Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  The bombing of the Chamber on 9 December 1893 had the effect of converting the coalition into a government. The president of the council, Jean Casimir-Périer, son of Auguste, framer of the 1875 constitution, grandson of Louis-Philippe’s minister and himself a director of the Anzin mining company, sometimes seen as the un acceptable face of capitalism, lurched to the right, enjoying the support of ‘rallied’ conservatives such as the Prince d’Arenberg.53 He rushed through the lois scélérates against terrorists and was elected president of the Republic on 27 June 1894, after the assassination of Sadi Carnot, but he was unable to wield the power he wished to and resigned on 15 January 1895. He was replaced by Félix Faure, a businessman of Le Havre who had been close to Gambetta but defined himself as above party and had voted against the expulsion of the princes in 1886 and therefore benefited from the support of conservatives.54

  The governmental manifestation of the moderate–conservative coalition was exemplified by the ministry of Jules Méline, which held office between April 1896 and 1898. Ushered in by the Senate coup against the Bourgeois ministry, it brought in a number of significant younger republicans such as Louis Barthou, lawyer and deputy for Oléron in the Basque country, who became minister of the interior.55 Inside the Chamber it relied on the support of conservatives, much to the anger of radicals and socialists, the latter denouncing the fact that ‘the Méline ministry has a majority of republicans against it; it is saved only by votes from every shade of the right, rushing to support this embattled opportunism.’56 Outside the Chamber, it had the support of business leaders keen on protection and social defence. These were solicited and corralled by the Association Générale du Commerce et de l’Industrie, headed by René Waldeck-Rousseau, who had reverted to making money as a commercial lawyer after electoral defeat in 1889, although he was parachuted in as senator for the Loire in 1894.57 All seemed set for a moderate–conservative victory in the elections due in May 1898. This new ruling class might have taken powerful root had not a momentous event intervened.

  THE DREYFUS AFFAIR: EMBATTLEMENT

  AND REPUBLICAN DEFENCE

  In December 1894 a General Staff officer of Alsatian-Jewish origin, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was court-martialled for passing French military secrets to the German army. After a ceremonial degradation in the courtyard of the École Militaire on 5 January 1895, when his emblems of rank were torn from his tunic and his sword broken, he was sent as a traitor to Devil’s Island off French Guiana. Little sympathy surrounded him: writing in La Justice on Christmas Day 1894 Clemenceau criticized the lightness of the punishment which would have been much harsher for an ordinary soldier, and demanded the death penalty.58

  Almost two years later a small group of individuals began to suspect that Dreyfus had been framed by his superior officers in order to cover the guilt of a Gentile officer who was much more closely integrated into the patronage system of the army. This group was partly Jewish – Alfred’s brother Mathieu, the former Gambettist and editor of La République Française, Joseph Reinach, the anarchist Bernard Lazare and the lawyer and intellectual Léon Blum. It was also partly Alsatian, and thus marginal but keen to demonstrate its patriotism. Colonel Picquart, head of the army’s Intelligence Service, who had taught Dreyfus at military school, began to suspect Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, a flamboyant nationalist, and reported his concerns to his superiors and Méline’s war minister, General Billot. Rather than explore that line they posted Picquart to Tunisia in January 1897. Granted a short leave in June 1897 Picquart returned and made contact with a lawyer who had been his contemporary at the Lycée of Strasbourg, Louis Leblois. On 13 July 1897 Leblois met the patron of all Alsatian republicans and Protestants, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, who was immediately converted to the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Scheurer-Kestner went straight to the top, calling on President Faure, General Billot and premier Méline. None of them wanted to have anything to do with his concerns and claimed that he had no evidence warranting a fresh look at the case. Méline announced to the Chamber on 4 December 1897, ‘There is no Dreyfus Affair.’59

  More than that, the rumour began to spread in the autumn of 1897 that this troublemaking, designed only to bring the army into disrepute and weaken the nation, was the conspiracy of a ‘Jewish syndicate’. This story was spread not only by hardline anti-Semites such as Drumont but by Catholic leaders such as Albert de Mun who denounced the ‘occult power’ behind the campaign and by left-wing nationalists like Henri Rochefort who, parodying Maupassant, dubbed Joseph Reinach ‘Boule de Juif’. The weight of opinion against the ‘syndicate’ pulled socialists along in its wake. Alexandre Millerand told Joseph Reinach, whose uncle had committed suicide during the Panama scandal, to rehabilitate his own family before he tried to rehabilitate Dreyfus, and fought a pistol duel with him.60 Although Jaurès was inclined towards Dreyfus, Jules Guesde and Édouard Vaillant told socialists on 19 January 1898 that they should ignore both sides in what they termed a ‘bourgeois civil war’.

