Dreyfus revisited: Émile Zola – on the run in London, 1898, by Michael Rosen
The Disappearance of Emil Zola: Love,
Literature and the Dreyfus Case
by Michael Rosen
[Emile Zola was sentenced to one year's imprisonment after writing "J'accuse", an open letter to the French government accusing it of anti-semitism in the Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, had been wrongly convicted of treason four years earlier. Zola fled to England but returned to Paris when charges were dropped.]
[Emile Zola was sentenced to one year's imprisonment after writing "J'accuse", an open letter to the French government accusing it of anti-semitism in the Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, had been wrongly convicted of treason four years earlier. Zola fled to England but returned to Paris when charges were dropped.]
Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for
Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...!,
written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair.
On Christmas Day 1898,
France’s most famous writer, if not the most famous writer in the world at the
time, was living in a hotel in Upper Norwood, south London. Émile Zola was the
author of a clutch of international bestsellers – Thérèse
Raquin, Germinal, La
Terre, Nana – but this Christmas he was holed up in a room
he hated, unable to speak English, longing to get back to France.
How had it come to
this? It was only two or three years ago that I pieced together what Zola
enthusiasts have known all along: that he was on the run.
Jasper Road off Westow Hill in Crystal Palace, south London. Photograph: Emile Zola
Early on the morning
of 19 July 1898, Zola had stepped off the boat train from Calais, carrying
nothing more than a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper and the name of the
Grosvenor Hotel on a bit of paper. The writer who, for me, had been forever
fixed in Paris – I imagined him to be a
little like Toulouse-Lautrec but more anonymous, creeping around
brothels and sewers, interviewing low-lifes and writing their answers in a
black leather notebook – had actually spent months in the UK, in hiding from
the French authorities.
And there was one word that explained everything:
Dreyfus. Captain
Alfred Dreyfus was an army officer who had been found guilty of
espionage on the basis of one document – in French, the bordereau –
which supposedly proved that he had leaked information about a gun to the
Prussians. He was sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Was Dreyfus
guilty? One view of this was that of course Dreyfus was guilty: he was Jewish.
Another was that Dreyfus was innocent because the bordereau was
not written in Dreyfus’s handwriting but in the handwriting of someone else,
Major Esterhazy.
From the Manchester Guardian; 24 February 1898: M. Zola victim of show trial
By this time, the
affair was dividing France down the middle: on one side a monarchist,
nationalist, Catholic and antisemitic bloc, and on the other, an alliance of
Republicans, Protestants, secularists and socialists. There were probably several
reasons why Zola got involved, but the reason Dreyfus’s supporters approached
him was that Zola had, in May 1896, written a ground-breaking article “Pour
les juifs” (“On behalf of the Jews”). This was an article written against
the folly of antisemitism at the height of nation-wide hysteria against Jews.
What’s more it was in a sense written against his former self, the author of L’Argent (Money)
a novel which had reproduced many antisemitic stereotypes.
Zola’s intervention on
the pro-Dreyfus side was sensational, if not decisive. He and the editor of the
newspaper L’Aurore, Georges Clemençeau, wrote a long article which was
headlined “J’Accuse …!” – in truth an open letter to the president of
France, Félix Faure, which accused the army top brass of conspiracy and
trial-fixing. Zola’s libel was made in the full knowledge that it would be
likely to bring down the power of the state on his head, because that was all
part of the plan. Finally, the pro-Dreyfus camp thought, all the most recent
discoveries proving Dreyfus’s innocence would be heard in court.
It was not to be so:
the state restricted the evidence to nothing more than Zola’s words, par
ordre (“by order of”) – an order that Esterhazy was found innocent
only because the court martial had ordered it. Zola was sentenced to a year’s
imprisonment and a fine of 3000 francs. Instead of serving time, he had fled
and by Christmas had been in England for five months.
Exile had made Zola’s web of relationships
even more complicated. In all but name, Zola had two wives: Alexandrine and
Jeanne. Alexandrine was Madame Zola; she and Zola, now 58, had been together
for 28 years but had no children. Zola and Jeanne Rozerot had been together for
10 years. She was 27 years younger than Zola and they had two children, Denise
and Jacques. In the sudden and dramatic turn of events that had led to Zola
living in the Queen’s Hotel, Upper Norwood, he would find himself one moment frantically
scanning the papers for news of the Dreyfus case, the next juggling
Alexandrine, Jeanne and the children, the next trying to get on with what he
hoped would be the first of a new kind of novel, one that offered solutions to
the plight of France, rather than simply “dissected” it, as he put it… read
more and see historic photos from 1898:
