amnesty should not have sufficed: if the Dreyfusards had been sincere they should have demanded a recognition by the Senate of the scandalous error which the lies of the police had caused it to commit; on the contrary, they seem to have seen nothing that violated the principles of eternal justice, in their continued support of a condemnation founded on the most evident fraud.
Jaurès and many other eminent Dreyfusards commended General André and Combes for having organised a regular system of secret accusations. Kautsky warmly reproached him for his conduct; the German writer demanded that Socialists should not continue to represent "the wretched practices of the middle-class Republic" as great democratic actions, and that they should remain "faithful to the principle which declares that the informer is the worst kind of rascal" (Débats, November 13, 1904). The saddest thing about this affair was that Jaurès asserted that Colonel Hartmann, who protested against the system of fiches (secret reports), had himself employed similar methods;[1] the latter wrote to him: "I pity you for this—that you have come to defend to-day, and by such means, the guilty acts which, with us, you condemned a few years ago; I pity you, that you should believe yourself obliged to make the Republican form of Government responsible for the vile proceedings of the police spies who dishonour it" (Débats, November 5, 1904).
Experience has always shown us hitherto that revolutionaries plead "reasons of State" as soon as they get into power, that they then employ police methods and
- ↑ In L'Humanité of November 17, 1904, there is a letter from Paul Guieysse and from Vazeilles, declaring that nothing of this kind can be imputed to Colonel Hartmann. Jaurès follows this letter with a strange commentary; he considers that the informers acted in perfect good faith, and he regrets that the colonel should have furnished "imprudently, further matter for the systematic campaign of the reactionary newspapers." Jaurès has no suspicion that this commentary made his own case much worse, and that it was not unworthy of a disciple of Escobar.
