Huysmans had published En Route in 1895, but the complicated history of his writing of that work had meant that many of the things he had intended to write did not make it into the final draft, and many of the things he had originally intended that book to be had not been achieved. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that in 1897 he serialized a portion of a new book in the conservative periodical L'Écho de Paris and published the book itself in 1898 as La Cathédrale. It would become Huysmans most successful work, facilitating his retirement from the civil service, with which his increasingly public religious proclivities had left him increasingly estranged. The threads that combined to make it so successful were many and varied. The book focuses heavily on Chartres Cathedral, and discusses it in detail enough that tourists started using it as a sort of guidebook -- a function it still has today. The critics generally recognized that in style and beauty of writing, Huysmans had outdone himself, but they split on whether Huysmans had become a religious loon enslaved to Church dogma or whether he was a religious hypocrite faking a faith he did not have. On the other side, some priests tried to get the book put on the Index for at least material heresy. All of these kinds of controversies, under the general marketing rule of "No publicity is bad publicity", increased the sales of the book. But perhaps the greatest contributor to the success of the book was the Dreyfus Affair.
In 1894, a French artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of treason for divulging French military secrets to the Germans; he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a French Guiana penal colony. The espionage was blown up by the press into a national object of attention, fears were raised because of the ongoing possibility of war between France and Germany, and the whole thing was exacerbated by the fact that its connection to national security meant that significant parts of the entire process occurred out of the public view. In 1896, however, information came to light that suggested that Dreyfus was innocent and that the actual culprit was a major named Esterhazy. The French brass, however, refused to accept the evidence; it was suppressed and Esterhazy was acquitted before a military tribunal. In addition, some of those involved in the original Dreyfus investigation forged evidence of Dreyfus's guilt. Despite the attempts of the French military to keep it quiet, the dispute over Dreyfus's guilt or innocent became increasingly public and noisy.
One of those who became convinced of Dreyfus's innocence was Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist movement, and in January of 1898, Zola published an open letter in a newspaper, L'Aurore, under the title of "J'Accuse...!" Zola accused the President and government of France of illegal activities motivated by antisemitism, as Dreyfus was Jewish. Zola was prosecuted for libel and convicted in February. He fled to England to avoid imprisonment, staying there until the next change of government, and the whole event began to split the entire French cultural establishment. It did not do so cleanly -- every class and rank of French society split over the matter in some way, and the break cut across the right/left divide of French politics in weird ways. What is more, at no point was any faction primarily arguing about Dreyfus; the pro-Dreyfus factions saw the event as symbolic of a broader corruption in the system, the anti-Dreyfus factions saw the ongoing attempts to defend him as mostly a byproduct of a broader attempt to overturn French customs and ways. The antisemitic character of much of the anti-Dreyfus side is widely recognized; the highly classist character of much of the pro-Dreyfus movement is much less widely recognized but was certainly not hiding (and is one reason why the socialists and communists were often reluctant to be pro-Dreyfus). The fractures were already there, and the Dreyfus Affair just opened them.
Huysmans's book had nothing to do with any of this -- except it was published two weeks after Zola's letter, and became popular among anti-Dreyfus conservatives as an argument for French traditions and French Catholicism. Purely by an accident of timing, Huysmans became a sort of anti-Zola.
In any case, The Cathedral will be the next fortnightly book; the translation will be Brendan King's revised and amended version of Clara Bell's translation, and the edition that I am using has a number of black-and-white photographs of statues at Chartres discussed in the book.