On the evening of 18 July 1898, the writer Émile Zola disappeared. He had left the court accompanied by a military escort and amid loud shouts of disapproval and insults from a crowd of several hundred people. “Go back to Venice! Go back to the Jews! You coward!” echoed around. Even stones flew at him. Then, one of the most recognisable Frenchmen secretly left his homeland and the next day got off unnoticed at Victoria station in London. All he had with him was a nightdress wrapped in newsprint and a slip of paper with four English words and the address of his hotel. As he knew no English, it was written for him by Georges Clemenceau, a friend, newspaper editor and, years later, French Prime Minister.
How did such a dramatic episode in Zola’s life (1840-1902) come about, and how could the most widely read writer of his age arouse so much anger and hatred that he feared for his life and fled his homeland?
This time, it was not for his allegedly notorious and obscene novels that he filled the headlines, but for his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, the most famous cause célèbre in modern French history. Alfred Dreyfus was a French army captain and trainee of the elite General Staff, sentenced in 1894 to life imprisonment on the infamous Devil’s Island in tropical French Guiana for high treason and selling military secrets to German diplomats.
Dreyfus was Jewish, which was crucial to his tragic personal story. It became the affair of the century, which split French society and scarred it forever. Alfred Dreyfus was innocent. But his Jewishness was the main reason why he fell victim to the conservative anti-Republican military establishment. Even when it was clear that he was innocent and the real traitor had been discovered, the army covered up the truth with more and more intrigues.
After four years of farce, when Dreyfus languished in the unimaginably cruel conditions of his hellish exile, Émile Zola became one of his most influential supporters. It was his intervention that turned the affair around and gave it global dimensions.
On 13 January 1898, Zola published an open letter to the President of the Republic, entitled J’accuse! (I accuse!), in which he exposed the corruption of the very top of the French army, all the deliberate irregularities, the falsification of evidence, the lies, the frauds, the miscarriages of justice and the cover-ups in connection with the Dreyfus case.
This revolutionary act inflamed the whole of France, and Zola made many enemies who wanted to believe in Dreyfus’ guilt, the inviolability of the army and the Jewish conspiracy. He also gave the names of all those involved and he was prosecuted for slander.
Before the judge’s decision came down, he retreated to exile in the UK and spent almost a year there. He only returned when it looked as if the affair would finally receive a fair epilogue.
At the time of the Dreyfus affair, Zola was at the height of one of the most prolific literary careers of modern times. A journalist, essayist, art and literary critic, and above all a novelist, he had established himself as the father of naturalism, a particular branch of realism. His books were a realistic picture of everyday life among the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of French society, which was undergoing a fundamental transformation at that very moment as a result of rapid industrialisation, rising capitalism and the birth of consumer culture.
He has captivated readers with his incredible storytelling talent, authenticity and eye for detail. He described, without a hair on his tongue, all aspects of life, of which sexuality, crime and prostitution were regular companions. In doing so, he challenged the established value system of decency and pushed the boundaries between the public and the private, the make-believe and the reality. He was often accused of debauchery and a painful obsession with denial, but he was convinced of the writer’s duty to strike at the social conscience, always committed to the truth.
For a close observer of social conditions like Zola, interest in the Dreyfus case was therefore natural. It was not just a case of a man wrongly accused; the affair exposed fundamental divisions in French society. It showed how deeply it was imbued with anti-Semitism and an ingrained hatred of Germans, how strong the reactionary forces were, and how fragile the values of the French Revolution – equality, freedom, justice – were.
Émile Zola has shown himself at his best in the Dreyfus affair, bravely standing up for justice. True, he was already a famous name, but he put not only his reputation as a writer on the line, but also his life. In 1902, he died in his apartment under unexplained circumstances. It appeared to be carbon monoxide poisoning, but the case was quickly ruled an accident. But could Zola have been murdered precisely because of his involvement in the Dreyfus affair? Decades later, new allegations have come to light.
Rise to the literary Olympus
His life was a thorny one, and at a young age he experienced first-hand many of the hardships he later described so masterfully in his novels. His father, a successful engineer of Italian origin, soon died and he and his mother found themselves in poverty. He failed his A-levels twice and had to find a low-paid job at a very young age.
