Émile Zola
Encyclopedia
Émile François Zola was a French
writer
, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism
and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism
. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus
, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse
.
in 1840. His father, François Zola (originally Francesco Zolla), was an Italian engineer. With his French wife Émilie Aurélie Aubert, the family moved to Aix-en-Provence
in the southeast, when he was three years old. Four years later in 1847, his father died leaving his mother on a meager pension. In 1858 the Zolas moved to Paris, where Émile's childhood friend Paul Cézanne
soon joined him. Zola started to write in the romantic
style. His widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile but he failed his Baccalauréat
examination.
Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for a publisher (Hachette
). He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had successfully run for the office of President under the constitution of the French Second Republic
, only to misuse this position as a springboard for the coup d'état
that made him emperor
.
During his early years, Émile Zola wrote several short stories and essays, four plays and three novels. Among his early books was Contes à Ninon, published in 1864. With the publication of his sordid autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude (1865) attracting police attention, Hachette fired him. His novel Les Mystères de Marseille appeared as a serial in 1867.
After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin
(1867), Zola started the series called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire
. In Paris Zola maintained his friendship with Cézanne who painted a portrait of him with another friend from Aix-en-Provence writer Paul Alexis
entitled Paul Alexis reading to Zola.
. Unlike Balzac
who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine
, Zola from the start at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol
and prostitution
which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution
. The series examines two branches of a family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts for five generations.
As he described his plans for the series, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."
Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood, they broke in later life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian
life of painters in his novel L'Œuvre
(The Masterpiece, 1886).
From 1877 with the publication of l'Assommoir
, Émile Zola became wealthy, he was better paid than Victor Hugo
, for example. He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant
, Joris-Karl Huysmans
and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Germinal in 1885, then the three 'cities', Lourdes in 1894, Rome in 1896 and Paris in 1897, established Zola as a successful author.
The self-proclaimed leader of French naturalism, Zola's works inspired operas such as those of Gustave Charpentier
, notably Louise
in the 1890s. His works, inspired by the concepts of heredity
(Claude Bernard
), social manichaeism
and idealistic socialism
, resonate with those of Nadar
, Manet
and subsequently Flaubert
.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish artillery officer in the French army. When the French intelligence found information about someone giving the German embassy military secrets, anti-semitism seems to have caused senior officers to suspect Dreyfus, though there was no direct evidence of any wrongdoing. Dreyfus was court-martialled, convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island
in French Guiana
.
Lt. Col. Georges Picquart
came across evidence that implicated another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
and informed his superiors. Rather than move to clear Dreyfus, the decision was made to protect Esterhazy and ensure the original verdict was not overturned. Major Hubert-Joseph Henry
forged documents that made it seem that Dreyfus was guilty and then had Picquart assigned duty in Africa. Before leaving, Picquart told some of Dreyfus's supporters what he knew. Soon Senator August Scheurer-Kestner took up the case and announced in the Senate that Dreyfus was innocent and accused Esterhazy. The right-wing government refused new evidence to be allowed and Esterhazy was tried and acquitted. Picquart was then sentenced to 60 days in prison.
Émile Zola risked his career and more on 13 January 1898, when his "J'accuse", 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
. Émile Zola's "J'Accuse" accused the highest levels of the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism by having wrongfully convicted Alfred Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. The case, known as the Dreyfus affair, divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church and the more liberal commercial society. The ramifications continued for many years; on the 100th anniversary of Zola's article, France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix
, apologized for its antisemitic editorials during the Dreyfus Affair. As Zola was a leading French thinker, his letter formed a major turning-point in the affair.
Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 7 February 1898 and was convicted on 23 February and removed from the Legion of Honor
. Rather than go to jail, Zola fled to England. Without even having had the time to pack a few clothes, he arrived at Victoria Station on 19 July. After his brief and unhappy residence in London
, from October 1898 to June 1899, 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 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. Emile Zola said, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." In 1906, Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court.
The 1898 article by Émile Zola is widely marked in France as the most prominent manifestation of the new power of the intellectuals (writers, artists, academicians) in shaping public opinion
, the media and the state.
Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning
caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62 years old. His enemies were blamed because of previous attempts on his life but nothing could be proved. (Decades later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to have closed the chimney for political reasons). Addresses of sympathy arrived from all parts of France; for a week the vestibule of his house was crowded with notable writers, scientists, artists and politicians, who came to inscribe their names in the registers. On the other hand, Zola's enemies used the opportunity to celebrate in malicious glee. Thus, Henri Rochefort wrote a piece in "L'Intransigeant
", claiming Zola had committed suicide, having discovered Dreyfus to be in fact guilty. 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
, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo
and Alexandre Dumas.
novels are a panoramic account of the Second French Empire
. They are the story of a family principally between the years 1851 and 1871. These 20 novels contain over 300 major characters, who descend from the two family lines of the Rougons and Macquarts and who are related. In Zola’s words, which are the subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart series, they are "L’Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire"("The natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire").
Most of the Rougon-Macquart novels were written during the French Third Republic
. To an extent, attitudes and value judgments may have been superimposed on that picture with the wisdom of hindsight. The débâcle in which the reign of Napoleon III of France
culminated may have imparted a note of decadence to certain of the novels about France in the years before that disastrous defeat. Nowhere is the doom laden image of the Second Empire
so clearly seen as in Nana
, which culminates in echoes of the Franco-Prussian War
(and hence by implication of the French defeat). Even in novels dealing with earlier periods of Napoleon III’s reign the picture of the Second Empire is sometimes overlaid with the imagery of catastrophe.
In the Rougon-Macquart novels, provincial life tends to be overshadowed by Zola’s preoccupation with the capital. Only in his picture of rural working-class life in La Terre
and in the corresponding picture of industrial working-class life in Germinal
, does Zola convincingly escape from Paris into the provinces. The life of provincial towns is an even more noticeable omission from his achievement, for only in Le Rêve
and in the twice repeated picture of Plassans (modeled upon his childhood home, Aix-en-Provence) does he achieve such a portrait (La Fortune des Rougon
, La Conquête de Plassans
). Le Docteur Pascal has the same setting but cannot properly be termed a novel of provincial life. La Débâcle
, the military novel is set for the most part in country districts of eastern France; its dénouement takes place in the capital during the civil war leading to the suppression of the Paris Commune
. Like Balzac, Zola’s imagination was roused by Paris and all that the capital represented to him.
and expounded by him in Introduction à la médecine expérimentale. Claude Bernard’s experiments were in the field of clinical physiology
, those of the Naturalist writers (Zola being their leader) would be in the realm of psychology
. Balzac, Zola claimed had already investigated the psychology of lechery in an experimental manner, in the figure of Hector Hulot in La Cousine Bette
. Essential to Zola’s concept of the experimental novel was dispassionate observation of the world, with all that it involved by way of meticulous documentation. Each novel should be based upon a dossier. With this object in view he visited the colliery of Anzin
in northern France, in February 1884 when a strike was on; he visited La Beauce
(for La Terre
), Sedan, Ardennes (for La Débâcle
) and travelled on the railway line between Paris and Le Havre
(when researching La Bête humaine
). Zola sometimes professed his awareness that the work of any creative artist must by its very nature be subjective.
For a writer who so strongly asserted the claim of Naturalist literature to be an experimental analysis of human psychology, Zola has seemed to many critics like György Lukács, to be strangely deficient in the power of creating life-like and memorable characters. These critics admit his ability to evoke powerful and moving crowd scenes but argue that he lacked the ability to create memorable characters, in the manner of Honoré de Balzac
or Charles Dickens
and the ability to make his characters true to life. It was important to Zola that no character should appear larger than life; but the criticism that Zola’s characters are cardboard, is a substantially more damaging one which in view of the characterization of Gervaise Macquart (L'Assommoir
), Nana Coupeau (Nana
), Jacques Lantier (La Bête humaine
), Serge Mouret (La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
), Jean Macquart (La Terre
) and Pascal Rougon (Le Docteur Pascal), may seriously be doubted. Zola, by refusing to make any of his characters larger than life (if that is what he has indeed done), did not inhibit himself from also achieving verisimilitude.
Although Zola would not accept that it was either scientifically or artistically justifiable to create larger-than-life characters, his work does present a number of larger-than-life symbols which, like the mine Le Voreux in Germinal
, take on the nature of a surrogate human life. The mine, the still in L'Assommoir
and the locomotive La Lison in La Bête humaine
impress the reader with the vivid reality of human beings. The great natural processes of seedtime and harvest, death and renewal in La Terre
are instinct with a vitality which is not human but is the elemental energy of life. Human life is raised to the level of the mythical as the hammerblows of Titans
are seemingly heard underground at Le Voreux or in La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
, the walled park of Le Paradou encloses a re-enactment – and restatement – of the myth of the Book of Genesis. This is the visionary aspect of the Rougon-Macquart series.
