Free The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read Page A

more,’ wrote Drumont, ‘they don’t have the time, they no longer know how to, they let their newspapers do their thinking for them, their brains are made out of paper.’ 3
    In order to help French people to think along the same lines as he did, Clemenceau founded a new newspaper, L’Aurore , in 1897, with an old leftist, Ernest Vaughan – a former Communard and follower of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Sharing Clemenceau’s conviction that Dreyfus was innocent, L’Aurore called for a review, and this backing was particularly welcome for the Dreyfusards because on 13 December, when the controversy over Esterhazy was at its height, Le Figaro , long an ally of the Dreyfusards, was forced by the large number of cancelled subscriptions to withdraw its support; its director, Fernand de Rodays, said that the paper would henceforth remain neutral.
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    It was now that France’s best-selling novelist and polemical journalist, Émile Zola, entered the lists as the champion of Alfred Dreyfus. Zola would later admit that his initial interest in the Affair was as a novelist, and was focused on the dramatic possibilities in the story. ‘The novelist was above all seduced and exalted by such a drama,’ he wrote, ‘and pity, faith, the passion for truth and justice all came later.’ 4 However, rather than write a novel based on the Dreyfus Affair, Zola had joined the fray as a journalist and in articles for Le Figaro had gone beyond his denunciation of anti-Semitism in ‘Pour les Juifs’ to an unambiguous support for the Dreyfusard cause. Zola had an acute understanding of the power, but also the amorality, of the French press – not just ‘the gutter press in heat, making its money out of pathological curiosity, perverting the masses in order to sell its blackened paper’ but also those ‘so-called serious and honest’ papers which content themselves ‘with recording all with scrupulous care, whether it be true or false’. 5
    On 6 January 1898, Zola published a pamphlet, Lettre à la France , in which he appealed to France’s ‘good-hearted and commonsensical people’ not to believe all they read in the papers about Esterhazy and Dreyfus. ‘A hundred papers repeat every day that it is unacceptable to public opinion that Dreyfus should be innocent, that his guilt is necessary for the salvation of the nation.’ This was perfect idiocy – une parfaite bêtise . He poured scorn on Commandant Ravary, General de Pellieux and ‘the three experts who did not see at first glance the complete identity of Esterhazy’s handwriting and that of the bordereau . Take from the street a passing child and show him the two samples: “It’s the same gentleman who wrote the two.” He doesn’t need experts – the fact that the two are identical is obvious for all to see!’ 6
    The time had come, wrote Zola, to call to account a press that shamed France in the eyes of the whole world – ‘papers such as L’Écho de Paris , a literary journal, so often in the avant-garde when it comes to ideas, and which has made such trouble over the Dreyfus Affair with vitriolic and partisan columns that are unsigned’. And ‘ le Petit Journal with its circulation of a million, directed at the humble, reaching everywhere, spreading error, misleading opinion, this is a serious matter. When one has charge of so many souls, when one is the pastor of a whole people, one must act with a scrupulous intellectual probity, or risk committing a civic crime.’ 7
    2: ‘J’accuse’
    Even as his Lettre à la France appeared in the bookshops, Zola was working furiously on another pamphlet which went much further than ridiculing Commandant Ravary and General de Pellieux, or the three handwriting experts who had given evidence at Pellieux’s inquiry. It was clear that these men were just pawns,