Zola, Émile

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ZOLA, ÉMILE

ZOLA, ÉMILE (1840–1902), French novelist who founded the naturalism movement in literature.

The second half of the nineteenth century in France was less prolific of great creative artists who made their presence felt in the realm of politics. A notable exception was Émile Zola.

Born in Paris on 2 April 1840, Zola grew up in Aix-en-Provence where his father, an expatriate Italian engineer, had been engaged to build the dam and canal that now bear his name. Zola's father died in 1847, shortly before construction began, leaving his family in straitened circumstances. Swindled of shares in the canal company, his widow, Emilie, initiated a lawsuit that lasted for years and haunted her son's childhood and adolescence. Zola attended the Collège Bourbon on a scholarship. His classmates there included Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), with whom he formed a close friendship.

After Emilie Zola's case was done inching through provincial courts, she followed it to a higher tribunal in Paris. The year was 1857. Zola completed secondary school up north, at the lycée Saint-Louis, in a troubled state of mind. Wanting a literary career but burdened with expectations that he would imitate his father, he failed the baccalaureate examination. This calamity, which coincided with the final, disappointing adjudication of Emilie's suit, proved to be a blessing in disguise, for in 1862 Zola found employment at the publishing house of Hachette and by 1866 had become its publicity director.

Zola's four years at Hachette shaped his future. He came under the influence of a house author, the philosopher Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (1828–1893), whose seminal work, Histoire de la littérature française (1862–1863), propagated the idea that cultural traits, works of art, and even metaphysical pieties, far from being independent of nature, belong to the material world and warrant material analysis. Epitomized in a celebrated formula—race, milieu, moment (race, environment, historical moment)—this view of human affairs would imbue Zola's fiction when, during the 1860s, he began to write novels. His animus against literary conventions extended to the realm of fine art, where the École des Beaux-Arts held sway, exercising its academic custodianship through the annual state exhibition, the Salon. In 1865, Zola, guided by Cézanne, took up the cudgels for avant-garde painting in a long article on Edouard Manet (1832–1883), later published under separate cover.

Distinctly unconventional was Zola's first important work of fiction, Thérèse Raquin (1867), which reflected his preoccupation with the theories of heredity that abounded in midcentury France. Ten years after the imperial regime had prosecuted Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) for his "assault on public morals" in Madame Bovary (and lost), it thought better of bringing similar charges against Zola, but Thérèse Raquin nonetheless enjoyed a succès de scandale, with one critic citing it as a prime example of crude realism, or what he dubbed la littérature putride.

One year later, Zola drafted the outline of a saga that was eventually to fill twenty volumes and bear the comprehensive title Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire. Work on it began in great earnest after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871).

Zola's purposes in Les Rougon-Macquart were to trace the ramification of a single family through the whole of French society between 1851 and 1870, to describe the various milieux its members inhabit, and to show heredity manifesting itself in the ghosts that pursue them. While earning his livelihood in journalism, he found time to compile for each novel a file or dossier préparatoire often bulkier than the novel itself. His motto, nulla dies sine linea, served him well. "No day without a line" resulted in few years without a novel. Journalism supported him until 1876, when the seventh installment of his saga, L'Assommoir—a story that unfolds in a Paris slum—achieved commercial success. Zola's powerful portrayal of the dissoluteness to which poverty lends itself went hand in hand with his exploitation of working-class argot. Thenceforth, every work he produced was a bestseller.

Fame attracted followers. Since 1872 Zola had been a reverent confrere of Flaubert, at whose flat he joined Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897), and Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) every Sunday afternoon during the winter season. Now he became a maître à penser in his own right, marshalling his entourage, which included Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) and Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), under the banner of naturalism. Well-schooled in publicity, he favored slogans that linked his aesthetics to scientific thought of the day. Claude Bernard's An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) is evoked throughout his critical work, where "naturalism," "physiology," and "experimental" recur with the obsessiveness of a mantra. This jargon did not please all his protégés—least of all Maupassant, who chafed at wearing labels. More importantly, it slighted the imaginative brilliance of his own work. During the last few decades of the twentieth century literary scholars, hostage no longer to Zola's polemical gloss, elucidated the art of his fiction and the mythic structures that demonstrate his affinity to the Romantic generation of French writers.

Zola's politics were no less complex than his artistic personality. He gave an excellent account of himself as a parliamentary reporter after the Franco-Prussian War, but came to hate political debate for distracting the public from literary conversation. He wrote stories that exposed the misery of the working class but excoriated the Communards of 1871. Zola the literary baron who fancied himself a captain of industry in his own domain (and a worthy heir of François Zola, who would have acquired great wealth had he lived long enough) idealized Fourierist utopianism in a late novel, Le Travail. Attacked by the Right as a saboteur of venerable institutions and by the Left for describing rather too vividly the moral degradation of slum dwellers, he contributed to liberal papers and conservative alike.

Of his devotion to the Republic there was never any doubt, however. When, in 1896, two years after the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) and his transportation to Devil's Island, a journalist named Bernard Lazare (1865–1903) asked Zola to join the small party of Dreyfusards in their campaign to exculpate the captain, he agreed with the alacrity of a man eager as much to avenge the unjust verdict of his mother's trial as to unmask the military establishment. The Dreyfus affair truly became an Affair when L'Aurore

published Zola's celebrated indictment, "J'accuse," on the front page of its 13 January 1898 issue. Only then did the cause gain adherents all over France, indeed, throughout Europe. Vilified by the anti-Republican, anti-Semitic opposition, Zola fled to England rather than risk imprisonment for slander and lived in hiding outside London until June 1899, when evidence supporting his allegations came to light. The Dreyfus affair inspired La Vérité, the fourth novel of his unfinished tetralogy, Les Quatres Évangiles.

Zola died in 1902 of asphyxiation from a defective flue. Suspicions linger to the present day that he was the victim of an anti-Dreyfusard conspiracy. Six years after his death, his remains were reinterred in the Pantheon, alongside those of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).

bibliography

Primary Sources

Zola, Émile. Oeuvres complètes. 15 vol. Paris, 1966–1969. The two principal editions of the Rougon-Macquart are in the Bibliothèque Pléiade (5 vols., edited by Henri Mitterand; Paris, 1960) and in the Bouquins series (3 vols., edited by Colette Becker; Paris, 1991).

——. Correspondance de Émile Zola. 12 vols. Edited by B. H. Bakker. Montreal, 1978–1995. Compiled by a team of French and Canadian scholars.