Conscience et devoilement de la verité. Modus & Dictum dans Verité de Zola

In the first part of this paper, I analyze the arguments of last D. Cohn’s essay (The Distinction of Fiction, 1999, French translation 2001) on the logic of fiction and fictionality: the deal is to find formal and more precisely linguistic marks which allow to distinguish fictional vs historical narratives. In a second part, I study and I try to apply this model to Zola’s novel: Vérité (Truth). In this novel, which is the last in Zola’s works, and which reproduces the Dreyfus case, the problem the novelist must face is to conciliate the “documentary” -or the historical truth with his naturalist esthetics which favors indirect free speech -or what D. Cohn (op. cit.) calls the “mental quotations”.