Part 12

Several attempts were made, according to Rochette, during the month of March 1908, to induce him to fall into cleverly laid traps which would make his arrest easy. “These traps were laid cleverly, but not cleverly enough,” Rochette declared, “and I was too astute to allow myself to be caught in them. That was why,” he added, “I was arrested on Pichereau’s disgracefully vamped-up charge.” Rochette was convinced, he told the members of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, that the anonymous letters and anonymous telephone calls warning him that his arrest was imminent with which he was bombarded between March 8 and 21 were police tactics for the purpose of persuading him to take flight and so to make matters easy for everybody. “I did not take flight,” said Rochette proudly, “and when I was arrested there were £440,000 in my safe. I could have taken this money out at any time. I did not take it.” Rochette declared that the examining magistrate, Monsieur Berr, had shown unfair prejudice against him from the moment of his arrest, and that this was so apparent that his lawyer, Maître Maurice Bernard, had made this accusation to the examining magistrate’s face: “I know that my client’s arrest was arranged, ‘worked’ if you will, by three men, Monsieur Lépine, Monsieur Prevet, and yourself!” And the examining magistrate made no reply. “Ten thousand shareholders in my companies signed a petition against my arrest and forwarded it to the Chamber of Deputies,” was one of Rochette’s points. “In this petition they stated that my arrest had been caused by Monsieur Prevet with the complicity of Monsieur Gaudrion and Monsieur Pichereau. In February 1909,” Rochette declared, “one of the experts who was examining my books walked into Monsieur Berr’s room in the Palace of Justice. I was in the little room next door, and I heard Monsieur Blanc, the expert in question, who had not seen me, ask the examining magistrate whether my case would come on for trial before the Correctional Court before Easter or not. This was proof that the experts and everybody else knew at this time that I was to be sent for trial, and that the pretence of examining my books was only a pretence and nothing more. The examining magistrate had made his mind up to send me for trial directly he had me under arrest. The Crédit Minier,” Rochette declared, “ought never to have been put into bankruptcy. None of my societies ought to have been declared bankrupt, for every creditor was paid 100 per cent. The only money that was lost was about £160,000, and that loss was due to the disgraceful “bearing” of my shares by speculators. It is not fair to say that I caused this loss of £160,000 to investors. The truth is that people who were too well informed were allowed to make £160,000 at the expense of the public. I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I have committed no fault. Surely the success of the Crédit Minier is not a fault. It had twenty-five customers when I started it, and five years later there were fifty thousand of them. I wish to point out,” said Rochette, “that my enterprises existed and did well before my arrest, and continue to exist after it and in spite of it. I venture to state positively that very few financiers who suffered as I have could make the same statement. The net result of my arrest was the heavy drop of the shares of my enterprises, a loss of £240,000 by the Crédit Minier, and the ruin of shareholders whom the _krach_ caught unawares. Of the £240,000 which the Crédit Minier lost, certain speculators made £160,000, and £80,000 went to the expenses of the bankruptcy. The liquidator alone was paid between £12,000 and £16,000.”

Rochette told the Commission of Inquiry that he had intended taking charge of the _Petit Journal_, as he had taken control in the _krach_ of the Say sugar refinery. He was, at that time, endeavouring to get hold of the concession of the Paris Omnibus Company and was backing up the Darracq group with money so that Monsieur Darracq could obtain the concession from the Municipal Council. Monsieur Rochette, questioned very closely by the members of the Commission, was forced to admit that one of his lawyers, Monsieur Rabier (one of the stalwarts of the Caillaux party in Parliament), drew about £500 a year for legal advice, and on other occasions received sums varying from £2800 to £3200. The members of the Commission expressed doubt about these figures, and a curious story was told by a former clerk of Rochette’s with regard to his book-keeping methods.

