Discussion

The newspaper L’Aurore had been founded just three months earlier, in October 1897, by Ernest Vaughan. L’Aurore had agreed to publish a series of articles by Emile Zola concerning the Dreyfus Case, after the novelist’s first series, started in November for Le Figaro, had been cut short following hostile reactions from its subscribers.

It took Zola just two days to write his “Letter to the President of the Republic.” According to tradition, its catchy title, “J’accuse...!”, inspired by the conclusion, was coined by Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), then political editor of L’Aurore.

Emile Zola (1840-1902) spent his youth in Aix en Provence where he befriended Paul Cezanne. He began his literary career as a journalist writing theater and art criticism while working on short stories. After publishing his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), he elaborated the theory of the modern novel that he called Naturalism. Inspired by Flaubert, he advocated a scientific and realistic approach to plot and character development. His multi-volume saga, Les Rougon-Macquart (1870-1893), illustrated these principles, giving vivid descriptions of milieus usually ignored by the Romantics, and addressing social issues, in novels such as L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880) or Germinal (1885). Zola’s books were often considered scandalous, since they touched on taboo topics such as sexuality, but this also accounted for their success. In 1892, his novel La Débacle, which dealt in antimilitarist fashion with the French defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, created yet another uproar.
At the time of “J’accuse,” Zola was working on the concluding novel, Paris (1898), of his new series Les Trois Villes [Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896)], in which he examined socialist, anarchist and anticlerical themes.
Like many other people, Zola was at first hardly interested in the story of a traitor convicted by a court martial. He learned about Dreyfus’ military degradation, in January 1895, during a dinner at the Daudets’: their son Léon had witnessed it and described what had happened. Léon Daudet was to become one of Zola’s most ardent opponents in the Dreyfus Case.
Not until 1897 was Zola approached by the writer Bernard-Lazare and was convinced by Louis Leblois and Scheurer-Kestner of Dreyfus’ innocence. He immediately joined the group of people who were seeking a re-trial.

One of the most famous, although controversial, writers of his time, Zola could have chosen simply to lend moral support to the Dreyfus cause rather than expose himself to the trauma of a libel trial. He surely knew the power of the press on public opinion but, as demonstrated by his private correspondence, far from being a publicity stunt, his involvement reflected his genuine outrage over the unfair treatment of an innocent man.

Félix Faure (1841-1899) was elected President of the Republic in 1895, succeeding President Jean Casimir-Périer (1847-1907), under whose mandate Dreyfus had been tried in December 1894 and who had resigned on January 15, 1895, after only 6 months in office.
In his position as President of the Republic, Faure was not constitutionally allowed to intervene directly, as Zola acknowledges here, but he obviously also avoided taking sides.

A year earlier, President Faure had granted an interview to Zola who was then actively involved in obtaining the Légion of Honor for his friend, publisher Georges Charpentier.

In 1895, Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) the author of the best-seller La France juive (1886) and the founder and director of La Libre Parole, an anti-Semitic newspaper, launched a campaign against President Faure, revealing that his father-in-law had been tried for embezzlement twenty years earlier.
In the same “yellow press” vein, La Libre Parole, thanks to a friendly leak from the War Office, published in October 1894 the juicy news that a Jewish officer had been arrested for treason a week earlier; then, on November 1rst, it publicly identified Cpt. Dreyfus. For the rest of the Affair, La Libre Parole would bring the most violent and outrageous support to the anti-Dreyfus cause.

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, unwisely started by Emperor Napoleon III, and concluded by a hastily established new Republican regime, ended with a defeat and a humiliating treaty (see also note 21). For the next few years, in a world in which other democratic regimes were few and far between, France found itself very isolated: Germany, Austria and Italy had formed a menacing Triple Alliance, and Victorian Great Britain was not yet ready for the Edwardian Cordial Entente (1904). Thus, in 1897, the only ally that Republican France could find was Czarist Russia. The celebrated Franco-Russian Alliance was considered a political and diplomatic achievement, especially for President Faure and General de Boisdeffre, Chief of Staff, who, as former ambassador to Russia, had been instrumental in the agreement.

In preparation since 1892, the Paris World Fair was supposed to open in the Spring of 1900. Besides countless delays which would prevent its full operation on time, the embarrassing repercussions of the Dreyfus Affair could also lead to an international boycott. Dreyfus’ eventual pardon by President Loubet in September 1899 ensured for the public opinion worldwide that a page had indeed been turned. The 1900 Paris World Fair, the most expensive ever, displayed 80.000 exhibitors spread on more than a square mile and eventually recorded more than 60 millions admissions.

