Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [144]
As the weeks of examination and testimony dragged on with the succession of witnesses personally and passionately involved, the contention of lawyers, the disputes of journalists and observers, the heated feelings of the town, suspense as to the verdict became almost insupportable. In Paris rumors of another coup d’état planned for the day Mercier was to testify caused the Government to raid the homes of a hundred suspects and arrest sixty-five in their beds, including Déroulède but missing Guérin, who got away, barricaded himself in a house in the Rue Chabrol with a cache of munitions and fourteen companions, where he held out against a somewhat lackluster police siege for six weeks. “I don’t budge from my office from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. seven days a week, in order to be prepared for anything,” wrote Galliffet.
On August 14 the too eloquent and aggressive Maître Labori, who “looked like Hercules and pleaded like a boxer,” was shot outside the court, but not killed, by a young man with red hair who ran away shouting, “I’ve just killed the Dreyfus! I’ve just killed the Dreyfus!” The name again had become an abstraction. The attack raised the temperature to the level of madness. Since the assailant had run away with Labori’s briefcase and had not been caught, it seemed to the Dreyfusards a deliberate plot and one more proof that the Nationalists would stop at nothing. They denounced their opponents as “murderers,” a “General Staff of criminals” and swore that “for every one of ours we shall kill one of theirs—Mercier, Cavaignac, Boisdeffre, Barrès.” Wrote Princess Radziwill to Galliffet, “My God, what an end to the century!”
The end of the trial came on September 9 and all the world gasped at the unbelievable verdict. By a vote of 5–2 Dreyfus was condemned again with “extenuating circumstances” which permitted a sentence of five years, already served, instead of a mandatory life sentence. Since there could obviously be nothing extenuating about treason, the rider was provocative to both sides. It had been devised by the prosecution, which realized that it would be easier to obtain a verdict of guilty if the judges did not have on their consciences the prospect of sending Dreyfus back to Devil’s Island.
The effect of the verdict was as of some awful disaster. People were stunned. Queen Victoria telegraphed Lord Russell, “The Queen has learned with stupefaction the frightful verdict and hopes the poor martyr will appeal it to the highest judges.” “Iniquitous, cynical, odious, barbarous,” wrote The Times correspondent, bereft of sentence structure. Like an angry Isaiah, Clemenceau demanded, “What remains of the historic tradition that once made us champions of justice for the whole of the earth? A cry will ring out over the world: Where is France? What became of France?” World opinion suddenly became an issue, more acutely because of the coming International Exposition of 1900. At Evian on Lake Geneva, where many of the gratin spent their summer holidays, Proust found the Comtesse de Noailles weeping and crying, “How could they do it? What will the foreigners think of us now?” In the Nationalist camp the same thought was cause for rejoicing. “Since 1870 it is our first victory over the foreigner,” exulted Le Gaulois.
Strength of feeling everywhere was made plain; the whole world cared. Excitement in Odessa was “simply extraordinary”; there was intense indignation in Berlin, “disgust and horror” in far-off Melbourne, protest meetings in Chicago and suggestions from all quarters for boycott of the Exposition. In Liverpool copies of The Times were bought out in minutes and soon sold at a premium.