Part 17 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Up against the Breastworks.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mr. Rhodes--The Napoleon of South Africa.

_From the Westminster ”Budget” (London)._]

Perhaps the most famous of all the admirable cartoons dealing with _l'Affaire_ was the ”Design for a New French Bastile,” which was of German origin and which caused the paper publis.h.i.+ng it to be excluded from French territory. It appeared just after Colonel Henry had cut his throat with a razor in his cell in the Fortress of Vincennes, when suspicions of collusion were openly expressed, and some went so far as to hint that the prisoner's death might be a case of murder and not suicide. The ”Design for a New French Bastile” showed a formidable fortress on the lines of the famous prison destroyed in the French Revolution with a row of the special cells beneath. In one of these cells a loaded revolver was placed conspicuously on the chair; in the next was seen a sharpened razor; from a stout bar in a third cell dangled a convenient noose. The inference was obvious, and the fact that the cells were labeled ”for Picquart,” ”for Zola,” ”for Labori”

and the other defenders of Dreyfus gave the cartoon an added and sinister significance. In caricature the Dreyfus case was a battle between a small number of Anti-Dreyfussard artists on the one hand, and the Dreyfus press with all the cartoonists of Europe and the United States as its allies on the other. The opportunity to exalt the prisoner, to hold him up as a martyr, to interpret pictorially the spirit of Zola's ringing ”_la verite est en marche, et rien ne l'arretera_!” offered a vast field for dramatic caricature. On the other hand the cartoon against Dreyfus and his defenders was essentially negative, and the wonder is that the rout of the minority was not greater--it should have been a veritable ”_sauve qui peut_.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fire!

_From ”Psst” (Paris)._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The last Phase of the Dreyfus Case.

Justice takes Dreyfus into her car.

_From ”Amsterdammer.”_]

The spirit of anti-Dreyfussard caricature was Anti-Semitism. One of the most striking of the cartoons on this side purported to contrast France before 1789 and France at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

In the first picture we were shown a peasant toiling laboriously along a furrow in the ground, bearing on his shoulders a beribboned and beplumed aristocrat of the old regime, whose thighs grip the neck of the man below with the tenacity of the Old Man of the Sea. That was France before the Revolution came with its b.l.o.o.d.y lesson. In the picture showing France at the end of the Nineteenth Century there was the same peasant toiling along at the bottom, but the burden under which he tottered was fivefold. Above him was the petty merchant, who in turn carried on his shoulders the lawyer, and so on until riding along, arrogantly and ostentatiously, at the top was the figure of the foreign-born Jew, secure through the possession of his tainted millions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Toward Freedom.

MADAME LA RePUBLIQUE--”Welcome, M. Le Capitaine. Let me hope that I may soon return you your sword.”

_From ”Punch” (London)._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Dutch View.

The present condition of the French general staff.

_From ”Amsterdammer.”_]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Between Scylla and Charybdis.

WALDECK-ROUSSEAU--”Forward, dear friends, look neither to the right nor the left, and we will win through at last.”

_From ”Humoristische Blatter” (Berlin)._]

The dangerous straits through which the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry was obliged to pa.s.s were hit off in a cartoon appearing in the _Humoristische Blatter_ of Berlin, ent.i.tled ”Between Scylla and Charybdis.” On one side of the narrow waterway a treacherous rock shows the yawning jaws of the Army. On the other side, equally hideous and threatening, gleam the sharpened teeth of the face typifying the Dreyfus Party. Waldeck-Rousseau, appreciating the choppiness of the sea and the dangerous rocks, calls to his gallant crew: ”Forward, dear friends, look neither to the right nor to the left, and we will win through at last.” Many of the cartoons dealing with the Dreyfus case were mainly symbolic in their nature; full of figures of ”Justice with her Scales,” ”Justice Blindfolded and with Unsheathed Sword,”

”Swords of Damocles” and so on. A Dutch cartoon in _Amsterdammer_, ent.i.tled ”The Last Phase of the Dreyfus Case,” showed Justice taking the unfortunate captain into her car. The horses drawing the car were led by Scheurer-Kestner and Zola, while following the chariot, to which they are linked by ignominious chains, were the discredited Chiefs of the Army. The same paper humorously summed up the condition of the French General Staff in a picture showing a falling house of which the occupants, pulling at cross-purposes, were accelerating the downfall. The decision upon Revision and the dispatching of the Spax to Cayenne to bring Dreyfus back to France was commemorated in London _Punch_ in a dignified cartoon called ”Toward Freedom.” Madame la Republique greeted Dreyfus: ”Welcome, M. le Capitaine. Let me hope I may soon return you your sword.” The same phase of the case was more maliciously interpreted by _l.u.s.tige Blatter_ of Berlin in a cartoon ent.i.tled ”At Devil's Island,” which showed the Master of the Island studying grinningly a number of officers whom he held in the hollow of his hand, and saying: ”They take away one captain from me: but look here, a whole handful of generals! Oh, after all, the arrangement is not so bad.”