Fernand Labori

Fernand Labori, 1914

Fernand Gustave Gaston Labori (born April 18, 1860 in Reims , † March 14, 1917 in Paris ) was a French lawyer, journalist and politician. In the context of the Dreyfus affair , he defended, among other things, Émile Zola on charges of defamation, Alfred Dreyfus in the second court martial and Henriette Caillaux in the murder trial against them.

Life

Fernand Labori, son of a railway inspector, studied law at the law faculty in Paris from 1880. In 1884 he was admitted to the bar. At the same time he became editor-in-chief of the Gazette de Paris . His first major case was in 1894 in the defense of the anarchist Auguste Vaillant , who carried out an assassination attempt on the French National Assembly . In 1897 he founded the literary magazine La Revue de Palais .

Very early on Labori was one of the so-called Dreyfusards, that is, one of the people who were convinced that Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted of treason. In the trial against Esterhazy at the beginning of 1898, he represented Alfred Dreyfus' wife Lucie Dreyfus . Esterhazy was acquitted by a court-martial on the basis of falsified evidence. Émile Zola had already represented the Dreyfusard cause several times before in eloquent articles. On January 13, 1898, Zola's open letter J'accuse…! Appeared on the front page of the literary newspaper L'Aurore . ( I'm accusing ...! ) To President Félix Faure, in which Zola now denounced Esterházy's acquittal.

Trial of Zola

Zola rhetorically took on the role of a prosecutor in his article. He charged the general staff member Armand du Paty de Clam , the former war ministers Auguste Mercier and Jean-Baptiste Billot , the deputy chief of the general staff Charles Arthur Gonse and the head of the French general staff, Raoul Le Mouton de Boisdeffre , of being masterminds of a conspiracy Dirt press anti-Semitic propaganda and again accused Esterhazy of being the real traitor. Zola also raised the crucial question, which was prophetic for the future of the Dreyfus affair, of the extent to which these military judges were still able to give an independent judgment. A conviction of Esterhazy would also have been a court martial that would have ruled the Dreyfus case and every military judge ruling on Esterhazy was aware that their war minister, to the applause of the MPs, had affirmed that Dreyfus had been rightly convicted. Zola went so far as to indict the first court martial

"... to have violated the law by convicting a defendant on the basis of an undisclosed piece of evidence, and I am indicting the Second Court Martial of covering this unlawfulness on orders and of having committed the criminal offense of knowingly acquitting a guilty party."

On the day of publication, conservative parliamentarians and the general staff called for action against Zola. On January 18, 1899, the Council of Ministers decided that the Minister of War should file a defamation suit against Zola and Alexandre Perrenx, the managing directors of L'Aurore . Contrary to what Zola expected, the prosecution focused their accusations on the passage in which Zola had accused the court-martial of acquitting Esterhazy on orders. The charge against Zola was thus unrelated to the conviction of Dreyfus.

The process took two weeks. On every day of the trial, nationalist demonstrators waited in front of the gates of the Palace of Justice for Zola's appearance, only to greet him with hoots, stones and death threats. In the courtroom, Fernand Labori and Albert Clemenceau succeeded in repeatedly eliciting statements from the witnesses about the Dreyfus affair through their skilful questioning, although the presiding judge constantly tried to limit their questions to facts relating to the prosecution. Cornered, General Pellieux brought up another document allegedly clearly proving Dreyfus's guilt and then quoted the wording of the faux Henry . When Labori asked to show the document to the court, General Gonse intervened, who, unlike Pellieux, was aware that it was one of the forgeries in the secret file. He confirmed the existence of the document, but claimed it could not be made public. The court then had the Chief of Staff Boisdeffre appear as a witness. Boisdeffre confirmed Pellieux's statements and then turned to the court as a warning:

“You are the judgment, you are the nation; if the nation has no confidence in the leaders of its army, in the men who are responsible for national defense, then those men are ready to leave their heavy duty to others, you just have to tell. This is my last word."