In October 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), who had been assigned to the General Staff, was arrested (15 October 1894) and charged with treason for delivering classified French military information to the German embassy in Paris. Dreyfus was found guilty by a court-martial (December 22, 1894), stripped of his rank in a degrading public display (January 5, 1895) and deported to Devil's Island, where he was condemned to remain in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.
In March 1896, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, then Head of Military Intelligence, uncovered evidence indicating that an infantry officer, Maj. Marie-Charles Walsin-Esterhazy (1847-1923), was actually the traitor. To prevent an embarrassing admission of error, Picquart’s superiors tried to silence the whistle blower: he was dismissed from his position, and then sent later in a dangerous mission in Tunisia in December while his file was peppered with forged incriminating documents and innuendos.
But, at about the same time, Cpt. Dreyfus’s brother, Matthieu Dreyfus (1857-1930), also uncovered evidence implicating Esterhazy and he started a suit against him. The War Office, in order to save face, staged a court-martial for Esterzhazy and then acquitted him of all charges on January 11, 1898.

The highly publicized court martial of Major Esterhazy was planned to defuse and refute definitively any accusations against him and prevent a retrial for Dreyfus. The expected verdict by unanimous vote of acquittal on 11 January 1898 outraged supporters of the innocent Dreyfus such as Zola, whose “J’accuse” two days later reflected his own indignation. In the following days, a petition was signed by many concerned intellectuals, French luminaries in the sciences, literature and the arts, incensed by such a travesty of justice.
            Actually, in spite of the verdict of innocence, Major Charles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, a womanizer, gambler and crook, was the real author of the “bordereau,” as he would finally admit on July 18, 1899 to Le Matin. For dubious reasons, he had been protected all along by some members of the General Staff, including Maj. Henry, Picquart’s successor as Head of Military Intelligence. His nefarious role, from the beginning of the case, could not have been known to Zola at the time of “J’accuse...!” (see last note).

Major Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam (1853-1916), had been in charge of the preliminary investigation in 1894: his relentless and vicious harassment of Dreyfus continued after the conviction and prevented any chance for a re-trial.

The word bordereau refers to a sort of memorandum, listing a series of attached documents that a mysterious traitor [Esterhazy] was peddling to Maximilian Von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché. Having been discarded in a paper basket, the bordereau found its way, through a channel of various French agents, to the War Office, and more precisely to its Intelligence Office.

Major Ferdinand Forzinetti (1839-1909) was Director of the military prison of Le Cherche-Midi to which Dreyfus was consigned in the Fall of 1894, awaiting his December trial. Impressed by the dignified behavior of his prisoner, even under all the stress caused by Du Paty de Clam’s harassment, Forzinetti became one of his stauncher supporters, a stand that did not help his career.

Colonel Jean Sandherr (1846-1897), was Head of the Military Intelligence from 1891 to 1895. His partisan anti-Semitism certainly influenced the preliminary investigations.

The name of the Military Intelligence Office, part of the War Office, was in fact veiled under the cover of “Statistical Section.” The French were especially watching the German Embassy where a charwoman, Mme Bastian, worked. She would regularly bring papers picked out of trash cans to other French agents. It was by this route that the bordereau, as well as the petit bleu, arrived at the Military Intelligence Office.

The bordereau addressed to Schwartzkoppen listed five potential bits of “interesting information” to be procured on demand by the traitor. One concerned Madagascar, another one the plan for covering troops; but three listed items solely related to artillery: “the provisional Firing Manual for Field Artillery, a note on the modification of the artillery formations and a note on the hydraulic recoil brake for the canon of 120,” a highly classified leak which the Chiefs of Staff erroneously thought could not come from anywhere but the General Staff itself and, furthermore, from an artillery specialist.

General Auguste Mercier (Arras 1838-Paris 1921). Minister of War 1893-1894 in the Casimir-Périer’s cabinet and the two Dupuy’s cabinets (1894; 1894-1895). As with General Sandherr, his own prejudice, as well as General Sandherr’s during the preliminary investigation, played a fateful part in Dreyfus’ conviction in 1894.
In 1900, his staunch anti-Dreyfusist attitude got him get elected as a nationalist Senator.

General Charles Le Mouton de Boisdeffre (1839-1919). The former ambassador to Russia, he was Chief of Staff from May 1894 to September 1898: the whole Dreyfus episode took place under his mandate.

General Arthur Gonse (1838-1917) Second in command in the General Staff. Gonse was instrumental in dismissing Lt. Colonel Picquart as Head of the Military Intelligence as soon he realized the cover up was going to be revealed.