  In fact Esterhazy was brought to court martial on 10–11 January 1898, a ploy by the military to clear the air, for he was promptly acquitted. This triggered a second phase of the Affair: an open letter to the president of the Republic, entitled J’accuse, penned by the novelist Émile Zola, and published on 13 January 1898 in L’Aurore by Clemenceau who, as over Boulanger, had changed his mind in mid-course. Zola denounced the cover-up by the military, naming war minister General Mercier, chief of General Staff General de Boisdeffre and Commandant du Paty de Clam as the officers concerned, issued warnings about military despotism, and perorated on the inevitable triumph of truth and justice.61 He was supported by a manifesto of intellectuals, among whom were Anatole France and Marcel Proust, published on 14 January, by Charles Péguy, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, who spread the word from his Bellais bookshop in the rue Cujas, and by avant-garde journals such as La Revue Blanche, run by the art-critic Natanson brothers.62 These intellectuals, however, remained a small minority. Of the fifty-five daily newspapers in January and February 1898, forty-eight were antidreyfusard.63 Zola was sent to trial on 7 February 1898 for defamation and sentenced to a year in prison, although he managed to escape to England. Outside the courtyard hostile crowds were orchestrated by Jules Guérin and his newly formed Ligue Anti-Sémitique, composed mostly of butchers’ boys from the abattoirs of La Villette.64 Henri Rochefort, who was sentenced to a mere five days’ gaol for libelling Reinach, was carried shoulder-high by the crowds on his way to Sainte-Pélagie.65 Anti-Semitic riots broke out in the main cities of France, degenerating in Algiers into a veritable pogrom.66 The only response of note on the dreyfusard side was the foundation of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, primarily by freemasons, Jews and Protestants, who had themselves been persecuted before the Revolution, in order to fight for human rights and tolerance.67

  Intellectuals without electoral concerns might join the highly exposed Dreyfusard camp. Politicians with elections to fight in May 1898 did not. In those elections the Dreyfus Affair was not an issue: to mention it was electoral suicide. Any politician suspected of favouring Dreyfus was unceremoniously abandoned: thus not only Joseph Reinach but also Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde lost their seats, although the latter’s defeat may be explained by the revenge of the Roubaix textile magnate, Eugène Motte. The election saw the return of twenty-two self-confessed anti-Semites, notably Édouard Drumont in Algiers, where the Ligue Anti-Sémitique had been his electoral agents. The main result of the elections was defeat for Jules Méline as opinion shifted to the left, and a radical, Henri Brisson, was appointed premier. The move to the left however, did nothing for the case of Dreyfus. Brisson’s war minister, Godefroy Cavaignac, told the Chamber on 9 July 1898 that he had irrefutable proof of Dreyfus’ guilt. The son of the republican dictator of 1848, he saw himself as a soldier in all but name, while Reinach described him as ‘the Robespierre of patriotism’, determined to put the national interest above individual rights.68 His certainty about Dreyfu
s’ guilt was punctured by the Preuves published by Jean Jaurès, and suspicion for framing Dreyfus now fell on Colonel Henry of the Intelligence Section. Arrested and confined in the fortress of Mont-Valérien, Henry slit his throat on 31 August 1898, evidence of his guilt for dreyfusards and of his martyrdom for antidreyfusards.

