The Dreyfus Affair Read Free Page A

appeared to a young shepherdess, Bernadette Soubirous. Miraculous cures were believed to have occurred when the incurably ill were bathed in the waters of a spring on the site of the apparition. These miracles were seen by Catholics as a divine refutation of the Positivist, atheist ideology of the Third Republic. The annual pilgrimages to Lourdes, largely organised by the Assumptionist Order, promoted ‘an alternative image of France . . . one that bound spirituality to politics, and France to the ancient traditions of rural, aristocratic Catholicism’. 15
    Lourdes was particularly significant to the women of France, and the influence of women on the unfolding Dreyfus Affair should not be underestimated. They did not have the vote: the male champions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were afraid that their wives would vote for Catholic candidates. But their influence, in alliance with priests, was considerable – particularly when it came to Lourdes. The social mix among the pilgrims to Lourdes – the duchess and the peasant united in their care of the sick and in their Eucharistic devotions – offered a paradigm of unity that eluded the ‘fraternal’ republicans. There were ‘hundreds of thousands of Catholic women in religious orders, mainly working in nursing and teaching and . . . untold legions of lay women active in fundraising and charity’, revealing ‘how comparatively small were the republican initiatives in such fields’. 16 And if they had saints to look up to such as St Vincent de Paul or St John Vianney (the Curé d’Ars), they also had devils to look down upon – among them, Émile Zola.
    Already a bête noire for the graphic portrayal of sex in his novels, Zola had outraged Catholic opinion by fictionalising the case of Marie Lebranchu in his novel Lourdes , suggesting that after a miraculous cure she had had a relapse, which was untrue. 17 Zola had not denied that cures took place but said they were brought about by hysteria in suggestible neurotics. To Catholics, Zola became ‘an emblem of the satanic nature of anti-clericalism’, and the Assumptionists’ magazine Le Pèlerin (The Pilgrim), alongside illustrations of miraculous cures, had caricatures of Zola, depicted as a Freemason ‘angered that his . . . novel had not undermined the shrine’s success’. 18
    There were other reasons to dislike Zola. He was not a fully fledged Frenchman. His father, originally Francesco Zolla, was an Italian engineer who had settled in Aix-en-Provence. Émile’s private life was unwholesome: he had two concurrent families, one legitimate, the other by his wife’s chambermaid, Jeanne Rozerot. Mme Zola ‘apparently had a previous chambermaid’, noted Edmond de Goncourt, ‘whom the good Zola started pawing about. She dismissed her and stupidly filled her place with another very beautiful girl . . . this was the girl whom Zola has made his hetaera for his second home.’ 19
    Even Zola’s fellow authors had misgivings about their friend. Goncourt described how, at a dinner with Ivan Turgenev and Alphonse Daudet, ‘Zola, with his coarse hair falling straight down over his forehead, and looking like a brutish Venetian, a Tintoretto turned house-painter . . . suddenly complained of being haunted by the desire to go to bed with a young girl – not a child, but a girl who was not yet a woman. “Yes,” he said, “it frightens me sometimes. I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.”’
    Goncourt thought Zola mean-minded: ‘Poor Zola . . . found it impossible to hide the spiteful envy which a colleague’s success always inspires in him’; and Daudet, after hearing Zola belittle Goncourt, ‘felt that the veil which had hidden the man’s worst side from him had suddenly been torn aside, and that he had found himself in the presence of a false, shifty,