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When Zola wrote 'J'accuse!'

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 20080330
Author:Jeff Jacoby

IT IS the most famous front page in the history of journalism. Its one-word headline - "J'accuse!" - is if anything even more renowned. On Jan. 13, 1898, the French newspaper L'Aurore published Emile Zola's extraordinary 4,000-word open letter on the Dreyfus Affair, a travesty of justice in which an innocent captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, had been convicted of treason and sentenced to solitary confinement for life on Devil's Island, a hellish penal colony off the coast of South America.

Zola was then the most popular writer in France, and his impassioned essay defending Dreyfus ...

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