Beyond ‘J’Accuse …!’

Chapter 2, also devoted to Zola, concentrates on the Dreyfus Affair itself. Where many discussions of his engagement focus entirely or primarily on his best-known text, ‘J’Accuse…!,’ I place that work in the context of Zola’s twelve other publications about the Affair: the complete volume of these writings is entitled La Vérité en marche. As a result, not only do the commonalities between his campaign for Dreyfus’s innocence and the literary and cultural ideas highlighted in chapter 1 become clearer, the full range of arguments and allusions he used in that campaign is allowed to emerge. In particular, where ‘J’Accuse…!’ is deliberately aimed at the army’s General Staff in order to provoke a legal confrontation, Zola’s other writings impeach a broader swathe of French society, from nationalist students to prime ministers to the populist press. By taking Zola’s Dreyfus-era writings as a connected whole, a more complex picture emerges, one which contributes to our revised understanding of the Affair as something more nuanced than a clash between two monolithic visions.