The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [11]
Politics, as Zola wrote of Florent, was Zola's destiny. The Dreyfus case was the climax of that destiny. Zola said of himself that he was a dull conversationalist and found a voice only when championing a cause. The French Revolution launched almost two centuries of something close to civil war. One side supported the Bonapartes, while the other opposed them. One side was monarchist, militarist, Catholic, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic; the other was socialist, anti-imperial, antimilitary pro-women. They were the two sides that clashed over the Dreyfus Affair, and a lifetime of political stances seemed to lead Zola to the showdown. The split endured even after the Dreyfus Affair, with World War II collaborators and resisters and in the fight over decolonization in the 1950s and '60s. It was Zola's old adversaries, half a century after his death, who shouted down the French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France for withdrawing from Vietnam by shouting “Dirty Jew.” Zola lived only two years into the twentieth century, but it is easy to see where he would have stood throughout those years. Zola was always clear about where he stood.
In The Belly of Paris this divide is between the fat people and the thin people. In Zola's youth and in many of his novels, the split was between supporters of Napoleon III's empire and its opponents. By the time Zola was in his twenties, the repression had loosened and dozens of new anti-Napoleon journals had emerged in Paris. Zola launched his career in these journals, showing such a flair for controversy, whether in a political essay or a theater review, that he was sometimes accused of deliberately being contrary to get attention. In literature and the arts he was always a champion of modernism, one of the early supporters of the much-criticized Impressionism of Edouard Manet. Zola relished the attention, and he enjoyed being in Paris, which he called “the star of intelligence.”
At times Zola seemed almost frustrated that his defiant political stands did not evoke the kind of persecution—trials, banned writing, exile—for which the older and more celebrated Victor Hugo had famously been singled out. Zola's timing was off. While he was in Paris writing reviews, Hugo was in political exile. When he left Paris to avoid starvation under the 1871 German siege, Hugo was there eating zoo animals. Zola was ashamed that he had managed to escape Paris during the German siege. Manet stayed and manned artillery on a starvation diet, and many of Zola's artist and writer friends were there.
Then, in 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army officer from the German-speaking part of Alsace that had been taken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, was falsely accused of passing secrets to the German command. A wave of anti-Semitism was unleashed in France. Zola did not so much befriend Jews as loathe anti-Semitism. He regarded it as a backward affliction of the mind that, if left unchecked, would eventually destroy France. Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island, and Zola became one of his most conspicuous defenders.
Zola's January 13, 1898, open letter in L'Aurore, “J'Accuse!” is considered one of the great masterpieces of journalism and is possibly Zola's most famous piece of writing. It explained how Dreyfus had been framed by a fellow officer and accused the army command of covering it up. It began to change public opinion and put Zola at the center of a historic conflict. He was forced to leave the country to avoid being prosecuted for writing “J'Accuse!” and became a highly controversial figure.
He refused to take payment for any of the articles he wrote on the Dreyfus