Lucie Dreyfus (1870-1945), née Hadamard. She had married Alfred Dreyfus in 1890 and was the mother of his two children Pierre, (b. 1891) and Jeanne (b. 1893). She had last seen her husband in February 1895 and wouldn’t see him again until July 1899. While protecting the privacy of her children, the young woman tirelessly worked for her husband’s retrial. In 1901, Alfred Dreyfus published their almost daily inspirational correspondence (Cinq années de ma vie).

The very questionable charges for the 1894 Dreyfus trial had just been made public on January 7, 1898 in Le Siècle, the paper run by Dreyfusist Yves-Guyot.

After the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded the Franco Prussian War in 1871, France had been forced to accept numerous humiliating conditions. Among them were a considerable amount of money to be paid as war compensation, and the loss of her eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine on the pretext that the language still spoken by the population was Germanic. In Lorraine, such cities as Metz, or in Alsace, cities like Strasbourg, Colmar or Mulhouse (Dreyfus’ birthplace) had to switch into a German Empire administrative overhaul. Many of their educated inhabitants chose to expatriate themselves if they could or at least send their young away. As Dreyfus’ eldest brothers had remained in Mulhouse to take care of the family textile factory, the French-educated young officer had traveled a few times to visit them in Alsace, now part of Germany. His “travels to Germany” and his knowledge of German obviously played a part in his conviction.
            Among the other Alsatians involved in the Affair were Lt. Colonel Picquart, his lawyer Leblois and Senator Scheurer-Kestner.

In 1894, the handwriting expert from the Banque de France Alfred Gobert had concluded that, in his opinion, anyone could have been the author of the bordereau attributed to Dreyfus. Mercier had him immediately replaced by another expert from the Parisian Police Headquarters, Alphonse Bertillon, well known for his up-to-date technique of criminal identification, anthropometry.

Zola is alluding to a document mentionned, but never produced, by the General Staff. The reason the document was damning evidence was that Dreyfus’ name appeared in it. The reason why the General Staff would not show it was that they knew the document was a forgery, among others, done by Major Henry. The document would be known later on as the “faux Henry.”

Zola had not waited until the Dreyfus Case to express his concern when confronted with increasingly virulent anti Semitism fueled by papers such as La Libre Parole or La Croix. See, for instance, his article “Pour les Juifs,” published in Le Figaro in May 1896.

Lt. Colonel Georges Picquart (1854-1914). Head of the Military Intelligence Services in 1895.
As Sandherr’s deputy, Picquart had attended Dreyfus’ trial and public degradation in 1894 and was, like many others, convinced at the time that justice had been done. But, as Zola mentions it, Picquart realized that the leaks to the German Embassy continued after Dreyfus had been sent to Devil’s Island and that the wrong man had therefore been convicted. He soon was able to identify Esterhazy. Picquart tried in vain to convince his superiors to admit the judicial error and grant Dreyfus a retrial.
Fearing for his life when he was sent away to Tunisia in January 1897, Picquart was able to reveal the whole cover-up and the name of the traitor Esterhazy to his lawyer Louis Leblois (1854-1928), during a brief leave in June 1897, asking him to keep the secret.
Following Esterhazy’s court martial, he was arrested and then dismissed from the Army; he was again incarcerated from July 1898 to June 1899, supposedly for having revealed military information to a civilian.

That lettre-télégramme, also known as “le petit bleu,” had been sent by the German military Attaché to Esterhazy. It reached the Military Intelligence Office through the same channels as the bordereau.

General Jean-Baptiste Billot (1828-1907), Senator and Minister of War in the Freycinet’s (1882) and the Duclerc’s cabinets (1882-1883) as well as the current Méline’s cabinet (April 1895- June 1898).

Marquis Antoine de MorPs (1859-1896). Although a graduate of Saint-Cyr Military Academy, he decided to pursue a business career. Married in 1882 to an American heiress, he founded in North Dakota her namesake town of Medora, where he started an ambitious cattle venture. Involved in many a gunfight in the tradition of the Old West, he almost has a duel with Theodore Roosevelt in the Dakota Badlands.
When his meat packing plant failed in 1886, he returned to France and started a series of other unsuccessful projects. Convinced that his failures were due to a Jewish plot, he rallied the anti-Semite campaign with all the rousing energy of a modern day condottiere. In 1892, in a duel caused by an antisemitic affront, he had killed Cpt. Mayer, an Alsatian and a Jew like Dreyfus, whose funeral turned into a patriotic demonstration of national unity and support for the military.
Morès’ last venture was an expedition to North Africa, where he was assassinated by Tuaregs in El-Ouatia in June 1896. Notre-Dame was packed for the funeral and Drumont and Maurice Barrès spoke at his burial. His assassins were finally found and arrested in January 1898, which explains Zola’s reference to the dangers of the area to which Picquart had been sent.

