The Dreyfus Affair (34 page)

It was a dangerous venture. The press in Paris was partisan and unruly, but there were laws against defamation that were enforced: Morès had been imprisoned for libel and Zola had no proof to back up what he said. He might be France's best-selling author with an international reputation but that did not mean that he was immune from prosecution. Zola knew the risks he ran; indeed he compounded those risks by writing in a deliberately provocative and intemperate style. Scheurer-Kestner, Picquart, Leblois and Demange had tried a soft approach and it had made no impression on public opinion whatsoever. Zola knew his audience; they wanted heroes and villains, not a nuanced analysis of legal procedures.
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‘
Monsieur le Président
,' Zola began,

 

Permit me, as a gesture of gratitude for the kind welcome you once extended to me, to express my concern for your well-deserved glory, and to tell you that your star, so happy until now, is threatened by the most shameful and the most ineradicable of stains . . . This stain of mud on your name – I was going to say on your reign – is this abominable Dreyfus Affair! A Court Martial is about to dare to acquit, under orders, an Esterhazy, flying in the face of all truth and justice . . . and history will state that it was under your presidency that such a crime was committed. Because they have dared, I will dare too. I will speak the truth because I have promised to speak the truth if justice . . . is not done in its entirety. My duty is to speak, I do not want to be complicit. My nights would be haunted by the spectre of an innocent man who is dying out there, from the most atrocious tortures, for a crime he did not commit.

 

Zola then outlined his understanding of what had occurred. He named as the chief conspirator
un homme néfaste
– an ill-omened man – Commandant du Paty de Clam. It was he who took advantage of the ‘mediocre intelligence' of the Minister of War, General Mercier, of the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, ‘who appears to have given in to his religious bigotry', and of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Gonse, ‘whose conscience seems to adapt to a number of things'.

 

But in the final analysis it was Commandant du Paty de Clam who first led them all on, who hypnotised them because he was involved in spiritualism, occultism, he converses with spirits. One cannot conceive of the ordeal he put the unfortunate Dreyfus through, the traps into which he hoped he would fall, the mad inquiries, the monstrous fantasies . . .
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Having established the flimsiness of the case against Dreyfus, Zola outlined the cast-iron case against Esterhazy – his name on the
petit bleu
, his handwriting not similar to that of the
bordereau
but identical. Since ‘a conviction of Esterhazy would inevitably lead to a retrial of Dreyfus', du Paty de Clam and the General Staff had moved to protect him. There had been a moment when the Minister of War, General Billot, seeing the evidence against Esterhazy, might have intervened. ‘He hesitated for a brief moment between his conscience and what he believed to be in the interest of the Army.' He chose the army and from that moment ‘he became as guilty as the others'. ‘Can you grasp this?' Zola asks the President. ‘For the last year, General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre, have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible thing to themselves. And these people sleep at night, and have wives and children they love!'

If these were the villains, Zola's heroes were Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart and the Senator for Life Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. Both had warned how the case could

 

degenerate into a public disaster. But no. The crime had been committed and the General Staff could no longer admit it. And so Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart was sent away on official duty. He was sent further and further away until he found himself in Tunisia, where they tried eventually to reward his courage with an assignment that would certainly have got him massacred, in the very same area where the Marquis de Morès had been killed. He was not in disgrace, indeed General Gonse even maintained a friendly correspondence with him. It is just that there are certain secrets that are better left alone.

 

But Picquart would not leave the secrets alone so he,

 

the one decent man involved . . . who, alone, had done his duty, was to become the victim of truth, the one who got ridiculed and punished. Oh Justice, what horrible despair grips our hearts! It was even claimed that he himself was the forger, that he had fabricated the
petit bleu
in order to destroy Esterhazy. But, good God, why? To what end? Find a motive? Was he, too, on the Jews' payroll? The best part of it is that Picquart was himself an anti-Semite. Yes! We have before us the ignoble spectacle of men who are sunken in debts and crimes being hailed as innocent whereas the honour of a man whose life is spotless is being vilely attacked: a society that sinks to that level has fallen into decay.

 

By his own admission, Zola's letter was long but he ended it with a ringing denunciation of those who had conspired to see that the innocent Dreyfus was punished for the crimes of the guilty Esterhazy.

 

I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice – unwittingly, I would like to believe – and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludicrous and evil machinations. 

I accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest iniquities of the century. 

I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus's innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face. 

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'.
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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.'
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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'.
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