From this story it appeared that efforts were usually made by Rochette to conceal the real amounts which were paid for their services to newspapers and to those lawyers in the employ of the financier who happened to be members of Parliament or political personages. Curiously enough most of Rochette’s lawyers happened to be political personages, and one of the lawyers of the Crédit Minier was Monsieur René Renoult, who is a member of the present Cabinet. In many ways the examination of Rochette by the Parliamentary Commission was an eye-opener to the public. Accusations of venality on the part of public men are so common in France, owing to the licence allowed in the Press, that such words as “corruption,” “theft,” “lying” and the like have almost lost their force when applied to men in the van of politics. But the details of the manner in which Rochette conducted his business impressed and alarmed the public by their unpleasant likeness to the unsavoury details of the Panama case.

One of the members of the Commission, Monsieur Jules Delahaye, who throughout the inquiry acted very much like a counsel for the prosecution of every political man who was mixed up in the Rochette affair, pointed out this unsavoury resemblance. “I consider Monsieur Rochette to be a great corrupter of public morals,” he said. “I am not at all content with his explanations. They do not satisfy me. There are matters of far greater gravity behind his methods than he would have us suppose, and I would ask my colleagues to concentrate their attention on the items of Rochette’s expenditure for publicity with the same intensity as the attention of the Parliamentary Commission had at the time to be concentrated, with the results which you remember, on the publicity accounts of the Panama Canal. In this case, as in the case of Panama, public morals have been corrupted. Millions (“of francs” is meant, of course) have been employed, not only to buy publicity in the newspapers, but, as the Prefect of Police has told us, to corrupt the moral and financial rectitude of people of all ranks and all stations in Paris, in the provinces, all over France. I will go so far as to say that the taint actually extended to the Church. That is a characteristic of the affair.” (Page 547 of the official shorthand reports of the Parliamentary Commission.)

Rochette paid, in many ways, on the plea of publicity. He was in the habit, when he wanted to pay and to preserve secrecy for the payment, of sending a note down to the cashier of the Crédit Minier with his initials “H.R.” and a little cross marked on it next to the amount. These little crosses were used in the books, it is suggested, to signify that the amounts entered against certain names were not the real amounts paid, which were much larger. The payments were made directly from hand to hand by Monsieur Rochette to his political friends and helpers, and no receipts passed. I do not propose to go very much into detail on this uncomfortable question. The evidence of Monsieur Duret, who acted as Rochette’s private secretary, and that of Monsieur Yenck, a clerk in the Crédit Minier, leaves a very uncomfortable taste in the mouth. Monsieur Yenck declared that Monsieur Duret’s sole business was to act as intermediary between political men and Rochette. He used to speak in very familiar terms of many well-known politicians, and was on the friendliest terms with Rochette himself. He always called Rochette by his first name, “Henri,” and was in the habit of alluding to Monsieur Rabier as “Rab.” It was Duret who, according to Yenck, secured, by political influence, the decoration of the Legion of Honour for Henri Rochette. Yenck declared that Duret had on one occasion made erasures in the private books of the Crédit Minier, so as to avoid scandal. He told the Commission that Duret, whom he had seen with a scratcher in his hand, and one of the Crédit Minier’s private books in front of him, had explained what he was doing by the remark: “I am very much afraid that Henri is going to be arrested, and I don’t want the name of ‘Rab’ to be found in the books.” (Page 566 of the official shorthand reports of the Parliamentary Commission.)

On February 1, 1912, the judgment against Rochette was annulled on grounds of technical irregularity, by the Court of Correctional Appeal, and the conclusions of the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission were laid on the table of the Chamber of Deputies. It will be remembered that according to the statement made by the Procureur Général, Monsieur Victor Fabre, the Prime Minister, Monsieur Monis, had brought influence to bear on him for the postponement of the Rochette trial on appeal from the judgment of July 1910. Monsieur Jaurès, the President of the Committee of Inquiry, on March 20, 1912, told the Chamber the history of the Rochette case as he knew it, and he knows it perhaps better than any other Frenchman living except Rochette himself. He told the story of the strangely illegal manner in which the police had had Rochette arrested. He pointed out that the police and the lawyers had been at loggerheads as to the procedure to be employed. The police acted in one way, the Parquet (that is to say the legal authorities) acted in another, and by their ill-considered lack of unity of action with the Parquet, the police had undoubtedly served the interests of a number of men who had speculated and had made money on the downfall of Rochette. It was, said Monsieur Jaurès, a curious fact that while the arrest of Rochette could not be effected for the mere purpose of protecting the small investor, it was effected by means of a conspiracy between a banker, Monsieur Gaudrion, who had sold Rochette shares for the fall, and Monsieur Prevet, the director of a newspaper, who was anxious to throttle a competitor.

