Emile Zola, the Cochonnerie of naturalist literature, and the Judensau.

Abstract

Scholars often identify pig images of Emile Zola during the Dreyfus Affair as an overt anti-Jewish motif meant to discredit the Dreyfusard cause. I will trace how Zola was identified as a Jewish cultural infiltrator throughout his controversial literary career, not just in the aftermath of J'Accuse. Medieval symbols of antisemitism, specifically those related to the motif of the Judensau (Jew-pig), had been recruited into the service of anti-naturalism as early as 1868, and three decades later these same symbols were merely reappropriated to represent Zola's Dreyfusism. I will consider the medieval, antisemitic pictorial sources that are drawn upon for the massive visual degradation of Zola, first as naturalist author of novelistic obscenities in the 1880s and then as a treacherous Christian supporter of Alfred Dreyfus.

Keywords: Judensau, Emile Zola, Dreyfusard

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In the popular narrative of the Dreyfus Affair, Emile Zola (1840-1902) plays the French hero. Convinced that the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted of spying for the Germans, Zola pens the unprecedented J'Accuse (January 13, 1898), condemning the French government and military of a willful miscarriage of justice. The front-page publication of J'Accuse propels Zola into a leadership role in the pro-Dreyfus camp, or, as they come to be known, the Dreyfusard intellectuals. Zola's audacious article ultimately gave Dreyfus a second chance, and it ensured that Zola would be remembered not only as an art critic and writer but also as an "engaged intellectual," an activist whose ammunition was his celebrity status and public approval. As was so often the case with the men and women who banded together to proclaim the injustice of the Dreyfus case, Zola's reputation became a subject of public scrutiny and debate.

The interest in Zola's article for intellectual history is that it roused a collective spirit by assuming the right of a cultural figure to assert himself as an arbiter of national morality. The day after the publication of J'Accuse, signatures were already being collected in support of Zola's position. With this petition, branded the "Manifesto of the Intellectuals," the signatories began to count their strength in numbers. (1) In his memoirs, the passionate Dreyfusard and first Jewish prime minister of France, Leon Blum, mused that the formation of the Dreyfusards was the most historically significant of all the events of the affair. (2) Indeed, it is J'Accuse that France chooses to remember of the Dreyfus Affair. On the centennials of Dreyfus's first court martial and the publication of J'Accuse, France celebrated with articles, books, exhibits, sculptures, and memorial events that hailed Zola's letter as more intrinsically "French" than the system that had accused Dreyfus. (3) A large-format reproduction of J'Accuse was hung on the pillars of the National Assembly illuminated by blue, red, and white spotlights. In a speech delivered on the centennial of J'Accuse, President Jacques Chirac echoed Anatole France's famous eulogy of Zola: "Zola's text rests in our collective memory as 'a moment in the conscience of humanity.'" (4)

Scholars have been drawn to Zola's Dreyfusism in light of this twentieth-century historiography that has interpreted his defense of the Jewish army captain as the birth of the modern French intellectual. (5) Historians have pointed out that the notion of the "intellectuel" as opposed to Voltaire's "philosophe" or Victor Hugo's "lettre" is commonly "taken in the sense of the Dreyfus Affair" to such an extent that some scholars assert that the French term "intellectuel" cannot be used in any other context. (6) This account, which claims that the Dreyfus Affair produced the unique social category of the modern French intellectual, explains why the intellectual Left has been saddled with a pronounced Jewish identity. Certainly, the evidence of popular caricature at the turn of the century, which imagined both Jews and intellectuals as connected to profiteering, passivity, homosexuality, deviance, and disease, supports this view. In siding with a presumed Jewish traitor, the public defender would invariably be "Semitized." Indeed, following the publication of Zola's article, hundreds of school-boy ruffians did make the connection, shouting through the streets: "Death to Zola! Death to the Jews!" While intuitive, this explanation does not account for any earlier links between "Jew" and "intellectual," or the historical tenacity of this association. The equation of the Dreyfusard intellectual with "Jew" overindulges a singular political campaign and ignores the cultural dialogue that made the intellectual an oppositional figure well before the dramatic debut of a lone Jewish officer accused of espionage. (7)