While dreaming of a literary career, he was thrown out of one apartment after another because he had no money to pay the rent, and the police were his regular guests. He often consorted with prostitutes and one of them, Berthe, was supposedly his mistress, but she certainly served as a model for one of Zola’s most famous and notorious literary characters, the prostitute Nana.
Even when he met his future wife Alexandrine, a seamstress and maid to wealthy bourgeois women, they lived a poor but bohemian life. These difficult years hardened Zola’s character and provided him with the experiences that would later inspire his novels.
Then, finally, fortune smiled on him and, with the help of a friend of his father’s, he got a job at the fast-growing publishing house Hachette, where he quickly showed his talent. Reading was then the most widespread pastime of the masses and universal literacy was the result of the educational reforms brought about by the French Revolution.
Zola was in charge of publicising new works of literature and soon realised that good marketing was at least as important as talent. As head of publicity, he got to know the world of publishing up close and came into contact with many of the leading authors of the day. He promoted his very first collection of short stories in a very clever way, by sending reviews, supposedly written by a ‘friend’, to all the newspapers free of charge. Suddenly, his hitherto unknown name was in all the literary columns. And there it remained until his death.
Zola’s most authoritative and creative masterpiece, which catapulted him into the world public eye, was the cycle of twenty novels about the Rougon-Macquart family. In this collection, he provided a critical picture of French society during the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852-1870), the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Through the intense and often tragic stories of several generations of family members, he provides a panorama of the modern world, detailing five worlds: the bourgeoisie, the merchant class, the lower class, the upper class and the marginals – prostitutes, criminals, artists and priests.
He was fascinated by the impact of the growth of industrial capitalism on the internal transformation of the various social classes, and in his works he touched upon the phenomenon of the emerging urban poverty. He wrote about the misery, hardship and suffering of the little man, and with a scientific approach sought to show that human behaviour is predetermined by heredity and environment. The Rougon-Macquart family’s degeneration was caused by alcohol, crime and prostitution, which were in their genes.
At the same time, the fate of Zola’s moral degenerates was a metaphor for the depravity of the corrupt regime established by the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, which Zola, as a convinced republican, found repugnant.
Under the pen of this defender of freedom of expression, taboos have fallen one by one. Most shocking of all was his graphic treatment of sexuality and the female body. Many of his opponents accused him of seeing his work as a threat to public morality. They were even banned in Victorian Britain and his translator was sentenced to imprisonment and fined for obscenity.
The three “most immoral books” are said to be Earth, Nana and Kitchen, and those writers who also dared to write about sex were accused of ‘Zolaism’. In his homeland, his application for membership of the prestigious literary institution, the Académie française, was rejected nineteen times.
He also began to associate with the painters later known as the Impressionists. As a teenager, he befriended the future painter Paul Cézanne, who opened the door to his understanding of the world of fine art. The Impressionists were close to his heart because, like him, they sought truth in realism and depicted the world as it was.
Manet, in particular, aroused the scorn of a stuffy conservative society with his depictions of the naked female body without embellishment. Zola, on the other hand, admired his courage and innovative approach, and defended him vigorously in his artistic critiques.
With Beznitsa – the seventh and one of the most famous novels of the cycle – he would intensify his attack on decency by describing the destructive power of sex and alcohol among the new industrial proletariat. The novel became a sensation, both for its original subject matter and for its scandalousness. “This is not realism, it is filth; this is not debauchery, it is pornography”, wrote the horrified critics.
But Zola did not let himself be distracted and persisted in his life’s mission. He was very consistent and methodical in his work – first collecting material, observing carefully and taking many notes. For Germinal, in which he described the workers’ movement, he went down into the mines with the workers for several days. That is why his works sound authentic and the reader can easily empathise with them. “My novels don’t lie”, said Zola, “I present the workers as they really were”.
It was his desire to capture and preserve a moment of truth forever that led him to become obsessed with photography later in life. He continued to take and develop pictures in his darkroom and even invented a selfie device to take selfies with his young family.
