A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: French novelist and critic, the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature, a literary school that maintained that the novel should be scientific in a strict sense. Inspired by his readings in social history and medicine like Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine (1865), Zola decided to apply scientific techniques and observations to the depiction of French society under the Second Empire. He composed a vast series of novels in which the characters and their social milieus are impartially observed and presented in minute and often sordid detail. He illustrated this doctrine chiefly in a series of 20 novels published between 1871 and 1893 under the general title The Rougon-Macquart. In 1858 Zola moved with her to Paris. In his youth he started to write under the influence of the romantics. Zola's widowed mother had planned a career in law for him. Zola, however, failed his baccalaureate examination - as later did the writer Anatole France, who failed several times but finally passed. According to one story, Zola was sometimes so broke that he ate sparrows that he trapped on his window sill. Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840, the son of a gifted engineer of Venetian extraction, who had formed a company to supply Aix-en-Provence with a source of fresh water. Zola spent his childhood in Aix-en-Provence, southeast France, where the family moved in 1843. When Zola was seven, his father died before the project had been completed, leaving the family with money problems. Emilie Aubert, his mother, was largely dependent on a tiny pension. Despite this, Émile's boyhood and schooling at Aix were, on the whole, a happy period of his life. He retained a lasting affection for the sunbaked countryside of this part of France. One of his closest friends at school and his companion on many a summer's ramble was Paul Cézanne, the future painter, but they broked in later life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the bohemian life of painters in his novel L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886). In 1858 Zola and his mother moved to Paris, where he completed his rather sketchy education. For a few years after leaving school, he led a life of poverty verging on destitution. Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department of the publishing house of Louis-Christophe-Francois-Hachette. Here he learned much about the business and promotional sides of publishing and met several distinguished writers, among them the philosopher and literary historian Hippolyte Taine, whose ideas strongly influenced the development of Zola's thought. He also wrote literary columns and art reviews for the Cartier de Villemessant's newspapers. As a political journalist Zola did not hide his antipathy toward the French Emperor Napoleon III, who used the Second Republic as a springboard to become Emperor. During his formative years Zola wrote several short stories and essays, 4 plays and 3 novels. Among his early books was Stories for Ninon, which was published in 1864. When his sordid autobiographical novel Claude's Confession (1865) was published and received many critics and brought negative attention to him including the police, Zola was fired from Hachette. About 1868-1869, he conceived the idea of writing a series of interlinked novels tracing the lives of various members of a single family whose fortunes were to counterpoint the rise and fall of the Second Empire (1852-1870). He proposed in particular to demonstrate how the forces of heredity might influence the character and development of each individual descendant of a common ancestress. The scheme enabled him to apportion to each novel the analysis of a particular section of society, ranging from the upper stratum of high finance and ministerial authority down to the suffering masses starving in the slums or toiling in the mines. The Rougon-Macquart was originally planned in ten volumes, but ultimately the series comprised 20 volumes, ranging in subject from the world of peasants and workers to the imperial court. Zola prepared his novels carefully. The result was a combination of precise documentation, dramatic imagination and accurate portrayals. Zola interviewed experts, wrote thick dossiers based on his research, made thoughtful portraits of his protagonists, and outlined the action of each chapter. The first six volumes were largely ignored by the critics, although they included some powerful pieces of social satire. For example, The Rush for the Spoil (1872) dealt with real estate speculation; The Belly of Paris (1873) attacked the pusillanimous conservatism of the small-shopkeeper class; and His Excellency Eugène Rougon (1876) was an exposure of political jobbery. Only with the seventh, L'Assommoir (1877), did Zola finally produce a best seller that made him one of the most talked of writers in France and one of the most bitterly assailed. The plot of this novel is almost nonexistent. He contented himself with tracing the life story of a simpleminded, good-hearted laundress who lived in a working-class district in the north of Paris. By dint of hard work she achieves at first a modest prosperity, until her husband's increasing fecklessness and addiction to drink drag her down to utter destitution. For the title of his novel Zola used a contemporary slang word for a liquor store. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the 'hereditary' influence of violence, alcoholism, and prostitution in two branches of a single family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts, for five generations. Though in no sense a work of propaganda, L'Assommoir succeeded in drawing attention to the wretched conditions in which the urban proletariat had been living throughout the 19th century. Succeeding volumes of the Rougon-Macquart cycle included many others that were universally read, even though savagely condemned by conservative critics. In 1885 Zola published one of his finest works, Germinal. It was the first major work on a strike, based on his research notes on labor conditions in the coal mines. The book was attacked by right-wing political groups as a call to revolution. It was the first novel in which the possibility of a social revolution launched by the proletariat against the middle classes was seriously mooted. In his descriptions of the dangerous daily labor in the pits and of the rioting of the exasperated strikers, Zola achieved effects of agony and terror of a kind never before realized in literature. Nana (1880), another famous work of the author, took the reader to the world of sexual exploitation. Zola's tetralogy, The Four Gospels, which started with Fruitfulness (1899), was left unfinished. The Soil (1887) represents his attempt to do for the farm laborer what he had done for the miner in Germinal. The picture of rural life he offered was anything but idyllic, rape and murder being shown as the inevitable concomitants of the narrowness of the peasant's horizons and his atavistic land hunger. Finally, The Downfall (1892) gave an epic dignity to the story of France's calamitous defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870. The immense sales of his works enabled Zola, by 1878, to purchase a property outside Paris, at Médan, a hamlet where he lived quietly for most of the year, occasionally entertaining the younger writers who made up the vanguard of the short-lived naturalist school. Five of them collaborated with him in the production of a volume of short stories issued in 1880 under the title Soirées de Médan. Of these five, the two most talented, Guy de Maupassant and Joris Karl Huysmans, forswore their allegiance shortly afterward. Zola did, however, have important disciples outside France: Giovanni Verga in Italy, Eça de Queiros in Portugal, George Moore in England, and Frank Norris and Stephen Crane in the United States. Zola set out his fundamental theoretical beliefs in The experimental Novel (1880), but even he adhered very loosely to them in practice. Naturalism embraced many of the tenets of the older realist movement, such as an interest in average types rather than above-average individuals, the cultivation of a pessimistic and disillusioned outlook, a studious avoidance of surprising incident, and a strict obedience to consequential logic in plot development. The special innovation of naturalism lay in its attempt to fuse science with literature. This meant, in practice, that human behavior had to be interpreted along strictly materialistic or physiological lines and that the individual was to be shown as totally at the mercy of twin external forces, heredity and environment. Zola's private life was not free of strains. He married in 1870, but this union was childless. Then, in 1888, he set up a second home with a young seamstress, who bore him two children. This unexpected blossoming of domestic happiness probably accounts for the sunnier tone of the books he wrote after the completion of The Rougon-Macquart. They included a trilogy-- Lourdes, Rome, and Paris (1894-1898)--dealing with the conflict between science and religion, and a tetralogy of utopian novels, The Four Gospels, of which only the first three were completed. Zola had an ardent zeal for social reform. He was anti-Catholic and wrote many diatribes against the clergy and the Church. Zola's dramatic intervention on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus carried his name even further than had his literary work. Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been wrongfully condemned for espionage in 1894, and with much courage and recklessness of consequences Zola challenged the findings of the court-martial in an open letter to the President of the Republic (J'accuse, Jan. 13, 1898). The letter was published on the front page of the Paris daily, L'Aurore. The newspaper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, who decided that the controversial story would be in the form of an open letter to the President, Félix Faure. (J'accuse accused the government of antisemitism and of wrongfully placing the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus in jail. The case, known as the Dreyfus affair, had divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church, and the more liberal commercial society. Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 9 June 1899, and was convicted on 23 February, sentenced, and removed from the Legion of Honor. He declared that Dreyfus' conviction and removal to a prisoners island came after a false accusation of espionage and was a miscarriage of justice. Rather than go to jail, he fled to England. But soon he was allowed to return in time to see the government fall. The government offered Dreyfus a pardon (rather than exoneration), which he could accept and go free and so effectively admit that he was guilty, or face a re-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again. Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon. In 1906, Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court. Zola died in Paris on 29 September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62 years old. His death may not have been accidental as the inquest found. There is reason to believe that he was the victim of an assassination plot engineered by a few of the more fanatical of his political enemies. His enemies were blamed, but nothing was proven. (Decades later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to have closed the chimney for political reasons.) Zola was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, but on 4 June 1908, almost six years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon. |
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