Seminar Paper : Émile Zola's "J'accuse...!" With a Grounding on the Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus affair took place at a time when France was in turmoil. The 'unbeatable' French army had been destroyed by the Prussian army under Bismarck. Napoleon III had been captured, and France itself had been completely humiliated. France was forced to sign an armistice that gave Germany the territory of Alsace-Lorraine, and a huge amount of money.

As an added humiliation, during the siege of Paris by the Germans, the poor (who were the majority of people left in Paris at this time, as the richer citizens had fled for the country) were brought to near starvation, forced to eat cats and dogs etc. After Versailles had relented and the siege had been lifted, the aristocrats and land owners returned to France, and demanded their rent from the poor, despite the situation they had been left in. This proved to be the final stress for the poor of Paris, who revolted and ousted the richer citizens from the city. The Paris Commune was then formed. Described by Marx as a 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat,' the Commune introduced social reform, encouraged feminism and established rights of workers to be able to take over businesses.

This made the royalists of France hugely concerned, in fact, there was worry all over Europe about this Geist of Communism that seemed to have taken over. As a result, the remains of the army were sent into Paris to utterly destroy the Commune. There was a huge amount of extreme violence targeted at the working class. Over 20 thousand people were killed, possible many more. The aim of this was to ensure that this uprising would never happen again. However, the short rule of the Commune would prove to have changed political thinking in France forever.

The media in France at this time was very influential, often being used as a way to control public opinion in France. Bismarck did exactly this to start his war with France. The resulting defeat suffered by France caused disbelief, and spawned mass conspiracy theories as to how the French could have lost. One of the most successful theories was of a Jewish syndicate, that worked in the shadows to bring down France.

It was at this point that the Dreyfus affair took place. France was attempting to gain back its pride by expanding its empire and becoming very militaristic amidst several scandals, and the higher-ups of the French military were looking for scapegoats to explain whatever failures it encountered. One such was begun when secret papers from the high in the French army were discovered in a wastepaper bin. This incriminated an officer in the French army and, wanting to make an example, they blamed the incident on a man named Alfred Dreyfus on incredibly flimsy charges. He was: Jewish, a great crime in France at this time when anti-Semitism was rife; From Alsace, this currently being controlled by Germany made him a German;  and he was intelligent, another great crime, as Zola comments in J’accuse:

“he is industrious, he wants to know everything, crime”

Dreyfus disgraced as his sword is broken in two.

Dreyfus was found guilty by the French council of war after his accusers, unable to provide any real evidence of his guilt, claimed they could not show the evidence as it could be damaging to France. He was disgraced, stripped of rank, and sent to Devil’s Island, a prison island that no one expected him to come back from.

It was at this point that an officer named Picquart found evidence that proved it was another man (Esterhazy) that leaked military secrets to the Germans, not Dreyfus. He took the evidence to his superiors who dismissed it, saying: “What is it to you if a Jew rots on Devil’s Island?”

The officer persisted however, and Esterhazy was put on trial. But, he was acquitted in an attempt to keep the affair quiet.

It is at this point that Emile Zola, a witness to the trial, and disgusted by the result, wrote ‘J’accuse…!’

J’accuse…!

Émile Zola himself

J’accuse…! Begins with a respectful address to the President, at no point, it is worth pointing out, does Zola ever criticise the President, portraying him as something akin to a victim of circumstance. He says that “your star, so happy until now, is threatened by the most shameful and most ineffaceable of blemishes?”
(…)
“what a spot of mud on your name - I was going to say on your reign - is this abominable Dreyfus affair!”

He  seems to write as though he feels he has been pushed to do so, clearly feeling that he should not have had to, and only does because justice failed:

“The truth I will say, because I promised to say it, if justice, regularly seized, did not do it, full and whole. My duty is to speak, I do not want to be an accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the spectre of innocence that suffer there, through the most dreadful of tortures, for a crime it did not commit.”

