J’accuse by Emile Zola

Emile Zola was a French novelist, playwright and journalist born in Paris in 1840. His father died in 1847 and his widowed mother had planned for Zola to have a law career but he failed his examination. In the build up to his breakthrough as a writer, he worked as a clerk in a shipping firm, and then in the sales department for Louis Hachette, a French publisher. Zola also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers.

During his early years as a writer, Zola wrote several short stories and essays, four plays and three novels. Hachette fired him in 1865 after he published a sordid autobiographical novel called La Confession de Claude which met with poor appreciation from the general public and caught attention from the Public Prosecutor.

Zola went on to write a twenty-novel cycle called Le Rougon-Macquart subtitled a Natural and Social History of a family during the Second Empire. It follows the life of a fictional family living during the second French Empire between 1852 and 1870 and is an example of French Naturalism. As a naturalist writer, Zola was highly interested in science and especially the problem of heredity, the passing of traits to offspring, and evolution. The series traces the environmental influences of violence, alcohol and prostitution.

From 1877 onwards, Zola published more novels part of his twenty-volume series which established him as a successful author. He was an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism and a major figure in the political liberalization of France.
In 1898, Emile Zola risked his career when his article ‘J’Accuse’ was published on the 13^th January on the front page of the Paris Daily L’Aurore. The article was published in the form of an open letter to the President. Zola wrote the controversial story following a case known as the Dreyfus affair. He knew he was putting his career and more at risk as he says in his letter ‘Since they dared, I too will dare.’ This sentence itself, I believe portrays Zola’s point of fairness because if they had the right to start this affair he had the right to publish this letter. Zola highly expresses his opinions and throughout the letter he uses the word ‘truth’ to stress the importance of religious freedom, justice and fairness that was being ignored.  

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal in the 1890’s. A Jewish artillery officer in the French Army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted for treason in November 1894 after the French intelligence discovered papers containing military secrets in a wastebasket in an office in the German embassy left there by someone from the French army. Anti-Semitism and the fact Dreyfus was highly intelligent led senior officers to suspect him even though there was no direct evidence. Dreyfus was innocent but found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island where he was put in solitary confinement.

Although French Army officer Georges Picquart came across evidence that suggested Dreyfus was innocent, and that another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was guilty. However, rather than freeing Dreyfus, the decision was made between the French army to protect Esterhazy and ensure the original verdict was not overturned. The army’s reason was “What difference does this make if a Jew dies on Devil’s Island.” Esterhazy was coached how to lie in court and was confident he would not be found guilty. French officer, Hubert-Joseph Henry forged documents that made it seem that Dreyfus was guilty and then had Picquart assigned duty in Africa. Before leaving, Picquart told some of Dreyfus’s supporters what he knew. It was announced in the Senate that Dreyfus was innocent and Esterhazy was guilty but the right-wing government refused new evidence to be allowed and Esterhazy was tried and acquitted. Picquart was sentenced to 60 days in prison. In his letter, Zola says ‘A council of war, under order, has just dared to acquit Esterhazy, a great blow to all truth, all justice.’ He uses strong words to express his passion he has for fairness, freedom and justice.

The Dreyfus affair completely divided France between the reactionary army and church, and the more liberal commercial society. The political right declared the Dreyfus case to be a conspiracy of Jews.

After Zola’s letter was published it formed a major turning-point in the affair. The government offered Dreyfus a pardon which he accepted and in 1906, Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court. Zola said, “The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it.”

Zola throughout his letter is very passionate in Dreyfus’ defence as he imagines Dreyfus suffering, in his words, ‘the most dreadful of tortures for a crime it did not commit.’

In his opening paragraphs, Zola addresses the President and describes him as honest and he is convinced the president is unaware Dreyfus’ innocence. It seems he is almost using sweet talk because he wants the President with great power, to gain his trust and support Dreyfus.

Zola goes on to list politicians and military personnel who he held responsible for the anti-Semitic conviction. He believes commander Du Paty de Clam was the first to accuse Dreyfus and believes he put Dreyfus through a ‘torturing insanity.’ Zola purposely uses passion and emotion throughout his letter that I felt effectively gave vivid images of Dreyfus’ experience. In his letter he is fighting to clear Dreyfus’ name and wants to make, not only the President, but the public reading it, feel appalled towards those who were involved in his conviction. He compares the torture of Dreyfus and the torture of those who knew the truth yet weren’t able to free an innocent man.

