In 1894 he was falsely accused of providing military secrets to the Germans; his trial, imprisonment, and eventual rehabilitation in 1906 caused a major political crisis in France, polarizing deep-set anti-militarist and anti-Semitic trends in a society still coming to terms with defeat and revolution in 1870–71. Notable among his supporters was the novelist Émile Zola, whose open letter, J’accuse, published in 1898, accused the judges at the trial of having convicted Dreyfus at the behest of the War Office.