THE FRENCH ARMY AND THE DREYFUS CASE.
WE spoke last week of the preternatural suspicion, as Carlyle called it, which makes every small defeat —as in Tonquin—or scandal—as in the Panama affair— or novel proposal—as, for example, the Income-tax—such a source of acute danger to French institutions. The whole people fancy that there is something behind, and ask with a sensation of anger why that something is with- held from their knowledge. Besides preternatural sus- picion, however, and the fierce racial feeling against and for a Jewish suspect, there is in this Dreyfus affair some- thing more serious still, something which really menaces not only the existing Government of France, but the Republic itself. The lower French people, who obey the authorities more readily than any other people in Europe —even the Germans pleading the law against officials more readily than the French do—have in their hearts an inner distrust of them, think them, in fact, sometimes in the teeth of evidence, a corporation of rascals, each of whom is capable of betraying his country for his own advantage. What the cause of this distrust can be it is exceedingly difficult to detect. It can hardly be race feeling, for it extends to men who are undoubtedly not only Frenchmen, but Gauls in every sense of the word ; nor can it be caste feeling, for the "plain men" who now govern France are as much distrusted, though not as much detested, as ever the old aristocracy was. The evil has been attributed to ignorance, but it does not die away with education, nor are the half-educated more free from it than those who are wholly without in- struction. Mr. Hamerton, who had made the ideas of the French peasantry a study of years, believed that it originated in a profound jealousy of Paris and its influences ; but as Parisians are more liable to it than peasants, that is not a satisfactory explanation. It is probably a result of many causes, one of them being the eagerness for pecuniary gain and personal position, of which all but the best Frenchmen are conscious in them- selves ; but whatever its origin, there can be no doubt either of the fact, or of the serious character with which it invests all scandals. They justify to the masses their inner distrust. The affair of the diamond necklace helped to destroy the Bourbon dynasty ; the Praslin tragedy shook the hold of the house of Orleans on the middle class ; the killing of Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte assisted in sapping the claim of the Napoleons to rule ; the Wilson scandal cut down the prestige of the Presidency as an institution to a scarcely visible point ; the Panama business weakened the general confidence in all Senators and Deputies; and it is by no means certain that this Dreyfus affair will not profoundly affect the view entertained by the whole Army of France of their relation to the Republic. It is their knowledge of this terrible result of scandals which makes all French Govern- ments so anxious to hush them up, to preserve secrecy at any hazard, to reserve to themselves the power of not sending charges before any public Tribunal. They cannot believe that any consequences of secrecy can be so injurious to the country as the consequences of publicity are sure to be. On the present occasion the danger they foresee will be direct, for it is the soldiery, nearly all the children of peasants or artisans, who will say that the War Ministry is obviously concealing something, that it dis- trusts its own best agents, or it would not have searched Colonel Picquart's rooms in his absence, that there is some one behind greater than anybody yet accused, that the Ministry ought to have known, possibly did know, Major Esterhazy's intense feeling of loathing for France. They will quite naturally disbelieve that unhappy officer's story of the forgery of his letters, thinking Jew syndicates far too clever to forge anything at once so silly and so im- probable, and they will reject, from ignorance of human nature, the far more likely explanation that the letters had no meaning, and were only the method in which a furious man, half maddened by pecuniary difficulties, vented his rage upon the world around him. Trollope in "Can You Forgive Her ?" makes his bad hero swear to himself in an almost precisely similar fashion. So believing, the Army, whatever the ultimate result of the full inquiry which the Government as yet is at least half inclined to avoid, will remain sullenly distrustful, suspicions, dis- heartened; feeling, in fact, as if, with all its sufferings and its obedience to discipline, it were not adequately com- manded. That would be the result even in England, and in England the Army would either distrust one individual, or insist, through Parliament, that an objectionable system should be swept away. In France the soldiers have no remedy, or think they have none, except in modifying the foundations of the State.
Do we then expect a mutiny in Prance? Certainly not. The. French Army is incapable of mutiny, the contrary belief in this country arising from some misunderstood incidents in the beginning of the French Revolution. There has not been, we believe, during the century a single instance in which the Army, or part of the Army, has acted for itself without the consent or orders of its legal chief. But we take it to be evident from the history of France, and especially from the incidents of 1848, and those connected with the rise of General Boulanger, that the Army regards all events in Paris with attentive eyes, and that when authority is discredited from any cause, or is supposed to have become unworthy of confidence, either for military or civil reasons, the soldiers do not heartily defend it. The buttress falls away from the wall, and at the first attack down goes the fabric, as it would have gone down had General Boulanger ridden to occupy the Elysee. It is lack of confidence if a campaign were sud- denly commenced, a lack of willingness to defend the Re- public if it were seriously menaced by unexpected internal danger, which we should dread from the scandals which have grown up around the Dreyfus affair. They are the more formidable, not the less, because the managers of the Republic have in one part of their Army management been singularly successful. Aided, no doubt, by accident, they have prevented the rise in France of any great military reputation,—of any soldier, in fact, whom the whole people have learned to trust, either as campaigner, organiser, or administrator. That is well for the Republic, but it is not so well for the Army when it is dejected, or when it looks around for some one whose word, in a business like this Dreyfus affair, will for soldiers be final. In England if Lord Wolseley, or Lord Roberts, or Sir Evelyn Wood, or Lord Lansdowne said that he had carefully examined into the facts of a trial, and that the sentence had been just, it would be believed to be just, and there the matter would end ; but in France no one occupies precisely that position. There is a rumour about every man, that from prejudice, or circumstances, or temperament, he thinks of other things than his strict duty to the people or the soldiers. We believe this danger to France to be a. serious one, and rather wonder that, seeing it, the Government does not run any risk, or break through any etiquette, in order to bring on a thorough and public investigation. That they do see it we take to be almost certain, first, from the hesitation evinced, and secondly, from General Billot's dithyrambic speech about the honour of the French Army. The Minister of War, was bound by his position to be honorific, and bound by tradition to express himself in an Ossianic style ; but there are degrees in all things, and to us this sentence reads like a manufactured compliment, carefully made extravagant in order to meet the necessity of reviving cheerfulness among the conscripts, and those who lead them, and who certainly suffer whenever there is a doubt that a Court-Martial has been well advised. He spoke of the "painful and passing incidents which may stir and sadden the Army without ever going so far as to trouble its calm and its silent devotion to duty, and without touching its legitimate pride. The French Army is like the sun, whose spots, far from darkening its light, give to its rays a more brilliant splendour."
Previous page