A double life
Zola’s private life did not follow the usual path either. He and his wife Alexandrine were happy, but they did not have children. The popularity of Zola’s books, which were published as if on a conveyor belt, allowed them to live a life of luxury and the years of bohemian pauperism were forgotten. Now it was Alexandrine who hired maids and cleaners, travelled and arranged her new estate not far from Paris. They regularly threw evening parties and entertained friends and associates.
But Zola was not safe from a midlife crisis and his life was turned upside down overnight. As he was finishing a massive project on the Rougon-Macquarts, already one of the most famous living writers, he took a lover twenty-seven years his junior, who soon bore him two children.
He was approaching 50 and in poor physical shape – suddenly he was no longer just a little round, but fairly chubby. He changed his lifestyle and gave up alcohol and carbohydrates. While he was trying to shed the pounds, he was drifting apart from his wife, with whom he shared a love of good food and drink. As she was spending more and more time in bed with migraines, she suggested that he get some fresh air in the company of her wigmistress and maid, Jeanne Rozerot.
But it was not only the fresh air that he enjoyed, and soon after the affair began, a daughter, Denise, was born in 1889, followed two years later by a son, Jacques. The children stayed with their mother, which was unusual for those times. Most illegitimate children were given to nuns, orphanages or adopted. But from the first moment, Zola was a devoted and loving father who loved fatherhood. He arranged a home for Jeanne not far from his own and successfully hid the affair from his wife for three years. But when she finally found out about it, she had a hysterical fit, confronted Jeanne with the discovery and completely destroyed her flat.
Then she came to terms with her husband’s infidelity. A love triangle was born, which lasted until Zola’s death, and in which Émile, Alexandrine and Jeanne established an unusual modus vivendi. Their threesome was an open secret. Alexandrine even established contact with the children, often taking them for walks, giving them gifts and seeing to their education. They respected her and maintained regular contact with her even after their mother’s death.
She has always been the only one to appear in public with her husband as the ‘official wife’. But privately, Zola lived in two households – sleeping and working at Alexandrine’s house, and spending his afternoons with his children and Jeanne. When the Zolas travelled, Jeanne would discreetly stay not far away. In his letters, he addressed them both as “dear wife”.
For Alexandrine, the situation was very painful and she often reminded her husband of her suffering. But as a woman with no income of her own in the 19th century, she had few other options, and Zola was, after all, ‘just’ a man of his time, despite his otherwise high moral principles. He did not bother about women’s equality and he did not show any progressive thinking when it came to bringing up his daughter. “If she can spell and play the piano, that will be enough to find her a prince,” he used to say.
The experience of double life and forbidden love also found its way into Zola’s fiction. The last book of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Doctor Pascal, is about an elderly doctor in love with his young niece, Clotilde. Although he officially dedicated the novel to his mother and his wife Alexandrine, he wrote in the copy he gave to Jeanne:
“To my dear Jeanne, to my Clotilde, who gave me the royal feast of my youth and rejuvenated me by thirty years by giving me my Denise and my Jacques, my two dear children, for whom I have written this book, so that they may know how I loved their mother /…/”
With this final book in his monumental series, he also responded to the changing situation in France as the so-called fin de siècle (end of the century) dawned. Despite scientific advances and a flourishing cultural scene, social and political tensions were becoming more pronounced, and it was clear that the French people did not share a common vision of the future of the nation.
Humiliated France
In the last gasps of the Second Empire and in a futile attempt to prevent the unification of Germany, save the throne and convince the European powers of the greatness of France, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia in July 1870. But the last French Emperor did not invade Berlin, but the opposite happened. Prussia attacked France and, after a humiliating defeat at the famous Battle of Sedan in September of that year, Prussia was forced to sign an armistice.
Even worse was the heavy compensation paid, and above all the loss of Alsace and Lorena. This disgrace led to the fall of the Empire and the Third Republic (1870-1940), but it also radically shaped the next fifty years of Franco-German relations and thus of European history.
A brief but extremely bloody civil conflict ensued, when revolutionaries in the capital declared a radical socialist commune because they disagreed with the new republican government, which was steeped in conservatism. Barricades were again being built, as they had been so many times since the French Revolution, and the working-class revolt that had inspired Karl Marx was a harbinger of the ideological clashes of the 20th century. Zola, then a journalist and parliamentary correspondent, watched at close quarters as the ground shook for the existing social order.
