The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  On 27 February Alexandrine left for Paris.

  Zola told Jeanne that Vizetelly visited him regularly. He knew to do this only in the afternoons and they would talk business and chat about the news or Zola’s work. As Zola was deep into writing Fécondité, he was glad to take from Vizetelly a summary of the views of one Rev. R. Ussher on ‘Neo-Malthusianism’ (the view that poverty was caused by over-population), the very idea that Zola was fighting against in the novel he was writing every morning. Vizetelly filled Zola in on details of ongoing legal cases in the English courts against ‘medical men’ and midwives. Zola was much interested in the case against the Dickensianly named brothers Chrimes who had been up in court for selling bogus medicines – we can presume for abortion purposes – and were also in trouble for blackmailing the women who had bought the medicines. This, in Zola’s eyes, not only made the Chrimes brothers culpable but also the hundreds of women applying to them for supposedly abortion-inducing treatments.

  Zola was amazed to find that the British newspapers hardly spoke of these matters. He suspected that some kind of ‘mythical innocence’ was being protected by non-publication when, in his view, the welfare of the whole nation was being sacrificed. ‘Let all be exposed and discussed in order that all may be cured,’ said Zola to Vizetelly, which was precisely what he thought he was doing by writing Fécondité.

  He was very interested in the statistics of the British birthrate, with its year-on-year decline, a direct result, as he saw it, of the ‘Bradlaugh–Besant’ campaign. Charles Bradlaugh had been Britain’s best-known atheist and republican, and Annie Besant Britain’s best-known champion of working women, having greatly assisted the notable Bryant and May matchworkers’ strike. Scandalously, Bradlaugh and Besant lived together. Zola’s interest in the pair stemmed from the fact that in 1877 they had published a book by the American birth-control campaigner Charles Knowlton. Knowlton’s position was the exact opposite of Zola’s, with Knowlton claiming that working-class families would never find happiness unless they had the means to control the number of children they had. Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested, charged with obscenity and found guilty. The case attracted a great deal of attention, with the Church opposing the pair and ‘liberal’ opinion supporting them. Eventually, the case was thrown out on a technicality. In the midst of proceedings, Besant founded the Malthusian League, which would go on to campaign for the decriminalisation of people promoting contraception. One immediate and personal consequence of the trial was that Besant lost the custody of her own children.

  This conversation between Vizetelly and Zola reveals that the turn-of-the-century fault-lines on either side of the Channel around questions of childbirth, contraception, eugenics, birth control and class don’t fit easily into modern left/right, liberal/conservative categories. Various well-known people in Britain who are often seen as ‘progressive’ were advocates of eugenic control of working-class birthrates, while Zola, the progressive, scientific, liberal socialist, was deeply hostile to this view.

  As they chatted on, Vizetelly and Zola were in agreement that the ‘English race’ was ‘physically deteriorating’ and one cause, they thought, was that English women were becoming less inclined to breast-feed their babies. Even worse, the nannies employed by well-off women could be seen around the streets of Norwood, neglecting their charges, standing about flirting, gossiping or looking in shop-windows. The mothers, Vizetelly and Zola presumed, were out visiting or ‘receiving’, reading novels, bicycling or playing lawn tennis. ‘Ah well,’ said Zola, ‘that is hardly my conception of a mother’s duty towards her infant, whatever be her situation in life.’

  These man-to-man chats on the state and role of woman-kind sometimes took place on their afternoon walks, heading down the hill from Upper Norwood, past Beulah Spa, round by the fields and the recreation ground, punctuated by some photography. Life for Zola at these times seems much less claustrophobic and oppressive from these accounts than it appears in his letters to Jeanne.

  Zola told Vizetelly that sometimes he amused himself by counting the number of hairpins he spotted lying on the pavement. This was, he thought, symptomatic of the ‘carelessness’ of English women. At other times, he thought about writing an essay on the effect of the capital ‘I’ on English character and another on the English ‘guillotine’ window. Vizetelly was glad to put Zola right about the hairpins. They were lying about in the street as a result of ‘penny-wise and pound-foolish’ spending: the cheap ones never ‘caught’ properly in women’s coiled-up hair. These cheap hairpins, Vizetelly pointed out, were made in Germany.