The poet is the artist in words whose writing, as in the racecourse scene in Nana
or in the descriptions of the laundry in L'Assommoir
or in many passages of La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
, Le Ventre de Paris
and La Curée
, vies with the colourful impressionistic techniques of Claude Monet
and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
. The scientist is the believer in some measure of scientific determinism – not that this, despite his own words “dépourvus de libre arbitre”, need always amount to a philosophical denial of free will
. The creator of “la littérature putride”, a term of abuse invented by an early critic of Thérèse Raquin
(a novel which predates Les Rougon-Macquart
series), emphasizes the squalid aspects of the human environment and upon the seamy side of human nature.
The optimist is that other face of the scientific experimenter, the man with an unshakable belief in human progress. Zola bases his optimism on innéité and on the supposed capacity of the human race to make progress in a moral sense. Innéité is defined by Zola as that process in which “se confondent les caractères physiques et moraux des parents, sans que rien d'eux semble s’y retrouver”; it is the term used in biology to describe the process whereby the moral and temperamental dispositions of some individuals are unaffected by the hereditary transmission of genetic characteristics. Jean Macquart and Pascal Rougon are two instances of individuals liberated from the blemishes of their ancestors by the operation of the process of innéité.
Evident in Le Docteur Pascal, and again in Fécondité (which is not part of the Rougon-Macquart series), is Zola's conviction that as scientific research makes progress step by step and from generation to generation, so by slow degrees but in a similarly steadfast manner the moral progress of the human race will be achieved as the environmental faults of particular societies are swept away, as (through innéité) the hereditary failings of particular families are overcome and as on a universal scale – in novels beyond the framework of the Rougon-Macquart series – humanity unites in brotherhood.
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism
Naturalism (theatre)
Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings Naturalism is a...
. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...
, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse
J'accuse (letter)
"J'accuse" was an open letter published on January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L'Aurore by the influential writer Émile Zola.In the letter, Zola addressed President of France Félix Faure, and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General...
.
Early life
Zola was born in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1840. His father, François Zola (originally Francesco Zolla), was an Italian engineer. With his French wife Émilie Aurélie Aubert, the family moved to Aix-en-Provence
Aix-en-Provence
Aix , or Aix-en-Provence to distinguish it from other cities built over hot springs, is a city-commune in southern France, some north of Marseille. It is in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in the département of Bouches-du-Rhône, of which it is a subprefecture. The population of Aix is...
in the southeast, when he was three years old. Four years later in 1847, his father died leaving his mother on a meager pension. In 1858 the Zolas moved to Paris, where Émile's childhood friend Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
soon joined him. Zola started to write in the romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
style. His widowed mother had planned a law career for Émile but he failed his Baccalauréat
Baccalauréat
The baccalauréat , often known in France colloquially as le bac, is an academic qualification which French and international students take at the end of the lycée . It was introduced by Napoleon I in 1808. It is the main diploma required to pursue university studies...
examination.
Before his breakthrough as a writer, Zola worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for a publisher (Hachette
Louis Christophe François Hachette
Louis Christophe François Hachette was a French publisher.He was born at Rethel in the Ardennes département of France. After studying three years at prestigious École Normale Supérieure with the view of becoming a teacher, he was in 1822 on political grounds expelled from the seminary...
). He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers. As a political journalist, Zola did not hide his dislike of Napoleon III, who had successfully run for the office of President under the constitution of the French Second Republic
French Second Republic
The French Second Republic was the republican government of France between the 1848 Revolution and the coup by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte which initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité...
, only to misuse this position as a springboard for the coup d'état
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
that made him emperor
French coup of 1851
The French coup d'état on 2 December 1851, staged by Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte , ended in the successful dissolution of the French National Assembly, as well as the subsequent re-establishment of the French Empire the next year...
.
Career
After his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin
Thérèse Raquin
Thérèse Raquin is the title of a novel and a play by the French writer Émile Zola. The novel was originally published in serial format in the journal L'Artiste and in book format in December of the same year.-Plot introduction:Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman, unhappily married to...
