Émile Zola: “I Accuse”

On January 13, 1898, the French author Émile Zola published an open letter to the president of the French Republic, Félix Faure, on the front page of the newspaper L'Aurore. In this letter, which appeared under the glaring headline “J'Accuse . . .!” (“I accuse”), Zola charged various French officials with a “ghastly miscarriage of justice” in connection with what was known as the Dreyfus Affair. Zola's impassioned accusations of deceit, slander, intrigue, complicity, and anti-Semitism have turned “J'accuse” into a modern catch-phrase often used to attack those who abuse their power and authority.

The Dreyfus Affair began in 1894, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent, was accused of treason, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment, all on the basis of flimsy evidence. In 1896 new evidence came to light that Major Ferdinand Esterhazy was the real traitor. High-ranking military officials suppressed this evidence—and levied additional charges against Dreyfus that, it turned out, were based on falsified documents. The affair evolved into a full-blown political scandal, with the moderate-to-liberal “Dreyfusards” supporting the captain and the largely right-wing “anti-Dreyfusards” insisting on his guilt. France was sharply divided, and the divisions became deeper in 1898 after Zola, a well-known and influential intellectual, published his denunciation of those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. Ultimately, the charges against Dreyfus were found to be groundless, and in 1906 he was exonerated and reinstated in the French army. Meanwhile, Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel in February 1898. After his conviction he fled to England, though he returned to France in 1899.

The Dreyfus Affair was at least partially responsible for the birth of Zionism, the call for the creation of a Jewish state in Israel. Assigned to cover the affair was the journalist Theodor Herzl. In response to the anti-Semitism he witnessed, Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896 and helped found the Zionist Organization in 1897. The affair, and Zola's letter, had the further effect of leading to a 1905 French law separating church and state and, for decades, relegating the right wing of French politics to its fringes.