  Antidreyfusards now had the wind behind them. The defeat of the moderates around Méline removed the plank along which the ‘rallied’ royalists and Bonapartists sought to return to power. There had always been royalists and Bonapartists critical of the Ralliement; now the initiative shifted to them as it seemed that they would never gain control of the parliamentary Republic, so it must be destroyed. In the autumn of 1898 anti-parliamentary leagues gathered shape and momentum, putting the parliamentary Republic in danger. The royalist pretender, now the Duc d’Orléans, saw the possibility of using the popular fighting-force provided by the Ligue Anti-Sémitique as a route back to power. Jules Guérin and a selection of his butchers’ boys were introduced to the duke in his Brussels exile on 24 January 1899, and royalist money for the Ligue was channelled by Boni de Castellane, who had married the American heiress Anna Gould, and by André Buffet, son of the Orleanist Louis Buffet, who had been a Moral Order premier in 1875.69 The Ligue des Patriotes, dissolved after the Boulanger Affair, was reconstituted in September 1898 by Paul Déroulède, who was elected deputy for Angoulême in 1898. Resistant to pressure from his militants to embrace anti-Semitism, he was if anything Bonapartist, and was looked to by Bonapartist leaders such as Gustave Cunéo d’Ornano, deputy for Charente, who coveted less the Empire than the Consulate of 1799–1804 as the model of a plebiscitary republic, under which the president would be elected by universal suffrage. Déroulède’s moment came on 23 February 1899, the day of the state funeral of President Félix Faure, who had died in the arms of his mistress. Déroulède, at the head of his Ligue, tried to seize the bridle of General Pellieux, who was leading the funeral procession, in order to march on the vacant Élysée palace and take power. But Pellieux refused to co-operate, and the coup d’état was bungled.70

  More bourgeois and respectable, less plebeian and streetwise, was the Ligue de la Patrie Française founded in January 1899 by two secondary school teachers, Henri Vaugeois and Gabriel Syveton. Their ambition was to bring over a majority of the Académie Française in order to demonstrate that not all intellectuals were dreyfusards, and they began with the poet François Coppée and the playwright and critic Jules Lemaître. Maurice Barrès delivered a keynote lecture to them, arguing that France had been desiccated and divided by a cerebral, Jacobin notion of the patrie peddled by philosophy teachers and that a deep and unifying nationalism had to be generated by a cult of the soldiers of 1870 who lay in graves in Alsace, now part of Germany, the cult of la terre et les morts. The high point of the Ligue came with the municipal elections of 1900, when several of them were voted on to the Paris municipal council, which was now captured by conservatives.71 Even before then Henri Vaugeois had branched off to join the left-bank journalist Maurice Pujo and Provençal regionalist Charles Maurras to found an Action Française Committee (April 1898), then an Action Française Bulletin (July 1899). Maurras had converted to monarchism during a visit to the eastern Mediterranean in 1896 when he realized how little influence republican France had in comparison to the monarchical empires of Great Britain, Germany and Russia. The Dreyfus Affair convinced him that the Republic had fallen into the hands of the ‘four confederate states’ of Jews, Protestants, freemasons and foreigners, and that only a restored monarchy could bring back a strong state, a united nation and national greatness. His approach to monarchism was theoretical rather than sentimental and his relationship with the Duc d’Orléans and his staff was decidedly ambivalent. Unlike the Ligue de la Patrie Française, Action Française had no truck with elections but communicated its ideas through its publications and street demonstrations and put its faith in a coup de force.72

  The turning point of the Dreyfus Affair came in the summer of 1899. On 31 May Déroulède, charged with attacking state security on 23 February, was acquitted by the Assize Court of the Seine. On 1 June Colonel Marchand, who had confronted British forces at Fashoda on the Upper Nile but been recalled by the government, made a triumphant procession through Paris.73 On 3 June the Cour de Cassation decided that the case for revising the Dreyfus conviction had to be answered, and referred the matter back to the court martial. The next day right-wing demonstrators assaulted the new president Loubet, who was thought to favour reopening the case, at the Auteuil races, and knocked his top hat off. Loubet now summoned Waldeck-Rousseau to form a government of so-called ‘republican defence’ that would bring together broad support for the regime and defuse the Dreyfus Affair. His ministry of 22 June 1899 was composed of former supporters of Méline who now broke with him over his refusal to deal with the Dreyfus Affair, and was the first government to include a socialist. His finance minister was Joseph Caillaux, son of an Orleanist Moral Order minister who joined the elite Inspection des Finances, inherited the family constituency at Mamers (Sarthe) as a moderate republican in 1898 and had Maurice Rouvier as a patron.74 In the difficult post of war minister Waldeck placed General Gallifet, who had fought with the Versailles forces in 1871 but had been a confidant of Gambetta. Most significantly, to draw in the left wing he appointed Alexandre Millerand as trade minister, the first time a socialist had held government office. Waldeck pushed through a raft of reforms including an Associations Law of 1901 which permitted trade unions to own property collectively, a factory act which limited the working day first to eleven hours and later to ten, and a pensions bill that did not become law till 1910.