After the defeat of Prussia, the pride of the great French nation was wounded. Above all, the army, always an institution central to French national ideology, was desperate to preserve its reputation. Fearing renewed aggression from a now united and increasingly powerful and militant Bismarck’s Germany, its value in the eyes of the public and politicians quickly rose again. The military leadership therefore remained arrogant and increasingly escaped the control of the republican government and, under the influence of the old aristocracy and the reactionary monarchical forces, wrote its own rules.
Vengefulness and distrust of the Germans were at their height. Patriotism turned into dangerous nationalism and, in a paranoid atmosphere, all minorities and marginalised groups became targets of attacks and suspicion. Anyone who dared to denounce the regime was under constant surveillance, including Émile Zola.
But the most tragic victim of this set of circumstances was Alfred Dreyfus, a talented Jewish captain in the French army’s General Staff. When, on the basis of his abilities and hard work, he successfully worked his way through the elite schools to become a trainee at the very top of the army, the hitherto hidden anti-Semitism came out in full force.
Jews have, of course, always been the target of attacks, notwithstanding the fact that Napoleon gave them more rights and the republican reforms gave them formal equality. France was also the first country to grant citizenship to Jews. But in a country with only 71,000 Jews among a population of 38 million, anti-Semitism was more ripe than ever.
The ‘thanks’ for this goes above all to the real anti-Jewish propaganda organisation, the engine of which was the influential right-wing thinker and monarchist Édouard Drumont. His newspaper La libre parole (The Free Word) was an effective and efficient vehicle for spreading hatred, lies and conspiracies that would have made Hitler himself proud. It also undermined the Third Republic itself and drew attention to the powerful Jewish minority at the heart of its most influential institutions.
In 1886, he published a book entitled Jewish France, the seminal work of modern anti-Semitism, in which he exposed the worldwide Jewish conspiracy to take over the state and its institutions and the drive for Jewish domination of the whole of humanity. The book was not only the favourite reading of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, but was read by everyone – this treatise of hatred and contempt was published two hundred times in twenty years!
As so many times before and so many times after, the Jews have become the scapegoat for all the problems. Anti-Semitism poisoned French society and became the springboard for an emerging nationalist ideology. Even among the more progressive, few were concerned about xenophobic social tendencies. One of these was Émile Zola and, in his view, the rise of anti-Semitism cast a dark shadow over the Republic.
France was also the embodiment of modernity, economic growth, scientific discovery and global intellectual influence, where composers such as Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Fauré were active and active at the turn of the century, the painters Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, the writers Zola, France, Huysmans, Gide, Proust, Barrès, the scientists Poincaré and the Curies, to name but a few of the names that epitomised universal development.
In Paris, the City of Light, the arts and art nouveau, café culture and mass media flourished, and electricity lit up the new wide boulevards of the famous architect Baron Haussmann, who transformed the look of the city. But beneath the surface of progress, deep social contradictions smouldered, hiding old habits and beliefs. The Dreyfus affair brought all this to light.
Tensions began to rise within the hitherto ‘racially pure’ army, as many able Jews managed to rise to high positions. Nevertheless, meritocracy was an important factor in promotion and a hope for those who did not have the right name and the right connections. Drumont therefore launched a vile campaign against the Jews in the army with scurrilous caricatures and false accusations.
This was the period in which the able, patriotic and serious Alfred Dreyfus rose rapidly through the military hierarchy. In 1891, he was admitted to the elite military academy, where only the very best got in, and after graduating, he was the only Jew to be recruited to the General Staff itself.
A plot worthy of a spy novel
On a cold winter day in 1895, a French army officer was stripped of all his military titles in a humiliating public ceremony called the degradation. Thousands gathered to shout: “Death to the Jew! Death to the traitor!” His crime was allegedly selling military secrets to the German embassy.
He was summarily sentenced to life imprisonment in French Guiana for high treason. In April of that year, he was the only prisoner already in a tiny hut in the notorious penal colony on Devil’s Island, from which few have returned. He languished there for almost five years in unbearable conditions. That was Alfred Dreyfus.
