Emile Zola

Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French novelist, journalist, and public intellectual whose twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle anchored the Naturalist movement in nineteenth-century European fiction and whose 1898 open letter helped overturn the Dreyfus affair. Born in Paris and raised in Aix-en-Provence after his father's early death, he failed his baccalauréat twice and entered journalism through the Hachette publishing house.

Beginning with The Fortune of the Rougons in 1871, he charted the genealogical fortunes of one extended family across the Second Empire, applying a self-conscious method of social and biological observation to crowds, factories, mining towns, and Parisian markets. L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, and La Bête humaine drew large readerships and persistent moral controversy.

In January 1898 he published "J'Accuse...!" on the front page of the newspaper L'Aurore, an open letter to the President of the Republic charging the army with framing the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus and covering up the real culprit. The letter was an act of calculated criminal libel: he was tried, convicted, and fled to England for nearly a year before returning when the case began to unravel.

Dreyfus was eventually exonerated. Zola died in 1902 of carbon-monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney in his Paris apartment, a death long suspected of being a deliberate act by political enemies. His ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in 1908.

The given name Émile is the French form of Latin Aemilius, a Roman family name sometimes connected to a root meaning rival. The surname Zola is Italian, from his Venetian-born father François Zola, an engineer who emigrated to France. He kept the paternal Italian surname unchanged.