Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [126]
The public was aghast; such charges flung at the military leaders of the nation seemed equivalent to an act of revolt. Many Revisionists felt Zola had gone too far. He had inflamed an already heated situation almost unbearably by frightening and angering the middle classes and increasing their support of the Army and their dislike of the Dreyfusards. Following de Mun’s resolution next day, the Government announced that Zola would be prosecuted. Hatred, filth and insults were spewed on him by the press and in songs sold on the streets. He was viciously caricatured. “Pornographic pig” was polite among the names he was called. Packages of excrement were mailed to him. He was burnt in effigy. Placards were distributed reading, “The answer of all good Frenchmen to Emile Zola: Merde!” Evoking one of the major emotions of the Affair, the attacks denounced him as a “foreigner,” in reference to his Italian father. In fact, Zola had been born in Paris of a French mother and brought up in the home of her parents in Aix-en-Provence.
The Government’s suit, filed in the name of General Billot as Minister of War, ignored all the accusations relevant to Dreyfus and confined itself to the single charge that the court-martial of Esterhazy had acquitted him “on order.” By this device the presiding judge could exclude any testimony not bearing precisely on that point. In a fiery protest against this procedure, Jaurès thundered in the Chamber at the Government, “You are delivering the Republic to the Jesuit Generals!” at which a Nationalist deputy, the Comte de Bernis, assaulted him physically, causing such an uproar that the military guard was required to restore order.
J’Accuse drew world attention to the Affair and gave it the proportions of heroic drama. That the French Army could be accused of such crimes and the French author best known to the foreign public be attacked in such terms were equally astounding. The world watched with “stupor and distress,” wrote Björnstjerne Björnson from Norway. When the trial opened, the Dreyfusards were conscious of that audience. “The scene is France; the theatre is the world,” they said. The trial transformed the Affair from the local to the universal.
The writer of his time who most truly touched the universal, Chekhov, was profoundly stirred by Zola’s intervention. Staying in Nice at the time, he followed the trial in growing excitement, read all the verbatim testimony and wrote home, “We talk here of nothing but Zola and Dreyfus.” He found the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus tirades of the St. Petersburg New Times, the leading daily which had published most of his own stories, “simply repulsive” and quarreled with its editor, his old and intimate friend.
Foreign opinion, except as conditioned by feeling about the Jews, saw the issue chiefly as one of Justice and could not understand the obstinate refusal of the French to allow Revision. Foreign hostility itself became a factor in the refusal. “French papers ask why foreign countries take such an interest in the Affair,” wrote Princess Radziwill, “as if a question of justice did not interest the whole world.” It did, but in France the Affair was not only that. It