He also was an early champion of Auguste Rodin. What is more important for Zola's literary fame, however, is that he has always been the writer whose name is most closely associated with the naturalist movement in literature. He popularized the terms "naturalist" and "naturalistic" in their literary sense, led the tumultuous press campaign that assured the triumph of naturalism in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and remained its main champion and theorist to the end of his life. He tirelessly promoted, moreover, his own image of himself as a naturalistic writer, succeeding so well that even today the discovery of his volcanic lyrical and epic genius and other non-(or supra-) naturalistic qualities still frequently comes as a surprise.
Zola was also one of the leading defenders of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer wrongly accused by his superiors in 1894 of spying for Germany. They persisted in treating him as guilty even after they knew that he was innocent. The resultant affaire grew into a major national political crisis, pitting the French liberal republican left against the militaristic, nationalistic, authoritarian right; anticlericals against rightwing Catholics; proponents of racial tolerance against anti-Semites.
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