J’Accuse was written by Emile Zola in 1898 in response to the imprisonment of a French military officer Alfred Dreyfus. J’Accuse was written as an open letter to the President of France exposing the errors in the trial, and accusing the French army of anti-Semitism. To understand the concepts within the article a little background of the state of France at the time is needed. The French had recently been defeated by the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussia war, it was an embracing defeat for France, who believed themselves to be dominant over their opponents. The French people looked for an excuse as to why the war was lost and many came to believe that it was a conspiracy masterminded by Jews which had given the Prussians the advantage. This only helped to increase the anti-Semitism in France at the time.
In 1894, a French spy who worked as a cleaning lady in the German embassy found a suspicious document in a bin, it was found to contain French military secrets. The French army accused an artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus of handing to documents to their enemy and was stripped of his ranks and then imprisoned on Devil’s island, it is as bad as the name suggests.
Emile Zola was outraged by this obvious miscarriage justice and wrote J’Accuse to expose the lies that had sent an innocent man to be unjustly imprisoned. In J’Accuse, Zola, gives his reasons for why Dreyfus is an innocent man.
In J’Accuse Zola said why he thinks Dreyfus was accused of the crime. The French army claimed that handwriting analysis from several experts showed that Dreyfus had written the letter, but because of the nature of the evidence, to show it would endanger national security. But Zola believed this evidence to have been falsified so that the French can blame their defeat to the Germans on Jewish conspirers. Dreyfus was a clever, successful, high ranking in the army and most importantly Jewish. This is why Zola believed Dreyfus to the perfect target for the army to blame for the crime. Zola then gives evidence that it would have been an member of the infantry who would have had the information in the letter that Dreyfus was accused of writing, Zola even goes as far as identifying the guilty man. But he said that for this man to actually be guilty it would mean that all of the generals involved in the court-martial would be guilty as well. By saying this I think Zola believes that he is fighting a lost cause because he knows even with the evidence he provides he knows that it is unlikely the guilty man will be brought to justice.
In 1899 Dreyfus returned to France for a re-trial, he was found guilty again but this time was given a pardon; after a second appeal 7 years later he was given an annulment of the guilty verdict.
Zola deliberately brakes French libel laws and challenges the man that have been accused to defend themselves and prove their innocence, Zola fled to London after this to avoid the libel claims. This tactic of deliberately defaming people in newspapers to try to gain justice though libel. One of the notable examples of this is an article published in the Daily Mail, declaring the murderers of Stephen Lawrence.
After the case was dropped by the Crown Court for insufficient evidence the Daily Mail published a front page with the headline “Murderers” and pictures of the 5 suspects in the case. The newspaper challenged the men to sue them after clearly being defamed, but the men did not, and haven’t till this day. This was an important case for journalists to study because it had an effect on newspaper laws, double-jeopardy laws and highlighted race problems within the metropolitan police. I have mentioned this example, not only because of its relation to Zola and J’Accuse, but also because after 18 years, two men are now standing trial for the murder after new evidence has been discovered. Stephen Lawrence new DNA evidence here is a link for more information about the new evidence and the trials.
Much like the Stephen Lawrence case Zola’s J’Accuse exposed many flaws in the legal system and brought to light a lot of prejudice and corruption. It is still considered to be one of the most influential pieces of journalism ever written.