  Another aspect of life in Norwood that caught Zola’s attention at this time were the grandiose names of the suburban houses, especially the French-sounding ones, Bellevue, Beaumont and the like, but Vizetelly was happy to translate Oakdene, Thornbrake, Beechcroft, Hillbrow, Woodcote, Fernside, Fairholme and Inglenook. One colonial one puzzled them – Ly-ee-Moon – derived, they eventually figured out, from the name given to ships sailing in the China Seas. The householder, they discovered, had been a ship-owner and sea captain.

  The way back to the hotel from these strolls included a visit to the post office, where Vizetelly bought Zola his stash of postage stamps. The sheer scale and steady regularity of Vizetelly’s stamp-buying, they noticed, caused a bit of eyebrow-raising by the ‘lady clerks’ in the Norwood post office.

  On 2 March, now on his own, Zola put Jeanne off from coming with the children at Easter. He might be back before then. If he came back straight after Easter, then it wouldn’t be sensible for them to make the journey for the sake of a few days. In the end, ‘if everything is ruined and I can’t come back for several months, it’s certain that “one” won’t leave me on my own and “one” would come here’. Again, Zola seems to want to show Jeanne that he is helpless in this matter and that it is Alexandrine who makes the decisions and controls the situation. On his walks he had again encountered groups of women on bikes. The tea in the hotel was making him sick. It felt like he was swallowing medicine.

  On 5 March, he told Jeanne that, since the death of Faure, everything was getting better and better. Jeanne had written again about coming at Easter, but he said he didn’t know if he would be ‘alone’. His great joy wouldn’t be to see her again here, in this damn country, but in Paris, in their home. She should tell the children that this would be the year they would get their bicycles. That was a promise. In July, before going to the country, he and Jeanne would take them to a velodrome so that they could learn to ride their bikes.

  Watching the bicycles go by outside, beneath my window, makes me think of ours. If yours is asleep in your toilet at Verneuil, mine’s asleep as well, at Médan, in my study. Let’s hope that we’re going to wake them up next. And it’s true, we’re going to be a little more free, the two of us, now that our children are taken up with their school work. We can benefit from that by the two of us arranging for a little part of our lives to be closer together.

  The next two weeks were going to be decisive, he said.

  What had been revealed in France that week, and had been repeated in the press in London, was the testimony of Esterhazy, the man whom Zola had accused of writing the bordereau. This testimony had been with the Supreme Court since November but had now been released. According to the Dreyfusards, this testimony showed the whole public how the General Staff had colluded with Esterhazy and how he had been in cahoots with one of the key anti-Dreyfus figures, Colonel Henry. (As it happened, Esterhazy was himself lying low in England too.) Surely now the stage was set for the release of Dreyfus and the glorious return of Zola to France, with ‘J’Accuse’ and all its allegations vindicated.

  On 9 March Zola asked Jeanne why she had given up on the idea of coming at Easter. (A curious thing for him to write since he had offered her three reasons why she shouldn’t.) It was now possible that not only would Dreyfus be acquitted but he would be too. The end was in sight.

  On the 12th he shifted his view yet again. There wo
uld have to be anything up to twenty sessions at the court and it was his great fear that it would end up with a judgment summoning Dreyfus to appear again rather than finding him innocent. That would push matters on till 10 May. He had agreed with his friends that he wouldn’t come back while these proceedings were under way in case it might jeopardise the outcome, or even be the cue for attacks and persecutions. (This reminds us of how often the Dreyfusards, including Zola, were on the end of abuse and mob violence. Many thought that if Zola had been found innocent he would have been murdered on the street outside the court.)

  He repeated the expression of not knowing whether he would be ‘alone’ or not. ‘You won’t be buying me a cake at Madame Louise’s before June.’