He begins his argument, with the lawsuit and judgement of Dreyfus, which he believes was almost solely carried out by the then Commandant, Du Paty de Clam, whom he calls a “Nefarious man” and describes as something of a shadowy figure, who sought to hide the truth with elaborate illusions and trickery. Most likely because he had no actual proof to use against him. De Clam was Zola’s first ‘culprit’, and he quickly moves on to others whom, he seems to suggest, are implicit, if not guilty:

“There is the Minister of War, General Mercier, whose intelligence seems poor; there are the head of the High Command, General De Boisdeffre, who appears to have yielded to his clerical passion, and the assistant manager of the High Command, General Gonse, whose conscience could put up with many things”

“Is this then true, the inexpressible things, the dangerous things, capable of plunging Europe into flames, which one must carefully bury behind these closed doors? No! There was behind this, only the romantic and lunatic imaginations of Commander Paty de Clam.”
He condemns the bill of indictment, he says that people could not read it without some kind of indignation or revolt. He lists the ‘crimes’ for which Dreyfus was charged, each absurd when read in the simple language he uses.

“Dreyfus knows several languages, crime; one found at his place no compromising papers, crime; he returns sometimes to his country of origin, crime; he is industrious, he wants to know everything, crime; he is unperturbed, crime; he is perturbed, crime.”

He lambastes the accusers of Dreyfus, all but calling them cowards, and referring indirectly to the power that the media gave to those who controlled it over the rest of France:

“no, no! It is a lie! and it is all the more odious and cynical that they lie with impunity without one being able to convince others of it. They assemble France, they hide behind its legitimate emotion, they close mouths by disturbing hearts, by perverting spirits. I do not know a greater civic crime.”

Zola moves on to what he calls the ‘Esterhazy affair.’ Three years after Dreyfus is sent to Devil’s Island,  Picquart, who found the evidence against Esterhazy (a telegram from a foreign agent) is described by Zola as a man who never did anything against his superiors, as a man who (we can assume) tried to always to the right thing. Zola describes how, having been presented with this evidence, his superiors (General Gonse, General De Boisdeffre, and General Billot) were assured of Esterhazy’s guilty, and therefore of Dreyfus’ innocence. But the High command did not want any revision of his trial.

Zola scathingly writes that Billot, a new party to the entire affair, and in know way implicated, felt “only one minute of conflict between his conscience and what he believed to be the military's interest.” and once he had taken this minute, he became implicated and, in Zola’s view, became worse that the others, as he had had a chance to do the right thing, and chose not to. He comments that somehow, despite their callousness, they had loving families at home.

As Esterhazy comes to trial, Zola marvels at his dramatic change of attitude. From him being “thrown into a panic, ready for suicide or escape” to his astonishing audacity, recognised by Zola as a result of help coming to him. Most probably from Paty de Clam with his “fertile imagination.”

Zola starts his last section with a rhetorical question. He asks:

“How could one hope that a council of war would demolish what a council of war had done?”

Essentially,  he is saying that the Council of War would not allow itself to contradict itself as it would completely undermine their authority. He does give some leniency to the first council of war. He says that the supreme chief giving credit to the accusations could not be simply ignored, and they were, in some fashion, forced into the sentencing. At the very least their hands were tied. But the second council, he calls criminal, as at that point, everybody knew of the innocence of Dreyfus. The problem they had, was that to proclaim Dreyfus innocent, would be to say that the high command were all guilty. As Zola sees it, he uses this as the motivation for the amount of protection given to Esterhazy.

Once more, Zola seems to find no reasoning strong enough to pardon their behaviour and ridicules the department of war. Whilst at the same time lamenting the loss of what he considers to have been a once fine institution:

“Where is the truly strong ministry of wise patriotism that will dare to reforge and to renew all? What of people I know who, faced with the possibility of war, tremble of anguish knowing in what hands lies national defence! And what a nest of base intrigues, gossips and dilapidations has this crowned asylum become, where the fate of fatherland is decided! One trembles in face of the terrible day that there has just thrown the Dreyfus affair, this human sacrifice of an unfortunate, a "dirty Jew"! Ah! all that was agitated insanity there and stupidity, imaginations insane, practices of low police force, manners of inquisition and tyranny, good pleasure of some non-commissioned officers putting their boots on the nation, returning in its throat its cry of truth and justice, under the lying pretext and sacrilege of the reason of State.”