The wealthy Dreyfus family was from Alsace, and Alfred, disillusioned by the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, moved to Paris to escape the German occupation. Very loyal to his homeland, he decided to serve it best in the army.
At a time when black clouds were gathering over his destiny, he was happily married to the daughter of a wealthy diamond merchant, with two young children and a promising career as an artillery officer. But he was not particularly popular in the service, being somewhat reserved, which led to his being seen as haughty. Few people thought that, as the only Jew, he might have found it difficult to integrate into a distinctly Catholic environment.
The affair began when Madame Bastien, a cleaner at the German embassy in Paris, handed over the suspicious contents of a waste bin belonging to the military attaché von Schwartzkoppen to French counter-intelligence, specifically Lieutenant-Colonel Henry, in September 1894. Spying was widespread among the diplomatic services at the time, and the French were particularly wary of their mortal enemies, the Germans.
Von Schwartzkoppen had been suspicious of the French for some time and had indeed been sent by Berlin to spy on the French. They quickly got wind of regular correspondence between this German diplomat and a spy in the French army. In view of the discovery of Madame Bastien, the so-called bordereau, or list, which listed, among other things, trivial but secret information on new French military technologies, activities and weapons, they (too) quickly concluded that the spy was a member of the General Staff of the Artillery.
The task of finding the culprit as soon as possible was given to the notorious anti-Semites themselves, and they quickly became suspicious of an officer named Dreyfus, “very talented but arrogant”, and above all a Jew. How convenient! The suspect had to write a few words from Borderenau unsuspectingly, so that they could compare the two scripts.
There were hardly any similarities and even the graphologists did not agree that the author was the same person, but the disgraced Dreyfus was arrested the same day. He was charged with high treason and thrown in prison. They held a gun to his head, saying “it is best to save your honour and say goodbye to this world”. With his wife and children in mind, and above all his innocence, he refused the ‘invitation’ in horror.
Thus began his long-lasting nightmare, which first turned from a personal tragedy into a public scandal and then into a national disgrace.
Dreyfus went mad in prison before his trial. He was delirious, hallucinating, screaming, banging his head against the wall and swearing his innocence. The prison warden, who watched helplessly his torment, was one of the few people convinced of his innocence at the beginning. Such an obviously desperate man could not be guilty. But in public and in court, Dreyfus showed no emotion and endured all the humiliations stoically.
Dreyfus’s guilt was only confirmed in a mock trial. Not only did they set up a man who was prepared to claim that the writing on the Bordeaux was his, the evidence remained hidden and neither Dreyfus nor his lawyer saw this infamous piece of paper. The whole judicial procedure was therefore illegal from the start. And since the news of the sale of French military secrets had already reached the media, the army urgently needed a culprit to save its reputation.
Aware of the fragility of the evidence, the military top brass hastily added another piece of fake evidence, namely the false testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Henry that he had heard about Dreyfus’ espionage months earlier. Henry was also a friend of probably the most influential French anti-Semite, Édouard Drumont. The latter was already happily printing in his newspaper fresh news of the treason of the ‘dirty Jew’.
In the anti-Semitic climate, of course, the public was not surprised that the traitor was a Jew, and no one bothered with the details of the judicial irregularities and the rigged trial. Nor did anyone care that Dreyfus did not in any way fit the profile of a traitor. The most common motive for spying was lack of money, and Dreyfus was in fact very rich. He would not have needed to serve in the army to survive, but he considered his profession his life’s mission.
When, during his degradation, his military patches were torn off his uniform and his sword was symbolically broken, he proudly told those gathered in the courtyard of the military school, “Soldiers, you have defiled an innocent man. Long live France, long live the army!”
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The truth is on the march
While Dreyfus lived in a hell 7,000 kilometres away, his scandalous conviction slowly faded into public obscurity. Often feverish, his teeth and hair fell out and, because the guards were not allowed to speak to him, he lost the ability to speak. He could walk only a few hundred metres a day in the courtyard in front of the hut. This was double fenced to block his view of the ocean.
Scorpions and spiders as big as the palm of your hand roamed his room, and when they started chaining him up at night, they crawled all over him. The sound of the sea was his only peace, and his will to live was sustained by the letters of his loving wife Lucie. He continued to write his diary for a while, but then he gave up: “I am so broken and tired, so broken in mind and body, that today I will stop writing my diary.”
