Zola's 'J'Accuse…!' and the Dreyfus Affair
Émile Zola published an open letter to the president of France on the front page of a newspaper in January 1898 and split the country in two. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain from Alsace, had been convicted of treason in 1894 on the basis of a handwritten note recovered from a German military attaché's wastepaper basket, in a court martial where secret evidence was shown to the judges and not to the defence. He was publicly degraded — his sword broken, his braid torn off, a crowd shouting outside — and sent to solitary confinement on Devil's Island. Colonel Picquart, the new head of intelligence, found in 1896 that the handwriting was that of another officer, Esterhazy, and was posted to Tunisia for saying so; Esterhazy was tried and acquitted in three minutes. Zola's letter, given the headline J'accuse by Clemenceau, named the officers responsible, accused the general staff of a cover-up, and was calculated to force a libel prosecution in which the evidence would have to be produced. It worked. Zola was convicted, fled to England, and the case became a public argument about the army, the church, the republic and antisemitism that ran for years. A forged document was discovered and its author killed himself in prison. Dreyfus was retried in 1899, convicted again with extenuating circumstances, pardoned, and fully exonerated in 1906. He rejoined the army and served in the First World War. The affair is where the word intellectual acquired its modern political sense, coined by the anti-Dreyfusards as an insult for writers who signed petitions about matters outside their competence. Theodor Herzl covered the degradation ceremony as a journalist and began organising political Zionism shortly afterwards.
- Year: 1898 CE
- Category: Social
