Henry Céard Reads the Dreyfus Affair

Chapter 5 examines the case of Henry Céard (1851-1924). A reluctant novelist and prolific journalist, Céard went from being one of Zola’s closest friends and collaborators, providing innumerable documents that Zola used in creating the Rougon-Macquart novels, to breaking with him both socially and intellectually. He moved to the right politically and disowned Zola’s late fiction, meaning that when the Dreyfus Affair arose, Céard was in a unique position. He used his insider knowledge of Zola’s literary ideas and private life in a lengthy sequence of articles that attempted to undermine the older man’s Dreyfusard campaign. Céard treated the Affair as a text, to which he applied a range of techniques of literary interpretation, from the historical to the rhetorical. His anti-Dreyfusism underlines the profoundly literary nature of many figures’ political engagements in the Affair, while also providing a glimpse of the realignment of the French right through the eyes of a middle-ranking journalist.