John N. Raphael

The first Commission of Inquiry closed its labours on March 20, 1912, with the hearing of three witnesses of importance. These three witnesses were the Procureur GÉnÉral, Monsieur Victor Fabre, the ex-Prime Minister, Monsieur Monis, and the presiding judge of the Chamber of Correctional Appeal, Monsieur Bidault de L’Isle. All three men were questioned on the rumours of the bringing of political influence to bear in March 1911 for the postponement of the Rochette trial. Two years later day for day, on March 20, 1914, these three men and Monsieur Joseph Caillaux were heard again by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry. A comparison of what they said in 1912 and what they were obliged to say in 1914 is enough to move any lover of France to tears. I am anxious to comment on what happened as little as possible. I am anxious to let these men exhibit their own shame in their own words. I shall therefore resume their evidence from the official shorthand notes which remain as its record, and the public and their own consciences may be their judges.

“On July 27, 1910,” said Monsieur Victor Fabre, “the Correctional Court rendered judgment in the Rochette case and Rochette appealed. Rochette from the very beginning of his case did everything in his power, and his power was enormous, to hamper the course of legal proceedings, and to drag them out. Unfortunately the French criminal code plays into the hands of a man like this,” said Monsieur Fabre, “and it is not too much to say that when a rich man—for he must be rich—is accused and wishes to drag out legal proceedings so as not to be judged, it is perfectly possible for him to effect his object. He has the right to make proceedings drag and drag, and to obstruct them, and his judges can do nothing to prevent him, for it is his right—if he can pay the cost—by the French legal code. Rochette abused this right. He hampered the course of justice with immense skill, and even before the final postponement he had succeeded in making the courts play into his hands. Even on July 27, 1910, you may say,” said Monsieur Fabre to the Commission, “the affair might have been called on appeal sooner than April 29, 1911. But there were several reasons against this. The first, the primary reason, was the long vacation. The courts were not to meet again until October 15, and before the trial could take place the President of the Correctional Chamber, the Conseiller Rapporteur, and the Avocat GÉnÉral, had to be given an opportunity of absorbing the facts of the case. This meant several long weeks’ study.”

“Another reason for the postponement of the trial till April, was the inquiry which had been ordered into the speculation on the Bourse and elsewhere in connexion with the Rochette affair. On April 29, 1911, the trial was postponed till January 11, 1912,” said Monsieur Victor Fabre. “The postponement was granted at the request of Monsieur Maurice Bernard. Monsieur Bernard invoked reasons of health. He wrote to the presiding judge of the Chamber of Correctional Appeal a letter which I have seen, in which he declares that his state of health will not allow him to plead the Rochette case before the holidays, and asks for a postponement. Astonishing as this may seem at first I could not oppose this request. I assure you that it was most disagreeable to me not to refuse it, that I was much annoyed at not being able to oppose MaÎtre Bernard’s request. My wish in this affair was to arrive at a solution as promptly as possible. But I was unable to make any opposition to MaÎtre Maurice Bernard’s request, much as I should have liked to do so. MaÎtre Bernard said that he was ill, and worn out. In consequence, following the traditions which have always prevailed in the relations between the court and the Bar I could not oppose a refusal to such a request. CERTAIN NEWSPAPERS HAVE STATED THAT POWERFUL INTERVENTION INFLUENCED MY DECISION, AND THAT MORAL PRESSURE WAS BROUGHT TO BEAR ON ME. I HAVE NO EXPLANATION TO GIVE ON THIS POINT. IF I HAD ANY INTERVIEW ON THE ROCHETTE AFFAIR WITH A FORMER PRIME MINISTER I CONSIDER THAT I SHOULD BE FAILING IN ALL MY DUTY IF I WERE TO TELL YOU WHAT TOOK PLACE AT SUCH AN INTERVIEW.” Monsieur Fabre was questioned and cross-questioned on this statement. He declared that the last part of it, the part in which he refers to Monsieur Monis, was purely hypothetical. The President of the Commission of Inquiry pointed out to him that everybody would take it to be a statement of fact. Monsieur Fabre refused to say anything more, but maintained, under cross-examination, his original statement that MaÎtre Bernard’s plea of ill-health, and nothing else, had been responsible for the postponement, for seven long months, of the trial of Rochette.

