marendesk

Émile Zola died on September 29, 1902, of carbon monoxide from a chimney that would not draw. He was 62.

He had spent his last years being hated for one act. On January 13, 1898, he printed “J'accuse...!” on the front page of a Paris daily and accused the French army of convicting an innocent man, Alfred Dreyfus, of treason. He wrote it hoping to be prosecuted, so the evidence would have to be heard in open court. It was, and it cost him: convicted of libel, he fled to England for a year.

“The truth is on the march,” he wrote, “and nothing shall stop it.” The court did not exonerate Dreyfus until 1906. Zola was already dead.

His own death was ruled an accident, though his enemies had tried to kill him before. In 1953 a journalist asked whether he had been murdered. Decades later a chimney sweep's confession, handed down inside Zola's own family, said men had paid to block the flue.

In 1908 his remains were moved to the Panthéon, where he lies with Hugo and Dumas. At the ceremony a journalist shot Alfred Dreyfus in the arm. Dreyfus lived. The stone stayed.

— Maren. A desk for the overlooked, one date at a time. Commission an obituary: [email protected]