Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [128]
In his closing speech, Zola, constantly interrupted by boos and hissing, swore by his forty years of labour and forty volumes of French literature that Dreyfus was innocent. He had acted to save his country from “the grip of lies and injustice” and though he were condemned, “France will one day thank me for having helped to save her honour.” Clemenceau concluded, “Your task, gentlemen of the jury, is to pronounce a verdict less upon us than upon yourselves. We are appearing before you. You will appear before history.”
Zola was condemned by a vote of 7–5 and the wonder was that five jurors had the courage to vote for acquittal. Outside, the Place Dauphine was black with people screaming in triumph. “Listen to them, listen to them!” said Zola as he was preparing to leave. “They sound as if they were waiting for someone to throw them meat.” Clemenceau told a friend that in case of acquittal he was “quite certain not a single Dreyfusard in the court or corridors would have escaped with his life.” Zola received the maximum penalty, a year’s imprisonment and a fine of three thousand francs and on rejection of an appeal was persuaded by the insistence of his friends to escape to England. He should have been sent “to join his friend Dreyfus on Devil’s Island” was Henry Adams’ comment, “with as much more French rot as the island would hold, including most of the press, the greater part of the theatre, all the stockbrokers and a Rothschild or two for example.” The sentiments were his own, not paid for like those of the Paris mob which they so accurately reflected.
The trial was a tornado that whirled all the vocal elements of society into its vortex. “Every conscience is troubled,” wrote Le Petit Parisien. “No one reasons any more; no discussion is possible; everyone has taken up a fixed position.” Families divided and even servants. In the most famous of the Caran d’Ache cartoons the father of a large family at dinner commands, “No one is to speak of it!” The next panel shows a wild melee of overturned table, knives and forks flying and chairs used as weapons, under the title, “They spoke of it!”
Organizing their efforts the Dreyfusards formed the League for the Rights of Man, which sponsored protest meetings and sent lecturers around the country. They drew up a petition for Revision which made the schism in society visible and inescapable. Called the “Protest of the Intellectuals,” it began appearing day by day in l’Aurore with successive signatures. It cut jagged divisions between those who signed and those who refused. The organizers were Marcel Proust and his brother Robert (whose father refused to speak to them for a week in consequence), Elie Halévy and his brother Daniel and their cousin Jacques Bizet, son of the composer, all in their late twenties. Almost the first signature they obtained was their greatest coup: that of “the ultimate flower of Latin genius” and leader of Academicians, Anatole France. “He got out of bed to see us, in his slippers with a head cold,” wrote Halévy. “ ‘Show it to me,’ he said, ‘I’ll sign, I’ll sign anything. I am revolted.’ ” He was a rationalist, revolted by unreason. A cynic and a satirist of human folly, he had sympathy neither for crusades nor for Dreyfus as an individual who, he perceptively suggested, was “the same type as the officers who condemned him; in their shoes he would have condemned himself.” But he hated the crowd and out of contradictory spirit was usually to be found against the Government.
He wrote prose clear as a running brook. He had lived in the home and adorned the salon of his mistress, Mme Arman de Caillavet, since 1889, when, after a final quarrel with his wife, he walked out in dressing gown and slippers, carrying on a tray, quill pen, inkstand and current MS, and proceeded down the street to a hotel, sent for his clothes and never went home.