by Emile Zola
Zola’s subject was clearly topical. Banking scandals were not confined to France, and in England the fraudulent speculations of the notorious swindler John Sadleir lay behind Dickens’s creation of the unscrupulous banker Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit (1857). Eighteen years later, in 1875, just a few years outside the time-frame of Money, Anthony Trollope created the grand-scale swindler Melmotte, a man of mysterious foreign origins, in The Way We Live Now. Melmotte’s ambitious schemes at times seem to echo those of Saccard, wrapping the pursuit of profit in a mantle of philanthropy: ‘he would be able to open up new worlds, to afford relief to the oppressed nationalities of the over-populated old countries.’6 But his schemes are only words and air, and unlike Saccard he leaves nothing of value behind him, finally ending his life with a dose of prussic acid, whereas Saccard goes on to further ventures. It is striking that one of the arguments offered in defence of Melmotte’s risky activities—‘You have to destroy a thousand living creatures every time you drink a glass of water, but you do not think of that when you are athirst …’7—is very like Saccard’s dismissal of worry about the damage his risky activities may cause: ‘As if life bothered about such matters! With every step we take, we destroy thousands of existences’ (p. 357).
In France, a number of novels on the Bourse and on banking had already been written. Among them was La Comtesse Shylock (1885) by G. d’Orcet, which stressed the dominance of Jews in the banking world. Count Shylock, as Henri Mitterand points out,8 has much in common with Gundermann, being based on the same figure: James de Rothschild. The novel also includes a Baroness Brandorff, addicted to playing the market like Zola’s Baroness Sandorff, as well as an idealist dreamer not dissimilar to Sigismond Busch. It is reasonable to assume that Zola read La Comtesse Shylock, but he takes a wider overview of the banking crash, showing the way the financial world interlocks with the politics and the economy of the time, and introducing the clash between capitalism and socialism. Above all, Zola makes of the subject an epic allegory, dominated by the riveting figure of Saccard.
Saccard
Whether the novel is seen primarily as a socio-political study, a financial document, or a penetrating and poetic reflection on a society on the brink of disaster, the figure of Saccard clearly dominates it. Villain or hero, he is a peculiarly fascinating creation, one who seems indeed to have fascinated his creator. Zola does not usually allow a character to return as frequently as Saccard in the annals of the Rougon-Macquart family.9 In The Fortune of the Rougons (La Fortune des Rougon) Aristide Rougon is an opportunistic republican journalist, who swiftly becomes Bonapartist when success beckons on that side. He changes his name to Saccard in The Kill (La Curée), commenting: ‘there’s money in that name’, and makes a great fortune in property speculation in the wake of Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris. The Saccard of Money is a more complex and ambiguous figure than the Saccard of The Kill, showing moments of compassion and remorse in the midst of his ruthlessness.
A great dynamic force, he is physically only a small figure, frequently seen stretching upward to gain height—an apt metaphor for the impatient ambition evident from the moment he enters the novel. He sees himself as a Napoleon of finance, aiming to achieve with money what Napoleon failed to achieve with the sword. He is also, as his son Maxime remarks, ‘the poet of the million’. Money is his sword, his delight, his obsession. Even for philanthropic purposes, with no motive of personal gain, as in his dealings with Princess d’Orviedo, he is captivated by the sheer joy of manipulating large sums of money. Fired by ambitious schemes of grandeur, Saccard turns money into magic; it is the royalty of gold, it is a magic wand, conjuring the magic that runs right through the novel in the tinkling of fairy gold, the barrels of treasure straight out of the Arabian Nights, the enchanted cash desks, the magic wand of money and science working together. Saccard dreams of rivers, even oceans, of gold, the dance of millions, which will create grand, colossal things.
