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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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