer, resolved to flee it, and went off to the country. M. de Séipse suffered, in fact, from the disorder as from a personal injury, which his age had done him; he saw the people both undergo it and conspire to do it. A deep anger devoured him to feel within himself the power of order, to know the will of it within himself, and to know that it must be without effect… Agitated by his thoughts, M. de Séipse resolved to take himself off, against the injurious tide, and he proposed to himself a walk in the most austere and most retired country to be found at the gates of Paris: he went off to Port-Royal-des-Champs.
It is probable that, half a century hence, a few memoirs will give to the historians notations of this quality, intimate and essential.
IX
It happened that we were victors. The Brisson ministry admitted the revision in principle; a commission began the inquiry; the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation was seized of the matter; then, the said chamber having been dispossessed by special law for the simple reason that it inclined toward the solution which finally prevailed, the Court, all chambers assembled, finished examining the affair. Thus, from ministry to commission, to chamber, to court, with a jolting but constant gait, we were going toward victory.
The direction was certain; but how difficult the goal still seemed to attain! A series of professional decisions had borne us thus far. All the acts remained to be done. The magistrates of the Court had judged according to justice, but justice is nothing without the state of a force, and how weak we felt ourselves, having for our only weapon against a hostile people that sentence read by M. Ballot-Beaupré! Madame Gyp was powerful then. She inspired Lemaître and Guérin. Félix Faure died, Loubet was elected; Dupuy, the prime minister, let him be hooted through Paris. Déroulède attempted his coup de force, and Dupuy conspired toward his acquittal. Taking that frondeur seriously, we dreaded the worst. For we did not know what our force was, immense but come from elsewhere.
I remember the precise hour at which I discovered it. It was in May 1899. Chance had led me to a provincial town. I had sat down on a bench, under the shade of a peaceful promenade. Behind me, a few men were talking in a little café. I caught a few phrases: they were speaking of the Affair. Three of them, Dreyfusards, wished to persuade a friend who was playing the recalcitrant. And I heard these words:
— The Dreyfus Affair, it is a blow of the Jesuits against France. They detest us, because we are in a republic. Their general, who is a German, had Dreyfus condemned in order to disorganize our army…
Then the voices mingled; I was sufficiently instructed. This stupid legend, hatched amid four absinthes, announced the future. I experienced a not altogether disagreeable thrill. A lie, at last, I thought confusedly, a lie for us! An immense force was therefore coming to us, the force of the instinctive sensibilities oriented by the myths, and that of stupidity itself.
Our adversaries soon perceived that the state of the times had changed. Exasperated to feel their prey slipping between their hands, ill held back by authorities that desired to betray, they attempted their last blows. At the weighing-enclosure of Auteuil, they insulted President Loubet for two hours. An instant of weakness could determine the most painful demagogic and military anarchy. It was urgent, in that vacancy of the laws, to oppose force to force, crowd to crowd. The socialist chiefs, in agreement with the Dreyfusard chiefs, convoked to Longchamp, for the day of the Grand Prix, the people of Paris. The form of the appeals is curious to consider. Gérault-Richard, an excellent journalist, held the pen. He did not speak of Dreyfus, whose cause was never popular; he avoided all revolutionary excitement, a calm day was wanted; he called the workers to demonstrate for the Republic, against the monks and the nobles, thus provoking, with a felicity that the success proved, the most ancient passions.
The workers came in immense numbers. The little red eglantines, which were popular for a few years, and gave to the somber socialist masses an air of grace and of gaiety, were then worn for the first time. Save for a brawl, which moreover was not bloody, there was no trouble. The workers, satisfied with their numbers and with their enemies fleeing before them, occupied with order and happiness, from the place de la Concorde to the stands of Longchamp, the magnificent Paris into which they enter so little. They went, came, covered the promenades; they rejoiced and made others share their festival.
Those republican and French crowds give off, in their best instants, a sort of emotion whose quality is unique; naive, no doubt, like all popular emotion; hopeful and benevolent. It appeared in all its force in July 1790; scarcely diminished, in March 1848; we were present at its reawakening in July 1899. It is a singular phenomenon, which never fails to move Europe. It introduces into the tragic history Christian impressions of salvation.
Nothing was so touching, very old Parisians tell us, as the truce of a day which interrupted, in April 1871, the war between Paris and Versailles. The weather was fine. The people at peace climbed, for amusement, onto the fortifications, crossed the sad barricades laughing. The gardens of Neuilly overflowed with lilacs in flower. Those gardens were pillaged, and in the evening, the besieged city, between Thiers at Versailles and the German at Vincennes, appeared all happy and adorned. “It is over,” people said in the groups, “an interrupted civil war does not resume…” But the next day, at the fixed hour, the cannon of Mont-Valérien recommenced the cannonade.
No doubt, had one questioned some one of those workers who were coming down the Champs-Élysées in groups, he would have replied: “It is over; there are no more reactionaries, there is no more Dreyfus Affair; now it is our turn, and we are going to be given laws that will make society just.”
It was very fine, those who mingled with those crowds tell us. Assuredly it was moving, since they were moved. We had been so much reproached with being intellectuals, handlers of texts in revolt against a people: we had the pleasure of being that no longer, and of feeling an immense people near us; but this pleasure definitively ended the first Dreyfusism, so aristocratic and human, Socratic and warlike. It was necessary to open the time of the instincts and of the masses.
Those instincts, those masses, let us not depreciate them, we owe much to them. A contact in the street did not satisfy us. We bound ourselves, in the public meetings, the groups, the congresses, to those revolutionary militants, those superbly tempered men who, working by day to earn their living, take from their nights the time for a civic labor, and too often exhaust themselves in ten years of pains beyond measure. They introduced us into their labor exchanges, their cooperatives, their very homes, and we thus came to know, in place of that bourgeoisie from which we were excluded, from which it pleased us to be excluded, that class hitherto rubbed shoulders with yet unknown, that working nation, which has its customs, its traditions, its heroes, its myths and even its gods. It appeared to us, at the end of our adventure, as the term of a long crossing in an unknown country. We made landfall in it. It gave us its confidence. We were happy and proud of it, and this happiness, this pride, mark the origin of a second Dreyfusism, less clear in its contours, more charged with life and with problems, less sure in its proceedings, no less noble in its intentions.
