Sunday Pages: "J'Accuse..."

An open letter by Émile Zola

Dear Reader,

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a slight man with a bushy moustache that looked like part of a child’s Halloween costume, was a wastrel and a fabulist who bullshitted his way into the French Foreign Legion by exaggerating his credentials and pulling some family strings. He served without distinction in the infantry during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. After blowing all his money during a subsequent four-year period of Parisian depravity, Esterhazy married, and immediately burned through his wife’s dowry, spending money he didn’t have on booze, dice, and bad stock investments. She left him in 1888. By 1894, he was in hock to any number of creditors, and so desperate he threatened to kill his wife and his children. With no other obvious recourse, he exploited his position of major in the army: he stole French military secrets and sold them to the hated Germans.

The treachery was discovered in 1894, when a housekeeper-cum-French spy who cleaned the German embassy found one of Esterhazy’s communications—known as the bordereau—torn up in a waste basket. After a perfunctory investigation, blame was cast not on Esterhazy but on a military captain named Alfred Dreyfus. Never mind that Dreyfus was from Alsace—the beloved French region surrendered to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War a quarter century before—and thus more likely to detest than assist the Kaiser. Or that he was a loyal Frenchman. Or that he was innocent. He was a Jew in a nation of Catholics, and therefore the perfect fall guy.

In December of 1894, Esterhazy, who had clearly never read Les Misérables, watched silently as Dreyfus was convicted of the crime he committed—treason—and sentenced to life imprisonment on the South American French penal colony of Devil’s Island, which was just as miserable as the name implies. Two years later, the head of French counterintelligence discovered new evidence, opened an investigation, and determined that Dreyfus was innocent and Esterhazy the real culprit. This evidence was suppressed by the military brass, the counterintelligence guy was reassigned, and Esterhazy, after a speedy and corrupt trial at which fake documents were introduced as evidence, was acquitted.

By 1896, the French public was well aware of, and deeply divided over, the Dreyfus Affair. The “Dreyfusards,” who supported the falsely accused captain, included everyone of consequence in French artistic circles, including the actor Sarah Bernhardt, the poet Charles Péguy, and the writer Anatole France; on the other side was the editor of a virulently antisemitic newspaper. (Note: If almost all of the artists are on one side of an issue, that’s the side you want to be on.)

But it was the novelist Émile Zola who thrust the scandal into the spotlight, with his open letter to the president of France, which ran on the front page of the French newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898—126 years ago this week—under the now-famous banner headline “J’Accuse...!” Over the course of some 5,000 words, Zola dismantles the case against Dreyfus, calls out the military men who covered up for Esterhazy, and accuses all involved of corruption and antisemitism.

In the final paragraphs of the piece, Zola writes, in words eerily relevant to the Trump era United States:¹

Where is that truly strong, judiciously patriotic administration that will dare to clean house and start afresh? How many people I know who, faced with the possibility of war, tremble in anguish knowing to what hands we are entrusting our nation’s defense! And what a nest of vile intrigues, gossip, and destruction that sacred sanctuary that decides the nation’s fate has become! We are horrified by the terrible light the Dreyfus affair has cast upon it all, this human sacrifice of an unfortunate man, a “dirty Jew.” Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people’s cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext.

Indeed, it is a crime to have relied on the most squalid elements of the press, and to have entrusted Esterhazy’s defense to the vermin of Paris, who are now gloating over the defeat of justice and plain truth. It is a crime that those people who wish to see a generous France take her place as leader of all the free and just nations are being accused of fomenting turmoil in the country, denounced by the very plotters who are conniving so shamelessly to foist this miscarriage of justice on the entire world. It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice.

Truth and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled, unrecognized and ignored!

I quote from “J’Accuse...!” now because, in the event of Trump’s re-election and subsequent weaponization of the Justice Department and the courts to punish his enemies, this is the sort of disgusting corruption—exacerbated by the same ugly antisemitism that is now escalating in the United States in the wake of October 7—we can expect to see in the despotic reign of Donald the Stinky.

For his trouble, Zola was sued for libel, lost, and was forced to flee to England—where Esterhazy, shorn of his bushy moustache, had also fled. Preposterous libel cases against writers, with corrupt outcomes, are also on the menu in a second Trump term, as promised by his attack dog Kash Patel. Are we all to flee to England?

After his return from exile in 1899, Zola was the target of a number of assassination attempts. The reactionary French military, bound by a fascistic strain of radical Catholicism, had many ardent supporters in the country, many of them keen to do violence. We might call them “le MAGA.” God only knows how many people were scared into silence by the fear of physical injury.

Dreyfus, eager to move on with his life, took a pardon. He returned to the military and served honorably during the four years of the Great War—as if to prove that he was no stinking traitor.

In 1902, the zealots got Zola. An anti-Dreyfus workman was paid to block up his chimney, and on the cold night of September 29, the writer died in his sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning. He was 62. And for all his many novels, for all his influence on the naturalist literary movement, what he is best known for is that open letter, in which he denounces antisemitism, speaks truth to power, and demands justice for all.

As the second article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man lays out—in words easy enough for English speakers to understand, although they are in French—the natural and inalienable rights are: la liberté, la propriété, la sûreté et la résistance à l’oppression.

Let it always be so.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Alex Aronson:

1. I am using the excellent translation by Shelley Temchin and Jean-Max Guieu, Georgetown University, 2001.