But there were people who firmly believed in his innocence and were willing to do anything to see justice done. Apart from his wife, the main hero of these efforts was Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu. He left his business and devoted his life to fighting for his brother’s release and finding the real culprit. He hired private detectives, knocked tirelessly on the doors of powerful people and wrote to MPs and the media – thus the so-called Dreyfus camp was born.
Meanwhile, more and more allegations have also come to light about all the irregularities in the trial, the forged evidence and even the name of the real spy. Mathieu Dreyfus’ campaign also soon bore its first fruit, despite fierce opposition from the army, the government, the Catholic Church and most of the media. More and more influential people, especially those with Alsatian roots, started to call for the case to be reopened.
Perhaps the most crucial dramatic twist in the story, before Émile Zola became involved, was the appointment of a new head of French intelligence. Georges Picquart was an extremely capable, truthful and meticulous man. His anti-Semitic tendencies were in the spirit of the times, but when he came on the trail of a real traitor, he did not even think of concealing the discovery, as his predecessor and superior had done.
Again, von Schwartzkoppen’s waste bin was decisive, from which the conscientious cleaner was still carrying discarded documents. In March 1896, a suspicious blue slip came into Picquart’s hands. It was addressed to a French Major Esterhazy, but the author, von Schwartzkoppen, threw it away without sending it off. It was obvious from the contents that von Schwartzkoppen and Esterhazy were in regular contact and that the latter was supplying the Germans with information of a confidential nature. Could Esterhazy have been the spy and traitor for whose crime Dreyfus was wrongly convicted?
Picquart compared the handwriting of the infamous Bordeaux and Blue Slip and it was more than obvious – both messages were written with the same pen. At the same time, he received confidential information that no one in German intelligence had ever heard of any Dreyfus, while information was regularly delivered to them by an infantry major. Esterhazy was an infantry major. Then Picquart had him pursued, and he was caught twice while leaving the German Embassy. Esterhazy was the culprit!
Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy came from one of Central Europe’s most prominent families of Hungarian origin, and his father was a distinguished general in the French army. But the son was a real pervert, a lecher, a womaniser, a gambler, a cheat and an anti-Semite. Picquart soon discovered that Esterhazy was living beyond his means and constantly borrowing money. His wife, too, was addicted to luxury.
So he contacted the German embassy and promised secret information in return for a fee. As his letters to his mistress later made clear, he felt no patriotism towards France, but was extremely hostile to the Jews. He was friends with Édouard Drumont and influenced the editorial policy of La libre parole.
Picquart wrote a detailed report of his discoveries to his superiors, but instead of praise, he was transferred to North Africa. His honesty cost him his post as head of the Intelligence Bureau. The military top knew all along that Dreyfus was innocent, and most of those involved knew about Esterhazy. If the truth were to come out, so would the lying, the falsification of evidence and the illegality of the proceedings against Dreyfus.
When he protested that it was their patriotic duty to do justice, all he heard was, “What do you care if this Jew stays on Devil’s Island?” Picquart began to fear for his life and whispered to the lawyer. “If anything happens to me, I want you to inform the President of the Republic of my findings!”
J’accuse!
By then, Esterhazy’s name was already circulating in the public. The Dreyfusars were gaining more and more influential followers. Zola did not get involved in the discussions from the beginning, although he had been invited to join the Dreyfus camp for some time. In fact, he had already published an article in Le Figaro in 1896 entitled “For the Jews”, in which he denounced the growing anti-Semitism and argued that all the stereotypes about them were the result of 1800 years of persecution, when “we put them in the ghetto like lepers”. But he had no political ambitions and did not know the whole case well enough. Then, as a writer, he became fascinated by the story itself and by the ever-new plots: “What a tense tragedy, and what brilliant protagonists!”
When the name of the real culprit appeared in the media, he and his followers decided to intervene. First, in December 1897, he wrote ‘A Letter to France’ – a paean to the values of humanity, truth and justice on which modern France was to be founded during the French Revolution.