He begins to come full circle at this point, addressing, if not directly, the President. Describing the petty and spiteful attitudes that have overtaken France.  Perhaps, for the first time laying some of the blame toward the President. He praises, however, the men he sees as being innocent and good in all of this. Giving them a fairly large amount of space, perhaps in gratitude for what they had done, despite being the vast minority. “There are two victims, two good people, two simple hearts, who waited for God while the devil acted.”

Once more, Zola addresses the President directly, again calling the affair a stain for his presidency, though assuring him that he sees no collaboration on his part:

“I very much doubt that you have no capacity in this affair, that you are the prisoner of the Constitution and your entourage.”

Towards the end of the article, he accuses the guilty men: Paty de Clam, “as the diabolic workman of the miscarriage of justice”; Mercier, “of being an accomplice, if by weakness of spirit”; Billot, “of having held in his hands the unquestionable evidence of Dreyfus's innocence and of suppressing it”; De Boisdeffre and Gonse, “as accomplices of the same crime, one undoubtedly by clerical passion, the other perhaps by this spirit of body which makes offices of the war an infallible archsaint.”; De Pellieux and Ravary “of performing a rogue investigation, by which I mean an investigation of the most monstrous partiality, of which we have, in the report of the second, an imperishable monument of naive audacity.”; The three handwriting experts that let off Esterhazy, and here Zola shows a small amount of humour, though I doubt that he would have found enjoyment in it. “Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting untrue and fraudulent reports, unless a medical examination declares them to be affected by a disease of sight and judgment.”

Finally, he accuses the first council of war for condemning a man unrevealed evidence. And the second of covering this up.

He openly says  that he has slandered these men, and is willing to accept it. And even now, after having scorned them and called them criminals, he makes an attempt to show that although there is undoubtedly bias. He has no personal malice against them:

“As for the people I accuse, I do not know them, I never saw them, I have against them neither resentment nor hatred. They are for me only entities, spirits of social evil.”

Once more, he addresses the president, as he did at the beginning, treating him with great respect. And clearly knowing that the repercussions of his piece will be massive. If not necessarily which way they will turn. He says:

“I am waiting”


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Thanks very much for reading all this. At some point in the near future, at urging from my lecturer, I intend to record myself reading this and post it on the blog.


Watch this space, my avid readers.


Much love.

Will Our Lecturers Teach the Government a Lesson?

As some of you may well have heard (I would certainly hope any students among you may have) lecturers are striking all over the UK in a bid to stop changes in their respective pension schemes. This is on top of planned government budget cuts that could cause redundancies all over the country.

For any foreigners who don’t know a huge amount about us Brits, it isn’t too often that this sort of thing actually happens. Certainly over the past year there have been countless demonstrations against the rise in university tuition fees; and of course, lest we forget the miner’s strike of the Thatcher era. But for the most part, we do not often go to these sorts of extremes. Perhaps it’s our mild temperaments, or our preference for the strongly worded letter. Personally, I think it’s the weather. No one wants to be stuck outside in the pissing rain, waving a disgruntled looking placard and wishing we’d just stayed in and played a game of Monopoly.

Now, look at France on the other hand (before you start, I’ve got nothing against France, I think it’d be wonderful if it weren’t for all the bloody French), over there, they will protest at the drop of a pin, maybe they just get bored of smoking in cafes, in black and white, I‘m not an expert of French culture

I’m not saying the weather over there is perfect, But it’s certainly a damn sight better than it is back here. Definitely enough sun for a good ‘manifestation’ every other week (A level French is finally proving useful).

Alas, I find myself diverted from the point I was trying to make. Personally, I’m all in favour of these strikes if it helps them to keep a little say in their lives, and if I am forced to not go to my lectures on Thursday then I shall carry that burden with head held high. You won’t find me crossing that picket line, I mean, my lecturers spit and shout at me anyway so that wouldn’t be a change. But remember the point I’m trying to get across: I now have a free day on Thursday!

I’m thinking... Waffles and COD.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12806189

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12745736

Rousseau, Romanticism, and the French Revolution.

Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, we emerge from our festering Christmas pits ready to glory in the renewed magnificence of HCJ. After a brief fistfight with a script writing lecturer, we put down our flag and were ready to get cracking. This year we kicked off with a sortie into the Romantic. And no, I'm not talking about Stephanie Meyer's sparkly, angsty, vampire novels (Team Edward FTW).

Perhaps a little background is needed.