In this conspiracy Monsieur Gaudrion furnished the prosecutor and Monsieur Prevet supplied the influence. Monsieur Gaudrion did not, himself, prosecute. He could not do so because he had been in trouble with the laws of his country. He found a man of straw to act as prosecutor in his stead, a man named Pichereau, and gave him shares and money to act against Rochette. “When we examined Monsieur Gaudrion before the Commission of Inquiry, I said to him,” said Monsieur Jaurès, “I can understand that you, who were gambling for the fall of Rochette shares should be anxious for the arrest of Rochette, but why did Pichereau ruin himself by bringing an action which made the shares in which he had invested his whole fortune perfectly valueless?” “Gaudrion answered,” said Monsieur Jaurès, “‘The shares did not belong to Pichereau’,” and this was the truth. Monsieur Jaurès suggested that the conspiracy had gone even further. Monsieur Clemenceau, who was Prime Minister, told us that he intervened because he was anxious to scotch the legend that the Government were protecting Rochette. “I told him to be careful,” said Monsieur Jaurès. Monsieur Prevet had told the Commission that Gaudrion had advised him on March 19 or early on the morning of the 20th, of the readiness of Pichereau to prosecute.

At half-past eleven on the morning of March 20, Monsieur Clemenceau telephoned for Monsieur Lépine and told him to find a prosecutor. Monsieur Lépine spoke to Monsieur Yves Durand, and Monsieur Yves Durand went straight to Monsieur Prevet. “When I pointed out,” said Monsieur Jaurès, “the significance of these dates, Monsieur Clemenceau exclaimed. ‘It is a coincidence.’ Monsieur Lépine also said, ‘It is a coincidence,’ and I can say no more than ‘It is a coincidence’ to the Chamber to-day.”

Here in a few words we have the real origin of the _affaire Rochette_, and the “coincidence” which Monsieur Jaurès pointed out to the Chamber is a painfully suggestive one. Rochette, after his first sentence, was allowed to drag proceedings out for many months, from July 27 of one year to April 29 of the next, though the courts always found against him except in very minor subsidiary actions. He then secured a further postponement from April 29, 1911, till January 12, 1912. During all this time Rochette had been a free man, and he was able to continue his financial operations. His reasons for spending immense sums of money on securing these postponements of his trial were self-evident. Monsieur Jaurès pointed out these reasons to the Chamber. Rochette said to himself, Monsieur Jaurès explained, that the more business he did, the more chance he had of ultimate escape. If during these months of delay he succeeded in bringing off one substantial _coup_ he would cease to be the adventurer who was a danger to the small investor, and would be considered as the clever and successful financier who had triumphed over the illegality of his arrest in the first place.

In this speech before the Chamber, Monsieur Jaurès referred to the contradictions in the evidence of the Procureur Général Monsieur Fabre, the Prime Minister Monsieur Monis, and Judge Bidault de L’Isle, with reference to the last and longest postponement of the Rochette trial from April 29, 1911, to January 12, 1912. He alluded to the rumour which was gaining ground that political influence had been brought to bear on the judicial authorities for the postponement of the trial. He expressed the regret that these rumours had not been probed until after the truth was made clear and he declared that Monsieur Fabre had said either too much or too little before the Parliamentary Commission. We know the truth now. We know that political influence was brought to bear for the postponement of the Rochette trial, we know who brought that influence to bear, and the truckling with the truth on the part of those concerned in the postponement must be the subject of the next chapter of this book, for this one is, I fear, too long already.

X

“THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH ...”

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.