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was Le Zut, owned by Frédéric “Frédé” Gérard and affiliated with the anarchist paper
Le Libertaire.
It was one of Picasso’s favorite hangouts in his early years in Paris, and he decorated its walls with murals. After police
     shut down that establishment, Frédé went on to open a new place, which became famous as Le Lapin Agile. (Previously it had
     been called the Cabaret of Assassins because portraits of murderers were hung on the walls.) The new name came from a pun
     on the name of the sign painter André Gill, who painted over the entrance a rabbit hopping out of a stew pot (
le lapin à Gill
). Le Lapin Agile became a gathering place for anarchists and criminals as well as the artists and poets who patronized it
     for the cheap Burgundian food. Here, as late as 1910, informers were reporting on the anarchist clientele. In 1911, the owner’s
     son was gunned down on the threshold of the café. His murderer was never found.
    Anarchist newspapers continued to be published, and antigovernment sentiments remained active. In 1911, a Russian émigré named
     Victor Kibalchich, later known as Victor Serge, took over editorship of the newspaper
l’anarchie
and urged his comrades to resume the active struggle to overturn the state. His words caused a spark that would burst into
     flame when they reached Jules Bonnot, a onetime chauffeur. A series of disappointments in love and in his career had embittered
     him, and he had turned to stealing the cars of wealthy people. Now, embracing anarchism, he would make his own contribution
     to automotive history and become for a time the most feared criminal in France.
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    Though Paris grew and prospered, the national government was perennially unstable. Unsure of how long the Third Republic would
     last, Parisians believed, in the words of one, that they were “dancing on a volcano.” 39
    The execution of President Sadi Carnot’s assassin was soon followed by the most severe internal crisis France faced during
     the Third Republic. The false accusation of a Jewish military officer for treason, known as the Dreyfus affair, divided the
     nation into bitterly opposed camps for years. It began in September 1894, when Major Hubert-Joseph Henry of the French intelligence
     service came into possession of a document that had been taken from a wastebasket at the German embassy. It was a note, afterward
     referred to as the
bordereau,
which indicated that someone in the French army apparently had provided the Germans with important information about French
     military plans. The type of information described in the
bordereau
implied that the traitorous informant had to be an artillery officer on the general staff of the army.
    That brought Captain Alfred Dreyfus under suspicion, on no grounds other than the fact that he fit that general description
     and that his handwriting was said to have resembled that on the
bordereau.
More important, Dreyfus was a Jew — a rarity at such an elevated rank — and his colleagues did not like him. France was experiencing
     an upsurge in anti-Semitism around this time. Despite the fact that there were only about 85,000 Jews in a French population
     of 39 million, 40 anti-Semites blamed them for many of the country’s problems. The accusation against Dreyfus played directly into this metastasizing
     intolerance.
    Military officials seeking to build a case against Dreyfus had asked Alfred Gobert, the handwriting expert of the Bank of
     France, to compare the handwriting on the incriminating
bordereau
with samples of Captain Dreyfus’s writing. Gobert reported that although the two writing samples were “of the same graphic
     type,” they “presented numerous and important disparities which had to be taken into account.” 41 He concluded that the
bordereau
had been written by someone other than Dreyfus. This did not satisfy the military, which began to look for a second opinion.
     Prefect of Police Louis Lépine recommended Alphonse