Die Welt.

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Telephone No. 8805.

Correspondence should be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9.

Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned.

Advertising rates: the four-column petit line, 10 kr.

Single numbers 15 kr.

Subscription rates: Austria-Hungary: half-yearly 3 fl. = 6 Kr., yearly 6 fl. = 12 Kr.; for abroad: Germany yearly 13 Mk. 70 Pf., half-yearly 6 Mk. 85 Pf.; England yearly 14 Shg., half-yearly 7 Shg; Russia yearly 7 R., half-yearly 3 R. 50 Kop.; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly 17 Frcs., half-yearly 8 Frcs. 50 Cts.; America yearly 3 Doll. 40.

No. 3. — Vienna, 21 January 1898 — 2nd Year.

Emil Zola’s Heroic Deed.

By Spectator.

There is something greater than the fame of being the master of the naturalistic novel. Emil Zola is proving it in these days in his own person. The whole Rougon-Macquart cycle will probably long since have become the waste paper of literary history when the heroism that Zola now reveals as a champion of truth and justice will still shine through history as an example of manly courage and intrepidity. And perhaps not the least part of the halo of glory that surrounds his open letters to France and to President Faure will be that the great writer stakes his immense popularity, the repose and comfort of his declining manhood, indeed his personal freedom, for the rescue of a — Jew. Out of the leading realist of literature there has become, overnight, a captivating idealist of history. In order to undo the ghastly miscarriage of justice which, by his conviction, was perpetrated upon the unfortunate Jewish Captain Dreyfus, Zola hurls himself against the foaming surf of chauvinism, against the overwhelming might of the military hierarchy, against the creeping double-monster of the monarchist-Jesuit alliance — he all alone, and armed only with the weapon of the holy wrath that fills his patriotic soul. What a stake, and at what a price! What he can achieve in the most fortunate case is the deliverance of the Jewish convict on Devil’s Island, for whom antisemitism has twisted the noose and to whom the State of France denies the possibility of expiation; what he stands to lose is the immense store of fame and popularity that he has amassed over 30 years. Neither the courageous Senator Scheurer-Kestner, nor Clemenceau, nor the valiant Lieutenant-Colonel Picquard stakes in this struggle remotely as much as the writer who marches before them; from them the present can take back what the present has given them. But Emil Zola casts the piece of French intellectual history that he represents in his person into the scales, and if it be in vain, then France will be doubly stained — in her justice and in her intellectual authority. Then the old sad saying may once again come true, that the victorious cause pleases the gods, but the vanquished one pleases Cato — yet this bitter consolation will not preserve the genius of France from the ineffaceable blemish that her present masters, in league with the antisemites, are assiduously bent on affixing to her.

One so often hears in these days Zola compared with Voltaire, his intervention for Dreyfus with Voltaire’s struggle for the memory and the descendants of the innocently executed Calas. But there are several considerable differences which make the parallel appear not entirely apt. Voltaire lived outside France, at his château in Ferney, when he conducted the campaign for Calas; in his “safe harbour” he was not personally hemmed in and threatened. Nor did the indiscriminately voracious Moloch of military chauvinism hold open its bared maw as it does now, for the phantom of national honour — which supposedly exhausts itself in the army alone — did not yet exist in those days; the matter concerned an error of the civil justice and the enforcement of the revision of an “adjudicated case,” in which the “national defence” did not come into question even as a pretext. The struggle of Voltaire for Calas almost resembles an idyll in comparison with the struggle of Zola for Dreyfus. Voltaire fought against the superstition of the Parlement of Toulouse. “Were it possible,” he cried in the memorial to the King, “that there should still be judges in Toulouse who do not weep over the innocence of a family so ill-used? Surely they weep, and they are ashamed as well; the proof that they repent their cruel sentence lies in this, that for four months they have persisted in their refusal to communicate the proceedings, or even so much as the verdict, to anyone who demands it.” And at another place in the memorial he formulated his demand in the words that “the truth be unveiled and, when it is brought to light, that justice alone be done.” Voltaire, the world-famous patriarch of Ferney, against the judges of Toulouse — it was an unequal struggle, which the defender of justice against religious fanaticism was bound to win. But above all: Dreyfus is a Jew, and a hundred and thirty-six years lie between the Calas case and the Dreyfus case. Within these hundred and thirty-six years France has lived through the great Revolution and its consequences, has proclaimed the rights of man before all civilised peoples, has for a full century truly marched “at the head of civilisation.” When the reopening of the Calas trial was enforced, the dawn of the rights of man did not yet stand in the sky of France; now, however, when the revision of the Dreyfus trial is demanded in vain, France is a Republic, she has a glorious world-historical epoch in the service of civil liberty behind her — yet to the Jew Dreyfus none of all this is of any avail. To him is denied what had to be granted to the dead Jean Calas, the Protestant merchant, for France no longer honours the traditions of 1789,