And then occurred one of those delightful little interludes which have a way of lightening the most serious and solemn of France’s bitter moments. The Parliamentary Commission had called Monsieur Monis to appear before it. Everybody knew, Monsieur Monis as well as everybody else, the reason of the summons. Everybody knew the seriousness of the accusation, implied if unformulated, which lay behind it. Everybody knew, Monsieur JaurÈs as well as Monsieur Monis, that the ex-Prime Minister would be asked whether or not it were true that he had brought undue pressure to bear on Monsieur Victor Fabre, in order to secure, for political and not altogether avowable reasons, a postponement of the Rochette case.

In spite of this knowledge, here is the letter in which the President of the Commission of Inquiry summoned Monsieur Monis. It reads like an invitation to lunch.

Monsieur Le PrÉsident, A la suite des dÉclarations faites par le Procureur GÉnÉral, Monsieur Fabre, la commission de l’affaire Rochette m’a chargÉ de vous prier de vouloir bien vous entretenir avec elle demain matin, mercredi, a dix heures et demie. Veuillez agrÉer mes sentiments respectueusement dÉvouÉs.

(Signed) Jean JaurÈs.

Monsieur Monis in acknowledging receipt of this invitation when he appeared before the Parliamentary Commission, described it as “an exquisite little note.” “I wanted to be polite,” he said, “in return for your politeness, and here I am.” Monsieur Monis then went on to say that politeness was the only reason for his presence, politeness, and the wish to protest. “I wish to protest energetically, with all my energy,” said Monsieur Monis. “If you wish to cover this country with a fresh crop of scandal you really must not count on my help. I will be the victim if you like of your injustice, but I will be a proud and silent victim.” And Monsieur Monis carried impudence to the extent of forcing the Commission, out of sheer politeness, to admit that he had been summoned without the least tinge of suspicion that he had done anything to be ashamed of, and his last words to the Commission as he left them were, “Respect and confidence.”

There was not quite so much politeness on either side, when, two years later, Monsieur Monis gave evidence a second time before the Commission of Inquiry. It was a Friday, of course, Friday, March 20, 1914. This time he was forced to admit the truth of the facts he had denied so lightly and so comfortably two years before. This time he was forced to admit that for political reasons and on the advice of Monsieur Caillaux he had brought pressure to bear on Monsieur Victor Fabre to postpone the Rochette trial. In other words Monsieur Monis, who had been Prime Minister of France in 1911, who had been forced to resign his position in the Cabinet now in 1914 because of the revelations contained in the Fabre statement which Monsieur Barthou had read in the Chamber of Deputies, was forced to stand before the Parliamentary Commission which he had hoodwinked with such extraordinary cynicism in 1912, admit that he had hoodwinked them, admit that he had lied.

The next witness after the Monis interlude, in March 1912, was the presiding judge of the Chamber of Correctional Appeal, Monsieur Bidault de L’Isle. He too declared that he was “rather surprised” at having been called before the Commission of Inquiry, he too explained that deference for the Commission had been the sole reason of his coming. He had received a letter from MaÎtre Maurice Bernard, he said, in which Rochette’s defending lawyer asked him to have the case postponed. MaÎtre Bernard said he was very busy, that he had several important cases coming on, that his doctor told him that he would be ill if he went on working so hard, and that he really couldn’t plead the Rochette case for some months. “We never refuse an appeal of this kind from a member of the Bar,” said Judge Bidault de L’Isle, “so I wrote to MaÎtre Maurice Bernard that the postponement would be granted. I wish to affirm in the most formal way,” said Judge Bidault de L’Isle, “that the question of politics played no part whatever in the decision of postponement.” Monsieur JaurÈs tried very hard, and other members of the Commission helped as best they could to get the truth from Judge Bidault de L’Isle, but he repeated the statement quoted above “on his soul and on his conscience.” On March 20, 1914, exactly two years after this statement, Monsieur Bidault de L’Isle, who had denied two years before that Monsieur Fabre, the Procureur GÉnÉral, had told him that the Rochette case must be postponed for political reasons, who in March 1912 had declared that the only reason for the adjournment was that MaÎtre Bernard had asked for it, ate his words without enjoyment, as Monsieur Monis and Monsieur Fabre had eaten theirs. Three men, a Prime Minister of France, the judge of one of the highest courts in the country, and the Public Prosecutor, lied, and admitted under pressure, when further denial was impossible, that they had trifled, deliberately, with the truth.

