![]() ![]() So, at the age of 57, equipped only with a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper, Zola made his way to the coast and boarded a boat to England. His family and associates argued that he should exile himself and demand a retrial, thereby ensuring the Dreyfus affair remained in the newspapers. Zola got his trial, but he didn’t get justice: the republic found him guilty of libel, fined him 3,000 francs and sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment. In the course of defending himself, he would be able to make public new evidence that would exonerate Dreyfus. His intention was to lure them into prosecuting him for libel. ! – in which he accused the military authorities of antisemitism. ![]() Zola’s intervention took the form of an open letter – J’Accuse. And on 13 January 1898 he said so, in print, on the front page of the Parisian newspaper L’Aurore. For Zola, the conviction of Dreyfus was an injustice, the product of institutional antisemitism. ![]() As the most famous defender of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Franco-Jewish artillery officer who in 1894 had been convicted of treason for passing military secrets to German officials, his residence in the city had become untenable. O n 18 July 1898, the French novelist, journalist and playwright Émile Zola (1840-1902) was preparing to flee his home in Paris. ![]()
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