Oprah, Wikileaks and 'J'Accuse'!

It was a declarative, brazen challenge to the establishment. Just like Wikileaks.

The open letter in the newspaper L’Aurore: Litteraraire, Artistique, Sociale was addressed to the President of France, Félix Faure, by editor Zola, in defense of the court-martialled Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army.

It became a “textbook” example of the watchdog role of the press.

In fact, the letter is acknowledged widely in the academic literature as an exceptional and rare proclamation in journalism that clarified, identified and exemplified the role of the press as the purveyor of truth and custodian of democracy and free speech.

As Zola said in the letter: “La vérité, je la dirai, car j'ai promis de la dire, si la justice, régulièrement saisie, ne la faisait pas, pleine et entire” (“Dare to tell the truth, for I have pledged to tell the full and complete truth if the normal channels of justice failed to do so.”). Sound familiar?

Its ramifications were prodigious and they convulsed a bigoted French society, politics and the press, outraged at Zola’s audacity at challenging and embarrassing the Prime Minister in public. Again, an obvious comparison.

At the time there were 2,401 newspapers published in Paris alone, and almost the entire popular press came out against Dreyfus. To these papers he was found guilty of espionage in collusion with Germany, uncontested and as charged. They shrank from their Fourth Estate role.

Dreyfus was arrested in 1894, tried and convicted on charges accepted uncritically by judges and in the absences of interrogation by the press it was only later learned that the conspiracy to pass on military secrets with Germany was actually carried out by another man in the military. Someone had to be framed - so it was Dreyfus.

But the letter, like all top notch investigative journalism, took time to bring about a just ending.

Stripped of his rank, banished to solitary confinement at the hellhole of Devil’s Island in French Guiana, the innocent Dreyfus was left to rot for the confected crime. And, when the French Army realised the extent of the heinous wrong they had perpetrated, instead of freeing Dreyfus, they engaged in an extraordinary cover-up that said more about manifest anti-Semitism and entrenched corruption in the military than the slipping of the odd military secret to the Germans, or indeed any notions of justice.

After the letter hit the streets, authorities were also determined to make life equally hellish for Zola. Not only did he fear for his life, he was arrested, tried, convicted and ordered to serve time eating porridge. Somewhere between the sentencing and the marching off for a prison term Zola managed to flee to London. He only returned when the French Government lost office in 1899.

Dreyfus was eventually freed from jail, exonerated, reinstated and promoted to major in the French Army but it was not until 2006 that the French Government formally apologised to both Dreyfus and Zola posthumously.