NBB-1

Émile Zola’s, posthumous novel Vérité (Truth) is a fictional reworking of the Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus was an army officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany and Zola had been prosecuted for libel in 1898 after writing his open letter J’Accuse…! accusing the French government of anti-Semitism, falsifying evidence and covering up knowledge of the real spy. In Verité, Monsieur Simon, a Jewish schoolteacher, is falsely accused of the sexual molestation and murder of his nephew, eleven-year-old Zéphirin Lehmann, a disabled ‘curly-haired angel’. The enemy of Zola’s novel is the Catholic Church rather than the army. The Roman Catholic Church protects a brother and the novel is an early exposé of the church’s policy of covering up the sexual abuse of young boys. ( )