In his meeting with the Hamelins, brother and sister, Saccard’s exuberant imagination takes wing, as he imagines the wonders to be performed, and makes the dreams of the Hamelins his own:
‘Look,’ cried Saccard, ‘this Carmel Gorge in this drawing of yours, where there’s nothing but stones and mastic trees, you’ll see, once the silver mine gets going, first a village will spring up, then a town… … And on these depopulated plains, these deserted passes, where our railway lines will run, a veritable resurrection, yes! The fields will cease to lie fallow, roads and canals will appear, new cities will rise from the ground and life will at last return… Yes! Money will perform these miracles.’ (p. 65)
It is Saccard’s energy that produces what he later calls ‘the pickaxe of progress’, his Universal Bank, to sponsor these vast enterprises and at the same time satisfy what seems at times an almost physical, fetishistic need to see ‘heaps of gold’ and ‘hear their music’. His recklessness manifests itself as soon as the Universal is launched, and illegality follows illegality. He aims to wrest control of the Bourse away from Gundermann, and will use every available means to that end. With Jantrou, he makes use of the growing power of the Press; the newspaper he purchases supports the bank with advertising and also provides potential leverage on the government by supporting or attacking the minister Rougon’s policies in its pages. After its first triumph over the leaking of the peace treaty after Sadowa, the Universal goes from strength to strength, with Saccard increasing the bank’s capital and using ‘frontmen’ to buy the bank’s own shares. The share-prices rocket ever upward, and even Gundermann, relying on the force of logic to bring the bank down, is almost on the point of giving up against this seemingly unstoppable success. It is the treachery of Baroness Sandorff that tips the scales and leads to the destruction of the Universal, and it is Saccard’s sexual appetite that has made that possible. In defeat Saccard stands resolutely beside his habitual pillar in the Bourse, not deigning to sit down until the moment of weakness when he thinks of ‘the enormous mass of humble folk, wretched little investors who would be crushed to pieces under the wreckage of the Universal’ (p. 308). Then he allows himself at last to sit, revealing a Saccard capable of real compassion—as he had indeed shown earlier in his dealings with the charitable Work Foundation.
Zola amply signposts Saccard’s energy, creativity, and sexuality: the scene of Saccard caught in flagrante with Sandorff is surprisingly explicit, and his lustfulness is further demonstrated in his frequent visits to ‘actresses’ like Germaine Coeur, and his extravagant but unsuccessful bidding for the favours of pretty little Madame Conin. At times Saccard becomes positively phallic, as in his triumph at countering Gundermann’s first attack on the Universal, when he is described as having really swollen and grown bigger. He succeeds in buying a night with Madame de Jeumont for a grotesquely huge sum, and parades her vaingloriously at the ball where, however, Bismarck watches them go by with an ironic smile. The smile is amply justified if Saccard here represents the dissolute society of the Empire, or even Napoleon III himself, who at Sedan would be crushed by the Prussians, accompanied by King Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. Saccard becomes a metaphor for energy, sexual vitality, creativity, at times seeming the embodiment of money itself, creative and destructive, capable of much good and much evil. In his audacity, Saccard is indeed a Napoleon of finance, and like Napoleon he has his ‘Austerlitz’. But he also meets his Waterloo when he is left on the trading-floor, waiting in vain for the promised troops from Daigremont, just as Napoleon at Waterloo awaited in vain the troops of Grouchy.
The fortunes of Saccard parallel the fortunes of the Empire, both reaching a peak with the Universal Exhibition of 1867, the ‘Exposition Universelle’, the extravagant world fair held in Paris under the auspices of Napoleon III, where forty-two nations were represented. The Empire is making a great display, and so is Saccard’s ‘Universal’, with its new, extravagantly palatial premises. If the Universal Bank is built on sand and lies, as Madame Caroline remarks, so, Zola suggests, is the Empire its
elf, as it promotes itself with false glamour. On the day when the Emperor in person awards the prizes to the exhibitors, the event is described as a huge fairy-tale lie. The Emperor presents himself as ‘master of Europe, speaking with calmness and strength and promising peace’ (p. 234) on the very day that news had come of the execution of Maximilian.10 Saccard’s glittering bank, with its coffers full of gold, is also a huge fairy-tale lie; this is fairy gold that will not stand the light of day. When the Exhibition is over, Paris is left still giddy and intoxicated with Second Empire extravagance, not realizing that Krupp’s splendid cannon, greatly admired in the Exhibition, would quite soon be pounding the city. At the end of the novel Saccard is bankrupt and so is the Empire, leaving France open to invasion and defeat: the Bourse, now deserted, is seen against a fiery sky that prefigures the fires that would rage through Paris in the violent days of the Commune: ‘Twilight was falling, and the winter sky, laden with mist, had created behind the monument of the Bourse a cloud of dark and reddish smoke as if from a fire, as if made from the flames and dust of a city stormed’ (p. 336).
