III
It would be strange if the old ideas were quite dead; the Dreyfus case showed us that the immense majority of the officers and priests still conceived justice in the manner of the Old Régime and looked upon condemnations for "State reasons" as quite natural.[1] That should not surprise us, for these two types of people, never having had any direct relationship with production, can understand nothing about law. The revolt of the enlightened public against the practices of the Minister of War was so great that for a moment it might have been believed that "reasons of State" would no longer be admitted as a pretext for condemnation (outside the two types mentioned above), except by the readers of the Petit Journal, whose mentality would thus be characterised and shown to be much the same as that which existed a century ago. We know now, alas! by cruel experience, that the State had its high priests and its fervent worshippers even among the Dreyfusards.
The Dreyfus case was scarcely over when the Government of "Republican defence" began another political prosecution, in the name of state policy, and accumulated almost as many lies as the Etat-Major (army council) had accumulated in the Dreyfus trial. No serious person nowadays can doubt that the great plot for which Déroulède, Buffet, and Lur-Saluces were condemned was an invention of the police; the siege of what has been called the Fort Chabrol was arranged in order to make Parisians believe that they had been on the eve of a civil war. The victims of this judicial crime were granted an amnesty, but the
- ↑ The extraordinary and illegal severity which was brought to bear in the application of the penalty is explained by the fact that the aim of the trial was to terrify certain spies who, by their situation, were out of reach; whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent troubled his accusers little; the essential thing was to protect the State from treachery and to reassure the French people, who were maddened by the fear of war.