  There was good news about Jacques but he hoped that like all mothers she wasn’t falling into doting on her son. He was good and intelligent but he was also capricious and had little bouts of rebellion. It was very bad of a little boy to say to his teacher that he didn’t want to do his homework. With Denise, you couldn’t ask her to do more than she could. She would end up being good at spelling. With that and a bit of piano, they would find her a prince.

  He could also tell her that he had finished his twenty-third chapter of Fécondité.

  Finally, this letter had a note about a meeting he had had a day or so earlier with a key figure in the leadership of the pro-Dreyfus campaign, one of the leading voices amongst the French socialists, Jean Jaurès.

  9

  ‘Here we have, alas!, no Zolas’

  At the time that Jean Jaurès came to England in March 1899, he was engrossed in writing a book about the French Revolution and editing the newspaper La Petite République (‘The Little Republic’). The year before, he had lost his seat in the National Assembly but was looking towards the end of 1899 to a conference which was aiming to unite all the different socialist organisations, groups and parties of France.

  It may seem unsurprising now that someone calling himself a socialist should go out of his way to meet Émile Zola but this was to fraternise with a fugitive from the law, who had sided with a convicted traitor and spy, had defended the corrupt, conspiratorial ‘syndicate’ aiming for world domination (‘the Jews’), and who was the kind of novelist who, according to some, was just a pornographer of the gutter. What’s more, only a short time before this meeting, Jaurès was still convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. In December 1894 he had contrasted the usual fate of simple soldiers guilty of a moment of aberration with that of Dreyfus, who had not been sentenced to death. Why hadn’t he received the death sentence? Because, according to Jaurès, he had benefited from the ‘prodigious deployment of Jewish power’ (‘prodigieux déploiement de la puissance juive’).

  There is some debate whether it was ‘J’Accuse’ that convinced Jaurès of Dreyfus’s innocence. Later, he would approvingly cite his fellow socialist, Jules Guesde, for calling ‘J’Accuse’ ‘the greatest revolutionary act of the century’.

  A few days after the sensational appearance of ‘J’Accuse’ he signed a manifesto which refused to take sides in the Affair, accusing ‘free thinkers and Jewish capitalists who, discredited by numerous scandals, were trying to rehabilitate themselves’, through siding with Dreyfus (‘les libres penseurs, et les “capitalistes juifs” qui, discrédités par des nombreux “scandales”, cherchent à se réhabiliter’).

  The matter isn’t clear cut, though. On 22 January 1898, nine days after the appearance of ‘J’Accuse’, Jaurès defended Zola in the Chamber, saying that the charges against Zola were based on nothing but lies and cowardice – a speech which won him the instant accusation that he was a mouthpiece of the ‘syndicate’. On 12 February Jaurès appeared for Zola at his trial. In prosecuting Zola, he said, the ministry, the army, and the Church were wreaking vengeance on a man who had too long defended the downtrodden and exposed their oppressors.

  They prosecute in him the man who defended the rational and scientific interpretation of miracles: they prosecute in him the man who, in Germinal, predicted the springing up of an impoverished proletariat, rising from the depths of suffering and ascending towards the sun … They can prosecute him, they can hunt him down, but I think I speak for all free citizens in saying that we bow down before him in deference.

  As a sign of how Jaurès’s views were evolving in the crucible of the Dreyfus Affair, on 19 February he spoke in the Chamber following an outbreak of anti-semitic violence in Algeria:

  Our duty as socialists is not to preach reactionary and deadly hatred against the Jews; no, it is to call attention to the suffering and exploited among the Jews, who, standing at the side of oppressed Arabs, should form, with the European proletariat, a party of all those who toil and suffer.

  The final trigger that brought Jaurès and many, but by no means all, socialists into the pro-Dreyfus camp was the ‘Henry Affair’: Colonel Joseph Henry was unmasked as the forger of a secret ‘dossier’ that supposedly further proved Dreyfus was guilty. This happened in August 1898, while Zola was in England.