Of these three men who lied and were forced to admit it, the most pitiful figure is that of the Procureur GÉnÉral, Monsieur Victor Fabre, for he was the victim of a system. Professional secrecy in France has become such a fetish that it has developed, from a means of preventing doctors, lawyers, and professional men generally from revealing unduly the secrets of those who have confided in them, into a kind of Mumbo-Jumbo idol which protects and cloaks untruth. Now that we know that Monsieur Victor Fabre told a deliberate lie and made a misleading half-disclosure of the truth to the Parliamentary Commission which examined him in 1912, we can only be sorry for the man and amazed at the system which made such juggling with the truth seem justifiable to him. In March 1911 Monsieur Fabre, under pressure from the Prime Minister, Monsieur Monis, had ordered Judge Bidault de L’Isle to postpone the trial of Rochette. In 1912 either just before or just after his examination by the Parliamentary Commission, Monsieur Victor Fabre had handed to the Minister of Justice, who was then Monsieur Aristide Briand, the written statement which Monsieur Barthou read in the Chamber of Deputies immediately after the murder of Monsieur Gaston Calmette in 1914. This statement told the truth which he concealed from the Commission of Inquiry two years before. Monsieur Fabre had written his statement immediately after political pressure was brought to bear on him; he knew, of course, of its existence when he was examined in 1912. And this is how he spoke of it when he was re-examined in 1914. “I was surprised and afflicted when I learned that a journalist, two years after I had handed my statement to Monsieur Briand, had boasted of its possession and proposed to publish it. I didn’t believe this. I thought that it was quite impossible that he should be in possession of my statement, that he could publish it, because I did not even know Monsieur Calmette by sight, because I had not given it to him, because I considered the fact that the Minister of Justice had this statement in his possession rendered it inviolable. MY CONVICTION ON THIS POINT WAS SO STRONG THAT WHENEVER THIS DOCUMENT WAS MENTIONED TO ME I INVARIABLY STATED THAT IT DID NOT EXIST, AND THAT THERE WAS NO FEAR OF ITS PUBLICATION.” In plain English, Monsieur Victor Fabre admitted that he had suppressed the truth, because he was convinced that the truth would not be known. “I made this declaration to Monsieur Caillaux, who appeared very uneasy at the thought that this document might be published. I consider that I HAVE THE RIGHT AND THAT IT WAS MY DUTY TO SAY WHAT I DID. I CONSIDER THAT I HAD NO RIGHT TO GIVE UP MY SECRET, FOR THIS DOCUMENT WAS MINE, I COULD DO WHAT I LIKED WITH IT, I COULD SUPPRESS IT OR TEAR IT UP. TO EVERYBODY BUT MYSELF THE DOCUMENT WAS NONEXISTENT.”

After this pitiful confession Monsieur Fabre, as a weak man will, accused everybody he could think of of breaking faith with him. “Unfortunately,” he said, “everybody had not the same reserve (this is an exquisite word to have chosen) that I had. I do not know how my statement passed from Monsieur Briand’s hands into other hands. I do know that the use which was made of it was a deplorable abuse.” It was indeed.