The popular force, saving Dreyfus, imposed a little justice. But its intervention also recalled to us the reality of another injustice, which is the most ancient of all, the most blinding and the most formidable, for it is engaged in the very structure of our society. We could not withdraw ourselves from this evidence, and we did not desire to. The true determines the just — the formidable maxim, brief and difficult as an oracle, imperious, enigmatic, still obliged us. We discerned the differences: the true, in juridical matters, is almost simple! But the true of human societies, are we armed to grasp it? The just, in juridical matters, at a pinch one can state it. But the just of human societies, that is to say, the end which it ordains, or the ends, if there are several, shall we know how to define them? Yet those differences, so profound scientifically, never go so far as to destroy the fundamental identity. There exist formulas of justice, there exist truths, and the true determines the just…
But this is not the moment to analyze this new alliance in its sentimental and intellectual detail. Let us consider the practical side, then imperious. The situation was difficult, few outlets were visible. The Court having ordered the revision, the Dupuy ministry, which had combated it, found itself without force, and fell. Who would succeed it? The officers were agitating themselves; they were exhorting, they were agitating their men. Who would impose silence on them? Dreyfus was coming back, an ironclad was bringing him back to France; would he find, at the landing, Guérin and his bands masters of the field? That would have been absurd. It was necessary to maintain order for the duration of the trial, to assure a rapid end to the affair we had engaged; it was necessary, in the end, to govern. Who could?
All the parties, save the socialist, having combated the revision, all, save it, found themselves, by the revision, discomfited. The little Dreyfusard group therefore alone had the clear view of the task and the energy to surmount its difficulties.
Here is the crisis, curious in its detail. (1) The country without masters floats, slack-sailed, like a barque that the winds abandon. Loubet calls Poincaré. So be it, he would have been followed, only a chief was wanted. Poincaré would offer to Casimir-Perier, who had persuaded himself of the innocence of Dreyfus, not just any ministry, but the presidency of the council, and the War portfolio. The idea was brilliant, it had to be abandoned. Casimir-Perier was a member neither of the Chamber nor of the Senate, and it appeared that Parliament would not accept a chief taken from outside its ranks. Poincaré felt the gravity of this first check. He persisted, however, and continued his approaches. A painful trial. He addressed himself constantly to his friends the moderates, he would have wished “to keep for his party the benefit of the operation to be accomplished.” It was a very honest, but very vain desire, for his party did not wish to accomplish the operation. Our journalists were handling him roughly, Clemenceau with an unheard-of vehemence, and they were right, for these gropings made the crisis last, and by lasting it was becoming very perilous.
Poincaré gave it up. Waldeck-Rousseau was called. He had pronounced in the Senate an admirable speech against the law of dispossession, and that act had given him authority over us. Waldeck-Rousseau understood perfectly that the crisis was without relation to the dispositions of the parliamentary groups, and from the first instant he conceived the double choice: Millerand-Galliffet. But after all he was a progressive, and did not wish to break with his friends from the first instant. He called Poincaré; that was to call up failure. Poincaré came. The moderates, always in his train, set to demanding, excluding. They excluded Millerand. M. Joseph Reinach cites a letter he received from Waldeck-Rousseau:
My dear friend, the era of difficulties begins. All accept to go with me, but this one believed that there would be that one, or that there would not be this one. This evening, at nine o’clock, all will be done or all will be broken. Whatever happens, nothing can be done if the friends (the socialists) do not accept the admirable man (Galliffet) who gives an example without precedent. It seemed to me easy to negotiate by taking Millerand. It has become impossible and I shall go no further than Lanessan. “Your friends” have the political sense. I believe them capable of keeping their word. Make it understood that G… not only covers me before the army, but covers the whole cabinet and the Republic, and that even before Europe. If they are wise, they will do, alas! as Jaurès says, the Republic in spite of themselves. But if G… must be vilified, this disgust, added to the others come from opposite points, permits me, me too, to pass the hand… to the unknown. I should like to have the result of your steps before six o’clock. Yours, R. W.-R.
The socialists did not disappoint the expectation of Waldeck-Rousseau. Jaurès, in their name, declared that they believed, that one would march all the same; that one would support the ministry, without Millerand, and with Galliffet present.
But the moderates, not content with having excluded, made demands. They wanted the War portfolio for one of their own, whom they designated: a declared anti-Dreyfusard, M. Krantz. Now, it was the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry that reserved the acceptance to itself, having at its side, as cabinet chief, General de Galliffet. The moderates held to all their views; the negotiations had to be broken off.
The crisis was becoming altogether serious. It was a matter of knowing whether the Republic would succeed in constituting a final ministry, or would abandon itself to the initiatives of Déroulède, who was waiting. Bourgeois was representing France at the conference of The Hague. Loubet recalled him. He came, very put out, very pressed, the time to excuse himself and to slip away; and went off again very quickly, to assure in Holland, far from torn France, the peace and the repose of the world. What was going to be done? Jaurès, Reinach, Millerand persisted in hoping only in Waldeck-Rousseau. Loubet asked him again for his concurrence. But he had left Paris. He had gone to General de Galliffet’s, at Clairefontaine, in the forest of Rambouillet, to thank him for his aid uselessly offered. It was there that Millerand went to track him down. The three men agreed to act. The ministry, in their idea, was constituted by them alone.
What an unforeseen assemblage, an exact symbol of Dreyfusism! A progressive disowned by the progressives, a soldier-gentleman disowned by those of his caste and his profession, a socialist soon to be disowned by half his party, were going to institute a government, to restore a regime. Let us reflect further, and we shall find that this assemblage, differently observed, ceases to appear disparate; that this government, instituted with an entire disdain for parliamentary usages, respects the real traditions of our Republic.
