Culture | Emile Zola and the Dreyfus case

Giant of France

The Frenchman who changed literature

Accuser-in-chief

The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case. By Michael Rosen. Faber & Faber; 302 pages; £16.99.

EMILE ZOLA came to London in 1893 and was “received like a prince”. Some disapproving bishops and headmasters thought his novels, particularly “La Terre” (“The Earth”), to be corrupting. But with his wife, Alexandrine, he stayed in the Savoy Hotel, met leading literary figures and addressed thousands at banquets at Crystal Palace and the Guildhall. By contrast, when he arrived at Victoria Station in July 1898 he was alone, a fugitive, carrying a nightshirt wrapped in newspaper. In “J’accuse”, his open letter in L’Aurore, a French newspaper, he had attacked the authorities for their shameful anti-Semitic conduct in the political scandal that came to be known as the Dreyfus affair. Found guilty of libel and sentenced to prison, Zola fled to England with no idea of when it might be safe to return.

He was to stay for almost a year, and it is the story of this little-known episode that Michael Rosen tells in characteristically engaging style. Assisted by one of his English translators, Ernest Vizetelly, Zola moved from one safe-house to another before taking refuge “in a suburban hotel in Norwood”. There he established his routine: writing “Fécondité” (“Fruitfulness”), cycling, taking photographs, communicating with his friends and family in France, pondering “the effect of the capital ‘I’ on English character”, complaining about the tasteless food and bemoaning the fact that British journalists wrote anonymously—still the practice in The Economist.

Zola’s wife joined him from time to time, and so, for idyllic weeks and with her permission, did Jeanne, his other, younger, chère femme, and the children he had had with her, whom he adored. Their hopes for his swift return from exile were continually disappointed, as was his desire that his son, Jacques, should work hard and come top of the class. Eventually the French government relented, the innocent Dreyfus’s case was reopened, though he was not yet pardoned, and Zola could return to France. However, there was no happy ending: in 1902 Zola died, possibly murdered, of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Some of the book’s charm lies in its snippets of information: in France children are happy as chaffinches, rather than larks; “a big snooze” is un gros dodo. A chillier note appears towards the end. Forty years after Zola’s death “a tragic rerun” of anti-Semitism saw Mr Rosen’s great-uncles deported to Auschwitz, along with 76,000 other French Jews. Religious divisions in France have a doleful way of enduring.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "When Emile Zola fled Paris"

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