Resolution of The Dreyfus Affair - Attacks On The Court

Attacks On The Court

While the Criminal Court was proceeding with its inquiry, notwithstanding the secrecy with which all its movements were surrounded, rumors were spreading that the decision would favour revision. To avoid this catastrophe at any price, the enemies of revision commenced a violent campaign in the newspapers, defaming the magistrates of the Criminal Chamber, who were represented as having been required to sell themselves to the cause of Dreyfus. The Ligue de la Patrie Française ("League of French Patriots"), founded in January 1899, under the auspices of the academicians François Coppée and Jules Lemaitre, energetically seconded this campaign and demanded that these "disqualified" judges be discharged from the case. The president of the Civil Chamber of the court, Quesnay de Beaurepaire, was willing to lend the support of his high office to these calumnies; he tendered his resignation as a judge (8 January 1899), and began in L'Echo de Paris a series of articles against his colleagues. His most serious charge was that President Loew, at the end of a long and tiring sitting, had sent Picquart a glass of hot grog.

The astonishment of the public was intensified when on 30 January the government presented a bill demanding that the affair be judged by the united sections of the whole Court of Cassation. Dupuy argued that the bill was a measure of pacification; it was necessary that the decision — and why did the Revisionists fear that the whole Court of Cassation would disavow the Criminal Chamber? — should have such force that nobody but "fools or rebels" would be found to contest it. These arguments, and above all the fear of provoking a ministerial crisis, triumphed over the resistance of a part of the republicans. The "loi de dessaisissement" was passed by the Chamber of Deputies (10 February), and a little later by the Senate (28 February).