Waldeck-Rousseau and Galliffet had known each other in the entourage of Gambetta; they found each other again with an idea that Gambetta would have understood without trouble. It is known how solid and fruitful were the friendships bound around that man, preserved by his memory. M. Joseph Reinach, so much heeded by them, belonged to the same group. But he also spoke in the name of another group, that league of the three bourgeoisies, the university one, the Jewish and the Protestant, whose authority the Affair did not found, but extremely increased. Those three bourgeoisies had just contracted an alliance with the working class and its orator, Jaurès. Waldeck-Rousseau needed that force, as, in other times, Thiers had needed the masses that Gambetta led. M. Joseph Reinach negotiated the alliance.
This paradoxical, but living, ministry scandalized above all the deputies who recognized in it no trace of their miserable groups. It seemed bound to disappear from the first day; it is known that it was to last nearly two years and to withdraw without having known defeat, its whole program realized. The socialists hooted Galliffet and Waldeck-Rousseau; the progressives hooted Millerand; the radicals hooted those three chiefs who were not of their own; and the right looked on, letting the republicans destroy one another.
And yet, at the instant of the vote, there was found to support the ministry a feeble but sufficient majority. What had happened? We observe two facts: M. Brisson spoke. He expressed in moving terms the moral tradition of which he was the guardian. Then it seems that he had a secret authority: “He stretched out, raised his arms,” writes M. Joseph Reinach.
The Waldeck-Rousseau ministry continued a tradition: that was its force. For the ensemble of the republican emotions, of the republican solidarities constitutes very exactly a tradition, the last that remains to us. Where is yours, let us say to the right, who speak of it ceaselessly? We knew it in Chateaubriand, Veuillot, Balzac, and here it is very active in many a young man’s prose. But it is absent from the facts, and, for fifty years, has had no hold on our history.
When the Second Empire was broken by its defeats, a tradition appeared suddenly; France drew on it to defend herself and to fight still: that tradition was republican, it raised up a Republic. The 4th of September is not the date of a revolution. A regime collapsed, and France without a guide followed her instinct. The installation was without violence. Democracy reappeared in 1870 as the monarchy did in 1815. The 4th of September was the contrary of a revolution, it was a restoration. And, at the same time as that Republic, appeared the formulas, the songs, the men; a national spirit, insufficient to conquer, sufficient to save some honor.
And when, the war over, a France had to be remade, was it not one of those instants when the most ancient, the surest traditions return and exert themselves? The idea of the old monarchy did indeed return, but pale as a reminiscence, a shade raised from the depths of memory. The count de Chambord, who had the calm and the nobility of shades, represented it worthily. Now, the tasks were heavy. Order had to be assured, the German armies camped on twenty departments had to be sent away at the price of five billions. The royalists, who felt their debility, temporized; it seemed expedient to them, since those republicans were there, to leave them the trouble, then to intervene a little later and to gather the fruits. Such was their calculation, whose villainy was chastised. They had not even the strength to gather those fruits. Those enemies of the Republic, those representatives of tradition, in truth served three of them — one, legitimist; another, Orleanist; another still, Bonapartist — which they never knew how to reconcile.
Meanwhile the republicans were working and serving the country: there is their title. Our “traditionalists” pride themselves on not being intellectuals. They tell us so in twenty very well-written volumes. The republicans, who are not intellectuals, write badly; but they govern. Their force is their tradition. Their tradition is simple.
The crisis of 1897-1900 recalls in many respects the crisis of 1871-1874. Here are the three fragments of the old tradition, sadly degraded by a desuetude of thirty years. In 1873, the Bonapartists had a young prince: they have lost him. The legitimists, a sovereign: they have lost him. The Orleanists, an honest chief: what vague Philippe directed them in 1898? What men did that party which clamors for men propose to France? It seems that a triumvirate was designated, in secret committee, at Fort Chabrol, on 17 June 1899, at the very moment when Waldeck-Rousseau was painfully trying to constitute his ministry. The triumvirs would have been Déroulède, a republican; Guérin, an Orleanist; General Hervé (?). — And what offered itself against them? Three men: Waldeck-Rousseau, General de Galliffet, Millerand, and no other.
No, we do not regret our fundamental decisions. For one must consider apart the short instants in which resolution exerts itself. Here are two of them: the autumn of 1897, first; were we to accept that error which was being erected into a dogma, or that injustice into a symbol? No. We followed Scheurer and Picquart, we did well. The spring of 1899, next; were we not to support those who offered themselves to reestablish, after twenty months of anarchy, some legality? Yes. We followed Waldeck-Rousseau, General de Galliffet and Millerand, we did well.
X
Let us remember that autumn which followed the liberation of Captain Dreyfus. Paris, three months earlier risen against us around Fort Chabrol, danced several evenings in honor of our victory, and two hundred thousand workers, deploying their red flags forbidden until then, went to salute on the place du Trône the triumphant Republic of Dalou.
Toward the end of that afternoon, we found ourselves again, a little group of friends, at the People’s University of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, which we were installing together. It was five o’clock. The crowd was coming back down; at six o’clock, at half past six, it was still coming down; at seven o’clock we left, mingled with the inexhaustible flood. We were not displeased, but with our pleasure was mingled a little astonishment. We read the words written on the banners: Liberty; Equality; Labor; Solidarity. We listened to the cries that alternated with the songs: Long live the social! Paul Desjardins was one of us; he observed:
— When those men read or pronounce those words which we read, listen to, what do they feel? It would be necessary to know it, and we do not know it.
Indeed, we did not know it. If our astonishment covered, as may be, a nascent anxiety, let us say that it was well founded, for our triumph announced all our difficulties.
Nothing had been so far from our expectation, from our desires, as the exercise of power. Let us recall our conversations: we foresaw a long constraint, ten years of opposition, that is to say, of work; ten years to examine our thoughts, to prepare patiently, not the conquest of a vain authority, but institutions truly republican, popular and yet distinct from the crowd, restricted as to number, organized in the end, that is to say (the words have the same sense) aristocratically governed. We envisaged that period, not as an ordeal, but as a benefit. Our republicanism, for which the flash of a crisis had allowed us to determine the doctrine, ignored that entire organism, and was interested solely in the less visible organisms, no less essential, in which the elite of peoples trains itself by a daily exercise in the disciplines of civic life, and protects its liberties. “Demopaedy, not democracy, is my party,” Proudhon said. We recognized his mastery, and we loved to call ourselves with him demopaedists, not democrats.