We know now how Monsieur Fabre’s written statement came to be read in the Chamber of Deputies, and we can guess how Monsieur Calmette and other journalists knew of its existence, and of its contents. Monsieur Briand had kept the damning document while he was Minister of Justice. When he resigned, Monsieur Briand, as his duty was, passed the document on to the new Minister of Justice, Monsieur Barthou. Monsieur Barthou, realizing what a political weapon the statement might become, kept it and used it. Whether he showed it to journalists, I do not know, but we know from the evidence of Monsieur Fabre as far as faith can be placed in this evidence after his own confession, that only two copies of the document were in existence. The one Monsieur Fabre kept in his own possession until he handed it over on March 20, 1914, to the President of the Commission of Inquiry, the other, on which he wrote “Copy for the Minister of Justice,” he copied out in his own handwriting and handed over to Monsieur Briand. With regard to the contents of the document nobody now denies that they were true.

On March 20, 1914, Monsieur Fabre no longer pleaded professional secrecy, no longer hesitated, but made this direct statement: “It is perfectly correct that I received an order from the Prime Minister, Monsieur Monis, to secure the postponement of the Rochette case until after the holidays. It is perfectly true that I insisted on Judge Bidault de L’Isle postponing the case. It is perfectly true that I told him why. If I had gone to Judge Bidault de L’Isle and said, ‘MaÎtre Maurice Bernard is not very well. Put the case off for a year,’ Judge Bidault de L’Isle would have told me that there was insufficient reason for the postponement. I sent for Judge Bidault de L’Isle, I told him of the interview which I had had with the Prime Minister, and of the order which had been given me. I explained the situation to him, I adjured him if he had any affection for me to grant what I asked. He ended by giving way.” Then this unfortunate man, whose chief fault is weakness, who trembled for his position, and who allowed the Prime Minister to dictate to him in consequence, attempted to explain his act away. He said that even if the case were postponed, even if, as duly happened, all legal procedure against Rochette were cancelled, Rochette would not enjoy impunity. At present he is certainly enjoying it, and he has answered this statement of poor Monsieur Fabre more simply and conclusively than anybody else can do. Monsieur Fabre had instructions and carried them out against his own wish, he said. He believed, and he believes now, that he was obliged to obey them. Under examination he was asked why he took the Prime Minister’s orders, why he did not go to his direct superior, the Minister of Justice, Monsieur Perrier. His answer shows the curiously direct influence of personality in the government of France. It shows that Monsieur Fabre considered that the Prime Minister’s order overrode anything that the Minister of Justice might or might not find to say. And as we know now that Monsieur Monis gave this order for the postponement of the Rochette trial because Monsieur Caillaux told him to, as we know that Monsieur Caillaux told him to give it because Rochette’s lawyer, MaÎtre Bernard, might say things in court which would be disagreeable to the Government, might make disclosures which would get the Government, and more especially Monsieur Caillaux himself, into trouble, we realize that the real ruler of France on March 2, 1911, was Henri Rochette, who fled the country under sentence for fraud.

Monsieur Caillaux himself had an interview, or rather two interviews, with Monsieur Fabre, who called on him on January 14, 1914, at seven o’clock in the evening. They spoke of the Rochette affair, and (this was the second interview) Monsieur Caillaux mentioned the order which Monsieur Fabre had received. “He asked me,” Monsieur Fabre said to the Commission of Inquiry (and he had asked me the same question on the occasion of my former visit), “whether it were true that a copy of my statement of my interview with Monsieur Monis existed and could be published. I replied in the negative. He insisted. He told me that he had information that a journalist was in possession of this document, and that he was afraid that it would be published. I told him that this was not possible, that he need not be afraid of the publication of a document which did not exist. I said this because I was convinced, as I was convinced up to the last minute, that this document would never be published and could not be published. I preferred not to reveal my secret so as not to upset Monsieur Caillaux (‘ne pas attrister d’avantage Monsieur Caillaux’), who was quite upset enough by the campaign against him. I had the right to speak as I did because this document was my property, and because it was useless for me to reveal its existence as it was not to be published.”

