by Emile Zola
When Rougon’s position as minister of the interior is weakened, and Clorinde engineers his fall, his ‘little court’ (p. 293) deserts him. He finds himself alone, lost, disconsolate.
He began to think back on his gang, with their sharp teeth taking fresh bites out of him every day. They were all round him. They clambered on to his lap, they reached up to his chest, to his throat, till they were strangling him. They had taken possession of every part of him, using his feet to climb, his hands to steal, his jaws to tear and devour. They lived on his flesh, deriving all their pleasure and health from it, feasting on it without thought of the future. And now, having sucked him dry, and beginning to hear the very foundations cracking, they were scurrying away, like rats who know when a building is about to collapse, after they have gnawed great holes in the walls. (p. 310)
While Rougon, the leader who despises the common herd, embodies the pathology of power, his gang represents a familiar reality of modern politics: leaders’ dependency on their supporters—their ‘base’.
Politics, Literature, Language
The artifice of Second Empire politics is brought out from beginning to end. In the opening chapter, after Rougon’s brief intervention in the Chamber, Madame Correur leaves her seat in the public gallery, ‘much as, before the curtain comes down, people slip out of a theatre box the moment the leading man has delivered his final speech’ (p. 20). In the closing chapter, Rougon’s speech (‘The rafters shook. Rougon’s triumph became an apotheosis’, p. 333) is glossed as reflecting a thirst for power ‘under the guise of parliamentary government’ (p. 333, my italics); it embodies the cynicism of pure performance, that is, of a performance that is nothing but a performance. Rougon’s nemesis, Count de Marsy, is actually described, by a member of Rougon’s entourage, as ‘a crook turned out like a vaudeville artist’ (p. 34). The decor of much of the novel — the Chamber, the Palais Bourbon, the Imperial Court — has a theatrical quality.
A striking feature of the novel, and of its satiric intent, is its repeated focus on the relations between literature, language, and the body politic. References to literature of all kinds, and its circulation, abound. An anonymous novelist is present at the house party at Compiègne; the Emperor himself is a writer (author of a work on pauperism) and he has a secret dream to create a newspaper of his own; Rougon is greatly exercised by his failure to persuade the committee controlling the distribution of literature by hawkers to prohibit a work he finds seditious. One might even see an ironic analogy between Rougon’s exercise of his godlike power as minister of the interior and the omniscient/omnipotent narrator of the novel. Rougon, as Chantal Pierre-Gnassounou has observed, ‘is at the head of a whole network of minor figures to whom he doles out positions and roles in the various plots he weaves and unravels. He is the very image of a busy novelist in charge of a large cast.’12 After his initial fall from power, as he vacates his office, he is seen sorting through papers and burning a large number of them. On his return to power, papers proliferate once more. Officials come in, with endless documents for him to sign: ‘There was a constant stream of them, the machinery of administration functioning with astonishing quantities of paper moving from office to office’ (p. 198). Rougon sits at his desk, drafting an important circular. ‘Jules!’ he shouts to his secretary, ‘give me another word for authority. What a stupid language we have!... I keep putting authority on every line’ (p. 192). For Rougon the idiom of authority is repetitious and reductive. It corresponds, of course, to his distrust of the press except as an instrument of propaganda.
At one point, Rougon and Clorinde discuss their respective literary tastes. Rougon makes it clear that he detests the type of literature — Realism and Naturalism — associated with Zola. He fulminates against one novel in particular.
A novel had recently appeared that incensed him: an imaginative work of the utmost depravity. While pretending to be concerned with the exact truth, it dragged the reader into the excesses of a hysterical woman. He seemed to like the word ‘hysterical’, for he repeated it three times, but when Clorinde asked him what he meant, he was overcome with modesty and refused to tell her.
