Le J’accuse…! d’Émile Zola imprimé en caractères plantiniens

The Dreyfus affair and the campaign launched by Émile Zola were both widely discussed in Belgium. The press was active, but the first reaction to the proceedings against Zola came from a writer known only to a few insiders at the time: Charles Van Lerberghe. Outraged, he promptly founded a committee of the most eloquent French-speaking Belgian writers of the time. The address of admiration to Zola, elegantly bound by Paul Claessens, was given to the writer by Albert Mockel in February 1898. At almost the same time, three young enthusiasts (Mécislas Goldberg, Léon Parsons and Henri Vandeputte) also initiated a large-scale project: a Livre d’hommage des lettres françaises à Émile Zola. The Franco-Belgian enterprise gathered a host of testimonies of admiration and constituted a sort of gotha of committed intellectuals.
A few biting remarks by Léon Bloy in his personal diary allude to another project, conceived by journalists from Antwerp. Images in John Grand-Carteret’s Zola en images, published in 1905, show that this project came to fruition. On the initiative of Eugène Landoy, Paul Billiet, Florent Burton and Charles Sluyts, a unique copy of Zola’s J’accuse was printed. To give this tribute an exceptional character, the printer Buschmann used old typefaces preserved in the Plantin Museum. The large, richly decorated copy was bound by Jacques Mössly. Its originators gave it to Zola at the end of December 1899. This remarkable piece is now on display at the Maison Zola/Musée Dreyfus in Médan. The same journalists also wanted to pay tribute to Dreyfus and his family by collecting a host of signatures from the people of Antwerp – several thousand of them – on the pages of another large album artistically presented by Buschmann and bound by Mössly. This beautiful piece of work, has now returned to its original location and is kept in the FelixArchief in Antwerp.