(1867), Zola started the series called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
. In Paris Zola maintained his friendship with Cézanne who painted a portrait of him with another friend from Aix-en-Provence writer Paul Alexis
Paul Alexis
Paul Alexis was a French novelist, dramatist, and journalist. He is best remembered today as the friend and biographer of Émile Zola.-Life:...
entitled Paul Alexis reading to Zola.
Literary output
More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-MacquartLes Rougon-Macquart
Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to a cycle of twenty novels by French writer Émile Zola. Subtitled Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire , it follows the life of a fictional family living during the Second French Empire and is an example of French...
. Unlike Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
, Zola from the start at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol
Alcohol
In chemistry, an alcohol is an organic compound in which the hydroxy functional group is bound to a carbon atom. In particular, this carbon center should be saturated, having single bonds to three other atoms....
and prostitution
Prostitution
Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...
which became more prevalent during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
. The series examines two branches of a family: the respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable (illegitimate) Macquarts for five generations.
As he described his plans for the series, "I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."
Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood, they broke in later life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
life of painters in his novel L'Œuvre
L'Œuvre
L'œuvre is the fourteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was first serialized in the periodical Gil Blas beginning in December 1885 before being published in novel form by Charpentier in 1886....
(The Masterpiece, 1886).
From 1877 with the publication of l'Assommoir
L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir is the seventh novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Usually considered one of Zola's masterpieces, the novel—a harsh and uncompromising study of alcoholism and poverty in the working-class districts of Paris—was a huge commercial success and established...
, Émile Zola became wealthy, he was better paid than Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, for example. He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents....
, Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...
and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Germinal in 1885, then the three 'cities', Lourdes in 1894, Rome in 1896 and Paris in 1897, established Zola as a successful author.
The self-proclaimed leader of French naturalism, Zola's works inspired operas such as those of Gustave Charpentier
Gustave Charpentier
Gustave Charpentier, , born in Dieuze, Moselle on 25 June 1860, died Paris, 18 February 1956) was a French composer, best known for his opera Louise.-Life and career:...
, notably Louise
Louise (opera)
Louise is an opera in four acts by Gustave Charpentier to an original French libretto by the composer, with some contributions by Saint-Pol-Roux, a symbolist poet and inspiration of the surrealists....
in the 1890s. His works, inspired by the concepts of heredity
Heredity
Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...
(Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...
), social manichaeism
Manichaeism
Manichaeism in Modern Persian Āyin e Māni; ) was one of the major Iranian Gnostic religions, originating in Sassanid Persia.Although most of the original writings of the founding prophet Mani have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived...
and idealistic socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
, resonate with those of Nadar
Nadar (photographer)
Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon , a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. Some photographs by Nadar are marked "P. Nadar" for "Photographie Nadar" .-Life: born in April 1820 in Paris...
, Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
and subsequently Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
.
The Dreyfus affair
Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish artillery officer in the French army. When the French intelligence found information about someone giving the German embassy military secrets, anti-semitism seems to have caused senior officers to suspect Dreyfus, though there was no direct evidence of any wrongdoing. Dreyfus was court-martialled, convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island
Devil's Island
Devil's Island is the smallest and northernmost island of the three Îles du Salut located about 6 nautical miles off the coast of French Guiana . It has an area of 14 ha . It was a small part of the notorious French penal colony in French Guiana until 1952...
in French Guiana
French Guiana
French Guiana is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. It has borders with two nations, Brazil to the east and south, and Suriname to the west...
.
Lt. Col. Georges Picquart
Georges Picquart
Marie Georges Picquart , was a French army officer and Minister of War. He is best known for his role in the Dreyfus Affair.-Early career:...
came across evidence that implicated another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy
Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was a commissioned officer in the French armed forces during the second half of the 19th century who has gained notoriety as a spy for the German Empire and the actual perpetrator of the act of treason for which Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused...
and informed his superiors. Rather than move to clear Dreyfus, the decision was made to protect Esterhazy and ensure the original verdict was not overturned. Major Hubert-Joseph Henry
Hubert-Joseph Henry
Hubert-Joseph Henry , French Lieutenant-Colonel in 1897 involved in the Dreyfus affair. Arrested for having forged evidence against Alfred Dreyfus, he was found dead in his prison cell...
forged documents that made it seem that Dreyfus was guilty and then had Picquart assigned duty in Africa. Before leaving, Picquart told some of Dreyfus's supporters what he knew. Soon Senator August Scheurer-Kestner took up the case and announced in the Senate that Dreyfus was innocent and accused Esterhazy. The right-wing government refused new evidence to be allowed and Esterhazy was tried and acquitted. Picquart was then sentenced to 60 days in prison.
