by Emile Zola
1897 Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac debuts.
1898 Paris, the last book of the Three Cities trilogy, is published. New evidence leads to the reopening of the Dreyfus case, and Zola publishes his famous open letter in defense of Dreyfus, “J’Accuse,” in the newspaper L’Aurore. He accuses the army of deception and coverup; found guilty of libeling the army, he is fined 3,000 francs and sentenced to a year in prison. He flees to England.
1899 Zola returns to Paris. Dreyfus is reconvicted at a second court martial but is granted a presidential pardon. Zola publishes Fécondité (Fecundity), the first installment of a new series, Les Quatre Évangiles (The Four Gospels).
1901 Travail (Labor), the next in the Four Gospels series, is published.
1902 Zola dies, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes resulting from a blocked chimney in his Paris apartment building. Many speculate that he was deliberately killed because of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. When he is buried at Montmartre Cemetery, his funeral is attended by 50,000 people.
1903 Vérité (Truth), the last of the Four Gospels novels that Zola completed, is published. The final volume, Justice, was not finished at the time of his death.
1906 Dreyfus is exonerated from any wrongdoing.
1908 In recognition of Zola’s achievements, his remains are transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.
1937 The Life of Émile Zola, a film directed by William Dieterle, wins three Academy Awards.
Introduction
For about a hundred years, novelists were seized with the desire to replicate the entire world. Beginning with Honoré de Balzac in the early nineteenth century and ending rather less memorably in the first few decades of the twentieth century with the likes of Jules Romains and John Galsworthy, this tendency saw the production of sweeping multi-volume series in which societies were sectioned up into thematic units and teeming masses of characters were assigned sociologically appropriate fates by their godlike authors. Balzac, who set the tone and the challenge, composed his Comédie humaine of some ninety novels and novellas, grouped together primarily according to their settings: private life, provincial life, city life, country life, military life, and so on. Characters sometimes overlapped from one book to another, and stories embryonically suggested in one volume would be fully developed in another. Balzac’s intention was to account for the entirety of life in France in his time, with all of its contrasts and variations. Although Balzac lived and wrote during a time of herculean production by writers of fiction, few followed his lead at first. While novelists all over Europe might comfortably issue two or three triple-decker epics a year, many ranging broadly in their focus all across the surface of their time, none was inclined toward Balzac’s systematic chronicle of society, not even Dickens, who came the closest.
It was not until two decades after Balzac’s death in 1850 that his heir presumptive announced himself. In 1871 Émile Zola published the first installment in what was to be a twenty-volume series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, an examination of the whole of French society through the lens of the family named in the collective title. Zola intended to go Balzac one better in the way of rigor. His chronicle would be founded on strict scientific principles derived from the work of Charles Darwin and his disciples. Mere realism was no longer sufficient; a methodical, experimental procedure was required, as firmly controlled and emotionally detached as the protocols that attended laboratory work. Each volume would depict one aspect of French life in all its breadth, would be meticulously researched, would be planned out to the last iota with nothing left to chance or inspiration. “Naturalism,” as this style came to be known, was to be as pitiless and comprehensive as photography, with no concessions made to piety, aesthetics, or received ideas. And it did effectively challenge conventional thinking about the role of literature—in some cases about society itself—so that it came to be associated with political radicalism, and regarded in some quarters as nothing better than pornography. Even if the works that have held up the best after a century or more have done so despite their extraliterary claims, naturalism in its time was crucial in confronting readers with aspects of society they were inclined to avoid.
Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840. His father, François, who was born Francesco Zolla in Venice, arrived in France right after the July Revolution of 1830, to make his mark and his fortune as an engineer. He was brilliant, and was unquestionably in the right place at the right time for the fulfillment of his talents and energies. The culmination of his enterprise was to be the construction of a system of canals and tunnels to bring drinking water to the city of Aix. Unfortunately, in early 1847, when the work was in its initial stages, he contracted pneumonia and died, at the age of fifty-one. His investment in the scheme was immediately parceled up among the other investors. His wife and child were left just enough money to send Émile to the local collège, where he spent a reasonably happy adolescence running around with his friends Louis Baille and Paul Cézanne, who was to become a great painter, although neither he nor Emile showed any particular promise at the time. After Émile’s maternal grandmother died when he was an adolescent, the remainder of the family—he, his mother, and his grandfather—moved to Paris, where they lived in penury. Émile proceeded to become entranced by the wonders of the city to the detriment of his studies. After failing his oral examination—he never earned his secondary degree—he spent several years living the bohemian life in all its most traditional aspects: unheated garrets in miserable neighborhoods, lack of food and clothing, all-night debates with his companions on artistic and philosophical subjects. At his lowest ebb, he occupied a furnished room in a hotel otherwise populated by prostitutes, and threw in his lot with one of them, who pawned his last overcoat for him. This period was to prove significant when, almost two decades later, he set out to write Nana.
Finally, when he was nearly twenty-two, his luck began to turn. First he pulled a high number in the draft lottery, virtually exempting him from military service, and then a friend of his father’s got him a job at the Hachette publishing house. It was a lowly position in the shipping department, but he was able to turn it to considerable advantage. He got to know many of the most important writers in France, running errands for them and otherwise ingratiating himself. Since the lineup included the two most fearsome critics in the country, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine, he had obtained for himself a powerful set of connections for his future career. Now that he was solvent and adequately lodged, he did not disdain the lowlife among whom he had earlier been consigned, but methodically explored alleys and dives and concert saloons, sometimes in the company of his friend Cézanne, who could not force himself to become a full-time Parisian any more than he could remain in the countryside for longer than a few months at a stretch.
Zola began to publish: a collection of tales, a study of Don Quixote, an increasing number of newspaper and magazine contributions, both criticism and fiction, and eventually, in 1865, his first novel, La Confession de Claude. Around this same time, partly as a result of his friendship with Cézanne, he came to know and befriend a group of young painters who found themselves at odds with the prevailing aesthetic as dictated by the powers who controlled the Salon. Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Cézanne all had their works rejected by exhibition juries composed of the art establishment of the day, men like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Ernest Meissonier, neoclassical painters of battle scenes and overupholstered nudes. Zola became spokesman for the painters, writing numerous articles about them for the press and an entire short book about Manet, and he figures among the painters in two tableaux showing members of the group—the Impressionists, as yet unnamed—gathering together in studios. Nevertheless, his life remained precarious. Even as he was serializing his first major work, Thérèse Raquin (1867), he supported himself by setting type for a provincial newspaper, while Alexandrine Meley, his mistress—whom he later married—was still wrapping books at Hachette.
What initially
made his name, oddly enough, was not his writing but the great portrait of him by Manet, exhibited in the 1868 Salon, in which he appeared as the very figure of dynamism and modernity—seated at his desk, fierce in his bi-colored beard, talismanically backed by Chinese and Japanese prints and a copy of Manet’s own scandalous nude Olympia. Meanwhile, Taine had written to him, “I believe that the future of the novel consists of the story of the will, struggling and winning its way through the chaos and upheavals of society” (Mitterand, Album Zola, p. 98; see “For Further Reading”). The notion did not fall on deaf ears. Zola had been reading Balzac, after all. In 1868 he signed a contract with the Lacroix publishing house for a cycle of ten novels, The Story of a Family, to be delivered at a rate of two volumes a year and annually compensated at 6,000 francs; eventually there would be twenty books, published over twenty-two years, at a steadily increasing rate of pay. Zola had been researching feverishly in libraries, particularly on the subject of heredity. He drew up a family tree in order to get a visual grip on his collective subject, carefully distributing the clan around all the major divisions of society, which he saw as consisting of four principal worlds—workers, tradespeople, bourgeoisie, and nobility-and “one world apart: whores, murderers, priests, artists” (Mitterand, p. 99).