This denouement, so convenient in appearance, how it embarrassed us in the end! We considered with surprise that astonishing victory, that sudden collapse of all that had been an obstacle to us, and that country at a loss fixing on us its naive expectation, its imploration of aid.
It was no longer a matter, as in June 1899, of instituting a makeshift power to resolve a defined problem, but of orienting for a long time that terrible French State, which by its nature is frivolous everywhere and about everything.
While we thus astonished ourselves, others astonished themselves less, and a number of men, who had scarcely loved Dreyfusism, offered themselves to direct the politics of which it was the origin (a Pelletan, a Berteaux, and, generally, the radical mass). What had been, during the Affair, our fears? We feared the advent of a demagogic bloc, ruining under its stupid authority the few liberties remaining to the country. And we saw precisely, at the term of our struggle, on the morrow of our victory, an eager bloc rise up beside us, form itself out of ourselves, and profit by our efforts.
What were we going to do, we Dreyfusards? One cannot say it without first defining, within that too vast “we,” some separations. Our troop having become an army, our name, even more than in the first times, covered very different manners of feeling.
Some (for example, a Picquart) were men of honest taste, of free mind, of humane humor. They had few illusions about the movement in which they were participating, and, the Affair over, content at having dissipated a demagogic menace, mistrustful of the next one, they resumed their old dispositions, their old sympathies, and, if they could, even their old friendships.
Others had listened to heavy passions, hatreds of race or of class. Those rallied to the new power and found themselves there more at ease than in Dreyfusism itself. The functions of State are offered to them, they seize on them, and here are our comrades promoted to dignities. A few followed them whose character merits no blame, but who did not know how to resist the pleasure of being victors, and to limit the pursuit.
Neither of these nor of those shall we speak here, but of a third little band, which we call ours. No doubt, the matter we are treating escapes precise definitions. The honesty of taste of the Dreyfusards of the first sort was not, we wish to hope, free of a little of the strange in us; but we do not flatter ourselves that we were exempt from hatreds. Let us eliminate what is not essential; let us say that we were young, curious of thought, without vocation for power; that we had few anxieties, occupations, friendships prior to the crisis; that we could not detach ourselves from that strange sentiment so dramatic and so gripping into which a chance had precipitated our lives; and that we experienced a very pressing need to rethink in calm and in benevolence what we had conceived in irritation and in haste.
What were to be the consequences of this Affair? It was a frequent question then, and many answered by enumerating all in one breath: “Mercier to the penal colony! The courts-martial, the religious congregations, the disciplinary battalions, suppressed; the scoundrelly laws, abolished; education, monopolized; the Church and the State, separated.” If we have a good memory, that was all.
What would we have answered? It is delicate to say, for nothing was less doctrinaire than our union. It was constituted above all by the pleasure we experienced in talking, by the confidence that helped us to find one for another the expressions of our thoughts. Brought together by a common aloofness from all the sects, it seems that we avoided well enough the peril of constituting ourselves into a sect against sects. And we hope to betray the intentions of none of us in supposing this answer, which is not doctrinaire: “Those consequences, we do not know them. We are working to know them, to know at last what event has crossed our lives, and what an emotion of two years will produce in us.”
Our little band gave itself a supple organization, and, with use, a satisfying one. A few of us founded reviews in order to continue those new habits of discussion and of correspondence that the Affair had created. Let us print the names of those team-leaders whom we gave ourselves: Charles Péguy, who founded the Cahiers (1900); Charles Guieysse, who founded the Pages Libres (1901). Let us indicate a third center, the bulletin of Correspondance and the Libres Entretiens whose conduct M. Paul Desjardins assures. Although he is not of our generation, he was never far from us. And let us name finally the friend M. Georges Sorel, whom since then we have read and listened to. — If there is some disparity in these names, let it be remembered that this writing is not a construction, but a relation whose object is our very disorder.
Each of these little organs had its office, its hours of conversation. In the evening, we found ourselves again in the People’s Universities, we met there the revolutionary militants. Each faubourg of Paris, each provincial town, had its own. Those little institutions, as long as they were active, were less lecture halls than circles of friends, of mutual instruction.
There was in us nothing but trouble and problems. We called ourselves republicans. It was a word; what was its bearing? It served us to express certain antipathies, certain accords of sentiment that existed in us, for example, our antipathy for the Jacobinism of the reactionaries, and our sympathy for that fine race of men, the French republicans of the nineteenth century, its workers so fine, so upright, the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires, the Carnots, the Aragos, the Quinets, the Chartons, the Bixios, the Recluses, the Courbets, the Millets or the Rudes — and so many others, whose descendants we had just seen at work: the Scheurers, the Duclaux, the Brissauds, the Carrières (we recall only the dead). But this accord, what were its bases and its terms? What did our recent faith signify, what was it worth?
The young nationalists, always very insolent, made sport of our indecisions and called us followers of “clouds.” Those clouds, we were warned of them better than they themselves, living, as we did, in an intimate manner, with workers whom no warning of culture forewarned against their passions. Was it necessary to turn away from them, and, because they did not always think correctly, to despise them? What pedantry! Those men, we knew them well; we admired their energies of heart and of thought, and we experienced each day how much we had to learn from them. Every somewhat lively movement of the soul hampers analysis and begins to engender clouds; so it is with all the movements. A confused love of humanity may bring about the destruction of the limited organs, fatherlands and castes, which produce and maintain humanity itself. But a confused love of the fatherland may bring about the destruction of the juridical spirit, of the necessary guarantees which the fatherland assures, against itself, to its children. Antisemitism is a very plausible opinion, and, within a certain measure, a prudent one; but it is also a passion which may blind even to the point of crime, and which must be watched over. People warned us against the sentimentalisms of love; well and good; but hatred has its own, of which the least that can be said is that they are worth no more.