‘Everything can be said,’ he went on. ‘Only, there are ways of doing it… It’s the same in government work, the most sensitive material often comes one’s way. For example, I’ve read reports about certain women. You know what I mean? But in those reports the most precise details are set down in a clear, frank, straightforward manner. Nothing dirty at all… Whereas novel-writers today have adopted a lubricious style, a way of describing things that brings them to life before your eyes. They call it art. It’s indecency, nothing more.’ (pp. 97–8)
This diatribe is an ironic allusion to contemporary attacks on Realist and Naturalist fiction. The allusions to the ‘exact truth’, a ‘hysterical woman’, and ‘indecency’ echo the accusations hurled at Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1857, the Goncourt brothers’ Germinie Lacerteux in 1865, and Zola’s own Thérèse Raquin and The Kill in 1867 and 1872. The question of ‘morality’ figured prominently in contemporary debates about Realism and Naturalism (in painting as well as in literature). Zola rejected conventional moralizing, arguing that ‘truth’ (truth to reality as perceived and experienced) contains its own morality: ‘Sincere study, like fire, purifies all’ (preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin). But whereas the Naturalist writer seeks to tell the truth, Rougon prefers to suppress it, or rather, to manipulate language in order to construct and impose his own ‘truth’. He is less a double of Zola than an anti-Zola. As a writer, he has problems. He is unable to complete his comparative study of the English constitutional system and that introduced by the Empire in 1852, finding the task too arduous:
when he had assembled his documents and the dossier was complete, he had to make a huge effort to pick up his pen. He would happily have put his case to the Chamber in a speech, but to write it, compose an entire text, with due attention to precise expression, seemed to him a very difficult task and without immediate practical use. Matters of style had always bothered him. Indeed, he despised style, and he did not draft more than ten pages. (p. 115)
While uncomfortable with the written word, Rougon is presented as a peerless practitioner, in his speeches and generally, of the rhetoric of political authority. In the opening chapter, Zola draws attention to the role of rhetoric in political life through his extended treatment of the speech by the deputy introducing the bill requesting approval of the funding for the celebrations of the Prince Imperial’s christening. The bombast of the speaker is ironized by the narrator’s references to his rhetorical flourishes. Rougon’s perceived prowess as an orator is first displayed on the public stage in Chapter 10, when he gives a speech at the ceremony held to inaugurate work on the Niort–Angers railway line. The description of Rougon’s pantomime-like visit to Niort is a good example of the satiric comedy that marks the novel: the utter cynicism of Rougon and his acolytes, the sycophancy of the locals, the provincial nature of the reception and of the ceremony itself, the bombast and platitudes of the speeches. The chief government engineer (a man who ‘prided himself on his irony’, p. 233) includes in his own speech several little barbs that subtly highlight the self-interest and double-dealing that underlie Monsieur Kahn’s scheme. Rougon responds to the engineer’s insinuations with a rhetorical performance that is majestic in its cant:
Now it was not merely the Deux-Sèvres department that was entering a period of miraculous prosperity, but the whole of France — thanks to the linking of Niort to Angers by a branch railway line. For ten minutes he enumerated the countless benefits that would shower down on the people of France. He even invoked the hand of God. Then came his rejoinder to the remarks of the chief engineer. Not that he referred to what he had said. He made no allusion to him at all. He merely said exactly the opposite. He extolled Monsieur Kahn’s devotion to the public good, describing him as a man of great modesty, disinterested by nature, truly magnificent. The financial aspect
of the enterprise did not trouble him in the least… In his peroration, when he came to the greatness of the regime, and praised the ineffable wisdom of the Emperor, he went so far as to intimate that His Majesty was taking a particular interest in this Niort–Angers branch line. It was becoming a state concern. (p. 235)
In the following chapter, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, Rougon uses a wide range of rhetorical techniques when he launches into a long speech (pp. 257–9), which lasts for nearly an hour, in defence of political repression. It is an unrelenting discursive performance, in which he deploys ‘a rhetoric of antinomies where the hyperbole of chaos and abjection jostles with the more sober signifiers of order and authority’.13 Rougon’s final speech, in favour of liberalism (‘Around me, wherever I look, I see public freedoms growing and bearing magnificent fruit’, p. 329) and the Church (‘Messieurs, I am happy here and now to kneel, with all the fervour of my Catholic heart, before the sovereign pontiff ’, p. 332), is a monument to political expediency. It reads, like many political speeches, like a parody.
The challenge for Rougon, as a politician, is to control discourse. As George Orwell wrote in his classic essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Orwell wrote those words in 1946, but they are eminently applicable to His Excellency Eugène Rougon, just as they resonate today.
1 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 141.
2 An exposé of the regime’s machinery of political surveillance is a major element of the third volume of the Rougon-Macquart series, The Belly of Paris. See the section entitled ‘Spies’ in my Introduction to that novel (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007).
3 In 1857 the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) and the novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) were prosecuted for offending religion and public morals with, respectively, Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal ) and Madame Bovary.
4 The world of high finance and the stock exchange is described by Zola in Money (Oxford World’s Classics, 2014).
5 Property speculation is a major theme of the second novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, The Kill.
6 Theodore Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1958) and Émile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).
7 Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 204. The quotation in the first sentence is from Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International Publishers, 1963), 135.
8 Emily Apter, ‘Politics “small p”: Second Empire Machiavellianism in Zola’s Son Excellence Eugène Rougon’, Romanic Review, 102/3–4 (2011), 411–26.
9 See David Bell, ‘Political Representation: Son Excellence Eugène Rougon’, in Bell, Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 2–8, for an extended analysis of the symbolism of the empty frock coat. It should be noted that Hugo’s pamphlet was similar, in its characterization of Louis-Napoleon, to the pamphlet of Karl Marx (see n. 7), which was published in the same year. Marx characterized Louis-Napoleon as a parody of his uncle. History, he wrote, repeats itself, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.
