by Emile Zola
Towards the railway itself the novel is ambivalent. On the one hand it is seen as the symbol and embodiment of progress. To the present-day reader some aspects of rail travel represented in the novel, such as foot-warmers, travelling rugs, luncheon baskets, ‘ladies only’ compartments and even the steam engines themselves, will appear rather antiquated. Even for readers of the novel in 1890 there may have been an outmoded feel to some of the scenes depicted, for Zola is attempting to describe things not as they were at the time the novel was first published but as they had been twenty years previously. Despite this, he is at pains to emphasize the modernity and the modernizing impact of the railways. The railways are seen as changing long-established patterns of living.14 Séverine is able to travel from Le Havre to Paris and back in a day. The young businessman from Le Havre travels to Paris every week. His fellow passenger, an American, professes to make the journey from New York to Paris every three weeks. This is no doubt an exaggeration, yet it points to the future. Rail travel, along with faster, steam propelled ocean-going liners, one of which is launched in Le Havre amid great festivities on the day after Grandmorin is murdered, is bringing the towns and cities of the world closer together and making access to them easier. The happy young mother who comes close to being murdered by Jacques in the train to Auteuil tells how, the previous summer, she and her family had enjoyed a six-week holiday in a remote part of Brittany, followed in September by a four-week stay at her father-in-law’s in Poitou, and how she now plans to spend the rest of the winter at Cannes. Such a pursuit of fresh air and sunshine would hardly have been possible a generation earlier. For Monsieur Dabadie, the stationmaster at Le Havre, the railway is an instrument of international commercial exchange. ‘He took little interest in the running of the passenger station, concentrating instead on the dock traffic and the enormous transhipment of cargo that passed through the goods yard. He was in constant touch with major companies in Le Havre and all over the world’ (III). Zola draws attention to the new architecture that the railways engendered - the spacious halls of glass and steel at the Gare Saint-Lazare - and to the new mechanics of locomotive engineering. The novel conveys an exhilarating sense of what a journey by train in 1869 might have been like - the unprecedented speed of travel, the new experience of being whisked across rivers, carried over viaducts high above the landscape, rushed through tunnels and seeing whole towns pass by the window in less time than it takes to draw breath. The influence of the railways is suggested in more subtle ways: in the heightened sense of life being measured by the clock and even in the availability of certain sorts of food and drink - Roubaud’s Gruyère cheese and tin of sardines and Jacques’s bottle of Malaga wine. In ways such as these the railway is presented as the agent of change from the old to the new. The image of technological advance and material progress was one which the Second Empire, not without some justification, was happy to show to the world. Within the thematic topography of Zola’s novel, the railway as a symbol of progress stands at the opposite extreme to the atavistic killer instinct that dogs his central protagonist. This alignment of opposing principles underpins the whole novel.
But the novel also places question marks against the modernizing influence of the railway. Aunt Phasie can make little sense of the endless succession of trains that rushes past her window. The trains are crowded with people who seem to be in a great hurry to get somewhere, but she has little idea where they come from, where they are going to or what their purpose might be. Aunt Phasie cannot relate to the frantic pace and restless urgency of the world that the railway seems to typify. She is puzzled by the fact that each train that passes so close to her house contains more people than she has met in the whole of her life, yet she knows none of them and realizes that none of them are even aware of her existence. For Aunt Phasie the railway has created a disturbing sense of a world that is anonymous and depersonalized. The faces that pass by in the trains are ‘an indistinct blur, all merging into each other and all ending up looking alike’ (II). Even Jacques, her own adopted son, whom she looks out for every time his train goes by, comes and goes so quickly that she barely has time to return his wave. The same sense of anonymity and depersonalization lies behind Flore’s disregard for the innocent victims of the train crash she causes. Aunt Phasie’s reaction to the bright new future that the railway is said to be leading towards, in which ‘all the peoples of the world ... would soon be one big family’ (II), is one of scepticism. Her reaction is to a large extent a product of her own personal disappointments; whatever benefits the railway may have brought for others, none of them have come her way. But Aunt Phasie’s disenchantment is supported elsewhere in the novel by the image of the railway as a colossus stretching itself across the country, soulless and triumphant, ‘wilfully disregarding whatever shreds of humanity survived on either side of it’ (II), and even more forcibly by the image that ends the novel of a trainload of soldiers being carried out of control towards the carnage of war. Both of these images present the railway as a mechanical, inhuman and destructive force.
