J’Accuse...! (Famous Open Letter in Defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus), Émile Zola, Paris: L’Aurore, January 13, 1898, with La Vérité Triomphe, Paris: L’Aurore, June 4, 1899

Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), an Alsatian Jew and officer in the French army, was wrongly accused of spying for the Germans in the fall of 1894. He was tried before a court-martial, convicted, publicly degraded, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana in December 1894. The open letter to French President Félix Faure (1841-1899) published by novelist and socialist-humanitarian Émile Zola (1840-1902) in Georges Clémenceau’s radical daily L’Aurore charged the French government and army with conspiring to suppress the facts about the case and with committing “high treason against humanity.” Zola’s widely disseminated accusation made the Dreyfus Affair a public issue, led many to suspect that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and indirectly resulted in Dreyfus’ retrial in 1899, emancipation, and ultimate vindication in 1906. The second article in this lot, entitled “The Truth Triumphs,” reviews the timeline of events leading to the announcement of the retrial.