Notes:

Émile Zola is a French writer famous for having openly confronted the French government and then incumbent president Félix Faure in 1898, in the midst of the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal which split the French Third Republic from 1894 to 1906.

Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of Jewish origin, had been convicted of treason and spying for the German Empire in 1894. Two years later, the real spy was identified as Ferdinand Walter Esterhazy. However, the military would not admit their mistake and tried to hide this new evidence. Émile Zola wrote an open letter, titled J'accuse…! – Lettre au Président de la République ("I Accuse…! – Letter to the President of the Republic") which was published in the newspaper L'Aurore on 13 January 1898.

This lead to a renewed interest in the Dreyfus affair. In 1899, he was offered and accepted a pardon from President Émile Loubet, a compromise that saved face for the military's mistake. The affair officially closed in 1906 when Dreyfus was fully exonerated by a military commission, with a promotion to chef d'escadron. He received the Légion d'honneur that same year and ended his military career after WWI, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.