Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [137]
The day came, crowds surrounded the Chamber, filled the Place de la Concorde and nearby streets, slogans were shouted, red flags waved. “It seemed like the eve either of a new Commune or of a coup by a dictator.” The atmosphere was threatening: troops and police were everywhere. The day passed, however, and the Republic still stood, for the Right lacked that necessary chemical of a coup—a leader. It had its small, if loud, fanatics; but to upset the established government in a democratic country requires either foreign help or the stuff of a dictator. As Clemenceau had harshly said when Boulanger shot himself on the grave of his mistress, inside the “Man on Horseback” was only “the soul of a second lieutenant.”
Events rushed on. On October 29 the Cour de Cassation announced it would accept the case and begin its inquiry, VICTOIRE! proclaimed l’Aurore in the same type as J’ACCUSE! Revisionists hailed the decision as re-establishing civil power over the military. Then the Court demanded the Secret File. The Minister of War refused and resigned. The Government fell. For the next seven months the Court became the focus of the battle. From this point on, the Right was on the defensive and the Affair entered its period of greatest frenzy. The Court was excoriated by the Nationalist press as the “sanctuary of treason,” a “branch of the synagogue,” the “lair of Judas,” a “combination of Bourse and brothel.” The judges were variously “hirelings of Germany,” “valets of the synagogue” and “rogues in ermine.” Pressures of all kinds were exerted, both sides were accused of corrupting the judges, and the Nationalists succeeded in forcing the case out of the Criminal Chamber, which was considered too favorable, to the united Court of three chambers, which was considered more susceptible to pressure.
A Dreyfusard tempest raged at the same time over Picquart. To keep him from testifying before the Cour de Cassation the Army had transferred him to Cherche Midi preliminary to a court-martial. The League for the Rights of Man organized public protest meetings every night, in the provincial cities as well as in Paris. Jaurès’ name and prestige drew 30,000 to a meeting in Marseilles. He, Duclaux the scientist, Anatole France, Octave Mirbeau and Sebastian Faure were the favorite speakers. Workers and bourgeois, students and professors, working women and Society women crowded the halls and overflowed onto the sidewalks, applauded the famous orators and marched together to shout “Vive Picquart!” under the prison walls of Cherche Midi. Signatures for a protest on Picquart came in this time not by hundreds but by thousands, including thirty-four members of the Institut de France, a measure, as Reinach said, of the distance covered by truth on the march. Among the new names were Sarah Bernhardt and Hervé de Kerohant, editor of Soleil, formerly against Revision, who signed the protest as “Patriot, Royalist, Christian.” The historian and Academician Ernest Lavisse felt strongly enough to act, and as his gesture of personal protest, resigned his chair at St-Cyr.
Even the Anarchists, hitherto resolutely contemptuous and indifferent, were swept into the cause. Formerly they had denounced the Dreyfus “parade,” in the words of their newspaper, Le Père Peinard, as a “bunch of dirty types” led by Clemenceau and by “the old exploiter Scheurer-Kestner, the toad Yves Guyot [editor of Le Siècle], the hideous Reinach, three malefactors who helped to concoct the lois scélérates.” Now, however, when their bourgeois enemies cried out the sufferings of the two martyred prisoners of Devil’s Island and Cherche Midi, the Anarchists did the same for their own martyrs sent to forced labour in French Guiana. With a new interest in these cases the League for the Rights of Man succeeded in obtaining pardons for five of them.
Some on the Right could no longer keep their heads turned from the truth. Mme