Emile in exile

Michael Rosen, a poet, journalist and prolific author of novels for children, has written an account of Emile Zola’s year’s exile in England between July 1898 and June 1899, as a result of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair in France. It is not a dispassionate work of history but a homage to Zola, ‘a hero in my eyes’, for his fight against anti-Semitism. Zola not only made ‘a brave, unpopular, self-sacrificing decision to support a wrongly convicted man’, but also persuaded the socialist leader Jean Jaurès to join the fight against anti-Semitism: at the time of Dreyfus’s conviction in 1894, both Jaurès and Georges Clemenceau had called for him to be shot.

Emile Zola had been first attracted to the Dreyfus Affair as material for a book. ‘The novelist was above all seduced and exalted by such a drama,’ he wrote, ‘and pity, faith, the passion for truth and justice came later.’ The drama was intense — a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of spying for the Germans, and sent to rot on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana; the discovery that another officer, a Major Esterhazy, was the more likely culprit; the decision by the army’s high command to cover up for Esterhazy — all played out for the nation in a vibrant gutter press.

Fantasies flourished on both sides. The Dreyfusards ascribed the conspiracy against Dreyfus to the Jesuits: the anti-Dreyfusards claimed that a ‘Jewish syndicate’ was plotting to free the traitor to discredit the army. Neither was true. The rise of anti-Semitism shocked Zola, a bestselling novelist but also a prolific journalist: he denounced it in an article for Le Figaro, then waded into the Affair itself with an open letter to the President of France, Félix Faure.