Georges CLEMENCEAU - Long manuscript on the DREYFUS affair.

Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)

Autograph manuscript – Against Justice.

Eleven pages in-4°. Some typographic annotations in blue pencil. Slnd [Paris. 1899]

“ Like a great flash of lightning in the night, the story of the Dreyfus affair will soon illuminate the horizon. » 

Important manuscript, first draft, by Clemenceau, immense architect of the fight for the truth in the face of the injustice of the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus.

This text – comprising numerous variants – constitutes the preface to the work Against Justice published by Stock in 1900, and bringing together the articles written and published by Clemenceau in l'Aurore between December 12, 1898 and March 31, 1899.

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“ Preface – This is the third series of my daily articles in the long campaign for the saving of innocence. The title says it all. The reader will witness the full development of the passions hostile to human conscience. He will see people and government at the forefront of the effort against justice and the law. I dare say that the scandal has not been overcome and will not be.

Judges were found to acquit a traitor. Judges were found to condemn an ​​innocent man. We found men , in a sect and class interest, to glorify falsehood, lies and deceit. We found herds of brutes to applaud , and to say, and to believe that falsehood, lies and cheating were the very essence of the country.

Class animosities and religious hatred have already given us the worst spectacles in history. Poured into the human soul, the beliefs of charity, the preachings of pity have overflowed “from the vessel of choice” in tortures, in tortures, in barbaric massacres. To “justify” murder, to excuse the profligacy of blood, you have to lie to men and first of all lie to yourself. The basis of the Dreyfus affair is the oldest story.

What makes it original is that we believed this story to be finished, that where Christ had failed to pacify the murderous soul and the human animal, the philosophers had passed, mocking the impotence of the dogmas and replacing them, as the foundation of the precepts of love, with industrious feelings of metaphysics from which resulted the proof that we were good by nature and that evil was only a reparable accident in humanity. So we had definitely left the primitive savagery. So the crimes of humanity were, not of the people, gentle, pitiful, loving, but of their masters, kings or priests, who by a learned organization of oppression, prevented them from developing their goodness.

There was indeed a difficulty. If the people had so many virtues, why did they tolerate so many crimes from their masters? We ignored it, not admitting that the gesture of the dominator was simply the expression of the soul of the dominated! And humanitarian historians hastened to demonstrate that the tyrant alone was guilty and that the people were all white as doves. The people were God, it was said. His word was declared identical to that of the creator. An admirable discovery that would revolutionize the world. It was enough to install the people in their freedom, and justice and law would reign on the earth.

A nation was ready for this experience. It was us, without any vanity. Gesta dei, gesta populi per Francos . [The action of God, the action of people passes through the Franks]. With trumpets – and even cannons – we hastened to proclaim in the universe the peace of happy justice. There followed a lot of bloodshed, and we took almost a century to establish among ourselves the regime that we had not succeeded in establishing among others. It doesn't matter. We had our business. We were in possession of the marvelous mechanism which allows men, freed from the evil of tyranny, to spread the good that is within them. The people of goodness, the people of light no longer had a master. Nothing prevented him from doing justice, from organizing the law.

To this end, delegates, to whom he gave a temporary mandate, met in Paris to put his wishes into law. What wiser organization of reasoning reason? What better method of justice through freedom? Historians would no longer say this time: “The evil was done in spite of the people. » If evil remained, it would be too obvious that the people would be the cause. But as only good would flourish, it is to the people that our annalists would be forced to report the glory.

I say nothing about what the people did with their power when the Republicans of 1848 decreed them free and sovereign. I am pleased not to draw any conclusions from this half century of our history up to the present day. However, it is impossible for me to ignore the present, and the present shows, in the furious madness of a section of the people, in the black indifference of the sovereign masses, despite the protests of a few, the delegates of the people and the government of their choice carrying out, under the label of the French Republic, the crime, prohibited by all the monarchical Constitutions of Europe, of changing the judges of an accused to obtain a conviction . I say that this is the act of villainy par excellence.

Judges acquitted a traitor; judges condemned an innocent man, with full knowledge of the facts. Civil judges or military judges, this is not a new spectacle in humanity. Changing the judges of an accused to convict him, "innocent or guilty", as a qualified representative of the people of Paris so aptly put it [Clemenceau here makes an allusion to the nationalist deputy of Paris, Georges Berry], this had been seen Again ; but of a monarch elected by God, of a Caesar master of the world, not of the legitimate of the popular will. Now it has been seen, it was done with the help of the passions and the indifference of the sovereign people, ready to re-elect tomorrow the representatives who dishonored them with this infamy .

The government which requested this act, the legislators, aware of the crime, who carried it out, will leave an indelible mark on the front of their Republic. They branded themselves with a red iron: that is nothing. Before the whole attentive world, with the consent of the Demos , they proclaimed the bankruptcy of their “democracy”. Through them, the sovereign people, torn from its throne of justice, exhibit themselves totally deprived of their infallible majesty!

There is no longer any way to deny it, it is with the complicity of the people themselves that evil is among us. The Dreyfus affair clearly demonstrates this. What is the Dreyfus affair? A cry of pain in the universal killing. A drop of blood in the ocean of iniquity. There is only so much evil in those who govern as is permitted by the crowd of those who are governed. The people are not God. The people are not even the Homo-Sapiens by which the superior human defines itself. The people don't know. It is the greatest evil on earth. What can he do with his useless and therefore dangerous power? What most monarchs made of it: the worst use.

The collective tyrant spread over the territory is no more acceptable than the tyrant established on a throne. The flatterers, the corrupters, the exploiters are not lacking in one any more than in the other. Your enemy is your master, said a wise man . Formerly, deliverance appeared in the form of a stab from which nothing other than a change of servitude ever came. Now we have upgraded to a better design. We do not kill the master when we carry within ourselves the source of tyranny. Besides, who could kill the sovereign people? Galliffet [General Gaston Galliffet] himself, with his thirty thousand corpses, did not succeed. Let us not kill our unfortunate thousand-headed master. Let's enlighten him, let's inform him, it's the safest thing. Let's send him to school and encourage him to teach himself a lesson. Because the great school for him is the spectacle of man every hour, every day. Let him watch himself live, feel, think, act and judge himself.

He needs the retreat of time. He will soon have it for the Dreyfus affair, even before justice is done. Never will a greater opportunity to know and understand be given to him. He just needs to make an effort to distinguish the liars from those who tell the truth. Let him read, question, compare, verify. I seek nothing, through this book, other than to provide him with a temptation to know . The truth seems slow to us, having only a brief hour for us. In the feeling of its continuity, the people accomplish without haste the fatal evolution of light. Know that yesterday he understood a little better than the day before; learn that tomorrow he will understand better than today. Help him, because he is suffering, and any help will be happy for him.

Like a great flash of lightning in the night, the story of the Dreyfus affair will soon illuminate the horizon. We will see, we will understand, we will know that a homeland without justice is an enclosure for slaughtered cattle. We will say to ourselves: let's make a better homeland, a homeland of humanity. To redeem the past, let's remove a little of the present evil, let's prepare a little good for the future. We will say it, we will do it and that day, dead or alive, the Dreyfusards will have their reward. »

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