BOOKS
461
Drouin, secretary of the International Society for the History of the
Dreyfus Affair and grandson of an ardent
dreyfusard
of his time, Mar–
cel Drouin (who in turn made a
dreyfusard
of his brother-in-law, Andre
Gide). A onetime literary publisher, Pierre Belfond, who sold his epony–
mous company before retiring, is the man behind the project under his
new imprint Memoire du Livre. Indeed, the whole project smacks of a
labor of love, in this time when the shelf life of a newly published book
is measured in weeks.
In its strict respect for chronology this compilation of articles trans–
ports the reader back to the last years of the nineteenth century as
Clemenceau chews over the day's crop of rumors concerning
l'affaire–
scraps obtained from one or the other camp, but chiefly from those
intent on exculpating Dreyfus. Clemenceau himself had come a long
way, and wasn't afraid to admit it, for the first column he reprints in
L'lniquite
is an editorial published on Christmas Day 1894-soon after
the court martial that convicted Dreyfus-at which time Clemenceau
saw no reason to doubt that the officer was fairly tried. "The Traitor"
is the title Clemenceau gave to this piece:
How can a human being so dishonor himself that he can hope for
nothing more than being spat upon in disgust by the very people he
served? Has he no parents, or wife, or child, or love of anything at
all, no ties of humanity, or even of animality-for beasts in a herd, by
instinct, defend their own-nothing but a filthy soul, an abject heart?
Clemenceau was then so certain that the charges against Dreyfus were
justified that he accepted the need for throwing a cloak over certain
facts so as not to give the enemy still more information. And although
he opposed the death penalty in principle, he found it appropriate for
an act of treason-the worst crime.
Nearly three years would go by before Clemenceau got wind of con–
vincing evidence of Dreyfus's innocence. "Is it then impossible to have
done with this case once and for all?" he seems to sigh as he begins the
editorial published on November
I,
1897, in
L'Aurore,
a new Paris daily
of which Clemenceau-then fifty-six years old-had been appointed
chief editorialist only the previous month. He knew that the agitation
surrounding the affair had been stimulated by Dreyfus's Jewishness: "an
extended anti-Semitic campaign had set off a violent prejudice against
the people who brought us Jesus." But human beings were fallible, he
added, as had been seen in certain recent trials conducted before the