Matthieu Dreyfus (1857-1930). As soon as he learned about his younger brother’s arrest, Matthieu Dreyfus left Alsace and the family textile mill he was running. With all his determination, he toiled to obtain a retrial for his beloved bother. For instance, in September 1896, he let the Daily Chronicle spread the false news of an escape in order to keep the memory of the prisoner of Devil’s Island alive. He helped Bernard-Lazare publish the first book of the Dreyfus Case, La Vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus (1897).
In November 1897, M. Castro, a stockbroker who had recognized the handwriting of his client Esterhazy from a copy of the bordereau reproduced in Le Matin, contacted him directly. Matthieu could finally have Esterhazy brought to trial in January 1898. This was the trial whose scandalous verdict of innocence prompted Zola to write “J’accuse.”

Auguste Scheurer-Kestner (1833-1899), an Alsatian chemist and industrialist, was Vice-President of the Senate. In July 1897, Picquart’s lawyer, Louis Leblois, told him about the military cover-up, asking him to act without revealing his sources. Scheurer-Kestner, in the fall of 1897, tried in vain to convince President Faure, Premier Jules Méline, Minister of Justice Darlan and Minister of War General Billot (who already knew the truth).

Esterhazy told the scandal hungry press (L’Echo de Paris, 18 November 1897) that he had received messages, including a letter signed “Espérance” [Hope], from a mysterious veiled lady who was trying to save him from his enemies. Among the cloak and dagger details that he mentioned were secret documents charging Picquart and definite proofs of Dreyfus’ treason, which he obviously never produced.

General Georges-Gabriel de Pellieux (1842-1900). As Deputy Military Governor of Paris under General Saussier, he had been in charge of the preliminary investigation for the Esterhazy Case.
During Zola’s libel trial - the result of “J’accuse” - in February 1898, General de Pellieux inadvertently made a damaging gaffe by referring to a document (the one forged by Major Henry) presented as key evidence in Dreyfus’ conviction in 1894. This mention on the witness stand of new evidence in the Dreyfus case allowed the possibility of a mistrial in spite of the opposition and additional fumbling cover-ups by the military.

Major Alexandre-Alfred Ravary, the rapporteur for the staged Esterhazy trial, concluded in his pre-trial report stating the Esterhazy case that allegations against Esterhazy were proven irrelevant and that the case should be dismissed. On the other hand, as Zola keeps mentioning, the report charged that Esterhazy had been in fact the victim of Lt. Col. Picquart, who was then paradoxically accused of having forged the “petit bleu” (actually the work of Maj. Henry) and who was arrested following the trial.

The Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (Declaration of Human and Civil Rights) was proclaimed on August 26, 1789, one of the first decrees of the newly formed French National Assembly. Its first article states: “All men are born and remain free and equal in rights”. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightment, it is very similar to the American Declaration of Independence (minus “the pursuit of happiness”).
Following “J’accuse,” Senator Ludovic Trarieux (1840-1904), who had been Minister of Justice in the Ribot Cabinet (1895), founded the Ligue francaise pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, with Director of the Pasteur Institute Edouard Grimaux (1835-1900) and Francis de Pressencé (1853-1914).
The United Nations' Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme is a modern version dated December 10, 1948.

As Vice-President of the Senate, Scheurer-kestner had requested a discussion of the Affair on the Senate floor in December 1897. But, unable to substantiate his allegations because of the secrecy requested by his source Leblois, he failed to raise the interest of his peers. Ridiculed by the anti-Dreyfusists as senile (when he was actually gravely ill from cancer), Scheurer-Kestner was soon voted out of office and retired from public life. He died in September 1899, the very same day that Dreyfus was granted a presidential pardon by Emile Loubet.

On January 21, 1898, the handwriting experts sue Zola for libel.

L’Echo de Paris (founded in 1844) and L’Eclair (fonded in 1888) were both violently anti-Dreyfusard and the General Staff willingly leaked to them partisan information: for instance, in September 1896, L’Eclair was able to reveal to its readers that some incriminating - but secret – evidence had been presented by the prosecution during Dreyfus’ trial in 1894. That charging “classified” file, hastily communicated to the military judges, had not even been mentioned to Dreyfus’ defense lawyer, Edgar Demange, a civilian. The documents had, in fact, been forged to ensure a fast guilty verdict.

On January 18, 1898, the Minister of War, General Billot, charged Zola and L’Aurore for libel. However, in spite of all Zola’s bold accusations, the War Office astutely chose to consider only as diffamatory the last item specifically concerning the Esterhazy’s court martial: that way, any direct mention of the Dreyfus case would be avoided .