In the Library
J'Accuse...!
Émile Zola, 1898
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 20 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Anonymous (1898)
- Original
- Original fr
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 5k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
truth is on the march, and nothing can stop it.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Germinal
Émile Zola
_Germinal_ does the same thing as this letter, Zola putting his anger at injustice into prose, but it builds a whole mining town where this one names names.
£1.99
The Trial
Franz Kafka
_The Trial_ does the same thing in fiction, a man condemned by a secret process he cannot see, but it dreams the nightmare that Zola's letter documents.
£1.99
About the book
"La vérité est en marche, et rien ne l'arrêtera": truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Émile Zola wrote that sentence to the President of France, and L'Aurore printed his letter across its front page under two words that have never lost their charge. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain, had been convicted of treason on forged evidence and shipped to Devil's Island, and the high command knew it held the wrong man. Days earlier, a court-martial had acquitted the real traitor. Zola, the most famous novelist in the country, answered by naming names. His last pages become a litany, each paragraph opening on the same blunt verb, aimed at generals and ministers in turn, a cold drumbeat of accusation that still raises the hair on the neck. He knew it would put him in the dock for libel, and he wrote it to be prosecuted. To read it now is to watch one man spend his reputation on a stranger's innocence, and to feel what one page of plain, furious prose can do to a lie.