The Funeral Oration That Said Zola Was a Moment of the Human Conscience and Cost Its Author His Académie Standing

Anatole France (1844–1924) — the pen name of François-Anatole Thibault, then 58 years old, member of the Académie française since 1896 and one of the most prominent literary figures of the Third Republic — delivered the principal funeral oration at Émile Zola’s burial at Montmartre Cemetery on 5 October 1902. The oration lasted approximately fifteen minutes. Its closing phrase — that Zola had been “un moment de la conscience humaine” (‘a moment of the human conscience’) — became one of the most-quoted lines of French Third Republic public oratory.

The oration also effectively ended France’s standing with the antisemitic faction of the Académie française for the following decade.

The funeral

Zola had died on 29 September 1902 of carbon-monoxide poisoning at his Paris apartment on the rue de Bruxelles. The death was attributed at the time to a defective chimney; subsequent evidence (a deathbed confession recorded in the 1920s by a chimney sweep named Henri Buronfosse) suggested the chimney had been deliberately blocked by anti-Dreyfusard activists. Whichever cause, the body was prepared for burial at Montmartre Cemetery on 5 October.

The funeral was a major Third Republic state occasion. Approximately 50,000 people lined the route from the rue de Bruxelles to Montmartre. Coal miners from the Anzin coalfield (the subject of Zola’s Germinal) attended in their work uniforms. Approximately 200 mounted gendarmes provided security against potential anti-Dreyfusard disruption. Alfred Dreyfus himself attended in civilian clothes and stood at the graveside throughout the oration. Senior Republican politicians (Georges Clemenceau, Léon Blum, Aristide Briand) were present in the official delegation.

The oration

Anatole France’s text was substantively prepared and substantively unsparing. He praised Zola’s literary achievement (the Rougon-Macquart twenty-volume novel sequence, the Thérèse Raquin, the substantial place of Zola in the substantial naturalist literary tradition) and substantively the J’accuse moment of January 1898 (“his courageous interventions, which alone could have arrested the criminal madness of the campaign against an innocent man”). The substantive closing was substantively the famous one:

Envions-le: il a honoré sa patrie et le monde par une œuvre immense et par un grand acte. Envions-le, sa destinée et son cœur lui firent le sort le plus grand: il fut un moment de la conscience humaine.

(“Let us envy him: he honoured his country and the world by an immense body of work and by one great act. Let us envy him, his destiny and his heart gave him the greatest possible portion: he was a moment of the human conscience.”)

The “moment of the human conscience” phrase substantively passed immediately into French Third Republic public oratory. It was reprinted in Le Figaro the following morning, in L’Aurore (the Dreyfusard newspaper where Zola’s original J’accuse had appeared), and in editions through the subsequent Third Republic political-historical literature.

The political price

The Académie française reaction to the oration was substantively cold. The Académie had retained anti-Dreyfusard sympathies through the entire affair period (Maurice Barrès, the leading literary anti-Dreyfusard, would be elected to the Académie in 1906 substantively partly on the reputation of his anti-Dreyfusard journalism); the Académie senior membership considered France’s Zola oration a breach of the neutrality the institution substantively expected its members to maintain on the Dreyfus question.

France was substantively excluded from Académie committee work and public-ceremonial functions for the next decade. He continued to publish (the L’Île des pingouins in 1908 was a satirical history of the French Republic organised around the Affair); his public standing among Republican readers was if anything enhanced by the Académie hostility; his international standing was unaffected.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, substantively the international vindication that the Académie had declined to provide. He died at Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire in October 1924, aged 80.

What happened to Zola’s body

The Montmartre grave was the first of two Zola burial sites. The 1908 Panthéon transfer moved the body to the national mausoleum of French heroes; the transfer ceremony was the occasion at which Alfred Dreyfus was shot twice by Louis-Anthelme Grégori and survived. The Anatole France funeral phrase still appears on the inscription beneath Zola’s Panthéon tomb.