In January 1898, under increasing pressure, Esterhazy was finally arrested, but was acquitted in a mock trial that was a complete farce, to the loud triumphalism of the right-wing and anti-Rightists. Many people testified that he was in no way the author of the bordereau and even suggested that the poor man was the victim of a conspiracy.
If he had been convicted, we would have had to review the Dreyfus trial, which the General Staff defended to the hilt because of all the irregularities. The situation became so perverse that Esterhazy became a hero and Dreyfus was even more despised than before.
It was a drop in the ocean for Zola. Ever the defender of the truth, knocking on the soul of France and warning it of the toxicity of anti-Semitism, on 13 January he published in the Republican left-wing newspaper L’Aurore (The Dawn) what was probably the most revolutionary piece of journalism of all time: ‘J’accuse!’, in the form of an open letter to the President of the Republic, in which he dramatically outlined all the details of the case known up to that time and named all those involved in the conspiracy.
He described the manipulation and falsification of evidence, the contempt of court proceedings, the depravity of Esterhazy, the findings of Picquart and the innocence of Dreyfus. Some of the claims were also false due to the complexity of the affair, and he attributed too much or too little responsibility to some of those involved.
But his drama was infectious: “Ah! The nullity of this accusation! That a man could be convicted on the basis of this act is a miracle of injustice. Let honest men try to read it without their hearts leaping with disgust and revealing their disgust at the thought of excessive penance down there on the Devil’s stream.”
The text covered the entire front page of the newspaper, which sold 300,000 copies that day, ten times more than usual. Zola had been a talented advertiser from a young age and he and his associates had carefully planned this action. They left nothing to chance – they sent young boys out into the busiest streets of Paris and in front of department stores, shouting ‘J’accuse!’ and shoving the newspaper under people’s noses. The whole thing was a sensation and the affair reached boiling point. The next day, a petition was issued by public figures demanding a review of the process.
The public was divided into two camps, the Dreyfusites and the anti-Dreyfusites, and from then on it was no longer just about Dreyfus as an individual, but about a clash of ideologies. The concept of the intellectual also arose precisely in connection with the Dreyfus affair. It was coined by Clemenceau to designate intellectuals from different disciplines who were prepared to publicly advocate a particular position on the basis of certain general values.
The Dreyfusarians were in principle republicans, leftists, intellectuals, the anti-Dreyfusarians clericals, monarchists, anti-Semites, rightists. The foundations of the Republic were shaken, fights broke out, riots broke out in the streets, families and friendships fell apart, students beat up professors who thought differently. And the world public stared in horror.
With the content of the text, Zola has boldly exposed himself. By accusing those involved by name, he deliberately broke the law on defamation. This was a tactical move that could have landed him in court and indirectly reopened the Dreyfus trial.
He did indeed find himself in court, just three weeks after the publication of J’accuse! He received countless letters of support and death threats. He was relentlessly portrayed as the messenger of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, like a pig performing a much-needed sacrifice on the French flag. Again, his allegedly bawdy books, proof of his obsession with human filth, were also targeted. At this time, for example, the bedpan in France was nicknamed ‘zola’.
His trial was also a spectacle, and the proceedings were staged. The judge refused to allow any discussion of Dreyfus’s case and innocence and sentenced Zola to a year in prison and a fine of three thousand francs. After an appeal, a second trial followed in July, but before it was over Zola slipped away unnoticed to England.
In his homeland, he became a central figure in the struggle between the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards, and his fame as a writer also made the whole world turn its eyes towards France.
The end of the Dreyfus affair
Zola’s disappearance was a sensation. While he settled in the quiet English countryside, newspapers reported seeing him in Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands, in Belgium, and eventually all over Europe.
It hasn’t been easy for him in England. Far away from family and friends, with no knowledge of the language, he hid like a criminal. Ever the gourmet, he loathed English food, but at the same time, on his bicycle with his camera, he enjoyed the freshness of nature and the freedom of movement he was no longer used to. He was compulsively writing again and the novel Fertility was born. He was happiest when he visited Jeanne and the children, when they lived together as a real family for the first time. He even wrote about their adventures together to his ‘official’ wife Alexandrine, who also visited him.
Although relieved from the constant attention and harassment, he missed action. And the action continued vigorously during his absence. The complications did not and did not end. The new Minister of War was a fervent anti-Dreyfusario, he took Picquart to task and had him imprisoned for revealing information of a military nature to the public.
