The publication of an open letter from the distinguished novelist Emile Zola to President Felix Faure in the Paris newspaper L'Aurore 100 years ago today was the dramatic high point of a 12year struggle against a flagrant miscarriage of justice. It sharply divided national opinion, exposing bitter divisions which were to continue to plague French society for decades into the next century.
Zola's front-page article, under the headline "J'accuse" (I accuse), came in the fifth year of the imprisonment for treason of Capt Alfred Dreyfus. The affair had started in September 1894 with the discovery by a French agent of a secret government memorandum in the wastepaper basket of the German embassy in Paris. From the beginning there was not the slightest evidence to link the memorandum to Dreyfus - save for the fact that he was undeniably Jewish, and as such automatically suspect to the Catholic and reactionary army establishment.
The army may well have expected Dreyfus, as an officer if not quite a gentleman, to do the decent thing and commit suicide. He proved unwilling to oblige, however, and began instead to prepare a defence. As the right-wing press ran with the rumour that a Jew from a rich family was about to buy himself leniency and avoid the appropriate (capital) penalty for his treason it became a political necessity to secure a quick conviction. This was facilitated by the clumsy but apparently convincing forgeries of a loyal army intelligence officer, one Lieut Col Henry. Dreyfus was cashiered and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana, where it was intended he should be left to rot.
Inconveniently, however, for those who wished the matter to end there, secret papers continued to be discovered in the German embassy, arousing the suspicions of a Col Picquart, one of the few officers in the affair to appear to have some concern for truth and justice. The trail led to another officer, Walsin Esterhazy, a flamboyant character with an expensive lifestyle and a reputation for being prepared to do anything to sustain it. The efforts of Picquart and the vigorous campaigning of Zola - initially in the columns of Le Figaro - led in January 1898 to Esterhazy's appearance before a military tribunal. After a number of sessions held in camera he was acquitted, to great public acclaim, after less than five minutes' deliberation. Col Picquart, for his pains, was imprisoned and later dismissed from the service.
For Zola this was just too much. His January 13th article in L'Aurore, in which he savagely denounced the army general staff, the Minister for War, the military judges and their suborned "expert witnesses", brought that paper's sales to 300,000, 10 times its normal figure. It also provoked uproar in the national assembly, led to anti-Jewish riots and pogroms and eventually to a court condemnation and exile for its author.
It was to be 1906, four years after Zola's death, before Dreyfus was finally vindicated, though he was brought back from Devil's Island broken in health and entirely unaware of the campaign being waged on his behalf in 1899. From the beginning of the affair in 1894, it was obvious that the case of Capt Dreyfus had the capacity to divide French opinion.
What Zola's J'accuse did was to ensure that that division should express itself in the most public manner possible and involve the whole of civil society. In every town and village in France, conservative squared up against liberal and socialist, believer against freethinker, nationalist against "cosmopolitan", Catholic against Jew, Protestant and freemason. On the national level the intellectual and artistic big guns of the forces of progress, Jaures, Durkheim, Proust, Monet, weighed in against those of order, Jules Verne, Maurras, Degas, Renoir.
For the more vulgar and populist organs of Catholic nationalism, such as La Croix, the newspaper of the Assumptionist order, there was never any doubt about Dreyfus's guilt: he was a Jew, and the Jews were clearly in league with the Germans to destroy France. For the intellectual right, as represented in particular by the writer and parliamentarian Maurice Barres, matters were a little more complex and, as it became increasingly clear that Dreyfus could not be individually guilty, the controversy moved onto a more philosophical plane.
For Barres, society was a tree, the individual merely a leaf; whatever the circumstances, the interests of the tree, of the whole of society, must prevail. If Dreyfus were to be declared innocent, the army, that is to say France itself, must be guilty - an "appalling vista" to be resisted at all cost.
The sharp divisions in French society uncovered by the Dreyfus Affair were to dissipate only with the virtual disappearance of the traditional right following the collapse of the Vichy regime in 1944.
If the part played by the left at the time of the affair was a heroic one, this was not always the case. Intolerant Catholicism in due course bred an equally intolerant anti-clericalism. Yet, as a Catholic head of state and Protestant head of government draw the broad republican family together in commemoration today (in a nation which has seen three Jewish prime ministers since 1936), France may well believe the work embarked on by Emile Zola 100 years ago has finally been well done.