Alongside descriptions of the railway, which might be classed as objective representations of observed reality, there are descriptions which function as suggestive poetry. The first time the railway is mentioned in the novel it is described in terms of a physical assault on the city of Paris; the railway line and the station have been ‘gouged out’ (I) of the Quartier de l’Europe. Towards the end of the first chapter, as the night express on which Grandmorin will be murdered prepares to leave Paris, a mist gathers, and a damp chill fills the air. A red light pierces the darkness ‘like a splash of blood’. Shapes loom out of the mist. Sounds are heard - giant gasps of breath ‘like someone dying of a fever’ and sudden sharp whistles ‘like the screams of women being violated’ (I). At this point in the novel the reader has already heard of Grandmorin’s abuse of Séverine, has seen the violence of Roubaud’s reaction and has been alerted to an imminent act of murder. The sombre description of the railway station echoes the violence that has been perpetrated and intimates the violence that is to come. It offers an image of the world of darkness and confusion into which the novel is about to escort us. In general terms Zola presents the trains, undoubtedly with a degree of hyperbole, as monsters belching smoke and flames, passing by with the force of a hurricane, making the ground shake like an earthquake and deafening the world with their noise. Descriptions of this sort provide a running accompaniment to the violence that pervades the novel. The sexually rooted nature of the violence that is done is also underscored by repeated descriptions of the railway and its trains in terms of sexual imagery. The train entering and emerging from tunnels has lent itself to what may seem to the present-day reader to have become a range of rather clichéd metaphors of sexual arousal and penetration. This was not the case at the time Zola was writing. Zola uses such imagery in a resourceful and frequently poignant way. Flore walks resolutely to her end by entering a tunnel in the face of an approaching express. She unfastens her blouse and lets it hang from her shoulders. As the train enters the tunnel she walks towards it as if to greet a woman friend. The moment of impact, ‘the final embrace’, is described as ‘a last gesture of defiance and revolt’. The half-naked corpse is recovered an hour later. The head is ‘a terrible mess’ but the rest of the body is ‘without a mark’, ‘remarkably beautiful - strong and unblemished’ (X). Zola’s description contains complex and inexhaustible associations of a female assertion of identity and independence, of female despair and self-sacrifice, of male dominance and aggressiveness and also, surprisingly perhaps, of male innocence. The episode suggests much more than it says. In a less intensely dramatic vein, the monotonous, mechanical routine of Misard’s job as a section operator echoes the dehumanized, joyless nature of his existence and the systematic, relentless way in which he undermines his wife’s health. The part played by the railway in the novel is thus much more than an incidental setting or background; the railway becomes an active ingredient in the novel’s discourse of sex
ual attrition and violence.
In its account of the judiciary and the law the novel is at its most politicized and polemical. Two judicial inquiries and the trial which follows them result in a travesty of justice, and one which is sanctioned not only by those directly responsible for controlling the operation of the law, but also by the government and ultimately by the Emperor himself. To make matters worse, the public is led to believe that justice has been done and that the process of law has resulted in a singular triumph of right-mindedness and decency.
In France during the Second Empire, as now, the judiciary was an instrument of executive authority rather than an authority separate from government. It was overseen by the Ministry of Justice, whose officers were answerable directly to the Emperor. At a time of more authoritarian rule, as under Napoleon III, such an arrangement rendered the law subject to pressure from above, especially when it had to deal with cases that might prove embarrassing to the state, and even more so if such cases occurred at times of political uncertainty. The inquiry into the murder of Grandmorin, a respected High Court judge who has received an official decoration and who regularly attends gatherings at the imperial palace, but who also, it is rumoured, leads a life of unrestrained profligacy, is immediately identified as being politically sensitive. Moreover the inquiry occurs at a moment when the government is under considerable pressure, being threatened with its first ever electoral defeat.
