Based on his experiences with the infamous Dreyfus case, this powerful last novel by Emile Zola about the scape-goating of a Jewish schoolteacher is a chilling depiction of anti-Semitism fully embedded in European society and an eerie presentiment of the Holocaust that would sweep across the Continent only forty years later. But this is not the whole story, for Zola also brilliantly demonstrates how truth, though suppressed for a generation, slowly but inexorably comes to light through the dedication and perseverance of a few humble defenders, who remain unswerving in their demand for justice.
EMILE ZOLA was born in Paris on April 2, 1840, the son of an Italian-Greek engineer father and a French mother. When Zola was two, his family moved to Aix-en-Provence. His father died soon thereafter, leaving his mother struggling to support herself and the boy. In 1860, after two years of study at the Lycee St-Louis, Zola returned to Paris, where he became a clerk and journalist, and began his writing career. He published a collection of short stories, Conts `a Ninon (Stories for Ninon), in 1864, followed by La Confession de Claude (1865), Therese Raquin (1867), and Madeleine Ferat (1868). In 1871 Zola commenced the long series called Les Rougon--Macquart, a sequence of twenty books described in the subtitle as "the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire." The series included such acclaimed works as Nana (1880), Germinal (1885), LaTerre (1887, Earth), La Bete humaine (1890, The Beast in Man), and Docteur Pascal (1893). Zola's novel Lourdes was published in 1894 as part of the trilogy Les Trois Villes, which included Rome (1896) and Paris (1898). With Gustave Flaubert and others, Zola helped found the Naturalist school of French literature. Its concentration on misery and misfortune swung public taste away from nineteenth--century Romanticism to a middle road of balanced taste. In 1898, Zola espoused the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer convicted of treason in 1894. Convinced of Dreyfus's innocence, Zola published his open letter "J'accuse" in the news-paper L'Aurore (January 13, 1898), denouncing the French gen-eral staff. This led to Zola's own trial on charges of offending the French government, which reopened the Dreyfus case to public review. Sentenced to imprisonment, Zola escaped to England. Both Dreyfus and Zola were eventually vindicated, and Zola returned to France in 1899. Zola died on September 28, 1902.