But it soon became obvious that Picquart was right. In August 1898, Lieutenant Colonel Henry, Esterhazy’s protégé, admitted to forging one of the incriminating documents and adding Dreyfus’s name to it. In his cell, he slit his throat. Panic-stricken, Esterhazy fled to England.
Zola did not return from there until the following year, and the Dreyfusarians finally obtained a retrial for their martyr. A man almost unrecognisable and broken from the suffering, injustice and brutal treatment, barely able to stand on his own feet, he returned home. He had no idea of the magnitude of his case during his absence. He was unable to show any more emotion at the trial and, in a monotonous voice, defended himself in a lukewarm and reserved manner. As he had done the first time, he did not inspire much sympathy or empathy.
The verdict was outrageous. He was found guilty again! General Staff officers testified against him and defended Esterhazy. This was an attempt to save the dignity of the army, but since everyone knew Dreyfus was innocent, he was sentenced to ‘only’ ten years’ imprisonment with mitigating circumstances.
Ten days later, the French President pardoned him, but this was not the same as an acquittal. Technically, he was still guilty. Outrage was at its height, with mass demonstrations all over Europe. Dreyfus declared, “Freedom is nothing to me without honour.” And Zola said, “Future generations will be scandalised by their ancestors.”
In order to finally put an end to the affair, and as soon as possible before the 1900 World’s Fair, when all of Europe was rushing to Paris, the government declared an amnesty for all those involved. Thus, all the conspirators and liars got off cheaply, but especially Esterhazy, who was never punished for his crime. Even though he admitted that he was the author of the infamous bordereau.
Dreyfus’s judgment was only overturned in 1906, when the party of Georges Clemenceau, Zola’s friend and former owner and editor of L’Aurore, where the text J’accuse! Dreyfus was restored to all his military privileges and granted the highest civic honour, membership of the Legion of Honour. He later even served in the First World War, before spending the rest of his life away from the limelight in the family circle.
Zola’s death
But Dreyfus’s most famous advocate met a swifter and more tragic end. Émile Zola died mysteriously at home in the early hours of 29 September 1902. The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, but the police quickly ruled the case an accident as an examination of the chimney and flue pipes revealed no problem. Alexandrine’s wife survived. The same afternoon, Jeanne and Zola’s children, Denise, 13, and Jacques, 11, were informed of the tragedy.
More than 50,000 people, including Alfred Dreyfus, accompanied the writer’s coffin to Montmartre Cemetery. Zola’s death deeply affected the Dreyfus family and Alfred even watched over his body, while Mathieu said that Zola was a great writer but an even greater citizen. Anatole France gave a moving eulogy: “Zola was a moment in the history of human consciousness”.
Later, the French Parliament passed a law to transfer Zola’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris. Today, only 78 people still rest in this majestic mausoleum for the most deserving Frenchmen. Zola was only the fourth writer to receive this honour, alongside Voltaire, Rousseau and Hugo.
But on the day his remains were moved, 3 June 1908, the supporters and opponents of Dreyfus clashed again. As many as 5 000 anti-Dreyfus protesters tried to disrupt the procession, and during the official ceremony the day after, a journalist and Drumont worshipper fired at Dreyfus, wounding him slightly. He later walked out of court acquitted for allegedly being unfit to stand trial, to the enthusiasm of the right-wing media. The fissures in French society were far from healed, and neither were those in European society, as the whole of the 20th century showed.
Zola’s death remains unexplained to this day. In 1953, more than forty years after the death, Libération published a fascinating discovery. A letter from a man claiming that Zola had definitely been murdered had reached the editorial office. His friend Henri Buronfosse, a former chimney sweep and a fervent anti-Dreyfussian who despised Zola, confessed to him on his deathbed. He swore that he had unnoticed Zola’s chimney while working on a neighbouring roof and had unblocked it again the next morning before the police arrived.
An insight into Buronfoss’ life revealed that he was a member of the extremist right-wing Patriot League. These claims were, of course, impossible to prove. Zola’s life still reads today as one of his novels about the ups, downs, virtues and vices of an individual.
