When Emile Zola published “J’accuse…!”, his open letter to the French president concerning the Dreyfus affair, he hoped to provoke a prosecution for libel that would cause the notorious case to be re-examined. In the letter, published in 1898, he accused the French establishment, and in particular certain named generals, of anti-Semitism over the imprisonment of the Jewish officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus, on the basis of forged documents.

Zola was duly prosecuted, fined and sentenced to a year in jail. He fled to England in exile to avoid his judicial fate, not of his own accord but that of his friends – “I obeyed like a soldier”. Dreyfus meanwhile was retried the following year, convicted again but pardoned.