L'Affaire Dreyfus, Lettres et entretiens inédits (review)

Book Reviews 113 L'Affaire Dreyfus, Lettres et entretiens inedits,by Emile Zola, collected and annotated by Alain pages. Montreal: University of Montreal Press, 1994, and Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994. 238 pp. FF 145. On the night of 18 July 1898, Emile Zola stood on the deck of an English channel steamer and watched the lights ofCalais fade in the distance, his eyes filled with tears. Leaving France was necessary to avoid arrest after having been sentenced to prison for slandering the French anny. Soon after his arrival in London, Zola wrote his lawyer, Femand Labori, "Someday, I will tell everybody of my heartbreak, but it is essential that truth and justice triumph." He confmned his dedication to the fight to clear Alfred Dreyfus from the charge of treason, which had led to his incarceration on Devil's Island. Emile Zola's reaction to the fate ofthis Jewish army captain had abruptly changed from indifference to action as soon as Zola had become convinced that Dreyfus was the victim of a monstrous frame-up. Previously, the writer had shown little desire to become involved in active politics. His was an ivory tower existence; he preferred, as he said, to help cure the abuses ofsociety by staying above the fray, acting as a tribune, imposing his ideas on others through the force ofhis eloquence and thus spreading his values throughout the country "like a sower broadcasts grain in the furrow of a fertile field." However, once committed he was unstoppable. His opening shot was three letters published in the Parisian newspaper L 'Aurore (Dawn). The first, which appeared on 14 December 1897, was addressed to the youth of France, calling upon them to use their "vibrant youth" to fight abuse of power and work for social justice. He specifically mandated them to end the "imbecilic poison" of antisemitism. What sadness, what perturbation for the Twentieth Century which is at hand! One hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights ofMan, one hundred years after this supreme act oftolerance and emancipation, people return to the wars of religion, even more odious and stupidly fanatical. Zola's determination was his personal undoing, leading to the complete disruption of a tranquil, predictable, and comfortable life. His third "open letter," addressed to the President of the French Republic, Felix Faure, was the famous J'accuse (I Accuse), printed under a banner headline on the front page ofL 'Aurore. In it, Zola specifically denounced those individuals he considered directly responsible for condemning an innocent man. For such audacity, the Paris cour d'assises found him guilty of slander and handed down the maximum: one year in prison and a three-thousand-franc fme. The sentence was upheld on appeal, but Zola did not wait around to be served an arrest warrant and fled to England, beginning an exile that would last a year. 114 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 It was a frustrating time.. He kept to himself, changed residences five times, resumed his writing, suffered the English weather. I go for days at a time without speaking to anyone. . . . The countryside is superb, endless lawns in which giant trees grow. Only the weather is terrible. There have been only two days of clear sky. A strong wind blows which is soon mixed with rain. No sooner it stops than fog covers the earth. However the weather is not as bad [as the awful] loneliness and the sense of being abandoned in a strange land. Zola kept in touch with his family, friends, and associates, hoping for a break in the, Dreyfus case, which would render the sentence against him moot and allow him to . return. Alain Pages concentrates on Zola's correspondence during this period of exile, an often neglected time of Zola's life. The collection can be viewed as part of the University of Montreal Press's larger undertaking of publishing a comprehensive collection of the French author's complete correspondence, the first volume of which appeared in 1978. There have been eight more since. Pages is no stranger to Zola. He serves as an associate editor on the Correspondance de Zola project and has published two other books of his...