Émile Zola risked his career and more on 13 January 1898, when his "J'accuse", was published on the front page of the Paris daily L'Aurore
L'Aurore
L’Aurore was a literary, liberal, and socialist newspaper published in Paris, France, from 1897 to 1914. Its most famous headline was Émile Zola’s “J'Accuse”, concerning the Dreyfus Affair. It was published by eventual Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.- External links:* Digitized issues of...
. The newspaper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles at the...
, who decided that the controversial story would be in the form of an open letter
Open letter
An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally....
to the President, Félix Faure
Félix Faure
Félix François Faure was President of France from 1895 until his death.-Biography:Félix François Faure was born in Paris, the son of a small furniture maker...
. Émile Zola's "J'Accuse" accused the highest levels of the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism by having wrongfully convicted Alfred Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. The case, known as the Dreyfus affair, divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church and the more liberal commercial society. The ramifications continued for many years; on the 100th anniversary of Zola's article, France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix
La Croix
La Croix is a daily French general-interest Roman Catholic newspaper. It is published in Paris and distributed throughout the country, with a circulation of just under 110,000 as of 2009...
, apologized for its antisemitic editorials during the Dreyfus Affair. As Zola was a leading French thinker, his letter formed a major turning-point in the affair.
Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 7 February 1898 and was convicted on 23 February and removed from the Legion of Honor
Légion d'honneur
The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
. Rather than go to jail, Zola fled to England. Without even having had the time to pack a few clothes, he arrived at Victoria Station on 19 July. After his brief and unhappy residence in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, from October 1898 to June 1899, 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 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. Emile Zola said, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." In 1906, Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court.
The 1898 article by Émile Zola is widely marked in France as the most prominent manifestation of the new power of the intellectuals (writers, artists, academicians) in shaping public opinion
Public opinion
Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views....
, the media and the state.
Death
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning occurs after enough inhalation of carbon monoxide . Carbon monoxide is a toxic gas, but, being colorless, odorless, tasteless, and initially non-irritating, it is very difficult for people to detect...
caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62 years old. His enemies were blamed because of previous attempts on his life but nothing could be proved. (Decades later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to have closed the chimney for political reasons). Addresses of sympathy arrived from all parts of France; for a week the vestibule of his house was crowded with notable writers, scientists, artists and politicians, who came to inscribe their names in the registers. On the other hand, Zola's enemies used the opportunity to celebrate in malicious glee. Thus, Henri Rochefort wrote a piece in "L'Intransigeant
L'Intransigeant
L'Intransigeant was a French newspaper, founded in July 1880 by Henri Rochefort. Initially representing the left-wing opposition, it developed towards the right during the Boulangism affair and became a major right-wing newspaper by 1920s. The newspaper was vehemently anti-Dreyfusard, reflecting...
", claiming Zola had committed suicide, having discovered Dreyfus to be in fact guilty. Zola was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
but on 4 June 1908, almost six years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon
Panthéon, Paris
The Panthéon is a building in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve and to house the reliquary châsse containing her relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens...
, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
and Alexandre Dumas.
Scope of the Rougon-Macquart series
Zola’s 20 Rougon-MacquartLes Rougon-Macquart
Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to a cycle of twenty novels by French writer Émile Zola. Subtitled Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire , it follows the life of a fictional family living during the Second French Empire and is an example of French...
novels are a panoramic account of the Second French Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
. They are the story of a family principally between the years 1851 and 1871. These 20 novels contain over 300 major characters, who descend from the two family lines of the Rougons and Macquarts and who are related. In Zola’s words, which are the subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart series, they are "L’Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire"("The natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire").
Most of the Rougon-Macquart novels were written during the French Third Republic
French Third Republic
The French Third Republic was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France...
. To an extent, attitudes and value judgments may have been superimposed on that picture with the wisdom of hindsight. The débâcle in which the reign of Napoleon III of France
Napoleon III of France
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was the President of the French Second Republic and as Napoleon III, the ruler of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I, christened as Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte...
culminated may have imparted a note of decadence to certain of the novels about France in the years before that disastrous defeat. Nowhere is the doom laden image of the Second Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
so clearly seen as in Nana
Nana (novel)
Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, the object of which was to tell "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire", the subtitle of the series.-Origins:A year...