People said to us: you adopt outworn formulas, manners of thinking very old; you bind yourselves to the old humanitarianism, you lose yourselves. We did not contradict those criticisms, we persisted nonetheless. For we were following a manner, not of thinking, but of feeling, that is to say one indifferent to refutations. We had acted in a worthy and sound manner, on that point we had not a doubt; we had, in doing so, found many friends who increased the agreeableness of our lives. We kept all those friends.
And what do the formulas matter? They are numerous in humanitarianism itself. A Saint-Simonian, faithful to the disciplines of labor, talked willingly with a Fourierist enthusiastic about the harmonies of attractive labor. What bond existed then between them? It was a certain manner of feeling, human and hopeful, tender and active, and which had the force to render negligible the radical opposition of the formulas. We felt it rekindled in ourselves, in its force and its confusion. We wished, then, by an incessant labor, to enlighten our instincts, and to govern the impulses of an emotion of which it did not seem to us, however clumsy it might be at expressing itself, that we should blush.
In what measure can we save it, apply it to the present realities, that sentimental force which is today defamed, which certain nationalists exclude from “integral” France, although it has carried high, one may say it in moderate terms, the valor and the glory of the French? The people (they are numerous) who, by the condemnation of a summary word, humanitarianism, set about repressing all generosity of heart, all aspiration toward peace and harmony, repress one of the moral riches of the race, and their force, their indelicacy are of the same order as that of the anticlericals who defame the Christian symbols and reduce their power. This Europe, for fifty years newly disciplined, hierarchized by the silently acquired supremacy of the industrialists and the financiers, this miserable Europe broken by the hatreds, how to safeguard within it an ideal of humanity? That was, or rather is to be, after ten years, one of our problems. We sought, and by our very researches, our attentions were kept fixed on that working class in which so many institutions seem to present the first sketches of what will perhaps one day be the forms of humanitarian enthusiasm, its conservative order.
Goethe, considering without willing it the French Revolution, had said it in two lines which we loved to repeat:
Alles regt sich, als wollte die Welt, die gestaltete, rückwärts Lösen in Chaos und Nacht sich auf, und neu sich gestalten.
While we thus lived in our groups, editorial offices, People’s Universities, other men, good Dreyfusards (most of them had not been so when the Affair was raging), were governing.
Shall we say that we remained without connections with them, that our relations were hostile? We could maintain it. Who, better than Péguy, combated the bloc? No reader of the Cahiers forgets his pamphlets of those days. Who, more bravely than Guieysse, attacked the Jacobins whom M. Combes led? Indifferent to the hundreds of subscribers who were leaving him, he persevered in a combat without glory in which his little review was nearly broken. He succeeded in the end, and thanks to him we long had the benefit of an honest paper, popular and very nearly free. At the moment of the Moroccan crisis, who, more vigorously than Péguy, did his duty? Taking up again a word whose use we had unlearned, (1) he wrote his cahier, Notre Patrie, and he proved, by the mastery of the use, that the word was his.
These facts seem conclusive. Yet they have not so much force. They are not worth as much for all of us. It would be convenient to have oneself judged thus on the conduct of friends chosen expressly, and we shall not make use of this convenience. Between the Combists and us, the affinities were nil or negative, that is sure. But there existed, in default of a sharing of love, a sharing of hatred, which suffices in many a case to bind us. The vanquished nationalists remained formidable, and, for some time, we wished above all to prevent their return. It seemed to us just (and it was just, we still believe it) to impose a penance on those men whose frivolity (this word is indulgent) had caused so many misfortunes. But this will remade us slaves of the fanaticisms, for we could do nothing against the one without leaning on the other, nothing against the nationalists without accepting those others.
Another bond hampered us. Jaurès was one of the chiefs, the true chief of Combism perhaps: what in the time of the Affair he had been for us. The number of those who followed him was great: they were so many comrades from whom we could not detach ourselves at full speed. We had militated together, that creates attachments, and to denounce a comradeship is to take back into oneself memories, and so to diminish oneself. When MM. Gast and Reinach violently repudiated the socialists, many of us experienced a disagreeable impression. What could we reproach them with? Had they not spoken their thought? Assuredly. But their past, what did they do with it? They struck it. That is grave. In June 1899, when Waldeck-Rousseau wrote to M. Reinach: “Your friends…,” it was the socialists whom he thus designated. An Arab proverb says: My friend has deceived me, let him be punished! My friend has deceived me a second time, let us both be punished! My friend has deceived me a third time, let me be punished!
The chance of a conversation, of an encounter, sufficed sometimes to rekindle the old comradeship. Few of us were absent from the funeral of Zola. We found ourselves there again, not a crowd (the Dreyfus Affair, in its nakedness, was never popular); but a little army, twenty thousand combatants, some old, scarcely keeping up, veterans of the Second Empire, who had been the faithful of Hugo, of Quinet, of Proudhon, of Blanqui; then their juniors, already graying, the Parisian radicals, unstoppable logicians; the anarchists, the aesthetes of 1892; the friends of Justice, disciples of Clemenceau, the militants from whom our syndicalists issue; and the last comers, finally, young men heated by four years of agitations, of demonstrations, of strikes and of festivals, humanitarian readers of Jaurès, anticlerical readers of l’Action, demopaedist and libertarian readers of the Pages Libres, founders of cooperatives and of People’s Universities — the generation of the red eglantine. What common thought gathered them? He who would define it would define at the same time the French Revolution, for it is she, ever mistress of her people, who pressed those twenty thousand souls behind the coffin of the dead master, of the brave and good man who had loved men, who had dared to believe them capable of instituting by their labor justice and liberty.