Madame Caroline
It is a central paradox of the novel that Madame Caroline, seen by Zola as a sort of ‘chorus’ for his drama, the voice of morality and legality, should fall in love with Saccard, the financial pirate. Having fallen into his arms almost inadvertently after an emotional shock, Madame Caroline berates herself for her weakness, but Saccard’s dynamism and energy again win her over. She shares his dreams of what ‘the all-powerful magic wand of science and speculation’ (p. 64) might achieve, and caught up by his enthusiasm she even finds him handsome and charming, though Madame Caroline is not endowed by Zola with anything like Saccard’s sexuality or passion. He stresses above all her prudence and her frustrated maternal instincts, a frustration she shares with Princess d’Orviedo. It is largely on the basis of a quasi-maternal affection that she becomes Saccard’s mistress, but when she learns of his affair with Baroness Sandorff she discovers, with a shock, that she really loves him. Her feeling for Saccard is one of the rare examples of genuine love in the novel: the other is the touching love of the Jordan couple, blessed as it is by their expected child.
Throughout the novel Madame Caroline provides a moral commentary on the character and conduct of Saccard as she tries to restrain his reckless illegalities, countering his excesses with her moderation and good sense. But he will not be restrained, and in the end, after promising so much, Saccard brings ruin, misery, and even death to his victims. Madame Caroline, the moral compass of the novel, condemns and curses the man she loved and almost sinks into despair. Her brother, however, persuades her to go and see the imprisoned Saccard. In their last interview Madame Caroline finally tells Saccard what has become of Victor, the illegitimate son he now regrets never having seen, and for the first time she sees him in tears. Unlike Hamelin, Saccard is not peacefully resigned. He demands—with some justification, given the weaknesses of the case against him and the vengeful involvement of Delcambre, the Public Prosecutor—to know why he and Hamelin are singled out for punishment. What about the directors who made huge amounts of money? And the auditors? Why are they all able to get away with it? If there were any justice, he argues, they and the heads of the major banks of Paris would be sharing his fate—questions and views that may strike a chord in contemporary Europe. Saccard’s belief in himself is still unshaken, and Madame Caroline marvels at his irresponsible assurance. Yet, as she feels once more his astonishing strength and vitality she finds her anger dissolving, and there is a moment of subdued tenderness between them before they finally part.
In the final chapter Zola takes Madame Caroline all over Paris, linking up with almost all the main characters, starting with Princess d’Orviedo from whom she learns of the rape of Alice de Beauvilliers by the fifteen-year-old Victor at the Work Foundation—that institution built to help and educate the poor. Seeing again its lavish splendour, she asks herself what was the point of it all if it couldn’t even turn one wretched boy into an honest citizen? Victor is now roaming at large, with no one to try to deliver him from his viciousness. The Beauvilliers have lost everything, with Alice raped, the son of the family dead, and what little money they had left lost in the collapse of Saccard’s bank. Madame Caroline witnesses the atrocious scene in which Busch manages to deprive the Countess of the last bits of her family jewellery, and yet when Sigismond dies she is able, with characteristic tolerance and kindness, to feel sympathy and pity even for Busch in his agony at his brother’s death.