In Léon Blum's view, the trial made it clear that Zola's allegations were correct. However, Boisdeffre's words demanding a decision between the army and Zola and the Dreyfusards had made a strong impression in public and in the courtroom. On February 23, Zola was fined 3,000 francs and sentenced to one year in prison. Prime Minister Méline described the Zola and Dreyfus cases as closed the next day in the Chamber of Deputies. However, the Supreme Court of Appeal initially overturned the judgment against Zola because of a procedural error. On July 18, Zola was found guilty a second time. Labori and Clemenceau then advised him to leave France immediately, as that would mean that the judgment could not be served and enforced. After the same day, Zola left for London.

Second court martial against Alfred Dreyfus

Demange and Labori, the two defenders of Dreyfus

After Zola's defense, Labori took on further cases of Dreyfusards who had been indicted in connection with the Dreyfus affair. In 1899 he represented Joseph Reinach , among others, against the defamation suit brought by the widow of Captain Hubert Henry , whose falsifications of evidence had contributed significantly to the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. He also defended Marie-Georges Picquart , the former head of the intelligence service in the General Staff, who had identified the real traitor, Ferdinand Walsin-Esterházy , and who subsequently resisted the demands of his superiors to let the misjudgment against Dreyfus stand. Together with Edgar Demange , he also took on the defense of Alfred Dreyfus after the Supreme Court of Appeal overturned the judgment of 1894 and referred the trial to a court martial again. The litigation turned out to be not easy. Alfred Dreyfus was considerably weakened by his almost five years of solitary confinement on Devil's Island, Louis Begley also points out that Dreyfus, with his rigid facial expression and his unemotional, monotonous voice, was not a defendant who won over the judges. During the trial there were several arguments between Labori and the court president. Labori also disagreed with his fellow defender Demange in the conduct of the litigation, and they made a number of mistakes during the trial. Although the Supreme Court of Appeal had already clarified that Dreyfus had never confessed to the treason and that the Panizzardi letters had no evidential value, the two attorneys accepted, for example, that the prosecution re-presented this evidence to the military court. There was also an attack on Labori during the trial. He was shot in the back on the street in Rennes on August 14, and the assassin was never caught. Labori was able to resume his defense after a week, but the attack unsettled him permanently. A major problem for the defense, however, was that the judges were officers who were exposed to the influence or even the pressure of the highest chiefs of the army to come to a new conviction. With five to two judges' votes, Dreyfus was found guilty of treason a second time. Joseph Reinach, Mathieu Dreyfus and, reluctantly, the Dreyfusard Georges Clemenceau advised a pardon, as Alfred Dreyfus' physical condition made it doubtful that he would survive another long imprisonment. In fact, a few days later he was pardoned by the French President.

Labori was one of the Dreyfusards who strictly opposed this step. Many Dreyfusards had made personal sacrifices because they had been professionally and socially disadvantaged because of their commitment to the rehabilitation of Dreyfus. Many of them were less concerned with Dreyfus as a person than with fundamental questions of the understanding of the law and the role of the army in the state. From this purely constitutional point of view, an objection to the Rennes judgment was an imperative. Labori therefore broke off all contact with the Dreyfus family.

Two measures by Prime Minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau and the new War Minister Garcon de Galliffet exacerbated the division within the Dreyfusards. Both politicians were convinced of Dreyfus' innocence, but they were keen to end the affair in a way that would save the face of the army. Galliffet issued a daily order two days after the pardon , which was read out in every company and which said:

"The case is closed. The military judges, accompanied by the respect of all, pronounced their guilty verdict completely independently. We bow to your decision without reservation. We also bow to the deep sympathy that guided the President of the Republic. "

On November 19, 1899, Waldeck-Rousseau submitted an amnesty law to the Senate, under which all crimes committed in connection with the affair should fall. The only exception was the crime for which Dreyfus had been convicted in Rennes. This left him with the opportunity to achieve complete rehabilitation through a revision procedure. The Amnesty Act, which came into force in December 1900, put an end to many pending proceedings, such as those against Picquart and Zola, but it also prevented legal proceedings against people like Mercier, Boisdeffre, Gonse and du Paty who were involved in the intrigue. Fernand Labori was one of the staunch opponents of this amnesty law.