We shall not forget that day: the October afternoon was so soft, and that Parisian people, impassioned as it was, itself so soft, polite and deferential. Anatole France spoke: all desired to hear him. The multitude spread out, drew closer without noise; it glided between the tombs, on the ground deadened by the leaves; it covered them, it rose upon them, without brutality nor false respect, with a murmur of rising water, an attentive rumor that hampered neither France who was speaking, nor us who were listening to him. We hear his voice:
One can pronounce over a coffin only grave and serene words, and give only those of truth and harmony. But do you know, gentlemen, that there is no calm regarding those men bent on the ruin of an innocent man, and who, feeling themselves lost if he were saved, overwhelmed him with the desperate audacity of fear? How to keep them from your sight, when I must show you Zola, rising up, weak and disarmed, before them? That would be to be silent about his heroic uprightness. Can I be silent about their crime? That would be to be silent about his virtue. Can I be silent about the outrages and the calumnies with which they pursued him? That would be to be silent about his recompense and his honor. Can I be silent about his glory? No! I will speak.
The assembly, collected until then, replied with sudden clamors. France recounted the Affair:
Gentlemen, he said at last, there is but one country in the world in which these great things could be accomplished. How admirable it is, the genius of our fatherland! How beautiful it is, that soul of France which, in the past centuries, taught law to Europe and to the world! France is the country of adorned reason and of benevolent thoughts, the land of equitable magistrates and of humane philosophers, the fatherland of Turgot, of Montesquieu, of Voltaire and of Malesherbes. Zola has deserved well of the fatherland by not despairing of justice in France.
Let us not pity him for having endured and suffered. Let us envy him. Erected upon the most prodigious heap of outrages that foolishness, ignorance and wickedness ever raised, his glory reaches an inaccessible height.
Let us envy him: he has honored his fatherland and the world by an immense work and by a great act. Let us envy him, his destiny and his heart made for him the greatest fate: he was a moment of the human conscience.
Anatole France fell silent. An immense call, triumphal and warlike, suited to the dead man whom we were honoring, confirmed his word.
We went out, we had all cried out.
Ah, let us mistrust our allies, let us mistrust our fidelities, all is a trap and a ruin for the mind. We united ourselves to such persons, to such a party, and it was perhaps a judicious choice. Three, four years pass, the time comes when it would be good to choose elsewhere. But those three, four years, which have modified things, have not modified us. They have hardened in us attachments and rancors, memories of injuries said or received, which have nothing in common with thought, but which trammel it and stifle it: laziness, which is always against thought, leans upon sentiments almost noble, upon the fidelity that is owed to the memory of struggles waged together.
It is necessary to determine exactly that, from such a day, such a struggle has ceased to be active. And when the evening has come, let the memory be venerable or glorious, as much as one likes; let crowns be woven for it, let hymns be dedicated to it — but let it intervene no more in life, where it has nothing to do, save to hamper the new struggles that are engaged.
Let us often begin again the criticism of our friends, let us revise our treaties of alliance. Let us be concerned for our liberty, even should we be by that concern condemned to live a little withdrawn, a little confined. We shall not fail to feel some weariness: at least we shall possess the enjoyment of the ideas, of the friendships, of the intellectual air that we shall have chosen, and that other enjoyment, this one dangerous, a smoke of pride which, if one does not watch over it, soon degenerates into foolishness.
The end we pursue, which is, if we are not mistaken, the cultivation of the human qualities, the maintenance of a certain taste and of a certain happiness, gives to its competitors the fundamental forces. What are the ends that move history? It is the search for wealth, that is to say, in our century, for money; it is a desperate desire for repose, for better being, for security, in the masses humiliated by the rich; it is, in races, the desire for conquest or for independence; it is again, in the inmost of souls, that fear of the unknown which determines the superstitions, which occasions the cults. Such are the most common aspirations, and, if we wish to increase the action of our desires, no doubt we shall have to conspire with one or another of them; but to know where we are going, to be ignorant of the pleasure of going fast, and never to let go of the helm.
Let us often begin again the criticism of our friends, we wrote. This word is not exact, it is allies that must be said. People often speak of “political friends”: the joining of these two words is suspect. Politics is a brawl in which all the delicate sentiments are in peril. Let us know in it only allies, and the alliance, let us not forget it, in no way implies friendship, it is sometimes but a very subtle form of war.
Was that funeral of Zola the occasion of our last accord? No doubt not. It seems that all the Dreyfusards felt a common joy, during that week of July 1906 in which they suddenly saw Dreyfus rehabilitated, the captain promoted commandant, decorated, embraced by his chiefs before the front of the troops; Picquart, waking one morning a lieutenant-colonel in the reserve, and in the evening falling asleep a general of division. This fairy-tale denouement made us happy for a few days, few days. It was less serious than charming; it was an entertainment well regulated by an old Parisian, a lover of forms. The nominative laws, creating a commandant, a general, were suspect; and the verdict of the Court of Cassation, quashing the verdict of Rennes without referral, debatable. In all this, we discern not the working of the law, but the action of grace — the ingenious and muffled grace of Georges Clemenceau.
Shall we, on that score, cry scandal? But the Dreyfus affair was from its first day devoted to irregularity. Irregular, the use of the secret documents at the trial of 1894; irregular, the simulated investigation against Esterhazy in 1897; irregular, the initiative of Cavaignac reading a secret dossier from the tribune and making the Chamber the judge of a trial; irregular, the intervention of the parliamentarians in favor of Picquart (November 1898); Waldeck-Rousseau asked the Senate to vote a law that would have interrupted the action of the military judges; irregular, that second parliamentary intervention, which no doubt the first inspired, dispossessing the criminal chamber; irregular, the attitude of the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, absorbed by the “deep thought” (J. Reinach, V, 187) of obtaining the acquittal of Dreyfus; irregular finally, that verdict of the Court of Cassation, taking upon itself to judge the substance of an affair of which it should have known only the form… We pass over the rest. It seems that the cause of this continual disorder is the ambiguous character of the Affair itself, which is both private and public, which is a trial and which is a civil war. “One may say, in a general manner, that the great political trials are all vitiated by their very nature,” M. Georges Sorel observed ten years before the Affair. (1) The power of the passions, the extent of the interests, overflows at every instant the narrow path of the judicial procedures.
This theatrical apotheosis was our last festival. Let us not speak of the ashes of Zola placed in the Pantheon; who then attended that? The nationalists insulted the widow and the corpse; we did not march against them. It is that nothing was more unsuited to what we had loved in Zola than that parade of bureaucrats, that sad homage of officers saluting with a constrained heart. Such a protocol carried us far from the poignant funeral!
