Émile Zola, Yves Montand and the time of the cherries

Posted on October 4, 2022

Émile Zola, the well-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalizm, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalizm. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined “J’Accuse” Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel prize in literature in 1901 and 1902, was almost certainly assassinated for his writings in response to the famous Dreyfus trial. The trial, which sparked mass hysteria and anti-Semitic pogroms, caused the greatest political crisis of the 19th century in France, dividing society into two camps for a decade.

Dreyfus, a traitor to his country

On 15 October 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer of Jewish origin, was arrested on charges of treason. On 5th January 1895, he was humiliated and stripped of his military rank, and on 15 January he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island (Cayene, French Guiana). His innocence was later proven because a conman, Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, posing as Count Esterhazy, sold French military plans and secrets to the German military leadership for money in exchange for debts. In 1894, after Alfred Dreyfus was tried and convicted of espionage, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the French army’s counter-espionage department, became suspicious because he recognised Esterhazy’s handwriting on documents attributed to Dreyfus.

Anti-Semitism

According to some legal experts, anti-Semitism was clearly a factor in Dreyfus’ conviction. For example, Picquart, who wanted to clear Dreyfus, was tried by some people to discourage him with arguments that he should not be embarrassed because a Jew had been convicted. Some of the accusations also highlighted Dreyfus’s Jewish origins, which had been cited as a kind of obvious ‘motive’ to explain the betrayal. After Dreyfus was indicted, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out in several regions of France, and several anti-Semitic newspapers covered the case closely, some even contributing to the fabrication of false evidence, thus further fuelling the anger.

In response, Émile Zola published an open letter entitled J’accuse (I accuse), addressed to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure. In a letter on the front page of the French newspaper L’Aurore, Zola accused the judges of having acquitted Esterhazy on the orders of the War Ministry. Zola was tried and convicted for libel, from which the writer fled to England. From then on, however, France was divided, with one side defending the army, which did not rule out Dreyfus’s innocence, and the other strongly in favour of Dreyfus’s guilt, and Jew-hating sentiment was rekindled. In 1898, Colonel Henry, who had been found to have fabricated the evidence against Dreyfus, committed suicide and Esterhazy fled to England.

By this time, however, ‘l’Affaire’, as the French press and historiography of the time have since referred to the Dreyfus trial, had become a central political issue dividing the society. Thus the Dreyfus affair became a point of conflict between the royalist, nationalist right (the ‘anti-Dreyfusards’) and the pro-Republican, socialist, anti-clerical left (the ‘Dreyfusards’), and ultimately led to the strengthening of the Republic and the political left, and the weakening of the influence of the army and the Catholic Church in France. Among those who opposed Dreyfus were Édouard Drumont, Paul Dérouléde, Maurice Barrés and Charles Maurras. He was backed by George Clemenceau, Jean Jaurés and the writer Anatole France, among others. In the following years, it became clear that this was not a miscarriage of justice but a legal scandal, as evidence was falsified to cover the real culprit

The murder

Zola had just finished his novel about the Dreyfus trial, ‘Vérité’ (Truth), and had planned a sequel, ‘Justice’, but on 29 September 1902, because of the unexpected cold Zola was freezing in his Paris apartment (Rue de Bruxelles) and asked to heat up. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning during the night. An investigation was launched into the suspicion of murder, but was unsuccessful.

Zola’s death was blamed on his enemies, who had tried to kill him several times before because of his conduct in the Dreyfus trial, but were unable to prove it because of the inadequacy of police investigation. For a week from the day of the funeral, the foyer of Zola’s house was packed with prominent writers, academics, artists and politicians, all eager to pay their respects to the great writer. But Zola’s enemies used the occasion for a malicious celebration. In the newspaper L’Intransigeant, Henri Rochefort claimed that Zola had committed suicide after discovering Dreyfus’ guilt..

Zola was then buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris. He was eulogised by Anatole France, who called the writer “the conscience of humanity” and was sang the famous chanson “The Time of Cherries”, a song from 1866 with lyrics by Jean-Baptiste Clément and music by Antoine Renard. The chanson later became the revolutionary song of the Paris Commune, with incendiary verses added to the lyrics. After Zola’s funeral, “The Time of the Cherries” became a metaphor for what life would be like when the revolution changed social and economic conditions. It is believed that Clément dedicated it to a nurse who fought during the Semaine Sanglante (“Bloody Week”), when French government troops overthrew the Commune. Since then, there have been many versions of the original lyrics in French-speaking countries, but in my opinion the version popularised by Yves Montand (1921-1991) is the most beautiful one (The clock in the town hall in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis alternates every hour between two different tunes, ‘Le roi Dagobert a mis sa culotte à l’envers’ and ‘Le temps des cerises- The time of the cherries’. This song inspired the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia to adopt two cherries as part of its logo and the French Communist Party to adopt a new logo in 2018).

And that was not the end of the story of Zola’s, because on 4 June 1908, just five years and nine months after Zola’s death, another scandal broke when the writer’s remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed in a crypt shared with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The ceremony was disrupted by a journalist named Louis Grégori and the anti-Semitic writer Edouard Drumont, who came to kill Dreyfus, who was attending the ceremony as a guest of honour. Grégori, who had not made a name for himself in the Dreyfus trial, remained relatively moderate in his comments during the discussions of the so-called “Affaire”, but it turned out that he did not agree with Dreyfus’ acquittal. He knew that among the guests of honour was Alfred Dreyfus, who had been fully rehabilitated by the French Court of Cassation in 1906, and then awarded the Legion of Honour and promoted to the rank of Major, with a military parade in his honour. So, on 4 th of June, Grégori arrived armed with a press pass authorising him to take the steps of the Panthéon and an 8mm revolver loaded with five bullets. He fired two shots at Major Dreyfus, wounding him in the arm and forearm. Grégori was immediately detained by the crowd and arrested, charged with attempted premeditated murder. Later on Grégori was eventually acquitted by a Paris court, which accepted his defence that he had not intended to kill Dreyfus, but merely to warn him. The Jew-hating far right outright welcomed Grégori’s “very French” gesture.

But to return to Zola: an investigation by the journalist Jean Bedel in 1953, published in the newspaper Libération under the title “Was Zola murdered?”, raised the idea that Zola’s death was not an accident but a murder. The investigation was based on the discovery by the Normandy pharmacist Pierre Hacquin, who was told by the chimney sweep Henri Buronfosse that he had deliberately blocked the chimney in Zola’s Paris apartment. According to literary historian Alain Pagès, this was probably true, and Zola’s great-grandchildren Brigitte Émile-Zola and Martine Le Blond-Zola confirmed this explanation of Zola’s carbon monoxide poisoning. According to a report in the newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour, Brigitte Émile-Zola said that her grandfather, Jacques Émile-Zola, son of Émile Zola, told her when she was eight years old that a man had come to her house in 1952 to give her information about her father’s death. The man was with a friend who was dying and who confessed that he had received money to plug Émile Zola’s chimney!