J'Accuse

Content Warning: This letter includes references to antisemitism.

Émile Zola wrote J’Accuse…! in response to the Dreyfus Affair, a highly significant socio-political controversy that took hold of French discourse during the mid-late 1890s. News of the affair and the various trials populated a number of newspapers, which often had a strong bias to one side or the other. Dreyfusard newspapers advocated on behalf of Dreyfus and his cause, while the anti-Dreyfusard newspapers pushed forth the narrative of his guilt. Zola, as a famous author and influential supporter of Dreyfus, penned this letter to share both his perspective on the affair and the facts of the case as he understood them.

At its core, Zola’s letter is an argumentative essay, intended to persuade his audience of Dreyfus’s innocence and Esterhazy’s guilt. Zola adopted the method of the open letter, a letter that is ostensibly addressed to a specific person (normally in a position of power or influence) but which is published in a journal or newspaper (in this case the liberal Parisian newspaper L’Aurore) and intended for a public audience. By utilizing the epistolary form (the form of a letter addressed to someone), Zola is able to address his stated recipient, President Felix Faure, while also allowing the facts of the cases and the moral argument he constructs to appeal to the citizens of France at large. Zola’s letter therefore seeks to inform and persuade the public, while bringing public pressure on President Faure to take action. Zola uses a blend of ethos (appeals to morality), logos (appeals to reason), and pathos (appeals to emotion) to craft his argument and demonstrate Dreyfus’s innocence to the reader. The letter takes a somewhat linear structure: Zola begins by addressing President Faure, explaining the facts of the Dreyfus Affair and how Dreyfus came to be falsely accused and then convicted via court martial, then explores Esterhazy’s guilt despite his acquittal via court martial, and ends with a list of against those he deems both responsible and complicit in the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair. The title of his letter, J’Accuse…!, (French for “I accuse”) formed the frontpage headline of the newspaper and encapsulated the bold and personal nature of Zola’s address. Zola also bookends his argument with direct addresses to President Faure, combining compliments for Faure’s successes with warnings of how the injustice of Dreyfus’s conviction will tarnish the reputation of his administration, both in France and in the world at large.

A key element of the Dreyfus Affair that Zola explores in J’Accuse…! is its links to Antisemitism in the French Third Republic. Dreyfus was a French citizen, but he was also a Jewish man. At the time, antisemitic discourse promulgated the false and damaging belief that Jewish people were divided in their loyalty to their religion on one hand and to their country on the other. This argument sought to marginalize Jewish people and to create distrust of Jewish citizens among the non-Jewish population; especially, it held that Jewish people were a risk to national security when they held positions of trust or power (such as military, political, and legal roles). The scapegoating of Dreyfus, which relied heavily on slurs around his identity as a Jewish French citizen, leaned on these antisemitic tropes. His conviction was also used to further antisemitic arguments which maligned the trustworthiness of Jewish people and their suitability for office.  

Zola refers throughout his letter to the prevalence of strong antisemitism in the Third Republic, calling it “the ‘dirty Jew’ obsession that is the scourge of our time” (14). He recognizes the widespread and pervasive nature of French antisemitism during his era and how it intersects with the Dreyfus case. It is unlikely, Zola postulates, that Dreyfus would have been persecuted for a crime he did not commit if he were not from an affluent, Jewish background. Zola frequently accuses du Paty de Clam and his co-conspirators of religious “bias” and “bigotry,” along with “stupidity” for inventing the false evidence against Dreyfus (9-10). Zola’s contempt for antisemitism is shown throughout, especially as he presents it as a fundamentally flawed and unreasonable position, aligned with inferior intellect, immorality, and opportunism.

Zola outlines Dreyfus’s supposed “crimes,” in a sarcastic and ironic tone in Paragraph 12, pointing out that these were behaviors typical of an educated Army officer, such as knowing multiple languages and staying informed of current events. One behavior that Zola points out as usual was Dreyfus “occasionally visit[ing] his birthplace” (12). Dreyfus was born in 1859 in Alsace, one of the territories that was annexed by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War ended. His visiting Alsace would not have been unusual, even after its annexation, but due to the nationalist sentiments popular in France after the Franco-Prussian War, it was possible to present this action as Dreyfus visiting enemy territory. French Nationalism and Militarism is a key theme that Zola explores in the letter. France during the Third Republic was working to create and understand its national identity, in a context of volatile international politics and internal social unrest. The early Third Republic was beset by questions of what it meant to be French and of how, and by whom, France should be ruled. Although these issues were increasingly settled by the time of the Dreyfus Affair, France having had a stable republican government for almost 20 years, these existential questions were still close to the surface.

Militarism especially worried Zola, especially as the Dreyfus Affair highlighted that military law allowed the military free reign within its own system of justice, without input or oversight by any civilian channels. Zola implicitly challenges this system: If, he asks, the military can imprison its own officers on false charges, what other corrupt action might it commit? The impunity of the military opens the door to further military expansion and aggression, which, Zola fears, could affect France’s Place in Global Politics. Zola places France “among the free and just nations,” but worries that this position is precarious while the Dreyfus Affair stains France’s global reputation (26). With the trampling of the moral ideals of truth and justice by the military, Zola argues that France cannot call itself a “free” and “just” nation if it can falsely imprison an innocent man and conceal the truth, while allowing the guilty party to escape justice.

Zola crafts an emotional tone through a heavy use of pathos. This vacillates between accusatory and bereft. He is angry when he accuses du Paty de Clam and his co-conspirators of their crimes against Dreyfus and the justice system of France, utilizing ample exclamation points and words such as “demented” and “monstrous” to describe du Paty de Clam (9-11). He expresses sympathy and sadness for Dreyfus in his plight, stating that any “decent man” would experience a “cry of revulsion, at the thought of the undeserved punishment being meted out there on Devil’s Island” (12). Here, Zola employs a less aggressive tone, instead encouraging the audience to empathize with the thought of Dreyfus imprisoned in an inhumane and inhospitable penal colony for a crime that he did not commit. While most of his tone remains consistent with the accusatory nature of this letter, the moments in which Zola stops and displays grief for Dreyfus are designed to create empathy in his reader, adding an extra layer of emotional persuasion to an argument that generally relies on reason and intellect. The reception of Zola’s letter and its effects are testament to the success of his writing in this case; his letter was instrumental in renewed calls for the exoneration of Dreyfus.