Emile Zola wrote “J’accuse” — the open letter that exposed the French military’s framing of Alfred Dreyfus and became the most famous act of public intellectual courage in modern history. He was convicted of libel, fled to England, and returned to France a hero. Then he died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney in his Paris apartment. Decades later, a roofer confessed on his deathbed that he had blocked the chimney deliberately — and the assassination theory has haunted Zola’s legacy ever since.

This episode traces Zola from his impoverished childhood through the Rougon-Macquart novels, the Dreyfus Affair, and the suspicious death that may have been murder disguised as an accident.

• Zola’s poverty-stricken youth and the naturalist literary movement he created
• The twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle that mapped French society through heredity and environment
• “J’accuse” and the Dreyfus Affair — the public letter that split France in two
• The carbon monoxide death, the roofer’s deathbed confession, and the unsolved murder question