[ZOLA EMILE]: (1840-1902) French novelist. A 4to printed broadside distributed by the organising committee of 'The ...

[ZOLA EMILE]: (1840-1902) French novelist. A 4to printed broadside distributed by the organising committee of 'The Old Army', printed in French by Belleville of Paris, with the heading Protestation, the text stating 'The former undersigned Officers, meeting in Paris, on 30 May 1908, in the Organising Committee of the 'Old Army', consider it a duty of Patriotism and military Solidarity to publicly express their unworthy regrets in front of the spectacle of the participation of the Army in the glorification of ZOLA, INSULTER OF THE ARMY. A military order can oblige the swords and the flags to bow before the remains of the one who wrote ''LA DEBACLE'' and who had the sad courage to smear the defeated heroics of [18]70. Our conscience will not bow. And, convinces to be the interpreters of the immense majority of our Comrades, condemned to silence, we formulate in the face of the Country our Protest of Soldiers and French!' The lower half of the broadside features the names of the Organising Committee of 'The Old Army' and its members. Some small areas of paper loss to the right edge and with a few neat tears to some edges, FR On 29th September 1902 Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning and following his funeral on 5th October he was initially buried in the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris, but on 4th June 1908 (around the time the present broadside was published), just five years and nine months after his death, his remains were relocated to the Pantheon, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The ceremony was disrupted by an assassination attempt by Louis-Anthelme Gregori, a disgruntled journalist, on Alfred Dreyfus, who was wounded in the arm by the gunshot. La Debacle was published in 1892 as the penultimate novel in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series. The story is set against the background of the political and military events that ended the reign of Napoleon III and the Second Empire in 1870.