He set to work at his usual feverish pace, but his rhythm was immediately thrown off by events. The regime of Napoleon III was weakening then, and republican forces-among whom Zola figured—were increasing in strength, but their rise was countered by ever more repressive measures. Newspapers, including virtually all the ones to which Zola contributed, were suppressed for varying periods, while the most direct assault on the liberty of the press came when the journalist Victor Noir was shot and killed by a member of the Bonaparte family. Meanwhile, industrial strikes raged around the country. As is frequently the case when regimes find themselves imperiled, the panacea came in the form of war, in this case against the Prussians. In the summer of 1870, crowds gathered in the streets of Paris, shouting, “To Berlin!” By September, however, after its decisive defeat at Sedan, on France’s eastern frontier, the empire had fallen and the emperor was a prisoner in Germany. From September 19 to January 28, Paris was besieged by the Prussians, a brutal war of attrition that saw numerous deaths from famine and disease. Zola first fled to the south, but he could not keep himself away from power and intrigue; besides, he was broke. So he traveled to Bordeaux, site of the provisional government, and tried for an official post, but the best he could obtain was a temporary handout. He returned to Paris in the spring of 1871, this time equipped with an assignment as parliamentary correspondent for a newspaper. Shortly thereafter, the government moved to Versailles, and an insurrection—which was to become the Commune—broke out in Paris. Zola blithely commuted between the two camps, which were at war with one another, eventually being suspected by each of sympathy for the other. He lived through the bloody repression at the end of May, when the forces of Versailles invaded the city, and tried, with little success, to urge clemency for various Communards sentenced to death or exile.
By the fall of 1871 and the winter of 1872, when the first two volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series finally appeared, a month apart, Zola’s opinions had gotten him banned from the Parisian newspapers altogether—for the following four years his views on the passing scene would be reserved for the reading public of Marseilles—but he had become a much greater presence in the literary and artistic circles of the city; he now numbered among his friends Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Stéphane Mallarmé, Alphonse Daudet, and the Goncourt brothers. The third volume, Le Ventre de Paris (1873; The Belly of Paris), made an impression for its meticulous documentation of the great produce market Les Halles, a place every Parisian knew but few among the reading public knew intimately. Although Zola was inspired by the painters, and wished to give an account of Paris that would match the immediacy and visceral power of one of the urban canvases of Monet or Degas, the book also marked the birth of an enduring archetype: the journalist-novelist, who painstakingly works up a subject from firsthand research, sometimes in the process issuing less a novel than an illustrated thesis.
The seventh installment, L‘Assommoir (1877; The Dram Shop or The Drunkard) went even further, and can be considered both the first major work of naturalism and Zola’s first authentic masterpiece. Based on firsthand observation as well as on research by sociologists, L’Assommoir depicts the lives in the Parisian slums of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the marginal, bound together by alcohol. Where previous literary treatments of poverty and dissolution in France had sentimentalized and moralized, L‘Assommoir takes a nuanced view of its characters, who are rounded and memorable. L’Assomoir judges, but with sympathy and understanding, and it knows that blame for the worst of its characters’ behavior can be directly attributed to the inequalities of capitalist society. As a result, Zola was branded a socialist and a communard, terms not taken lightly then, a mere six years after the defeat of the insurrection. That did not, however, keep the book from a resounding popular success. The attraction was, naturally, prurient. The book exuded sexuality, of a sort that its readership would view as primordial, and there were many ancillary pleasures, such as its use of French slang, called argot, which had been around since the Middle Ages but studiously avoided by upper-case Literature. The government banned the sale of the book in train stations, but that had little effect on its runaway success, which can best be viewed in the light of its spin-offs: a play that ran for 300 performances, popular songs, pipes in the shape of characters’ heads, dishes printed with vignettes of major scenes.
One of the book’s minor characters, who appeared near the end of the story, was a little girl named Anna Coupeau, known as Nana. The daughter of Gervaise Macquart, who already had three sons by a previous relationship, and an alcoholic laborer named Coupeau, she was predestined for a life of waste and a miserable end, it appeared. Three years later, in 1880, Zola brought out the ninth in his series, Nana, which told the remainder of the story of Anna Coupeau. Besides the sketch in L‘Assommoir, the character had another source as well: Manet’s 1876 painting, also entitled Nana, which shows a young actress in deshabille in her dressing room, turning away from applying her makeup to look directly at the viewer with an assured, slightly calculating gaze, as a stout older suitor in top hat and tails sits waiting on a couch, bisected by the edge of the frame. Zola assembled her character from a series of prominent actresses and courtesans of the day, used various bits of gossip to inform the plot, pursued his research by simply being who he was by then: a man of the world and an attendee at the theaters, receptions, salons, and restaurants of le tout Paris. The notoriety of his book exceeded even that of L’Assommoir—the first printing consisted of 55,000 copies, an outrageous figure for the time. It was immediately adapted for the stage and launched songs and caricatures and denunciations.
