Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case

The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case, Michael Rosen, 2017, Faber and Faber, 302p, £16-99. ISBN 978-0-571-31201-6

Emile Zola occupies a pivotal position in the world of personal integrity and courage. His intervention over the scandalous treatment of the Jewish French army officer, Captain Dreyfus, who had been wrongfully convicted of treason and sent o Devil’s Island, with his article entitled ‘J’ Accuse’ in the columns of L’ Aurore marked a major turning point in what had at least in part been an anti-semitic conspiracy.

Michael Rosen has now explored for us what effect this intervention had on Zola himself. Faced with a conviction for a form of libel, Zola disappeared for about a year. Rosen explores this year from various perspectives: his separation from his loving wife and his mistress and their two children; evidence of nervous breakdowns; where he stayed; and how he spent his time.

He ‘disappeared’ to England and for much of the time he stayed at the Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood. Rosen gives us a good insight into his life in the outer London suburbs. What becomes apparent is that anyone resident in the Crystal Palace or West Norwood area in 1898-99 would have been familiar with Zola walking about their neighbourhood. He was an energetic walker and enthusiastic photographer, and an archive of his photos from his exile survives.

Advised by his friends, Zola returned to France in June 1899 and his possible conviction ebbed away as his allegations of an anti-Jewish conspiracy were confirmed and Dreyfus was eventually exonerated.

Rosen adds two rather sanguine thoughts at the end: one is that there are rumours that Zola’s death from carbon monoxide poisoning was deliberately engineered, evidence of a continuing hostility from somewhere in the ‘establishment’ against this vociferous writer.  An even more trenchant point is that in 1940 some of the officials of the Vichy Regime who arranged the transportation of French Jews to concentration camps were, in effect, the behavioural successors of conspirators who had plotted against Dreyfus half a century earlier. The message about continuous vigilance is very strong indeed.