Metro Stop Paris by Gregor Dallas

Author:Gregor Dallas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

ZOLA AND HIS wife died, asphyxiated by an open fireplace in their home in Médan, on the night of 28-29 September 1902. It is possible that they were murdered. In the early 1950s a businessman is said to have admitted to a journalist that he had stuffed the chimney Over the last years of his life Zola had received a number of death threats.

The Rougon-Macquart novels had become increasingly popular, and increasingly contested, too. Like his artist hero Claude Lantier, Zola had kept his distance from politics, simply painting with words the poverty he saw in the streets of Paris, in the coal mines of the north, in the flat rural landscape of the Beauce. But his story of a refugee from Devil's Island, victim of injustice, came back to haunt him in the last years of his life. He learned, in the winter of 1897-98, that a certain Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. A righteous fury, which he had never known before, took hold of Émile Zola; in January 1898 he published in Georges Clemenceau's Aurore his article "J'accuse." Why should a famous writer put at risk his fortune and his reputation for the sake of a Jewish officer accused of treason? "I would not have been able to live," he said.

It is remarkable how the language Zola employed to counter the anti-Semitic campaign of the anti-Dreyfusards so resembled the language of Zola in his Ventre de Paris. If there were a single ideal behind his article "J'accuse"—which would spark off the whole Dreyfus Affair—it was not one of class or of race: it was the struggle of life against the forces of death. It was the ideal Florent realized when out in rural Nanterre. "Death to the Jews! Death to Dreyfus! Death to Zola!" cried the dockers at Nantes, the workers of Rennes and of Marseille; effigies of Zola were hanged in Moulins, Montpellier, Marmande and Angoulême. "France saved from death by education," scribbled Zola on a piece of paper a few days before he died.

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