• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1327 0

” and that his “guilt was absolutely certain.” He thereby, before the trial, tied the Army to Dreyfus’ guilt and locked the terms of the Affair into a position that could never be broken. The issue was instantly recognized at the time. “Today one must be either for Mercier or for Dreyfus; I am for Mercier,” said his parliamentary aide, General Riu, to reporters. “If Dreyfus is acquitted, Mercier goes,” wrote the royalist editor, Cassagnac, in l’Autorité, adding, since Mercier was a member of the Government, “If Dreyfus is not guilty then the Government is.” Thereafter every repetition of the choice only hardened the issue.

At the trial, it was General Mercier who authorized submission of the Secret File and its withholding from the defence—the act that made the trial illegal. Fully recognizing the decisive nature of what he had done, Mercier lived up to it during the next two years, through all the mounting evidence of forgeries and false conviction, with increasingly arrogant and positive assertions of Dreyfus’ guilt. Once Dreyfus had been convicted on false evidence, any reopening of the case would reveal the Ministry of War, the General Staff and himself as dishonored; in short, as a colleague said, if in a retrial “Captain Dreyfus is acquitted, it is General Mercier who becomes the traitor.” Through every reinvestigation and taking of testimony, the trial of Esterhazy, the trial of Zola, the inquiry of the Court of Appeals, the final trial at Rennes, he beat back the forces of Revision and held the citadel of the false verdict. Angular, haughty, icy-faced, never wavering in self-control even when the whole structure he had built was tottering, he reminded an observer of the character in Dante’s Inferno who looked around him with disdain, “as if he held Hell in great contempt.”

All the strength, except truth, was on his side. Each time the Dreyfusards brought forward new evidence which they were certain this time must force a retrial, it was quashed, suppressed, thrown out or matched with new fabrications by the Army, supported by the Government, by all the bien-pensants or right-thinking communicants of the Church, and by the screams and thunders of four-fifths of the press. It was the press which created the Affair and made truce impossible.

Variegated, virulent, turbulent, literary, inventive, personal, conscienceless and often vicious, the daily newspapers of Paris were the liveliest and most important element in public life. The dailies numbered between twenty-five and thirty-five at a given time. They represented every conceivable shade of opinion, calling themselves Republican, Conservative, Catholic, Socialist, Nationalist, Bonapartist, Legitimist, Independent, absolutely Independent, Conservative-Catholic, Conservative-Monarchist, Republican-Liberal, Republican-Socialist, Republican-Independent, Republican-Progressist, Republican-Radical-Socialist. Some were morning, some evening, some had illustrated supplements. Of four to six pages, they covered, besides the usual political and foreign affairs, news of the haut monde, of le turf, of fashions, of theatre and opera, concerts and art, the salons and the Academy. All the most admired writers, among them Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Maurice Barrès, Marcel Prévost, contributed columns and critiques and their novels ran serially across the bottom of the front page. Editors on important issues contributed signed editorials of passionate invective. The press was daily wine, meat and bread to Paris. Major careers and a thousand minor ones were made in journalism. Everyone from Academicians to starving Anarchists made a supplementary living from it. Prominent politicians when out of office turned to journalism for a platform and an income.

Newspapers could be founded overnight by anyone with energy, financial support and a set of opinions to plead. Writing talent was hardly a special requirement, because everyone in the politico-literary world of Paris could write—and did, instantly, speedily, voluminously. Columns of opinion, criticism, controversy, poured out