Looking for help from Saccard’s other son, Maxime, Madame Caroline finds him just about to set off to Naples for the winter. Reflecting once more on the huge difference between Saccard’s two sons, Madame Caroline wonders if it is poverty that has made Victor a voracious wolf, and wealth that has made Maxime an elegant, idle dandy? When she finds the little girls in the Work Foundation saying prayers for Saccard, she is at first outraged, but then reminds herself that he had indeed been kind to them, and to many others at the Work Foundation, as well as to people like the Jordans, whom he befriended and helped. Perhaps she could forgive herself for having loved him. Looking back once more on her ‘fall’, and her guilty love for a man she could not esteem, she feels able to ease her shame, recognizing that a man may do much harm, yet also have much good in him. Madame Caroline now learns that Saccard has gone to the Netherlands, where he is already working on drainage schemes, reclaiming land from the sea. Hamelin is revisiting the places that feature in the maps and pictures that Madame Caroline now takes down from the walls, before going to join him. Saccard had promised so much, failed so badly, done so much damage, and yet some of those promised miracles have indeed happened. Hamelin, writing from the Carmel Gorge, tells her:
a whole population had grown up there… The village, at first of five hundred inhabitants, clustering round the workings of the mine, was at present a city of several thousand souls, a whole civilization, with roads, factories, and schools, creating life in this dead and savage place… And wasn’t this the awakening of a world, with an expanded and happier humanity? (p. 371)
It is the realization of at least part of what Saccard had so enthusiastically prophesied, and money, filthy as it might be, had accomplished it. Money might be a dung-heap, but it was also the compost in which the future would grow. Saccard had argued that love itself can sometimes be sordid, and money, similarly, may be filthy but fruitful.
The novel is a mighty allegory, but not in terms of simple one-to-one correspondences: each figure is multiple, a nexus of meanings and contradictions. Madame Caroline herself, with all her good sense, does not entirely preserve her integrity; she is, after all, imperfect, but, as she herself suggests early on in the novel, her case is, ‘in microcosm, the case of all humanity’ (p. 62).
In the telegraphic style of his preparatory notes, Zola wrote: ‘I should like, in this novel, not to conclude on disgust with life (pessimism). Life, just as it is, but accepted, in spite of everything, for love of itself, in its strength.’ This was what he wanted to emerge from the whole Rougon-Macquart series. He had put much of himself into Madame Caroline, with her indestructible love of life and stubborn joy in being alive, and it is left to her at the end to bring all the paradoxes together, underlining the coexistence of good and evil in an imperfect but always interesting world.
Economics and Politics
Money reflects a sophisticated view of the economy, and it also shows economic concerns as deeply embedded in the social milieu, affecting both public and private life at every level. The people involved in speculation with the Universal Bank cover a huge social range—from pensioners with small savings to country priests, relatively well-off bourgeois, and aristocrats, both penurious and wealthy. Politics too plays an integral part. It is not by accident that the first chapter of the novel introduces references to political events that will affect the lives of the characters, and indeed the life of France and its people. Three of the political issues raised in the conver
sation in Champeaux’s restaurant recur throughout the book: Mexico, Rome, and the foreign policy of Prussia. All three exemplify the weaknesses—some might say follies—of the foreign policy pursued under Napoleon III. In Mexico, the attempt to gain a foothold in the country through French military intervention, while the United States was preoccupied with the Civil War, failed dismally after only three years, ending with the execution of Maximilian, the emperor Napoleon III had chosen for Mexico. In the matter of Rome and the Italian Wars of Independence, Napoleon III’s intervention to defend the Pope was driven as much by domestic politics and the need to keep the Catholics on side as by foreign-policy considerations. Italy was being created, with French support, out of a patchwork of small states, some controlled by Austria and some by the Pope. The decision to prevent the Papal States, including Rome, from being absorbed into Italy, with the use of 2,000 troops in 1867, as well as being expensive and ultimately ineffective, alienated those who supported the liberal cause of Italian nationalism while leaving the Catholics thoroughly dissatisfied.
Moser’s references to the matter of the Duchies, wrested from Denmark by Prussia and Austria, not only serve to tie the novel into actual events of the period but also draw attention again to the inadequacies of the regime’s foreign policy. When Moser remarks that ‘when big fish start eating the little fish you can’t tell where it will all end…’ (p. 6), the reader is reminded of the end that lies in store. Bismarck was already steadily creating the German Confederation while France did nothing: ‘In a few short years Bismarck had overturned the European balance of power and France, under the incompetent and vainglorious guidance of Napoleon III, found herself facing a politically unified and increasingly aggressive Germany.’11