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11
    Ã‰mile Zola
    1: A Letter to France
    The acquittal of Esterhazy, and the confirmation by both the government and the National Assembly that the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus was not to be questioned, left the Dreyfus family and their supporters baffled and dismayed. It was clear that, whatever the evidence and however clear the reasoning, the French were unwilling to accept that they were being deceived by the leaders of the one institution that retained their respect – the army. It was a time of intense rivalry among the European powers, particularly in Africa. A force of 150 French riflemen under Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand was hacking its way through the jungles of central Africa from Senegal to the Sudan to establish a French presence on the Nile at Fashoda to thwart Britain’s ambition of establishing its rule from the Cape to Cairo.
    In France, there was little respect for the state as such. Charles Péguy, an ardent Dreyfusard, felt that the republican ‘mystique’ had died at the time of General Boulanger. The middle-class ascendancy that had existed since the Restoration – whether under kings, an emperor or a republic – with bankers and leading industrialists firmly in charge was now being challenged by anarchists, socialists and trades unions. France was a democracy; there were periodic elections. But there was a widespread belief, confirmed by the Panama Canal scandal, that the politicians were corrupt, manipulated by secretive and unaccountable agencies – the Jesuits, claimed the left; the Freemasons, claimed the right – and, in the case of Dreyfus, the Jewish syndicate.
    Not that all the members of a particular group were necessarily of a like mind. There were some Catholic Dreyfusards and Jewish anti-Dreyfusards, but on the whole the different ‘tribes’ closed ranks. Jews, Protestants and free-thinkers thought the worst of the Jesuit-educated officers on the General Staff while the Catholic, conservative, aristocratic elements in society had a blind faith in the integrity of the High Command.
    At the time of Esterhazy’s acquittal, the centrist republican politicians were mostly concerned to establish their patriotic credentials by lauding the army: they had yet to see that the Affair could be used as a stick with which to belabour the right. A difference of opinion, however, had appeared on the left with Alexandre Millerand, as we have seen, vilifying the Dreyfusards and castigating in particular the Dreyfusard Deputy Joseph Reinach, Jean Jaurès wavering and Georges Clemenceau now a convinced Dreyfusard.
    Clemenceau’s political career had faltered because of his involvement in the Panama Canal scandal, and his identification with British interests: ‘aoh yes’! After losing his seat in 1893, he had concentrated on journalism and, even though back in the Chamber by 1897, he still saw the press as a powerful ‘fourth estate’. As Pierre Miquel noted in his L’Affaire Dreyfus , ‘the Clemenceaus, the Rocheforts, knew how to use the press and to inflate it with their faith and their passion . . . The Dreyfus Affair is above all about the manipulation of public opinion. At every stage, as it unfolds, one finds the press – not a press faithfully reporting on what was taking place, but an aggressive, provocative partisan press . . . a ‘‘gutter press’’.’ 1
    Newspaper proprietors were as partisan as the journalists who wrote for their papers – Drumont on the right, of course, but also members of the syndicate: Edmond de Goncourt was told that ‘the money behind L’Autorité , that conservative paper, is supplied by a Jew, by a certain Fould, and there’s a clause in his agreement by which Cassagnac [the editor] undertakes not to attack the Jews’. 2 Readers of the Parisian press did not expect detachment or objectivity. ‘French people don’t think for themselves any