Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/212

 The Recent Zola Trial.

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THE RECENT ZOLA TRIAL. THAT monster judge named Jeffries who lived in the century long gone by, and the monstrous injustices in the courts of his time that are narrated in the State trials, seem to have had companionship at the close of this enlightened century, in the recent trial at Paris of Emile Zola for defamation, when arraigning in a published letter the conspirators who had consigned innocent Alfred Dreyfus to a death worse than the peine fort et dure of the age of Jeffries. A full report of Vaffaire Zola — as the French writers term it — lies on the library table of The Green Bag; and its 3 5 5 pages teem with scenes and court proceed ings which astound the reader who has been accustomed to American justice as adminis tered in our courts. In this published authorized report M. Delegorgue, president of the court of assize, fairly casts Jeffries' conduct into the shade; and the attorney general, Van Cassel, for the prosecution, presents a com panion picture to Sir Edward Coke during the State trials of his day. Fifteen days of last February were consumed with the Zola hearings in the assize court of the Seine, attended by hundreds of spectators who, throughout, were allowed to accentuate the proceedings by clamor of assent or dissent, and which the Parisian reporters euphemis tically denominated by the word (printed in parentheses) "murmurs." There was present from first to last among the specta tors, what Parisians term a claque, in the interest of the military arm of the govern ment which instituted the prosecution of Zola, against whom not only " murmurs" in the court room were heard, but also in the corridors of this (ironically named) palais de justice, hisses and invectives as he passed in or out. fimile Zola, early in January last, pub

lished in a daily paper of Paris called "L'Aurore," a letter addressed to President Faure in which he charged, in no uncertain or mealy terms, an accusation against the military tribunals which within the few preced ing months had acquitted an alleged traitor named Esterhazy, and which, in 1894,hadcondemned another army officer named Alfred Dreyfus to imprisonment for life in a penal settlement after his conviction, for the treason of revealing army secrets to a for eign government. And it is a curious fact that at no moment was the identity of that government publicly revealed, although it would surmisingly seem to have been either the Russian or German government. The charge of treason against Dreyfus was a gen eral one; imputed and implied by the finding in the waste basket of a foreign attache, an incriminating message in writing, that im parted army secrets valuable for a foreign power to know in case of war. The French word for the document found is bordereau (meaning an itemized memorandum). That was believed to be in the handwriting of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a staff officer who had access to all the records of the War office. Then commenced oppressive meth ods of the French government which shock the keen sense of American justice. Word is, on Oct. 14, 1894, brought in a secret enclosure from the minister of war to a Major Forzinetti in charge of the prison of Cherche Midi, to immediately inscribe on the jail book the name ofAlfred Dreyfus, who, on the next day, would be under military escort brought as a prisoner to that jail; also to provide a close cell in which he was to be imprisoned, forbidden to see anybody, not even wife or members of family, and to be for bidden weapon, pen, pencil, paper or ink. The major was also forbidden to prevent the incarceration being known in or outside of