J’Accuse.
—Front page of L’Aurore, January 13, 1898
The author of one of the most legendary headlines in the history of newspapers, Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a prominent French novelist, journalist, and social critic. He may be best known today for his role in the Dreyfus affair, a scandal that rocked France and pitted Zola against the French military and political elite.
Zola was born in Paris and worked as a shipping clerk, art reviewer, and journalist before publishing his first novel, Thérèse Raquin, in 1867. He was a proponent of naturalism, a nineteenth-century literary movement in France that sought to inject more realistic observations of social conditions into fiction.
The Dreyfus affair began in 1894, when a Jewish officer in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), was accused of leaking secrets to Germany, convicted by a military court on thin evidence, stripped of his rank, and imprisoned. Suspecting that Dreyfus had been railroaded by anti-Semitic generals and politicians, Zola published a series of articles questioning the evidence against Dreyfus.
Zola’s most famous article, appearing under the inflammatory headline “J’Accuse”—“I accuse”—specifically accused the French army of a miscarriage of justice. The article, in the form of a letter to the French president, caused an enormous uproar; Zola was convicted of libel several weeks later and forced to flee to England to avoid prison.
The Dreyfus affair was a major turning point in French history, creating a lasting political schism between liberal Dreyfusards, who thought the officer was innocent, and conservative anti-Dreyfusards. Dreyfus was eventually pardoned in 1899 and restored to his rank when evidence suggested that another officer, Ferdinand Ester-hazy (1847–1923), was most likely responsible for the leaks.
Zola returned to France in 1899. He was killed three years later, when his chimney was blocked and he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. His death was ruled an accident, though many have theorized that his political opponents might have blocked the chimney.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Zola is buried in the Panthéon, the resting place of French luminaries, next to the author Victor Hugo (1802–1885). Dreyfus attended the interment and was wounded in an assassination attempt at the ceremony.
- Dreyfus was reinstated in the French military after his exoneration, served on the front lines in World War I, and received the Legion of Honor in 1918.
- Zola was a close childhood friend of the painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), who attended the same school as Zola in Provence. The neurotic, insecure painter in Zola’s 1886 novel L’Oeuvre was based on Cézanne, which humiliated the artist and ended their friendship.