But the further evidence of Monsieur Victor Fabre, when, in March 1914, he told the whole truth at last, shows that the orders he received really did come from Rochette and came almost directly from him. After his interview with Monsieur Monis, the Procureur-GÉnÉral had a conversation with his assistant, Monsieur Bloch-Laroque, whose title (Substitut) does not exist in England. Monsieur Bloch-Laroque and Monsieur Fabre talked over the fact that Monsieur Maurice Bernard had deliberately threatened Monsieur Fabre, that he had said, before leaving the room and banging the door behind him, that “if Monsieur Fabre did not obey, it would be the worse for him.” It is surely unheard of, that Rochette’s lawyer should be able to have terrorized the French Procureur-GÉnÉral with such language, but Monsieur le Procureur-GÉnÉral Victor Fabre told the Commission of Inquiry, “I was well aware of the influence and knew the friends of MaÎtre Maurice Bernard, and I knew that he did not say what he said without knowing that his words would receive sanction in high places.” MaÎtre Maurice Bernard is an intimate friend of Monsieur Caillaux, and was his lawyer in his divorce case.

We may resume this inner history of a series of disgraceful happenings in the history of France in comparatively few words. Rochette has made enormous sums of money in a very few years, and the French authorities believe that he has swindled and is swindling the public. There are difficulties in the way of proving this immediately. The authorities connive at the substitution of a man of straw for a proper prosecutor so as not to allow Rochette to slip through their fingers, and he is arrested. By every means in his power, and the French legal code gives him many opportunities, Rochette drags the case against him from court to court, and succeeds in avoiding final judgment for over two years and six months. Then, when a definite trial appears inevitable, the Prime Minister, acting under advice from the Minister of Finance, who has allowed himself to be terrorized by Rochette—to put the mildest possible construction on the reason for his conduct—brings influence to bear on the magistrature, and postpones the trial again. Rochette in the meanwhile has left France, and has continued to prosecute his financial schemes. There we have the Rochette case in a nutshell. There also we have its intimate connexion with the Caillaux drama, for the Minister of Finance who, for more or less personal reasons, persuaded the Prime Minister to order the postponement of the trial, was Monsieur Joseph Caillaux.

How personal were Monsieur Caillaux’s reasons for advising Monsieur Monis to secure the postponement of the Rochette trial were shown in a letter from Rochette himself, which he sent to the President of the Commission of Inquiry on March 27, 1914. The letter was a very long one. In it Monsieur Rochette told the story of how he had terrorized the Minister of Finance, Monsieur Caillaux, into working for him. Rochette had compiled a volume of 120 pages on the history of financial issues made in France and floated on the market from 1890 to 1910. In these tables it was shown that French investors had had heavy losses amounting in all to four hundred million pounds sterling. The book was likely to create very serious difficulties for Monsieur Caillaux, the Finance Minister, who had been responsible for permitting many of these issues of stock, and it was Rochette’s determination that his lawyer should read these figures in court on the plea of showing that if some of his issues had brought losses to the French investor other issues under higher authority than his own had done the same thing on a larger scale. The importance which Monsieur Caillaux attributed to this book is proved by the fact that he spoke of it to Monsieur Monis as a political reason for doing what Rochette wished, and postponing the trial. It is interesting to note that there are actually thirty-eight prosecutions waiting Rochette’s return to France.

The history of the Rochette case shows unfortunately that Madame Caillaux’s revolver shot was not the only crime in the full story of the Caillaux drama. There is another criminal whom a higher court must try than the Paris Court of Assizes, there is another victim besides Gaston Calmette. The criminal is expediency, expediency which allows men in the positions of Prime Minister, of judge, of Public Prosecutor to tamper with fact, to mislead and to lie in the belief that they “have the right” to do so. The victim whom they murdered is The Truth.