I accuse General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse of complicity in the same crime, the former, no doubt, out of religious prejudice, the latter perhaps out of that esprit de corps that has transformed the War Office into an unassailable holy ark.
I accuse General de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a villainous inquiry, by which I mean a monstrously biased one, as attested by the latter in a report that is an imperishable monument to naive impudence.
I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement.
I accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L’Éclair and L’Écho de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing.
Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.
In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29 July 1881 regarding the press, which makes libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk 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.
Émile Zola, 13 January 1898
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.
‘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 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 r
est 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, hypocritical creature, “an Italian, yes, an Italian”, he kept saying’.20
A competitive spirit in authors often leads them to an exaggerated disparagement of their confrères, and there was a widespread envy in the Goncourt circle of Zola’s immense success. However, the facts of Zola’s private life, the pornography of his novels and his dishonest portrayal of Lourdes led the very people whom the Dreyfusards should have tried to win over to decide that everything Zola wrote in ‘J’accuse’ must be lies.
The anger ignited by ‘J’accuse’, however, was deeper and more widespread than that felt by envious authors or devout ladies who believed in the miracles at Lourdes. For days after its publication, 3,000 youths went on the rampage in the streets of Nantes, smashing the windows of shops owned by Jews and assaulting the synagogue. In Rennes, the capital of Brittany, 2,000 rioters attacked the home of two Jewish academics. In Bordeaux, demonstrators shouted ‘Death to Zola!’, ‘Death to Dreyfus!’ and ‘Death to the Jews!’ There were demonstrations in Moulins, Montpellier, Poitiers, Tours, Angoulême and Toulouse. The army was called in to restore order in Angers and Rouen. In Saint-Malo, Dreyfus was burned in effigy. In Nancy, in eastern France, Jewish shops and the synagogue were attacked by demonstrators; and towards the end of January 1898 there were similar outbreaks in other cities in Lorraine. In Dijon and Châlons, police were called out to protect synagogues and shops owned by Jews.
By and large, anti-Semitic agitation was found in the larger towns and cities – notably in the west of France where there were few Jews but where there remained folk memories of the persecution of Catholics during the French Revolution; and in the east where there were substantial Jewish communities, and age-old conflicts and commercial rivalries came into play. There were rural communes in which anti-Semitic sentiment intruded on traditional festivities: at Chapareillan in the Isère, a stuffed model representing Zola, ‘the impudent defender of the traitor Dreyfus’, was burned in the bonfire; and in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in Savoy, a mannequin representing Zola and Judas was carried in the Mardi-Gras procession.21 Even in the intimacy of an haut-bourgeois household in the Landes, outrage could be expressed with small, symbolic gestures: the French Catholic novelist François Mauriac, then a child, was told by his parents to call his chamber-pot ‘Zola’.22
The worst riots set off by Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ were in Algeria, where there remained a deep-seated resentment of the Crémieux decrees of 1871 which had given French citizenship to the entire Jewish community – seen ‘as an act of favouritism on the part of the nascent Republic’.23 Between 18 and 24 January 1898, there was rioting in almost all Algeria’s towns and cities. In Algiers itself, rioting that started on 18 January went on for several days. The Jewish bazaar was destroyed and every day Zola was burned in effigy. In some cases, the Jewish proprietors defended their shops, and in the ensuing conflict there were casualties. A number of policemen were wounded and a demonstrator killed. ‘The Jews have dared to raise their heads,’ said a lawyer called Langlois. ‘We must crush them.’ During the funeral of the demonstrator, Jews were stoned and one beaten to death. There were more than 100 casualties and over 600 arrests. A young student, Max Régis Milano – like Zola, of Italian extraction, who dropped the Milano to become Max Régis and was described as ‘tall, handsome, strong and energetic’ – was the most charismatic of the street-fighters’ leaders. His adoring followers roamed the streets singing anti-Semitic songs and subscribed to the newspaper he founded, L’Antijuif. Anti-Semitic demonstrations continued for months after the publication of ‘J’accuse’, and in May Édouard Drumont, invited to stand by Régis, was elected as one of the six deputies from Algiers to the National Assembly with a majority of 13,000 votes.
In January 1898, there remained five months until a general election, but the centrist government of Jules Méline could still be brought down by defections in the Chamber of Deputies. It therefore had to move with caution on the Dreyfus Affair. Méline and Billot understood only too well that Zola, in writing ‘J’accuse’, meant not only to shift public opinion in favour of a review but also to provoke the government to sue him for criminal libel – a legal process that would mean examining the Affair in a civilian court. Both were keen to avoid this and hoped that if they ignored ‘J’accuse’ it would soon become yesterday’s news. However, opposition politicians from both left and right were not going to let the government off the hook. In the Chamber of Deputies, on 13 January the Comte de Mun demanded that steps be taken to punish ‘the bloody outrage’ of Zola’s attack on the army’s High Command; and the Radical Godefroy Cavaignac, the former Minister of War, assured the Chamber that support for the army came from the left as well as the right. He rebuked the government for not making public the conclusive evidence proving Dreyfus’s guilt, in particular evidence of the confession that Dreyfus had made at the time of his degradation.
