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Article: ZOLA'S WRITINGS ON DREYFUS AFFAIR REVEAL A BRAVE BUT LONELY AUTHOR.(Lifestyle)(Review)
- Article from:
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- Article date:
- September 3, 1996
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To make a very long story simplistically short: 100 years ago, the French military command was in an uproar. Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, the first great hero of the Dreyfus affair, was pressing the case against the real culprit, Maj. Ferdinand Esterhazy.
Capt. Alfred Dreyfus - who, not incidentally, was Jewish - was languishing in his third year of solitary confinement on Devil's Island, off French Guiana, wrongfully convicted of espionage.
The novelist Emile Zola took up Dreyfus' cause in print in November 1897, by which time Picquart himself was wrongfully imprisoned. Zola became the second great hero of the affair the following January with ...