Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [134]
Jaurès went out and wrote Les Preuves (The Proofs), a series of articles beginning that week in the Socialist paper, La Petite République, which stunned its readers and marked the first collaboration of Socialism with a cause of the bourgeois world. Through the Affair the bridge of class enmity was crossed.
Jaurès himself had been a declared Dreyfusard since before Zola’s trial. Short, stocky, strong, red-faced and jovial, he radiated the joy of battle. With his big head, rough beard and careless clothes finished off by drooping white socks, he looked like the accepted image of a labour leader. He was not, however, of working-class origin but came from the poorer branch of a respectable bourgeois family, and had been a student at the Ecole Normale, where he excelled in Greek and Latin and the humanities and was a friend and classmate of Henri Bergson and his rival for the highest honors. When waiting to testify at Zola’s trial he had paced up and down the corridors with Anatole France reciting Seventeenth Century poetry. In the Chamber when he climbed with heavy, purposeful steps to the tribune and tossed off a glass of red wine before speaking, auditors tensed with expectancy, either worshipful or hostile. He spoke with a “splendid amplitude” in a voice almost too loud which he could easily have lowered and still have been heard in the last rows of any hall but which, as Rolland said, was a sensual pleasure to him when he let it out to the full. He could speak at this pitch for an hour and a half to two hours at a time. Using no notes, he could not be fazed by interruptions which served only to supply him with new inspirations. When heckled he played with his opponent “like a huge cat with a mouse, caressing him, making him jump this way and that,… and then with a sharp blow, flattened him with a final word.”
He was never a sectarian who put a particular orthodoxy ahead of the ultimate goal, a habit which afflicted the Socialist movement. For Jaurès, who led the Carmaux strike in person, the ultimate aim of working-class power was not a theory but a realizable goal and Socialist unity a necessity for its achievement. Once persuaded of Dreyfus’ innocence by Lucien Herr and others, he believed that Socialism, by abstaining from combat against injustice, would diminish itself. By making the cause of justice its own it would place its mark on the ultimate victory, open to itself a new path to power and cover itself with moral glory. The Affair, as he saw it, could become the catalyst of a united front of the Left which the Socialists should lead.
His colleagues in the Socialist party shared his enthusiasm not at all. Moderates like Millerand and Viviani did not want to be mixed up in this “obscure and dangerous” business; the extremists led by Jules Guesde, while personally Dreyfusard, opposed party action as an effort diverting working-class strength from a cause not its own. At a caucus of the party after J’Accuse, to decide what action to take if the Right demanded the prosecution of Zola, the moderates squirmed, preferring discretion to valor on the eve of the election. “Why risk our re-election for Zola?” they said. “He is not a Socialist;… he is after all nothing but a bourgeois.” As the factions argued, Guesde in impatient disgust threw open the window with an ostentatious gesture for fresh air and cried, “Zola’s letter is the greatest revolutionary act of the century!” But it was no more than a gesture and he signed the manifesto which declared, “Leave it to the bourgeoisie