After the Dreyfus Affair

Labori was elected MP in the year Dreyfus was fully rehabilitated. He initially supported the government of Clemenceau and at the same time campaigned for the expropriation of church property and the abolition of courts-martial. In 1911 he was elected President of the Bar.

In 1914 Labori defended Henriette Caillaux that the Figaro - editor Gaston Calmette had murdered after this her love letters to the politician Joseph Caillaux wanted to publish. The letters were written at a time when Caillaux was still married to his first wife. Labori obtained a controversial acquittal.

literature

• Maurice Barrès : Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme . Éditions du Trident, Paris 1987, ISBN 2-87690-040-8 .
• Louis Begley : The Dreyfus Case: Devil's Island, Guantánamo, History's Nightmare. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42062-1 .
• Léon Blum : Summoning the Shadows. The Dreyfus Affair. From the French with an introduction and a note by Joachim Kalka. Berenberg, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-937834-07-9 .
• Jean-Denis Bredin: The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. George Braziller, New York 1986, ISBN 0-8076-1109-3 .
• James Brennan: The reflection of the Dreyfus affair in the European Press, 1897-1899 . Peter Lang, New York 1998, ISBN 0-8204-3844-8 .
• Leslie Derfler: The Dreyfus Affair . Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 2002, ISBN 0-313-31791-7 .
• Vincent Duclert: The Dreyfus Affair . Military mania, hostility to the republic, hatred of Jews. Wagenbach, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-8031-2239-2 .
• Eckhardt Fuchs, Günther Fuchs: “J'accuse!” On the Dreyfus affair. Decaton-Verlag, Mainz 1994, ISBN 3-929455-27-7 .
• Ruth Harris: The Man on Devil's Island - Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that divided France. Penguin Books, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-14-101477-7 .
• Martin P. Johnson: The Dreyfus Affair - Honor and Politics in the Belle Époque . Macmillan Press Ltd, Houndmills 1999, ISBN 0-333-68267-X .
• Elke-Vera Kotowski , Julius H. Schoeps (Eds.): J'accuse…! …I accuse! About the Dreyfus affair. A documentation. Catalog accompanying the traveling exhibition in Germany May to November 2005. Published on behalf of the Moses Mendelssohn Center . Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam 2005, ISBN 3-935035-76-4 .
• Alain Pagès (Ed.): Emile Zola - The Dreyfus Affair; Articles - interviews - letters. Translated and supplemented by Karl Zieger. Haymon-Verlag, Innsbruck 1998, ISBN 3-85218-265-4 .
• Uwe Wesel : History of the law in Europe. From the Greeks to the Lisbon Treaty. Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60388-4 , pp. 516-522.
• George Whyte : The Dreyfus Affair. The power of prejudice. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-60218-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Fernand Labori ( 1860-1917 ) at dreyfus.culture.fr . Retrieved February 10, 2020
2. ↑ Pagès, pp. 102-113
3. ↑ quoted from Pagès, p. 113
4. ↑ ^{a b} Kotowski et al., Pp. 41-42.
5. ↑ Pagès, pp. 42-43.
6. ↑ Begley, p. 151.
7. ↑ quoted from Begley, p. 152.
8. ↑ Blum, p. 82.
9. ↑ Pagès, p. 34.
10. ↑ Begley, pp. 152-153.
11. ↑ Pagès, p. 35.
12. ^ Begley, p. 174.
13. ↑ Begley, pp. 170-173.
14. ↑ Harris, pp. 322-323.
15. ↑ Begley, pp. 174-175.
16. ^ Begley, p. 183.
17. ↑ quoted from Begley, p. 184.
18. ^ Begley, p. 185.