The Grand Affaire (1898)

Abstract

There have been moments when one individual has reshaped destiny’s patterns. In mid-January 1898 the case of the bordereau was over. Dreyfus had been convicted and Esterhazy acquitted. Picquart was arrested, Scheurer-Kestner defeated. Then Zola — that deeply flawed egotist with his novelist’s sense of the dramatic — transformed the landscape. ‘Mr President’, he wrote to Faure in L’Aurore on 13 January,

I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical agent of a judicial error…

I accuse General Mercier of having made himself an accomplice…

I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands absolute proof that Dreyfus was innocent and of having suppressed it…

I accuse General Boisdeffre and General Gonse of making themselves accomplices to the same crime…

I accuse General de Pellieux and Commandant Ravary of having conducted a villainous inquiry…

I accuse the Ministry of War of having led an abominable press campaign…

I accuse, finally, the first court martial of having violated the law by condemning a suspect on the basis of a document unknown to him, and I accuse the second court of having covered up this illegality under orders by committing in its turn the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.

The Dreyfus Affair is now a religion, the religion of justice and truth.¹