It is Monsieur Camy-Lamotte, the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Justice, who has the responsibility of ensuring that the government is not compromised and that the judicial investigation is kept under tight control. The fact that such an operation is delegated by the Minister of Justice to someone who is less in the public eye (Camy-Lamotte is the equivalent of a permanent under-secretary) is itself a face-saving political manoeuvre: Camy-Lamotte knows that if things go wrong, he will have to carry the can. Zola makes it quite clear in which direction Camy-Lamotte’s loyalties lie. His sole concern is the reputation of the government he serves. Justice itself he regards as a ‘wearisome business’ (V) and something which, if he can find discreet ways of doing so, he is perfectly prepared to override. He turns a blind eye to the questionable morality of Grandmorin’s private life; in fact Grandmorin’s apparently unquenchable sexual appetite is something he envies. If Camy-Lamotte has any interest in ascertaining the truth, it is ‘in order, if necessary, to conceal it’ (IV). Camy-Lamotte, it seems, is called upon regularly to deal with these ‘more delicate matters’ (V) and is summoned to the imperial palace almost daily; the sort of scandal which the Grandmorin affair risks exposing is clearly not an isolated case. The Secretary-General is presented as a shrewd, cynical and ruthless manipulator, operating from the heavily curtained secrecy of his private residence in Paris and prepared to employ every means at his disposal to protect the interests of his political masters. He knows exactly how to use the established process of law to his own advantage. In France in the nineteenth century investigation into a crime was passed to the judiciary at an early stage and placed in the hands of an ‘examining magistrate’ (juge d‘instruction). The examining magistrate’s investigation (instruction) was conducted in private. If there was insufficient evidence, the case would be dismissed. If the examining magistrate felt that there was a case to be answered, it would be forwarded for trial by jury in an open court (cour d’assises).15Camy-Lamotte is able to intervene in the process of law at the stage of the preliminary inquiry, before the case is sent for public trial. He is able to bring direct pressure to bear on the man responsible for conducting the inquiry and does so both by exercising his authority and by a mixture of flattery and enticement. Initially Monsieur Denizet, the examining magistrate, is simply ordered not to reach any decision until he has received instructions from the ministry. His continued compliance is secured by a vague promise of a better-paid position in Paris and by the offer of a decoration. Denizet is only allowed to forward the case to a public trial when Camy-Lamotte is confident that scandal can be averted. Camy-Lamotte, having made inquiries of his own, knows full well that the eventual trial is based on a completely erroneous case for prosecution and that the accused will be wrongly convicted. This is of little concern to him and he is happy to withhold and finally destroy the evidence he has in his possession which would prove how false the indictments against the accused are. In doing this, Camy-Lamotte himself commits a criminal offence. If Camy-Lamotte is able to manipulate Denizet in this way, it is because Denizet, unlike most others in the legal profession (Camy-Lamotte himself included), has not had the advantage of inherited wealth or influential friends to help him on his way. The judiciary is represented as a hive of nepotism and venality, where nonentities such as Grandmorin’s son-in-law, Lachesnaye, and the young protégés of Grandmorin’s sister, Madame Bonnehon, rise quickly to positions of importance, whilst the efforts of capable and deserving men such as Denizet go unrewarded. Camy-Lamotte, being in charge of all official appointments, is able to exploit Denizet’s long-frustrated desire for recognition and promotion, and his fear that one mistake on his part in dealing with such a sensitive case might spell the end of his career. Although Denizet is a pawn in Camy-Lamotte’s political game, he himself is also partly to blame for the final miscarriage of justice. He is initially presented as a conscientious, hard-working lawyer, dedicated to the cause of justice. His weakness, however, is that he has a conceited and exaggerated sense of his own abilities. What starts out as a single-minded concern to establish the truth is quickly overtaken by a desire to demonstrate his superior gifts of intelligence and perspicacity. Zola presents Denizet’s misguided investigation in a series of sustained and carefully contrived ironies. Denizet describes the exact manner of Grandmorin’s murder and instantly dismisses it on the grounds of sheer impossibility. His belief that it was Cabuche who murdered Grandmorin is confirmed by Roubaud’s patently fictitious description of the murderer, a description which simultaneously convinces Jacques that the murderer was Roubaud. Denizet allows himself to be persuaded by intuition and instinct rather than proof. He ‘knows’ that Cabuche is a murderer because he displays the murderer’s characteristic appearance and manner of behaviour, and is all the