By that time, the Naturalist school had been formally constituted, with Zola presiding over a coterie of slightly younger writers, of whom Joris-Karl Huysmans and Guy de Maupassant became the most prominent. Besides writing a series of critical works—Le Roman experimental (The Experimental Novel), the bible of Naturalism, was published in 1880, and the following year saw the publication of no fewer than four volumes of critical essays—he was issuing novels in the Rougon-Macquart series at a clip of nearly one per year. Pot-Bouille (1882; Restless House), the tenth, took the facade off a fashionable apartment building, unraveling the tangled lives within. Au Bonheur des dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight or A Ladies’ Paradise) , the eleventh, chronicled the life of a large department store. The thirteenth, Germinal (1885), was an uncompromising exposition of the misery of coal miners, and it galvanized the European labor movement. The fifteenth, La Terre (1887; Earth or The Soil), was his chronicle of the peasantry; its relative frankness about sexuality and bodily functions was enough to cause some of the more delicate Naturalists to separate themselves from their master. La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast or T
he Beast in Man) , the seventeenth, was inspired by Zola’s turn at jury duty; it is a study of homicidal pathology, set against the background of the railroads. The nineteenth, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle or The Collapse), his novel of war, was in its time the greatest success of the whole series.
His energy did not flag. After completing the Rougon-Macquart series he immediately embarked on Les Trois Villes (The Three Cities): Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898), the first two of which targeted the Catholic Church. Although Zola had at one point accepted an assignment from the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, causing a flurry of denunciations by the socialist press, he was by then unambiguously identified with the left; it was a period of sharply polarized political divisions that extended into nearly every aspect of French life. Clearly, although he was the country’s preeminent novelist and had been unopposed in that rank since the death of Flaubert in 1880, he would never be elected to the Académie Française. He had a broad base of popular support, but few allies at the top; although he was a rich man, his candor and moral resoluteness set him apart and made him anathema to the power brokers.
Thus it was that in 1898 he embarked upon the most significant episode of his life, which was only tangentially connected to literature. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a career officer, was accused of spying for the Germans, convicted, and sent to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Very soon indications began to turn up that Dreyfus had been falsely accused, targeted because he was Jewish. The incriminating documents had, it appeared, been forged by a certain Major Esterhazy. Zola, who examined the evidence, became convinced of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’s innocence. After Esterhazy was cleared by the military of any wrongdoing, Zola wrote an open letter to the president, Félix Faure, published on the front page of the newspaper L‘Aurore and given the resounding title “J’Accuse ... !” Zola directly accused the government of conspiracy in having tried and sentenced Dreyfus on the basis of forged evidence while deliberately concealing the existence of exculpatory material. In response, the government accused Zola of libel; his trial featured a parade of superior officers who accused him, in effect, of treason. Zola was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. He appealed, but the appeal languished, and in the meantime he was constantly attacked by anti-Semites and the right (the overlap between those two designations was nearly one hundred percent). The attacks occurred in the press, although they undoubtedly would have been physical had Zola been sufficiently imprudent to show himself in public, and they consisted of every possible form of insult, one journalist taking it upon himself to besmirch the life and career of Zola’s father and employing forged documents to make his case. When it appeared that Zola’s appeal would fail, his friends counseled voluntary exile, and he went off, under a pseudonym and leaving his family behind, to voluntary exile in England. It was nearly a year later that the Cour de Cassation, the highest appeals court in France, finally reversed Dreyfus’s conviction. Zola then returned, although his own sentence was never formally voided.