He also describes how this miscarriage of justice not only affects one man and his supporters but also women and children. Dreyfus’ wife was terrorized and put in danger by commander Du Paty De Clam. Zola is also trying to stress that wives and children are also involved in Dreyfus’ conviction and are in danger because they are loved by men who without any care can sleep at night knowing that at innocent man is suffering. Zola was considering the rights of everyone and was trying to use children and women to convince the President that this controversial story will cause conflict amongst all of France, dividing the country and affecting everyone.

Zola turns his attention to Picquart, and praises him for his honesty. He thinks that Picquart, who was the only honest man who did his duty, became the victim of ridicule and punishment. He’s trying to portray that all the honest men who were doing no wrong were being punished which to me and many people, is cruel and doesn’t make sense.

When concluding his letter, Zola effectively lists those he accuses individually, he effectively makes the names noticed and his points clear with his reasons identified.

His letter is clearly defamatory and Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 7^th February 1898
and was convicted on the 23^rd February, sentenced and removed from the Legion of Honor. But rather than go to jail, Zola fled to England.

He says in his letter, he has no hatred for the people he accuses which suggests that he does not want to appear judgemental however this seems contradictory as his letter clearly shows emotion and passion throughout. But the main purpose of the letter is to restore justice and to rightly free an innocent man and to punish those who are guilty.  

Rural Rides

William Cobbett was an English journalist, agricultarlist and political reformer born on the 9th March 1763 in Farnham, Surrey. He was taught to read and write by his father and first worked as a farm labourer.

Cobbett enlisted in the British Army in 1784 and made good use of the soldier's spare time to educate himself in English grammar. He obtained discharge from the Army in 1791 and in 1792 he fled to France. He intended to stay a year to learn the French language but this was at the time of the French Revolution, and the French revolutionary wars were in progress, so he left for the US in 1792.

Cobbett became a controversial political writer and in 1802, started his own newpaper called the Weekly Political Register. At first he supported the Tories but soon became a radical. By 1806 he was a strong advocate of Parliamentary reform. After sucessfully publicising the radical movement, the Reform Bill of 1832 was introduced and Cobbett won the parliamentary seat of Oldham.

Cobbett wrote many polemics, arguing strongly on subjects from political reform to religion, but is most famous for his book called Rural Rides, which he published in 1830. Cobbett began writing the book in the early 1820's at the time when he was an anti-Corn Law campaigner, newly returned to England from the US. He disapproved of proposals for remedies for agricultural distress suggested in Parliament in 1821. He made up his mind to see conditions for himself, and to "enforce by actual observation of rural conditions", the statements he had made in answer to the arguments of the landlords before the Parliamentary Agricultural Committee.

Throughout his book, Cobbett describes a series of journeys he took by horseback accross the countryside, from Southeast England to the English Midlands. The book is set in the form of a diary, Cobbett wrote down what he saw from the point of view of both a farmer and a social reformer. Cobbett describes in detail the scenary of the early nineteenth century countryside and its people and community and expresses his own opinions.

Concern and passion for mostly the people is shown throughout his book. Cobbett descirbes his past memories of when he visited these same places when he was young. He seems to enjoy talking of his childhood yet at the same time, he feels anger because the system will ruin the many places he spent his childhood in.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Germany. He was a German philosopher, sociologist, historian, political economist and theorist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. He developed the socio-political theory of Marxism. He was born to Jewish parents and coverted to Lutherism. His ideas have played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He has published many books throughout his lifetime, his most significant being The Communist Manifesto which he wrote with fellow German revolutionary socialst, Friedrich Engels.

In 1849, Marx fled to London with his wife, Jenny Von Westphalen, where he lived until his death on 14th March 1883. His Tombstone read:

"Workers of the world unite" and "The philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point, however, is to change it."

Marx was interested in, and critical of, Hegel. He became involved with a group of radical thinkers known as the Young Hegelians. They were critical of Hegel's metaphysical assumptions, but still adopted his dialectical method in order to criticise established society, politics and religion. Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms arguing for the primacy of matter rather than idea. Hegel saw the spirit as driving history, however Marx saw this as unnecessary mystification, obscurring the reality of humanity and its physical actions shaping the world.

He said that "Hegelianism stood the movement of realisty on its head, and that one needed to set upon its feet."

Marx believed that you could explan everything about a society by analysing the way econmic forces in shape social, religious, legal and political processes.

Marx achieved a fusion of:

1. Hegelian philosophy (especially the philosophy of history and dialectics).
2. British empericism (especially econmics of Smith)
3. French Revolution politics (especially socialist politics, Man is born free but everywhere is in chains).

