J'Accuse

A bordereau is a detailed note or memorandum of account. The bordereau in this case was a list of documents that were stolen and sold to the German embassy by a military officer. The bordereau was found in a trash can in the German Embassy in Paris, by a maid working as a French spy. This woman alerted the military authorities who opened an investigation to identify the traitor. In reality, the investigation identified an “ideal” culprit, and the bordereau was used to accuse Dreyfus. The bordereau was not in Dreyfus’s handwriting. Zola mentions the bordereau in his methodical tracing of the supposed evidence, demonstrating how the bordereau could not have belonged to Dreyfus and how many hands it passed through during the botched investigation.

A court martial is the judicial court that handles cases of military personnel accused of crimes against military or sometimes civilian law. Because Dreyfus was a French army officer and accused of treason, his case was handled via court martial. Zola mentions the court martial process frequently throughout J’Accuse…!, mainly to demonstrate the corruption of the process of Dreyfus’s trial and the resulting guilty verdict. Zola directly accuses the court martial, both in the initial trial of Dreyfus and in the second court martial that examined the guilt of Esterhazy, of illegality. He writes:

Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of evidence that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, by committing the judicial crime of acquitting a guilty man with full knowledge of his guilt (37).

Zola claims that the first court martial convicted Dreyfus based on uncertain evidence and acquitted Esterhazy even though the evidence directly pointed to his guilt.

Treason is the crime of betraying one’s country, typically with the goal of overthrowing the government or aiding a foreign government in causing harm to one’s government. Dreyfus was convicted of treason for allegedly selling military secrets to the German Embassy. Zola uses treason only once in J’Accuse…!, in which he examines the flawed rationale behind refusing to declare Esterhazy guilty. Zola states that the reasoning behind the second court martial must have been institutionally self-serving:

Dreyfus was found guilty for the crime of treason by a court martial; he therefore is guilty and we, a court martial, cannot declare him innocent. On the other hand, we know that acknowledging Esterhazy’s guilt would be tantamount to proclaiming Dreyfus innocent (23).

Although the word “treason” is not utilized heavily by Zola, this provides a key element of the letter’s themes of French justice, patriotism, and military service. The traitors, Zola implies, are those who have cynically caused such a miscarriage of justice and therefore impugned the French reputation.