, which culminates in echoes of the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
(and hence by implication of the French defeat). Even in novels dealing with earlier periods of Napoleon III’s reign the picture of the Second Empire is sometimes overlaid with the imagery of catastrophe.
In the Rougon-Macquart novels, provincial life tends to be overshadowed by Zola’s preoccupation with the capital. Only in his picture of rural working-class life in La Terre
La Terre
La Terre is a novel by Émile Zola, published in 1887. It is the fifteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. The action takes place in a rural community in La Beauce, an area of northern France...
and in the corresponding picture of industrial working-class life in Germinal
Germinal
Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France...
, does Zola convincingly escape from Paris into the provinces. The life of provincial towns is an even more noticeable omission from his achievement, for only in Le Rêve
Le Rêve (novel)
Le rêve is the sixteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola.The novel was published by Charpentier in October 1888 and translated into English by Eliza E. Chase as The Dream in 1893...
and in the twice repeated picture of Plassans (modeled upon his childhood home, Aix-en-Provence) does he achieve such a portrait (La Fortune des Rougon
La Fortune des Rougon
La Fortune des Rougon, originally published in 1871, is the first novel in Émile Zola's monumental twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart...
, La Conquête de Plassans
La Conquête de Plassans
La Conquête de Plassans is the fourth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. In many ways a sequel to the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon , this novel is again centred on the fictional Provençal town of Plassans and its plot revolves around a sinister...
). Le Docteur Pascal has the same setting but cannot properly be termed a novel of provincial life. La Débâcle
La Débâcle
La Débâcle is a novel by Émile Zola published in 1892, the penultimate in les Rougon-Macquart series. The story is set against the background of the political and military events that ended the reign of Napoléon III and the Second Empire in 1870, in particular the Franco-Prussian War, the Battle...
, the military novel is set for the most part in country districts of eastern France; its dénouement takes place in the capital during the civil war leading to the suppression of the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
. Like Balzac, Zola’s imagination was roused by Paris and all that the capital represented to him.
Quasi-scientific purpose
In Le Roman expérimental and Les Romanciers naturalistes Zola expounded the purposes of the 'Naturalist' novel. The experimental novel was to serve as a vehicle for scientific experiment, analogous to the experiments conducted by Claude BernardClaude Bernard
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...
and expounded by him in Introduction à la médecine expérimentale. Claude Bernard’s experiments were in the field of clinical physiology
Physiology
Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
, those of the Naturalist writers (Zola being their leader) would be in the realm of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
. Balzac, Zola claimed had already investigated the psychology of lechery in an experimental manner, in the figure of Hector Hulot in La Cousine Bette
La Cousine Bette
La Cousine Bette |Bette]]) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and...
. Essential to Zola’s concept of the experimental novel was dispassionate observation of the world, with all that it involved by way of meticulous documentation. Each novel should be based upon a dossier. With this object in view he visited the colliery of Anzin
Anzin
Anzin is a commune in the Nord department in northern France.It lies on the Scheldt, 1-½ miles northwest of Valenciennes, of which it is a suburb.-History:...
in northern France, in February 1884 when a strike was on; he visited La Beauce
Beauce
Beauce is a natural region in northern France, located between the Seine and Loire rivers. It now comprises the Eure-et-Loir département and parts of Loiret, Essonne and Loir-et-Cher. The region shared the history of the province of Orléanais and the county of Chartres, which is its only major...
(for La Terre
La Terre
La Terre is a novel by Émile Zola, published in 1887. It is the fifteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. The action takes place in a rural community in La Beauce, an area of northern France...
), Sedan, Ardennes (for La Débâcle
La Débâcle
La Débâcle is a novel by Émile Zola published in 1892, the penultimate in les Rougon-Macquart series. The story is set against the background of the political and military events that ended the reign of Napoléon III and the Second Empire in 1870, in particular the Franco-Prussian War, the Battle...
) and travelled on the railway line between Paris and Le Havre
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...
(when researching La Bête humaine
La Bête humaine
La Bête Humaine is an 1890 novel by Émile Zola. The story has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions. It is based around the railway between Paris and Le Havre in the 19th century and is a tense, psychological thriller....
). Zola sometimes professed his awareness that the work of any creative artist must by its very nature be subjective.