Present in the Chamber was Charles Dupuy, Prime Minister at the time of Dreyfus’s court martial, who was well aware that Dreyfus had not confessed to his crime; but neither he nor the other statesmen who knew that this was a canard said anything to contradict Cavaignac. Méline repeated the government’s position – that Dreyfus’s guilt had been established by due process of law: it was a chose jugé, an established verdict. However, General Billot, speaking before him, and buoyed up by the applause he received when praising the army, assured the Chamber that legal action would be taken against Zola, and Méline was obliged to give the same assurance.
At a second debate, on 22 January, Méline, pressed by Cavaignac, confirmed that Dreyfus had confessed to his crime to his escort at his degradation, Captain Lebrun-Renault. He made clear that to attack the verdict on Dreyfus was to attack the nation. ‘What we are defending are the permanent interests of the country: our military power and the renown of France abroad . . . Like soldiers, we will remain at our posts.’24 His words were vigorously applauded by most of the deputies, but it was all too much for the Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès. Now, for the first time, he came off the fence on the Dreyfus Affair, denouncing the ‘Jesuit-spawned generals protected by the Republic’ and the pusillanimity of the government. ‘Do you know what we are suffering from? What we are all dying from? I say so assuming full responsibility: ever since this affair began, we have all been dying from half-measures, reticence, equivocations, lies, and cowardice! Yes, equivocations, lies, and cowardice!’
Tumult and uproar. A deputy from the Gard, the Comte de Bernis, denounced Jaurès as ‘the syndicate’s lawyer’; Jaurès shot back that Bernis was ‘a wretch and a coward’. More tumult. More insults. Bernis hit Jaurès. Soldiers were called in to clear the Chamber.
3: The Trial of Émile Zola
On 7 February, Émile Zola, and the managing editor of L’Aurore, Alexandre Perrenx, were put on trial on a charge of defaming not Commandant du Paty de Clam, or Generals de Boisdeffre and Gonse, but the judges who had acquitted Major Esterhazy. The libel was Zola’s accusation that they had acquitted Esterhazy ‘under orders’. This narrow definition of the libel would be a handicap, but it did not deter the Dreyfusards from preparing a case which, they hoped, would establish the criminality behind Dreyfus’s continued detention. A committee was formed to work on Zola’s and Perrenx’s defence which included among its members the former Minister of Justice Ludovic Trarieux, Louis Leblois, Joseph Reinach and Mathieu Dreyfus. On Leblois’ recommendation, Zola retained the lawyer Fernand Labori who had represented Lucie Dreyfus at Esterhazy’s court martial.25 Léon Blum assisted Labori. Perrenx was defended by Albert Clemenceau, the brother of Georges.
The presiding judge, Albert Delegorgue, was de
scribed by Joseph Reinach as ‘a big and rotund man who was neither mean nor lacking in wit’; but the prosecuting attorney, the Advocate General Edmond Van Cassel, was ‘surly and brutal’, and both had a clear brief to keep the proceedings within the narrow limits of the charge. The jury was made up of merchants and artisans. When the trial opened, the court-room at the Palais de Justice was packed with army officers, journalists, society ladies, government officials – among them Maurice Paléologue from the Foreign Office – and foreign diplomats, including military attachés such as Panizzardi. The only protagonist to stay away was Mathieu Dreyfus, who felt that his presence might cause a riot.
Lucie Dreyfus attended the first session – pale, nervous and dressed, as she had dressed since her husband’s conviction, in black. She was inevitably a figure of pathos but also of curiosity and admiration: only three weeks before, on 19 January, the Dreyfusard paper Le Siècle had published some of the letters written by Alfred Dreyfus to Lucie from prison which successfully added poignancy to the case. She took the stand as the first witness, but when Fernand Labori asked her ‘What is your view of Émile Zola’s good faith?’ the presiding judge would not allow her to answer. ‘The question will not be put!’ It was a phrase that was to be repeated interminably throughout the trial.
After Lucie’s mute presence on the witness stand came the evidence of Leblois, then that of Scheurer-Kestner, but again the judge pre-empted any attempt to widen the scope of the trial. ‘The question will not be put!’ On the second day, General de Boisdeffre was called to the stand. Marcel Proust, then a young novelist and ardent Dreyfusard, described the arrival of Boisdeffre at the Palais de Justice in his novel Jean Santeuil.
A cab drew up. An officer got out accompanied by a gentleman in civilian clothes. ‘That’s not him.’ – ‘Yes, it is.’ – ‘Nonsense, that’s not Boisdeffre.’ – ‘It is, I tell you.’ The gentleman in civilian clothes was very tall. The most noticeable thing about him was a very high top-hat tilted at an angle. Listening apparently to the officer beside him with close attention, he moved forward slowly with a stiff motion of the legs, as though he were very tired. Every now and again he came to a halt. Though he still gave the impression of youthfulness his cheeks were covered by a delicate red and purple mottling such as one sees on garden walls in autumn when they are clothed in Virginia Creeper. There was a look of concentrated attention in his eyes but from time to time they blinked with a sort of nervous tic and now and again he plucked at his moustache with an ungloved hand . . . He seemed very calm and completely unhurried. As he passed, the onlookers raised their hats and he returned the salutation politely like a man of very high rank, some Prince of the church, who, knowing that he may excite envy, is at pains to disarm it by the perfection of his manners.26