On January 13, 1898, on the front page of the French daily “L’Aurore” (Dawn), novelist Emile Zola addressed an open letter to Felix Faure, the President of France. In it, he accused those he considered to be the true perpetrators of the crime of treason for which Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery captain, had been convicted. Stripped of his rank, Captain Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guyana.
Zola wrote his letter in the name of truth and justice. He argued Dreyfus had been convicted, not because he was guilty, but because he was Jewish. At a time when antisemitism was rife and anti-German sentiment strong, Captain Dreyfus, a Jew born in Alsace in 1859, eleven years before the province was annexed to Germany, became a perfect scapegoat in a complex affair of espionage involving high-ranking officers.
After publishing his letter, Zola was accused of libel and his courageous act cost him his reputation. The day of his trial, an angry crowd assembled outside the courtroom, ready to attack the once beloved novelist if ever he were acquitted.
Despised, belittled, alone, such was the position of both Zola and Dreyfus in 1898. Zola died in 1902. Dreyfus was cleared of all charges in 1906, the year he was reinstated in the army. In 1908, the ashes of Zola were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, the final resting place of those men and women who have contributed to the grandeur of France.
In November 2019, a new film about the Dreyfus affair was released in France. In French, the title is “J’accuse,” in English, “An Officer and a Spy.” Critics praise the film, which has won three French Césars, the equivalent of Oscars, but it has not found a distributor in the USA. The reason? Its director is Roman Polanski, charged in 1977 with unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Convicted and sentenced once in an L. A. County court, freed from prison on good behavior and then charged again, Polanski fled the United States in 1978 and since that time has not returned.
On August 5th, 1970, thanks to the generosity of my mother, I was visiting Winchester Cathedral in England. That summer, I’d travelled to France with Mrs. Alice Ney and a group of students from Pottsville Area High School. We also made a week’s excursion to England and Winchester was one of the stops. I have no memory of the cathedral, but I do remember a poster at a newsstand: the face of Charles Manson and the words, “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.”
On August 4th, Manson, accused of the 1969 murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate, managed to enter a Los Angeles courtroom with a newspaper bearing the above headline and flashed it at the jury. His act made news around the world. The next day in Winchester, on the cover of an English tabloid, the crazed eyes of Charles Manson stared out at me.
Roman Polanski, still today, is a fugitive from American justice. Convicted of the rape of a minor, he faced American justice once but fled his retrial. His case has not been laid to rest and for 43 years, director Polanski has been treated as a pariah in some parts of the world.
The current American president Donald Trump faces multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and rape. He denies them all, disparaging one of the women for not being his type. If she had been, would rape have been alright?
Certainly, his accusers should be heard out. The President should also be able to give his version of events. Word against word, memory against memory, and all pertinent evidence should be weighed. This, I would say, is the American way of justice.
On September 18, 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Thanks to her work as a lawyer, legal scholar and judge, women have achieved greater equality in society and before the law. Up until the day of her death and the end of her tenure on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised the Court’s collegiality. She and her eleven colleagues were “free to dissent,” and Ginsburg believed anger and annoyance are of no use when one seeks to persuade.
Since Antiquity, Justice has been personified as a woman. In one hand, she holds a set of scales, in the other, a sword. Her eyes are blindfolded; she is dressed in a simple toga. The scales represent the weighing of evidence; the blindfold, impartiality; the sword, the swift accuracy of a judicial decision; the toga, authority.
Lady Justice stands tall and erect, guided by reason, keeping her emotions under control. Above all, she is impartial, free of partisan interests, working for the good of all, very much like her disciple, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Judge Ginsburg served “We the People of the United States.”
“L’affaire Dreyfus” began in 1894. Captain Dreyfus had to wait 12 years for justice to be done. Since the founding of the United States in 1776, all have not been equal before the law and still today, a person’s skin color or socioeconomic status can determine the outcome of a trial. In 2020, “one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all” remains an ideal.
Is it an ideal we are still fighting for? Do Americans still aspire to remain “free to dissent?”
Today Zola remains a very popular novelist in France. Readers in the coal region would especially enjoy Germinal, a story about life in the mines of northern France at the end of the 19th century. In 1993, it was made into a film with Gérard Depardieu and Miou-Miou.
In 1961, American novelist Walker Percy published The Moviegoer, a novel with a philosophical bent. I’ve never read it but it’s on my list of “must-reads” ever since I came across these words in an essay by the author written in 1957, the year of the forced federal integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Instead of despising him (the segregationist) as an enemy, one corrects him as a brother, all the while in fear and trembling for one’s own salvation.” And Percy adds, “No white southerner can write a j’accuse without making a mea culpa.”
Food for thought. On November 3rd, who will go to the polls: “We the People” or bitter and intransigent enemies?
