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Emile Zola: Anatole France
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Born in Paris, Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola spent his formative years in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Although Zola’s father died when Émile was seven, Émile and his mother remained in Aix until poverty forced them to move to Paris in 1858. There the young Zola eked out a living working as a clerk for the publishing house Hachette and writing literary and political articles for newspapers. His knowledge and understanding of poverty, evident in his later novels, was due in part to personal experience.
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Zola was a leading light of France and his letter formed a major turning-point in the Dreyfus affair, causing the captain's case to be reopened, whereupon he was acquitted. In the course of events, Zola was convicted of libel and sentenced himself and removed from the Legion of Honor. Rather than go to jail, he fled to England to escape imprisonment. Soon he was allowed to return in time to see the government fall. Dreyfus was convicted again, but was ultimately freed, in large part due to the moral force of Zola's arguments. Zola said "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." In 1906, Dreyfus was entirely exonerated by the Supreme Court.
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More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career re synthetized his work into La Comédie Humaine, Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial revolution. The series examines two branches of a single family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts, for five generations.
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Zola's dramatic intervention on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus carried his name even further than had his literary work. Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been wrongfully condemned for espionage in 1894, and with much courage and recklessness of consequences Zola challenged the findings of the court-martial in an open letter to the President of the Republic (J'accuse, Jan. 13, 1898). Since his statement charged certain highranking army officers with falsification of evidence, Zola was put on trial. He lost his case, spent a year in hiding in England, and returned to France on June 5, 1899. His sudden death in Paris on Sept. 29, 1902, from carbon monoxide poisoning may not have been accidental as the inquest found. There is reason to believe that he was the victim of an assassination plot engineered by a few of the more fanatical of his political enemies.
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Zola had an ardent zeal for social reform. He was anti-Catholic and wrote many diatribes against the clergy and the Church. His part in the Dreyfus Affair (notably his article, “J'accuse,” 1898) was his most conspicuous public action, and he became the special object of the hatred of the anti-Dreyfus party. Prosecuted for libel (1898), he escaped to England, where he remained a few months until an amnesty enabled his return to France. He was accidentally asphyxiated in his bedroom after inhaling fumes from a blocked chimney.
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Zola argued that Dreyfus had been framed, and he had the facts on his side, including testimony from members of the military itself. But his defense of the officer, then imprisoned at Devil's Island, stuck a finger in the eye of French anti-Semitism. Zola was convicted for libel. He appealed and lost, so, to avoid imprisonment, which would have prevented him from further defending Dreyfus, he fled to England. His J'accuse, and his idealism, cost Zola his hard-won place on the roll of the Legion of Honor. And only after his efforts had forced the Dreyfus case to be reopened did Zola feel it safe to return to France.
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