Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [136]
Cavaignac resigned and within two weeks his successor, the sixth Minister of War since Dreyfus’ arrest, also resigned. The Government, surrendering to what was now unavoidable, submitted the case to the Cour de Cassation (literally, “Court of Breaking”), whose task was to decide whether a given verdict should be upheld or broken. The action, taken as mistrust of the Generals, caused another War Minister to resign. Awaiting the Court’s decision whether or not to accept the case, Paris boiled with excitement. If the Court took the case, the Secret File must come under civilian review, which the Army was committed to prevent. In England the sober Spectator thought the logic of the situation must lead to an Army coup d’état. In Paris the royalists and wild men of the Rightist leagues, hoping to provoke exactly that, spread rumors of a plot, called meetings, sent out their hired bands to shout in the streets. It was Déroulède’s longed-for hour.
An irrepressible agitator, a poet and a deputy, long-legged and long-nosed like Don Quixote, Déroulède saw windmills to charge in every aspect of the Republic. A veteran of 1870, he had founded his Ligue des Patriotes in 1882 to keep alive the spirit of revanche. It bore the legend “1870–18—–” with the second date left significantly blank and a motto of noble meaninglessness, France Quand Même. Déroulède wrote patriotic verse, loathed the royalists as much as the Republic and had “the political vision of a child.” To foment a crisis he now joined forces with Jules Guérin, active head of the Anti-Semitic League, which was receiving a subsidy from the Duc d’Orléans, who hoped to ride in on the tail of the crisis. Tension grew when a strike of 20,000 construction workers on the site of the Exposition of 1900 caused the Government to bring in troops to occupy the railroad stations and patrol the boulevards. Word spread of a coup planned for the reopening of the Chamber on October 25. Déroulède and Guérin called for a huge protest meeting in front of the Palais Bourbon to demonstrate “confidence in the Army and abhorrence of traitors.”
The Socialists, or a part of them, suddenly discovered the Republic was worth saving. However dedicated to overthrow of the existing system, they did not want it overthrown by the Right. Besides, they were discovering from their local committees that their neutrality in the Affair was compromising them with some of their constituents. “Because we seem to oppose all forms of bourgeois republicanism,” wrote a party worker from the provinces, “many people take us for the allies of monarchist reactionaries.”
The Socialist leaders, sending out notices by pneumatique, called an emergency meeting of their several groups to organize a united front in face of the peril, and such seemed the urgency of the moment that they succeeded in forming a joint, if temporary, Committee of Vigilance. Following proper revolutionary procedure, it decided to hold meetings every night and call upon the people for mass demonstrations. Clashes with the Rightist leagues, riots, even civil war loomed. In awful anxiety the Dreyfusard League for the Rights of Man called upon all Republicans to disdain fracas in the streets, but Jaurès saw Socialist opportunity: “Paris is trembling with resolve … the proletariat is organizing.” Warned, however, by Guesde that to provoke an outbreak would be playing the game of the Generals, who were believed to be waiting for a riot to seize power, the Committee of Vigilance had second thoughts. Socialists would provoke nothing, it announced. “Revolutionary groups are ready to act or abstain, according to the circumstances.”
So certain were the royalists of “the day” that André Buffet, chef de cabinet for the Duc d’Orléans, telegraphed the Pretender that his presence in nearby Brussels on October 24 was “indispensable.” The Duke, who was hunting in Bohemia,