10 There were also statuettes, which Daumier created as preparation for his lithographs. One such statuette is on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
11 Oliver Larkin, Daumier: Man of His Time (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 103.
12 Chantal Pierre-Gnassounou, ‘Zola and the Art of Fiction’, in Brian Nelson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 86–104 (at 101). The self-reflexive elements of Zola’s fiction are discussed in detail by Susan Harrow in her book Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). This book is a stimulating study of the modernist and postmodernist themes and textual strategies present in Les Rougon-Macquart.
13 Harrow, Zola, The Body Modern, 198; see pp. 195–8 for an analysis of the practice of language in His Excellency Eugène Rougon.
Translator’s Note
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon was translated into English by Mary Neal Sherwood (as Clorinda) in 1880, by Kenward Philp (as The Mysteries of Louis Napoleon’s Court) in 1884, by Ernest Vizetelly in 1897, and by Alec Brown in 1958. I am pleased to have produced the first new translation of the novel in nearly sixty years.
The novel is one of the least popular of Zola’s novels. However, it is valuable to the historian as a detailed evocation of politics during Napoleon III’s Second Empire; and it is especially noteworthy as a surprisingly modern satire of all forms of authoritarian government and of the malevolence, duplicity, and language games of which those in power are capable.
I would like to record my gratitude to the French Ministry of Culture (Centre national du livre) for a grant that enabled me to spend some time at the Centre international des traducteurs littéraires in Arles.
Select Bibliography
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon was serialized in the newspaper Le Siècle from 25 January to 11 March 1876. It was published in volume form by Charpentier in March 1876. It is included in volume ii of Henri Mitterand’s superb scholarly edition of Les Rougon-Macquart in the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7), in volume vii of the Nouveau Monde edition of the Œuvres complètes, 21 vols. (Paris, 2002–10), and in volume ii of Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Colette Becker et al., 5 vols. (Paris: Robert Laffont, Collection Bouquins, 1992–3). Paperback editions exist in the following popular collections: Folio, ed. Henri Mitterand; Les Classiques de Poche, ed. Philippe Hamon and Colette Becker; GF-Flammarion, introduction by Émilien Carassus.
Biographies of Zola in English
Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995; London: Macmillan, 1996).
Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Emile Zola (London: Elek, 1977).
Studies of Zola and Naturalism in English
Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Baguley, David (ed.), Critical Essays on Emile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).
Harrow, Susan, Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2010).
Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola (2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
Lethbridge, R., and Keefe, T. (eds.), Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
Nelson, Brian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Nelson, Brian, Zola and the Bourgeoisie: A Study of Themes and Techniques in Les Rougon-Macquart (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Wilson, Angus, Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels (1953; London: Secker & Warburg, 1964).
Works in English on or concerning His Excellency Eugène Rougon
Apter, Emily, ‘Politics “small p”: Second Empire Machiavellianism in Zola’s Son Excellence Eugène Rougon’, Romanic Review, 102/3–4 (2011), 411–26.
Bell, David F., ‘Political Representation: Son Excellence Eugène Rougon’, in Bell, Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 1–25.
Grant, Richard B., Zola’s Son Excellence Eugène Rougon: An Historical and Critical Study (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960).
Schor, Naomi, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Ziegler, Robert, ‘Politics and the Future of Writing in Zola’s Son Excellence Eugène Rougon’, Dalhousie French Studies, 42 (Spring 1998), 95–102.
Background and Context
Baguley, David, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
Harvey, David, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Malcolm Bowie and Mark Overstall.
Zola, Émile, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
Zola, Émile, The Belly of Paris, trans. Brian Nelson.
Zola, Émile, La Bête humaine, trans. Roger Pearson.
Zola, Émile, The Conquest of Plassans, trans. Helen Constantine, ed. Patrick McGuinness.
Zola, Émile, Earth, trans. Brian Nelson and Julie Rose.
Zola, Émile, The Fortune of the Rougons, trans. Brian Nelson.
Zola, Émile, Germinal, trans. Peter Collier, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
Zola, Émile, The Kill, trans. Brian Nelson.
Zola, Émile, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson.
Zola, Émile, A Love Story, trans. Helen Constantine, ed. Brian Nelson.
Zola, Émile, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton, rev. Roger Pearson.
Zola, Émile, Money, trans. Valerie Minogue.
Zola, Émile, Nana, trans. Douglas Parmée.
Zola, Émile, Pot Luck, trans. Brian Nelson.
Zola, Émile, The Sin of Abbé Mouret, trans. Valerie Minogue.
Zola, Émile, Thérèse Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell.
A Chronology of Émile Zola
1840 (2 April) Born in Paris, the only child of Francesco Zola (b. 1795), an Italian engineer, and Émilie, née Aubert (b. 1819), the daughter of a glazier. The naturalist novelist was later proud that ‘zolla’ in Italian means ‘clod of earth’