Émile Zola

Émile Zola (born April 2, 1840, Paris, France—died September 28, 1902, Paris) was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, and for his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair through his famous open letter, “J’accuse.”

Life

Though born in Paris in 1840, Zola spent his youth in Aix-en-Provence in southern France, where his father, a civil engineer of Italian descent, was involved in the construction of a municipal water system. The senior Zola died in 1847, leaving Madame Zola and her young son in dire financial straits. In Aix, Zola was a schoolmate of the painter Paul Cézanne, who would later join him in Paris and introduce him to Édouard Manet and the Impressionist painters.

Although Zola completed his schooling at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, he twice failed the baccalauréat exam, which was a prerequisite to further studies, and in 1859 he was forced to seek gainful employment. Zola spent most of the next two years unemployed and living in abject poverty. He subsisted by pawning his few belongings and, according to legend, by eating sparrows trapped outside his attic window. Finally, in 1862 he was hired as a clerk at the publishing firm of L.-C.-F. Hachette, where he was later promoted to the advertising department. To supplement his income and make his mark in the world of letters, Zola began to write articles on subjects of current interest for various periodicals; he also continued to write fiction, a pastime he had enjoyed since boyhood. In 1865 Zola published his first novel, La Confession de Claude (Claude’s Confession), a sordid, semiautobiographical tale that drew the attention of the public and the police and incurred the disapproval of Zola’s employer. Having sufficiently established his reputation as a writer to support himself and his mother, albeit meagerly, as a freelance journalist, Zola left his job at Hachette to pursue his literary interests.

In the following years Zola continued his career in journalism while publishing two novels: Thérèse Raquin (1867), a grisly tale of murder and its aftermath that is still widely read, and Madeleine Férat (1868), a rather unsuccessful attempt at applying the principles of heredity to the novel. It was this interest in science that led Zola, in the fall of 1868, to conceive the idea of a large-scale series of novels similar to Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), which had appeared earlier in the century. Zola’s project, originally involving 10 novels, each featuring a different member of the same family, was gradually expanded to comprise the 20 volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series.

La Fortune des Rougon (The Rougon Family Fortune), the first novel in the series, began to appear in serial form in 1870, was interrupted by the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July, and was eventually published in book form in October 1871. Zola went on to produce these 20 novels—most of which are of substantial length—at the rate of nearly one per year, completing the series in 1893.

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In the 1860s and ’70s Zola also defended the art of Cézanne, Manet, and the Impressionists Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in newspaper articles. During this period he was a constant presence at weekly gatherings of the painters at various studios and cafés, where theories about the arts and their potential interrelationships were vociferously debated. Zola’s friendship with Cézanne and the other artists was, however, irreparably damaged by the publication of his novel L’Oeuvre (1886; The Masterpiece), which depicts the life of an innovative painter who, unable to realize his creative potential, ends up hanging himself in front of his final painting. Cézanne, in particular, chose to see the novel as a thinly disguised commentary on his own temperament and talent.

In 1870 Zola married Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley, who had been his companion and lover for almost five years, and the young couple assumed the care of Zola’s mother. In the early ’70s Zola expanded his literary contacts, meeting frequently with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, and Ivan Turgenev, all successful novelists whose failures in the theatre led them to humorously refer to themselves as auteurs sifflés (“hissed authors”). Beginning in 1878 the Zola home in Médan, on the Seine River not far from Paris, served as a gathering spot for a group of the novelist’s disciples, the best-known of whom were Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, and together they published a collection of short stories, Les Soirées de Médan (1880; Evenings at Médan).

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As the founder and most celebrated member of the naturalist movement, Zola published several treatises to explain his theories on art, including Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel) and Les Romanciers naturalistes (1881; The Naturalist Novelists). Naturalism involves the application to literature of two scientific principles: determinism, or the belief that character, temperament, and, ultimately, behaviour are determined by the forces of heredity, environment, and historical moment; and the experimental method, which entails the objective recording of precise data in controlled conditions.

If Zola’s penchant for polemics and publicity led him to exaggerate his naturalist principles in his early writings, in later years, it can be said, rather, that controversy sought out the reluctant novelist. His publication of a particularly grim and sordid portrait of peasant life in La Terre in 1887 led a group of five so-called disciples to repudiate Zola in a manifesto published in the important newspaper Le Figaro. His novel La Débâcle (1892), which was openly critical of the French army and government actions during the Franco-German War (1870–71), drew vitriolic criticism from French and Germans alike. Despite Zola’s undisputed prominence, he was never elected to the French Academy, although he was nominated on no fewer than 19 occasions.

Although Zola’s marriage to Alexandrine endured until his death, the author had a fourteen-year affair with Jeanne Rozerot, one of his wife’s housemaids, beginning in 1888. Jeanne bore him his only children—Denise and Jacques—who were “recognized” by Madame Zola after her husband’s death.

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In 1898 Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair—that of a Jewish French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 sparked a 12-year controversy that deeply divided French society. At an early stage in the proceedings Zola had decided rightly that Dreyfus was innocent. On January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore, Zola published a fierce denunciation of the French general staff in an open letter beginning with the words “J’accuse” (“I accuse”). He charged various high-ranking military officers and, indeed, the War Office itself of concealing the truth in the wrongful conviction of Dreyfus for espionage. Zola was prosecuted for libel and found guilty. In July 1899, when his appeal appeared certain to fail, he fled to England. He returned to France the following June when he learned that the Dreyfus case was to be reopened with a possible reversal of the original verdict. Zola’s intervention in the controversy helped to undermine anti-Semitism and rabid militarism in France.

Zola’s final series of novels, Les Trois Villes (1894–98; The Three Cities) and Les Quatre Évangiles (1899–1903; The Four Gospels), are generally conceded to be far less forceful than his earlier work. However, the titles of the novels in the latter series reveal the values that underlay his entire life and work: Fécondité (1899; Fecundity), Travail (1901; Work), Vérité (1903; Truth), and Justice (which, ironically, remained incomplete).

Zola died unexpectedly in September 1902, the victim of coal gas asphyxiation resulting from a blocked chimney flue. Officially, the event was determined to be a tragic accident, but there were—and still are—those who believe that fanatical anti-Dreyfusards arranged to have the chimney blocked.

At the time of his death, Zola was recognized not only as one of the greatest novelists in Europe but also as a man of action—a defender of truth and justice, a champion of the poor and the persecuted. At his funeral he was eulogized by Anatole France as having been not just a great man, but “a moment in the human conscience,” and crowds of mourners, prominent and poor alike, lined the streets to salute the passing casket. In 1908 Zola’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon and placed alongside those of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Victor Hugo, other French authors whose works and deeds, like those of Zola, had changed the course of French history.