The Dreyfus Affair Read Free

voluntarily. 
    As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill-will nor hatred.  To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society.  The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. 
    I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness.  My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.  Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the inquiry take place in broad daylight!  I am waiting. 
    With my deepest respect, Sir. 
    Ã‰mile Zola, 13 January 1898
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    Having written his letter, Zola decided that it would have a greater impact if it was published not as a pamphlet but in a newspaper. He showed it to Clemenceau and Ernest Vaughan who thought it superb; so too did the staff of L’Aurore to whom Zola read his polemic aloud. It was Clemenceau who came up with the idea of calling the piece ‘J’accuse’ – the title to be printed as a banner headline on the front page .
    The paper went to town on its scoop: 300,000 copies were printed; posters put up all over Paris; and several hundred extra paper-boys recruited to sell the paper in the streets. On the morning of 13 January 1898, more than 200,000 copies were sold in a few hours. To some, this was ‘the greatest day of the Affair’. The Socialist Jules Guesde called it ‘the greatest revolutionary act of the century’. 10 To Léon Blum it was ‘a masterpiece’, a piece of writing ‘of imperishable beauty’, and Zola’s act ‘was that of a hero’. 11 It was certainly a defining moment in the history of journalism; it has been often imitated, and is frequently remembered when its inspiration is forgotten.
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    â€˜J’accuse’ has been criticised for being too emotive, too melodramatic; the word ‘crime’ appears ten times in the course of twenty lines. But, given that much of what he wrote was inevitably conjecture, Zola’s pamphlet was a remarkably accurate summary of the Dreyfus Affair. It laid too much responsibility on du Paty de Clam and not enough on Mercier, Boisdeffre and Gonse. Colonel Sandherr was left out of the frame altogether, as were his minions from the Statistical Section, Henry, Gribelin and Lauth. He was hard on General Billot: he was not to know that the letter the Minister had been shown naming Dreyfus, supposedly from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen, was a forgery, though clearly Billot had his suspicions. ‘We are in the shit,’ he told a cabinet colleague, Ernest Monis, ‘but it hasn’t come from my arse.’ 12
    Zola’s sensational intervention has also had its critics, both subsequently and at the time. Albert S. Lindemann concedes that ‘J’accuse’ put ‘life back into the campaign to free Dreyfus’, but ‘even more powerfully revived the previously unsuccessful anti-Semitic movement of the late 1880s and 1890s’. 13 Scheurer-Kestner was shocked by Zola’s tract. ‘Zola took the revolutionary path,’ he wrote. ‘What a mistake! The era of stupidities began.’ Scheurer-Kestner ‘was not wrong’, wrote Marcel Thomas, ‘that the terrible misfortunes which the country was to know for many years were caused by these new tactics adopted by the revisionists’. 14
    The problem was not just the content of ‘J’accuse’ but also the reputation of its author, Émile Zola. His status as France’s best-selling author certainly ensured public attention, but to the conservative Catholic element in French public opinion his name acted as a red rag to a bull. Four years before, in 1894, Zola had published a novel called Lourdes – a story set in the shrine in the Pyrenees where the Virgin Mary was said to have