Marx's most significant work, The Communist Manifesto, was a short book published in 1848. It has since been recognized as one of the most influential political manuscripts. It was Commissioned by the Communist Party, and laid out the Party's purposes and program. Rather than a prediction of Communism's potential future forms, the book presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and the problems of Capitalism.

The Manifesto contains Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, they say: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The book was written and published at the time of the Capitalist society, and they discuss how eventually the Capitalist society will be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism.

The text begins with "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies." This suggests that Marx and Engels know that governments and society have a fear of communism.
Their passion is to advise communists about how to continue promoting their cause, despite those who are against it, as they go on to say: "It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself."

The Communist Manifesto talks of class differences and struggles. The Manifesto argues that the class struggle under capitalism is between those who own the means of production, the ruling class or bourgeoisie, and those who labour for a wage, the working class or proletariat.

HCJ - Romanticism - Kant and Hegel

Immanuel Kant was a German professor of philosohpy at Königsberg, in Prussia. He was researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy during and at the end of the 18th century Enlightenment. Kant's ideas moved philosophy beyond, the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, bringing about various forms of German idealism.

Kant  believed in the idea that within the limits of criminal law, every man could do as he pleased. he had a love of freedom and was a believer in democracy.

He believed

"There can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another"

meaning you should only do what pleases you, and not because someone tells you too.

Kant's theory of perception maintains that our understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts. Kant’s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781, aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. This was Kant's most influential work which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy.  

Kant believes that our understanding of the external world is not found mainly in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what he and others referred to as his Copernican revolution.

Kant uses a conceptual disitinction to distinguish propositions in two types. These are analytic propositions and synthetic propositions.

•  Analytic Propostions are true by nature of the meaning of the words used in the sentence. There is no further knowledge required to know the sentence is true other than to understand the language and to know the meaning of the words. For example:

"A tall man is tall"

• Synthetic propositions are propositions that tell us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of these statements derive from somethig outside of their linguistic content. For example:

"Tuesday was a wet day"

Kant disagrees unlike empiricists, e.g. Hume, and rationalists, e.g. Leibniz, that all synthetic propositions are only known from experiences.

Kant claims that elemntary mathematics like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, meaning its statement provides new knowledge but not knowledge that has derived from experience. A priori proposition is one which though it may be from experience, is seen, when know to have a basis other than experience. He accepted that geometry and arithmetic are synthetic but are likewise a priori. Emperical propositions are ones we cannot know except by the help of sense and perception, e.g.facts of history and geography. Kant argues Space and Time are not derived from experience but are forms of intuition.

Kant's other influential work included a short story he wrote after the Lisbon earthquake. In this essay he debates whether the west wind in Europe is moist because it has crossed the atlantic ocean. This relates to Rousseau's idea of pureness.

Hegel often criticised Kant although, Hegel's systems could not exist if Kant's hadn't first. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born August 27th, 1770 and died November 14th, 1831, was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German idealism. He published only four books in his lifetime:

• Phenomenology of Spirit 1807, this was Hegel's account of the development of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge.
• Science of Logic in three volumes published in  1811, 1812 and 1816, the logical and metaphysical core of Hegel's philosophy.
• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences 1816, this was a summary of his entire philosophical system.
• Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1822, Hegel's political philosophy.

Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, as I  soon realised when reading his work. he introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy and the world itself. Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broad tradition that includes Plato and Kant.

Hegel was a free-will believer. The French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real individual political freedom into European societies for the first time in record history.
He believes in 'the state'. He believes the state is existing realized moral life. Truth and unity is found in the state laws, universal and rational arrangements. He comes to the conclusion that the state is The Divine Idea.

He also believes in a very interesting idea, one that I can't argue with or find any other conclusion for. He says to suppose the universe as a whole to be spherical is self-contradictory. This is because nothing can be a sphere without boundaries and to have boundaries you need something outside of the sphere, at least empty space, but everything is inside the universe so there are no boundaries.

Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". This is similar to the big question 'What came first; The chicken or the egg?' The Absolute of an uncle is a newphew because without the nephew, there wouldn't be an uncle as you need a nephew to say you're an uncle. Therefore, the Absolute is a nephew, but then the newphew exists because if his parents etc. This whole system is called 'The Absolute Idea'.

It's also interesting to know that Hegel likes the idea of war. He believes that states are individual and war rightly prevents states from coming together. This relates with his Dialectical process. The Dialectic is the winner and war brings a winner and change which he believes is needed for a civil society. He believes The Absolute of the world is everything inside it and we can't get there as individuals, we get there through the Dialectic and become the absolute through social change.

He says:

"We Progress, we change. This change is a dialectic process. We move in this direction because there is a spirit guiding us into this direction".