We reproduced in the Pages Libres a forgotten allocution of Zola. He had addressed it, on 13 January 1900, to a few members of the League of the Rights of Man, who had come to offer him a gold medal: “I think it would be better not to have been a victor…,” he had said. That was our commentary on the triumph. (2)
And from then on, our passions being diminished, we saw the state of the field of battle, France at last at the term of the combat.
Let us take up again that old book whose support we have already once felt, the France nouvelle of Prévost-Paradol, and let us cite this page. Does it not give, in its essential traits, the exact analysis of those degradations that have wearied the country for a hundred and twenty years?
Several enlightened persons who saw, without personal interest and without passion, the passage from the government of the Restoration to the government of July have often repeated to me that there was then operated, in the moral and social state of France, a sort of sudden change, fairly analogous to those abrupt modifications of temperature which the setting of the sun produces under the sky of the Midi; not that the sun of France was already cooled as at the close of its day; on the contrary, one remarked rather then a development of heat and an overexcitation of minds; what had diminished sensibly and without return was the feeling of the general security and I know not what aspect of grave dignity which still reigned in the struggles of politics, in the debates of the press and in the social relations. The institutions had changed little, the functions and the names of the functions had remained the same, there was still a king, magistrates, peers, deputies; but it was known, without one’s needing to say it to oneself, that those names no longer covered exactly the same things, as if the rank and the dignity of all had found themselves lowered by one degree by a movement of the whole. There was, in this general change, nothing abrupt, nor promptly graspable; men were doubtless worth no less than the day before; they were worth even more, if one takes account of practical skill, of youthfulness of mind, of the patriotic desire to do well, of ardor at work; but the soil trembling anew had shaken everything, the Revolution had resumed its course, and democracy, more and more near, was finishing drying up, with its powerful breath, the last flowers that the so often thunderstruck trunk of old France still produced.
No doubt, the France of 1897 bore less foliage and above all fewer flowers than the France of 1829. Yet it still possessed a fairly rich ensemble of concordant instincts, of memories and of hopes naturally shared. It is useless to insist on the lessening, the diminution of that heritage.
No, this outcome is hardly happy: let us not triumph, but let us not permit anyone to triumph over us. We were the victors of a civil war, a victory not desirable, we say it; this war was declared. We found ourselves drawn into it because it was declared. We found ourselves the masters of the country, masters without glory, we confess it; this mastery, did we desire it? We asked only for very few liberties. Our adversaries imposed everything on us, first the combat, then the power. Let them answer for the catastrophes!
But we exculpate ourselves in vain: our protestations do not persuade us. What discontent subsists, accusing an unknown wrong? All that we have said seems exact. Our writings, our friendships, our acts, were such. Our words, let us not speak of them. If people were to be hanged for so little, there would not be enough branches on the oaks of our forests. There is not what hampers us. What then, in the end, is it? That sentiment which we feel — and can this impression deceive us? — that certain wrong, what then is it? Is it a wrong of thought? Our watchfulness, on that side, was constantly active. A wrong of sentiment? Let us seek.
Let us fix our gaze, and we shall recognize this: we were, being victors, for an instant at least, touched by the passions we had stirred up. Reason, justice and love had conquered through us; through us the liars were disappointed, the shadows dispersed; without intrigue (we who were accused of so much intrigue), we had foiled the intrigues, the hatreds; without money (we who were accused of so much corrupting), we had carried it over the riches complicit with the bourgeois, noble or half-noble. A whole people, which the day before insulted us, acclaimed us, and called us, promised and proved its good will toward us. That people seemed happy, happy through us, and that happiness which we had given, we felt it. What was its source? It was the revolutionary hope. Let us repress the weariness of avowing that we, however little it may be, followed it. We listened to its songs, that is much. The most antique institutions had been broken under our blows, all the parties discredited, and a few hundred volunteer militants, united almost without chiefs, triumphed upon those ruins: the faith of the prophets follows them. Such an emotion does not go without ineffaceable consequences. Short or long, it matters not; it is a belief, he who has known it knows it absolute; it suffices that it has existed.
We did not approve the detail of the destructions, so be it; but at the minute when the attack was begun, the impetus given, we brought the concurrence of our joy, the sign of an intimate consent. Here are such institutions, this army, this Church, with all their blemishes. Yet they exist: so few things exist! and because they exist they are venerable. M. Boutroux was right when he insisted in an almost desperate manner with the reporter who had hunted him down: “Say clearly that we respect, that we love the army, our army, such as it is…” Those words made us laugh. It seemed paradoxical to respect, to love the army, such as it was, in January 1899. Paradoxical, and yet commendable. We did not understand it, and we moved away with a movement so abrupt, so tearing, that, though we may draw closer today, we cannot watch over, correct our mistrusts, nor restore that which, wounded, does not heal, confidence. It is over. The perturbation is irremediable, we carry within us those ruptures that break our very country.
XI
But it is enough, it is too much to accuse ourselves. Anger comes back to us with the memories, that anger which your injustice made enter into us, and which renders it so difficult for us to be just.
Men of the right and of the center, when that decisive autumn of 1897 came, you were the masters of the country, and you could, by serving it, make the Republic yours, just as the liberals, in 1829, could make the Monarchy theirs, by serving it. At sixty years’ interval, the occasion is inverse, but similar. It is not the year of Martignac, it is the year of Méline; it is not a regime of the right that proposes peace to the left, that takes the power from the hands of the courteous Girondin, it is a regime of the left that proposes peace to the right, that lets itself be led by a prudent man of the Vosges. The occasion of order which corresponds to the occasion of liberty that Charles X offered is not better seized. The left, in 1829, overthrew Martignac. The right, in 1898, overflowed and betrayed Méline, yet so weak before them. Fine adventure and fine success! The left succeeded in 1829, that honors a combat. The right, in 1898, went deliberately to ignoble defeat. O the warriors! they set out, crests in the wind, and have themselves picked up in the field, by fifty workers, ten pastors, thirty agrégés of grammar or of philosophy, and the Jews. — The year of Martignac has not been seen again; shall the year of Méline be seen again?
