Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [121]
The assumption so carelessly taken for granted in St. Petersburg was passionately rejected in the French Chamber in December by a sincere and honorable man of lofty ideals. To Comte Albert de Mun the innocence or guilt of Dreyfus was infused with another meaning; transformed, no less than the bread and wine of the sacrament, into another nature. Belief in Dreyfus’ guilt was belief in God.
The fusion of these ideas lay in the condition of chronic war between the Church and the Republic. Since the Revolution, the Church had been on the defensive against the purpose of the Republic in the words of Jules Ferry, “to organize mankind without God or King.” The religious orders, furiously resisting the effort of the Republic to displace them from control of education, saw their hope of survival in restoration of the Catholic monarchy. This was what brought the Church in France into position in the Affair. It was the ally of the Army in its own mind as well as in Republican propaganda, which always linked “the Sword and the Censer.” In the Jesuits the Republic saw the militant and aggressive general staff of clericalism who pulled the strings which moved the Dreyfus plot. The Jesuit leader was Father du Lac, confessor of both General Boisdeffre and the Comte de Mun, who were regarded as his mouthpieces.
To Pope Leo XIII, a realist looking on from outside, it seemed possible the Republic was here to stay. After the collapse of the Boulanger coup he could no longer believe that restoration of the monarchy was a serious possibility. Besides, he needed French support in his struggle with the Italian state. In the Encyclical of 1892 he urged French Catholics to reconcile themselves to the Republic, to support, infiltrate and ultimately capture it, in a policy called the Ralliement. Catholic progressives rallied, others did not and the Left did not trust the policy. “You accept the Republic,” said Léon Bourgeois, leader of the Radicals to a meeting of Ralliés. “Very well. Do you accept the Revolution?” De Mun was one who never had.
When, in the midst of the Affair, de Mun arrived at the peak of a French career—election to the French Academy—he chose Counter-Revolution as the theme of his address. The Revolution, he proclaimed, was “the cause and origin of all the evils of the century”; it was “the revolt of man against God.” He believed the ancient ideals and ideas were about to “reappear in our time with irresistible evolution” and revive “the social concepts of the Thirteenth Century.” To heal the wounds of social injustice under which the working class suffered and re-Christianize the masses alienated by the Revolution had been the goal of his political career.
As a young cavalry officer out of St-Cyr, de Mun first became acquainted with the lives and problems of the poor through the charitable work of the Society of St-Vincent de Paul in his garrison town. During the Commune, as an aide to General Galliffet, who commanded the battalion that fired on the insurgent Communards, he saw a dying man brought in on a litter. The guard said he was an “insurgent,” whereupon the man, raising himself up, cried with his last strength, “No, it is you who are the insurgents!” and died. In the force of that cry directed at himself, his uniform, his family, his Church, de Mun had recognized the reason for civil war and vowed himself to heal the cleavage. He blamed the Commune on “the apathy of the bourgeois class and the