  Waldeck’s government acted fast to secure the regime. The arrest of Jules Guérin and his royalist backer André Buffet was ordered for threatening state security. Guérin holed up with his Ligue in their offices in the rue Chabrol, near the Gare du Nord, and police were sent in for what became known as ‘the siege of Fort Chabrol’. The retrial of Dreyfus by court martial was conducted for security reasons outside Paris, in Rennes. Had he been acquitted General Mercier and the military top brass would have been liable to prosecution for obstructing the course of justice, and might have resorted to a coup d’état, but on 9 September the court again found Dreyfus guilty, by a majority vote, ‘with extenuating circumstances’, whatever they might be. This opened the way to a pardon being granted by President Loubet on 19 September, which did nothing to satisfy the dreyfusards, who dreamed of a formal acquittal and punishment of the guilty generals. ‘Once again it is up to us poets’, Zola wrote to Madame Dreyfus, ‘to nail the guilty to the eternal pillory.’75 Only the right-wing civilian conspirators were charged with conspiracy and effectively dealt with. The Senate sat as a high court from November 1899 till January 1900, condemning Guérin to ten years in prison and Déroulède and Buffet to five years’ exile.76 As if to mark this success the final, bronze-cast version of Dalou’s Triumph of the Republic was unveiled on 19 November 1899 on the place de la Nation in the presence of President Loubet and premier Waldeck-Rousseau.77 Finally, in June 1900 Waldeck secured the Chamber’s approval of a bill to amnesty all those implicated in the Affair, cunningly quoting what his first political master Gambetta had said about amnestying the Communards. ‘“When disagreements have divided and torn apart a country,”’ he repeated, ‘“all men of political wisdom understand that the time comes when these need to be forgotten.” Messieurs, I think that the hour of which Gambetta spoke has arrived.’78

  BETWEEN REPUBLICAN

  CONCENTRATION AND APAISEMENT

  The Dreyfus Affair split the political class that had been plastering over its differences in the 1890s in order to deal with the threat of socialism and anarchism. The renewed threat to the parliamentary Republic, even to the Republic itself, provoked a throwback to republican concentration in defence of the regime that had characterized the 1870s and 1880s. The rhetoric of the French Revolution was once more in the air: Aulard’s Political His
tory of the Revolution, which saw it as the inevitable victory of national sovereignty, appeared in 1901. The dominant party until 1940 was the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party, founded in 1901 as a party that ‘rallies all the sons of Revolution, whatever their differences, against all the partisans of counter-revolution’.79 These Radicals were constantly alert to the militarist and clerical threat from the right that had manifested itself during the Dreyfus Affair, but they had no truck with socialism and were resolute defenders of private property. They represented France’s petites gens – small businessmen, artisans and shopkeepers, small farmers, the salaried lower-middle class of government employees, instituteurs, post office workers, the employees of banks, insurance firms and railway companies, very much the ‘nouvelles couches sociales’ whose advent Gambetta had proclaimed in 1874. These had their ‘hearts on the left and pockets on the right’, subscribing to the principles of 1789 and hostile to monopoly capitalism but believing that people should make their way by hard work, saving and education. They were led by small-town and rural notables: doctors, lawyers, teachers and businessmen, who nurtured the single-member constituencies by obtaining concessions and favours from the government: new schools, roads and branch lines, jobs and scholarships in the public gift, exemption from military service or legal proceedings.80 The increase in deputies’ allowances to 15,000 francs in 1906 made it possible for less wealthy men to envisage a parliamentary career. In the Palais Bourbon, those they might disagree with politically belonged to the same ‘république des camarades’, who ‘sit on benches that touch, receive their constituents and mistresses in the same salons, use the same offices, the same library, the same headed paper and the same café’.81 Between 1906 and 1913 the president of the Republic, Armand Fallières, with his white beard and taste for good living, symbolized a period of pacification after political struggle in what became known as ‘the Republic of Monsieur Fallières’.82