The conservative instinct has been weak in us, so be it! Was it then for us, liberals by choice, tradition, taste, to incarnate it? It is to you that this tradition was common, men of the right; you were to defend it by your acts, to honor it by your lives. You dishonored yourselves, you dishonored it. It is a misfortune for the country, we say it; what can we do about it? You ought to have thought of it first, and not to have dishonored yourselves. You complain that a past you love is defamed, and we too love it: the prestige it still kept, ten years would not have known how to wear it down. Confidence in the chiefs, faith in the symbols, such were the sentiments committed to your charge, and you respected them: you evoked them to cover crimes. You left us the country without a master, worse still, through you disgusted with all masters, disabused of all respect, of all belief. That was the first wrong, and it is yours; do you know it?
You reproach the republicans with their faults accumulated over ten years. You have the easy side of the game. The state of the country is unhealthy, we say, so be it! Would it be better, if we had tolerated your triumph? It has happened to you to conquer, we do not forget the sequels of your victories.
Let us take that year 1848, kin to our year 1898; let us suppose that the republicans of then, happier than they were, had known how to consolidate their power. What happens? We conceive a slow anarchy, a state similar to the present state, an inglorious France, incapable of waging war, moreover not loving it and for many a reason fearing it; powerless to halt the military effort of Prussia (let us observe, however, that if France had remained republican, the European reaction would have been less clear-cut, and Bismarck in Germany more hampered than he was), but not troubling it, effacing herself before it, humiliating herself it is possible, and perhaps keeping, at the price of that humility, Alsace and Metz. Moreover such a regime, generous to the universities, to the sciences, instructing the people, would have had its estimable aspects. “The republicans degrade France!” the reactionaries would have cried. It is known that they did not exercise that vexatious power. Their faults were avoided, others committed; the right governed, it is known toward what end. We can conceive that a republican regime might have led France as low as it went in 1871; lower, who could? And the success of the “Dreyfus stroke,” a crime more proven, more gratuitous and more stupid than the coup d’état of 1851, would no doubt have drawn a worse chastisement. “Where would France be led, in this array?” Clemenceau wrote on 29 November 1898, at the moment when the masters of the army, masters of the government, were charging Picquart with espionage or with forgery and were leading him to the penal colony. “Seek in history what was, in all times, for peoples, the expiation of the great public crimes, and say whether you accept for the French fatherland the worst catastrophes of destiny.” Let us recall who were our eventual masters, the triumvirs of Fort Chabrol: Déroulède, Guérin, General Hervé.
Let us leave aside what you could have done, what you did suffices, for you are never weary of inventing new faults. You reproach us with being weak against those who preach indiscipline to the soldiers: yet you preached it to the officers. They refused to obey their chiefs, and you approved them. Which is the harder chore, for a Catholic officer to force the door of a church, or for a man of the people to fire on men of the people? You reproached us with dividing France without care for the external perils: but you divided her on an order of the pope, and that very moderate parliamentarian, M. Ribot, pressed by you, attacked, overthrew Rouvier at the most critical instant of the conference of Algeciras.
And you were so thoroughly at fault, always at fault, that, being the opposition, whose role is clear, you lost, always lost, retreating each year before those republicans whose faults, however, were neither rare nor slight. At last you brought about these last elections, which set you aside entirely and hand over to your adversaries, to the Dreyfusards alone, all the charge of the country. Here they are: from Reinach to Jaurès, from Charles Humbert to Pressensé, they deliberate and work together. They divide, having no more enemies; they must suffice for everything, and hold, as best they can, the roles left by you to drift. Alone, Gast, Humbert and Reinach, figure the right. You laugh at their clumsiness; have you indeed the right to laugh? No doubt, it would be better if you were there. We know that a country is threatened if it does not possess a party of true conservation, of reaction sometimes, which restrains it, props it up, guarantees its bearing. That party, yours, is destroyed: we suffer from it as you do yourselves. But whence comes this destruction? From your fault. Ten years ago you were strong, we were weak, we told ourselves the truth. You lied, why did you lie? We dishonored you, was it wrongly, was it a wrong? It was for you to keep your honor, and you betrayed it. You disqualified yourselves, you are at fault even for our faults.
We had the design of writing an apology for ourselves; an indictment against others escapes us. What evil demon obliges us to begin the quarrel again? Let us resist it, although it is ours; let us not let ourselves go to begin again the monotonous and vain dialogue of the passions. Let us limit ourselves to thinking that our action, limited to the correction of an error, to the repression of cruel sentiments, was beneficent. If Dreyfus had died on Devil’s Island, our public life would be poisoned; he lives in the Monceau quarter, that is well. If Picquart were in the penal colony, what a scandal! He was being sent there, however. He is today a general of division, soon to command an army corps. So be it, that is the fish-pond of lives.
The victim is recovered, the iniquitous chastised. It is finished, so much the better. Let us keep our memories, which almost all honor us, which never dishonor us; let us honor that very crisis, brutal but not unhealthy, and which obliged us to work so hard; and let us not sing of having been victors, for the mêlée was confused.
But if we consent to triumph no longer, let no one at least triumph over us; let people cease to call traitor an innocent man whose life is broken, malefactors those who delivered him; if it pleases us to reflect by measuring our wrongs, let people no longer provoke us to defend ourselves by measuring our rights! And above all, let us wish it very strongly, let people never replace us in a situation analogous to the one in which we found ourselves in December 1897. For, indeed it would have to be: more anxious, no less resolute, we would begin our campaigns again. What means is there of acting otherwise?
Meanwhile, let us all work; our children will know what we have done.
October 1907 – January 1910.
[Printer’s note: The bon à tirer for this tenth cahier — fifteen hundred copies, and twelve copies on Whatman paper — was given, after corrections, on Tuesday 5 April 1910. The manager: Charles Péguy. This cahier was composed and printed by unionized workers: Julien Crémieu, printer, 17 and 21 rue Pierre-Dupont, Suresnes.]