more convinced because, as he puts it in a piece of curiously convoluted logic, ‘if we can’t prove it was him, we can’t prove it was anybody’ (V). His final reconstruction of events is described as ‘a work of art’, a piece of creative inventiveness besides which the truth itself ‘would have appeared ... more far-fetched and even fantastical’ (XII). To the general public, the unassailable logic of Denizet’s conclusions stands out with ‘blinding’ certainty. Zola ensures, however, that the reader is supplied with enough of the truth to be able to see at every step in Denizet’s inquiry how close he comes to it, how quickly he loses sight of it and how readily he embraces his own fictions. For the reader, the court-room drama consists not in seeing a crime exposed and a criminal brought to book, but in seeing justice itself being systematically abused. Having wrongly condemned those it has brought to trial, it is the judiciary itself that stands accused. Grandmorin, Camy-Lamotte, Denizet, Roubaud, Séverine, Jacques and Cabuche are all fictional characters. The murders in the novel are also fictional. But the novel’s representation of the judicial inquiry and trial by jury are accurate reflections of Second Empire practice and procedure. If Zola finds a place in the novel for some measure of sympathy for his murderers, he offers no such olive branch to the perverters and mishandlers of justice. The novel presents a sustained critique of judicial practice under the Second Empire. Here can distinctly be heard the voice that in 1898 was to speak out so courageously against the injustice done to Dreyfus.16
If the voice of justice is silenced, it is because those in power require it to be and provide the means of ensuring that it is. Zola’s critique of judicial practice extends by implication to a broader critique of the closed and repressive nature of Second Empire politics. The action of the novel takes place between mid-February 1869 and July 1870, a period
which sounded the death knell of the Second Empire. From its inception in December 1852, the Second Empire had proved itself to be an autocratic regime. Even before being proclaimed Emperor, Louis Napoleon had made it clear that he was determined to exercise personal power. ‘I shall never submit to any attempt to influence me ... I respect those whose ability and experience enable them to give me good advice ... But I follow only the promptings of my mind and heart ... I shall march straight forward ... with conscience my only guide.’17 National policy was to be determined by the Emperor himself, ensconced in his palace at the Tuileries. The Emperor appointed (and dismissed) all ministers of state, who were obliged to swear an oath of loyalty to him and to attend an audience at the palace every week. The Assemblée legislative (Legislative Assembly), which was charged with converting national policy into law, was given only limited powers. Members of the upper house were appointed by the Emperor and met in secret. Members of the lower house, which could ratify or reject but not initiate or amend legislation, were elected by male suffrage. But the elections were carefully managed. Certain candidates were designated as ‘official’ candidates and it was the responsibility of Prefects in the various départements of France (again appointed directly by the Emperor) to ensure that these ’official’ candidates were elected. This was achieved by tight control of publicity and election propaganda, with the result that very few opposition candidates were elected to the Assembly during the whole period of the Second Empire.18 The Empire also took steps to ensure that discussion and criticism of public affairs in the press was similarly controlled. It promoted ‘official’ government newspapers (such as L’Opinion nationale) and exercised rigorous censorship over the opposition press. By 1869 opposition to such a ‘closed’ form of government had gained considerable momentum, and the 1869 elections to the Legislative Assembly provided it with a focal point. The Empire had been obliged to adopt a more liberal attitude towards the press a year earlier, and the run-up to the elections saw the creation of a number of new opposition newspapers. Zola himself contributed articles to three of them (La Tribune, Le Gaulois and La Cloche) between 1868 and 1872. Criticism of the regime certainly had the effect of rallying opposition from all sides (from Republicans on the left to Orleanists on the right). In Paris, attendance at electoral meetings averaged 20,000 nightly, and rioting was commonplace.19 In the event, opposition candidates polled 3.5million votes compared with 4.5million votes for the ‘official’ candidates. This represented the most serious challenge to its authority that the Second Empire had ever faced. The Emperor was forced to agree to demands for a more liberal form of government. On 8 May 1870 a new constitution was voted on by plebiscite and overwhelmingly approved. The so-called ‘Liberal Empire’, however, was to be a very short-lived affair. No sooner had the new constitution been approved than France was mobilizing for war against Prussia. By September 1870, the French had suffered a series of military defeats, the Emperor had been taken prisoner and France had been proclaimed a Republic.