The Dreyfus Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

throughout the night. As the news spread to the provinces, groups gathered in bars and bistros to pass motions of support for the army. Crowds marched through the streets shouting ‘Long live the army!’ and ‘Down with the Jews!’ ‘I will not attempt to describe’, wrote one of the brightest of the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals, Maurice Barrès, ‘the excitement, sense of brotherhood, the joy at the way things had turned out.’ He wrote this in Le Figaro , the paper that had once supported the Dreyfusard cause.
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    Zola and Perrenx were not the only ones to be punished for defying the army’s High Command. The day after the verdict was delivered, the Prime Minister, Jules Méline, told the Chamber of Deputies that ‘There is no longer either a Zola trial or a Dreyfus trial; there is no trial at all . . . all this has to stop . . . And from now on, all those who would continue the struggle will no longer be arguing in good faith . . . We will apply to them the full severity of the laws, and if the arms at our disposal are insufficient, we will ask you for others.’
    On 26 February, Colonel Georges Picquart was dismissed from the army for ‘grave misdeeds while in service’. He was also deprived of his pension. Louis Leblois was dismissed as deputy mayor of the 7th arrondissement in Paris by the Minister of the Interior, Louis Barthou; he was later suspended from the Paris bar for six months ‘for having consulted outside his office’ and broken the professional confidence of his client, Picquart, to Scheurer-Kestner. Scheurer-Kestner, when he stood for re-election to the post of Vice-President of the Senate, suffered a decisive defeat. The eminent chemist Professor Édouard Grimaux, who had given evidence in favour of Zola, was dismissed from his post at the École Polytechnique. 31 Both Joseph Reinach and Jean Jaurès lost their seats in the general election in May.

The Taking of the Bastille by Jean-Pierre Houel. The storming of the Bastille by 60,000 Parisians on 14 July 1789 liberated four forgers, an Irish lunatic and an incestuous aristocrat. However, the Bastille symbolised the arbitrary powers of the absolute monarch and this was the first act of defiance against King Louis XVI.

    The Tennis Court Oath (1791) by Jacques Louis David. Locked out of their usual meeting place, the delegates of the Third Estate gathered in an indoor tennis court and proclaimed themselves a National Assembly. They were joined by most members of the Fourth Estate, the Catholic clergy.

    Le prêtre refractaire , engraving by Léopold Massard, based on Henri Baron. On 12 July 1790, the National Assembly passed a law demanding an oath of loyalty to a Civil Constitution for the clergy. This entailed the election of priests and bishops and a breach with the Pope in Rome. Here a priest refuses to take the oath. Most of the clergy followed suit which led to a brutal persecution of Catholics.

    Napoléon le Grand rétablit le culte des Israélites , engraving, by François Louis Couché. On 21 September 1791 the National Assembly gave full civil rights to French Jews. Most, like the Dreyfus family, were from Alsace. Napoleon’s conquests extended these rights throughout Europe. Here grateful Jews thank their liberator.

    Maximilien de Robespierre (1791) by Pierre Roch Vigneron. In the place of Catholicism, French revolutionaries such as Robespierre initiated a cult of Reason.

    The Procession of the Goddess of Reason by Louis Blanc, engraved by Meyer-Heine. A woman dressed as the Goddess of Reason is carried through the streets of Paris to the cathedral of Notre Dame, converted into a Temple of Reason.

    The Drowning in the Loire During the Reign of Terror (1793) by H. de la Charlerie. An uprising of Catholics and Royalists against the Revolution in the West of France led to atrocious reprisals. Men and women are drowned off scuttled barges in the