We're in France, it is the end the 18th century, the Church's creative force has diminished, and a man named Jean Jacques Rousseau has taken a sabbatical to wander the mountains of Switzerland and the beaches of Vienna. Following an intense experience listening to the sounds of nature, and finding all his cares slipping away, he decides that the void of creative force left by the Church should be filled by the divinity of nature. He felt that all that had been written and proposed before were lies, that there was honesty in nature. That the empiricists were wrong, and it is feeling, not reason, that drives us. Reason did nought but stand in the way of innocence and beauty, and what it was to be truly human.

Rousseau calls to mind a state of nature, quite different to that of Hobbes, who would have us believe that before society was formed, we were all psychotic savages living in an anarchical world and that we cannot be trusted to live without a sword of Damocles threatening to drop at the slightest provocation. Rousseau claims that natural man was virtuous and was the perfect example of humanity. Indeed, he glorified what he called the 'Noble Savage' as being pure and beautiful.

While I'm sure he salivated over the idea of stripping down to a loincloth and running around the countryside, he was intelligent enough to realise that this would not be possible, what with all the trappings of society cemented about us. He claims that the origin of civil society and all of it's incumbent inequalities was found in property.

"The first man [he wrote] who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying "this is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of society." One wonders what he would have said to Locke on the subject if they had ever met, Locke being a great lover of property and basing near all his philosophy on the stuff. But I digress.

Rousseau's Romanticism was built upon the supremacy of emotions and was essentially a reaction to the enlightenment, which he perceived to be passionless. He despised the situation that man had gotten himself into, saying: "Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are." As far as his view is concerned, the world was is rotten, and civilisation corrupt. Man is engulfed in an endless competition of self esteem, which can never truly be conquered, 'am I doing as well as I could be?', 'why is my horse a poorer model than my neighbours?', 'why is the other man's joopleberry shrub always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet?' etc.

Rousseau wished for a different type of social contract than had been proposed before. The problem was finding a government that would protect you, yet leave you free to do what you wished. And also create laws which everyone agrees with, allowing everyone to keep their freedom.

Now, Rousseau's idea of 'everyone' needs a little explanation. He came up with the concept of 'general will'  which decides the best way doing anything e.g. "we shall all eat Crunchy Nut for breakfast." Every citizen has a share in the general will, allowing everyone to be free, yet it is a conglomerate, and if an individual was to differ from the mass, then they would be "forced to be free." think of it as a tyrannical form of peer pressure, à la 1984.

This 'cult of sensibility', while initially, not particularly popular,was a political time bomb that would throw all of France into chaos. All it would take was a country that was completely out of pocket, and a king willing to let the paysans help sort it out. Quel surprise! Just such an event occurred. The commoners were brought in to discuss the country's financial problems and they decided this would be a perfect time to write their own constitution, which happened to be in the image of Mr Rousseau. Men being free and equal, and laws being an expression of "general will". This eventually led to the French Revolution.

As revolutions go, this one began somewhat, bureaucratically. Until the Bastille was stormed, a symbolic act that apparently irritated the six or seven prisoners residing there, as they had probably been having a kip. Whilst all this unruliness was going on in France, radicals in England, were becoming more and more intrigued. Indeed, many went over to France to see Rousseau's natural man becoming a reality for themselves. Wordsworth wrote that "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."

But of course, this could not last. The power vacuum that resulted from the idea of general will, meant that no one had any idea who was supposed to be in charge, leaving everyone running around like the proverbial chicken. France's neighbouring countries, were not looking too happily at the chaos beginning to engulf France. The Prussians (being renowned for their sense of liberty and their happy-go-lucky attitude) were looking to invade France and banish this unseemly attitude once and for all. And the French, becoming more and more paranoid, began handing out weapons willy-nilly to allow the citizens to defend themselves and their country (the two being virtually synonymous). And this, coupled with their paranoia, made the French begin to massacre each other in search of counter revolutionaries. Tens of thousands died before it was brought to an end, along with much of the revolution, though it changed France forever. A legacy of the Romantics. Take that Robert Pattinson!

During the lecture, we also discussed Mary Wollstonecraft, and her writing, including her Vindications of the Rights of Women. But as she will be the subject of our seminar next week, I will discuss her in more detail then. Cheerio!