  At this point, Jaurès made his position clear: if Dreyfus had been condemned illegally, this made him innocent, and so, if he was innocent, then in Jaurès’s worldview he was no longer an officer or a bourgeois – in the language of socialists, no longer the ‘class enemy’. Jaurès expanded on this: Dreyfus was ‘no longer anything but humanity itself’ (in other words someone who socialists could and should support). This line of thinking went on: Dreyfus’s fate at the hands of the courts had become a protest against the social order and this drew him to the side of the working class. (This formulation was how Jaurès pulled many in the socialist wing of the labour movement into the Dreyfus campaign.)

  Then to back up these arguments, in September 1898 he published The Proof: The Dreyfus Affair, a lengthy book, which put the case for the innocence of Dreyfus in great detail.

  By the time of his visit, then, Jaurès was an unequivocal supporter of Dreyfus and Zola.

  His visit was not solely for the purposes of meeting Zola, though. He had come to attend a conference called by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in the St James Hall, Piccadilly, to promote ‘universal peace and international fraternity’. The SDF was the forerunner of the British Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain and this conference was chaired by its founder, H. M. Hyndman; speakers included Jaurès, Wilhelm Liebknecht from Germany, Britain’s first socialist MP, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Harry Quelch, the Marxist editor of the SDP’s newspaper, and Dadabhai Naoroji, who had for three years been Britain’s first Asian MP. Someone else who was asked to speak, declined, but attended all the same was the novelist Joseph Conrad; though, according to Cunninghame Graham, it wasn’t a happy experience for him.

  The Times of 9 March, reporting on the conference, quoted Jaurès saying, ‘It was absurd to believe that there could be universal peace under the present capitalist system, which was itself based upon letting loose war throughout the world and encouraging strife among the working classes. Socialism was their only hope in the direction of true peace. (Cheers.)’

  This was the Jaurès of the moment of the visit to see Zola. The organisation that had invited him had an official periodical, the Social-Democrat. Its December 1898 edition included an article called ‘L’Affaire Dreyfus’. It was a summary of the Dreyfus Affair, from a totally pro-Dreyfus stance, saying clearly that the government and the anti-semites were to blame. Zola was named and praised for having ‘done much to awaken the French people to a sense of the injustice which had been done’.

  The article went on to explain to any doubting readers (and if you track back through socialist and anarchist journals of the mid-1890s, in France and Britain, you can find plenty such people) exactly why socialists should support someone who was a wealthy Jewish army officer: in brief, the writer says, it is because ‘socialists stand for the justice of all’, citing Jaurès as an authority to back him up. In conclusion, the article took a different twist: it warned readers a
gainst ‘throwing stones’ at ‘our French neighbours’. Justice being enacted by the British at that very moment in the Transvaal (that is, in the Boer War) was no better, but

  here we have, alas!, no Zolas, no Clemenceaus, no Guyots. All our public men, the whole of the Press, outside the Socialist ranks – which are, unfortunately not nearly so powerful as in France – were on the side of our Esterhazys, our Paty du Clams, our Henrys, and our Cavaignacs.

  This volley of villains had been identified earlier in the article as being the key anti-Dreyfusards – especially Esterhazy, the man who had forged the document which had incriminated Dreyfus in the first place.

  Had Zola read the article, or had anyone from the SDF made their way to the Queen’s Hotel to tell him about it, we might guess that Zola would have been pretty pleased with what the Social-Democrat had to say. This imaginary person might also have shown Zola an article which had appeared in the same magazine only three months before Zola began his stay in England. Credited to A. S. Headingley, it was headed ‘The Dreyfus and Zola Case’. As with the December article, the writer summarised where both cases had reached, echoed Zola’s and Jean Jaurès’s words in highlighting the nature of the injustice, the government’s and high command’s role, ending with a tribute to the ‘honour and integrity of M. Zola’. With these two articles, we can say that, by the time the year turned at the end of 1898, the Social-Democrat had signalled to left-wing readers in Britain that Zola’s politics were to be respected and admired.

  About the same time as Headingley’s article had appeared, an Austrian-born London-based socialist, Max Beer, had visited Paris to interview Zola. The article he wrote wasn’t actually published until 15 October 1902 (also in the Social-Democrat) three years after Zola’s stay.