Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [139]
Suddenly and strangely on top of all the excitement, the President of France, Félix Faure, died. The public sensed something unexplained and the truth in fact was too embarrassing to be told. Proud of his amatory prowess, President Faure died in the performance thereof in a ground-floor room of the Elysée. An aura of something hushed up was added to the atmosphere already charged with aggression and suspicion.
In the election of a new president, held in the midst of hysterical battle over jurisdiction of the Court, Emile Loubet, President of the Senate, a steady, simple Republican and product of peasant stock, won over the Conservative Méline. As Premier at the time of the Panama scandal, Loubet was despised by the Nationalists. They called his election an “insult to France,” a “challenge to the Army,” a “victory for Jewish treason.” Their hired mobs sent to hoot his progress from the Gare St-Lazare to the Elysée raised such a clamor that even the band playing the “Marseillaise” could not be heard. “The Republic will not founder in my hands,” said Loubet calmly. “They know it and it maddens them.”
The Right in a state of ungovernable excitement was prepared to make it founder. “In a week we will have driven Loubet from the Presidency,” boasted Jules Lemaître. The state funeral of Faure was fixed on as the occasion for a coup d’état. The Army must be persuaded to save the country. The “Leaguers” thought they could do it by a cry, a gesture, an occasion, and did not concern themselves with serious organization. Their plan was to intercept the military escort of the cortege while it was returning from the cemetery to its barracks in the Place de la Nation, and lead it to seize the Elysée. Déroulède joined by Guérin led a band of two hundred patriots into the streets, caught hold of the bridle of General Roget, commander of the escort, shouting, “To the Elysée, General! Follow us, General, follow us! To the Place Bastille! To the Hotel de Ville! To the Elysée! Friends await us. I beg you, General, save France, establish a Republic of the people, kick out the parlementaires!” The General kept his head and kept moving, the crowd, ignorant but willing, shouted, “Save France! Vive l’Armée!”, the troops sweeping Déroulède and his followers with them, marched on to the barracks and entered. Déroulède, throwing open his coat to reveal his deputy’s scarf, emblem of parliamentary immunity, was nevertheless carted off to the police station to be indicted for insurrection and provide at his trial one more cause for combative passions. The fiasco did nothing to daunt the expectations of the Right. In the following month the Anti-Semitic League received 56,000 francs from the Duc d’Orléans and 100,000 from Boni de Castellane.
Hardly had breath been drawn when the verdict that all France was awaiting was announced by the Cour de Cassation. Forty-six judges in scarlet and ermine declared for Revision. A cruiser was sent to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island for retrial. Zola returned from England with an article which l’Aurore headlined in the now familiar type, JUSTICE! He saw all factional and party lines now dissipated in one great division separating France into two camps: the forces of reaction and the past against the forces of justice and the future. This was the logical order of battle to complete the task of 1789. With the unquenchable optimism of their age the Dreyfusards hailed the Court’s decision as the herald of social justice for the century about to be born. A great burden of shame seemed lifted and replaced by pride in France. “What other country,” wrote a correspondent of Le Temps at The Hague where the Peace Conference was assembled, “has had the privilege of making the world’s heart beat faster as we have for the last three years?” Revision meant not only the triumph of justice but of “the liberty of mankind.” Others beside Frenchmen felt this universality. William James, traveling in Europe, wrote as he saw daylight breaking through the Affair, “It may be one of those moral