740 Ch. 18 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalism
The novelist Emile Zola now took up Dreyfus’s case. In January 1898, he
wrote an article in a daily newspaper with the bold headline “J'accuse!” (“1
accuse!”), denouncing the army and the government for covering up the real
ity of the case. The political right and the Church hierarchy jumped in on
the side of the “anti-Dreyfusards,” seeing the Dreyfus Affair as a conspiracy
of Jews and Freemasons to destroy France by undermining the prestige of its
army. A Catholic newspaper demanded that all Jews be deprived of their citi
zenship. Action Fran^aise, a right-wing nationalist and monarchist organiza
tion led by Charles Maurras (1868—1952), an anti-Semitic novelist, jumped
into the fray against Dreyfus. Socialists demanded a new trial.
Another officer soon discovered that some new documents had been
added to the Dreyfus file. They had been quite badly forged by Lieutenant
Colonel Hubert Henry, who hoped they would lead to a new conviction of
Dreyfus. Confronted with the evidence, Henry committed suicide in a mili
tary prison. In 1899, the army retried Dreyfus, once again finding him guilty,
but with ‘‘extenuating circumstances.” Dreyfus returned, a broken man, to
Devil’s Island. However, the president of France gave Dreyfus a presidential
pardon that year, which allowed him to return to his family, although Drey
fus was not fully exonerated until 1906, when his military rank was restored.
The Radical Republic
Dreyfus’s return to France provided the republic with a badly needed
period of stability and boosted the Radical Party. The Dreyfus Affair had
helped forge a working alliance between the Radicals, who were anticleri
cal moderate republicans, and socialists, which moved the republic to the
left. In the Radical government formed in 1899, Alexandre Millerand
(1859-1943), a reform socialist, became minister of commerce, despite
the bitter opposition of many socialists who objected to a socialist serving
in a “bourgeois” government.
In contrast to Britain, where the Anglican Church had always stood behind
the government, in France the dominant religion had—at least until 1891 —
stood against the regime. The Radicals moved to separate church and state
against conservative opposition. In 1902, the Chamber of Deputies, with
socialist support, passed legislation exiling religious orders from France. In
1905, church and state were formally separated in France. During the next
two years, the state took possession of all ecclesiastical property and assumed
responsibility for paying the salaries of priests. Despite papal condemnation
and the resistance of some clergy and parishioners, a modus vivendi evolved,
with parish councils leasing churches from the state.
The Radical Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) embodied
aggressive French nationalism. The man who later became known as “the
Tiger” had been born into a family of modest noble title. His father was a
prominent republican who had been exiled by Napoleon III. Clemenceau
was a wealthy bully and a formidable dueler who hated socialists, unions,