Characterization
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
or Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
and the ability to make his characters true to life. It was important to Zola that no character should appear larger than life; but the criticism that Zola’s characters are cardboard, is a substantially more damaging one which in view of the characterization of Gervaise Macquart (L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir is the seventh novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Usually considered one of Zola's masterpieces, the novel—a harsh and uncompromising study of alcoholism and poverty in the working-class districts of Paris—was a huge commercial success and established...
), Nana Coupeau (Nana
Nana (novel)
Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, the object of which was to tell "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire", the subtitle of the series.-Origins:A year...
), Jacques Lantier (La Bête humaine
La Bête humaine
La Bête Humaine is an 1890 novel by Émile Zola. The story has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions. It is based around the railway between Paris and Le Havre in the 19th century and is a tense, psychological thriller....
), Serge Mouret (La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret is the fifth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village.The plot centres on the...
), Jean Macquart (La Terre
La Terre
La Terre is a novel by Émile Zola, published in 1887. It is the fifteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. The action takes place in a rural community in La Beauce, an area of northern France...
) and Pascal Rougon (Le Docteur Pascal), may seriously be doubted. Zola, by refusing to make any of his characters larger than life (if that is what he has indeed done), did not inhibit himself from also achieving verisimilitude.
Although Zola would not accept that it was either scientifically or artistically justifiable to create larger-than-life characters, his work does present a number of larger-than-life symbols which, like the mine Le Voreux in Germinal
Germinal
Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France...
, take on the nature of a surrogate human life. The mine, the still in L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir is the seventh novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Usually considered one of Zola's masterpieces, the novel—a harsh and uncompromising study of alcoholism and poverty in the working-class districts of Paris—was a huge commercial success and established...
and the locomotive La Lison in La Bête humaine
La Bête humaine
La Bête Humaine is an 1890 novel by Émile Zola. The story has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions. It is based around the railway between Paris and Le Havre in the 19th century and is a tense, psychological thriller....
impress the reader with the vivid reality of human beings. The great natural processes of seedtime and harvest, death and renewal in La Terre
La Terre
La Terre is a novel by Émile Zola, published in 1887. It is the fifteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. The action takes place in a rural community in La Beauce, an area of northern France...
are instinct with a vitality which is not human but is the elemental energy of life. Human life is raised to the level of the mythical as the hammerblows of Titans
Titan (mythology)
In Greek mythology, the Titans were a race of powerful deities, descendants of Gaia and Uranus, that ruled during the legendary Golden Age....
are seemingly heard underground at Le Voreux or in La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret is the fifth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village.The plot centres on the...
, the walled park of Le Paradou encloses a re-enactment – and restatement – of the myth of the Book of Genesis. This is the visionary aspect of the Rougon-Macquart series.
Zola’s optimism
In Zola there is the theorist and the imaginative writer, the poet, the scientist and the optimist.The poet is the artist in words whose writing, as in the racecourse scene in Nana
Nana (novel)
Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, the object of which was to tell "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire", the subtitle of the series.-Origins:A year...
or in the descriptions of the laundry in L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir
L'Assommoir is the seventh novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Usually considered one of Zola's masterpieces, the novel—a harsh and uncompromising study of alcoholism and poverty in the working-class districts of Paris—was a huge commercial success and established...
or in many passages of La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret is the fifth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village.The plot centres on the...
, Le Ventre de Paris
Le Ventre de Paris
Le Ventre de Paris is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It is set in and around Les Halles, the enormous, busy central market of 19th Century Paris. Les Halles, rebuilt in cast iron and glass during the Second Empire was a landmark of modernity in the city,...
and La Curée
La Curée
La Curée is the second novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It deals with property speculation and the lives of the extremely wealthy Nouveau riche of the Second French Empire, against the backdrop of Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and...
, vies with the colourful impressionistic techniques of Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...
. The scientist is the believer in some measure of scientific determinism – not that this, despite his own words “dépourvus de libre arbitre”, need always amount to a philosophical denial of free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
. The creator of “la littérature putride”, a term of abuse invented by an early critic of Thérèse Raquin
Thérèse Raquin
Thérèse Raquin is the title of a novel and a play by the French writer Émile Zola. The novel was originally published in serial format in the journal L'Artiste and in book format in December of the same year.-Plot introduction:Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman, unhappily married to...
(a novel which predates Les Rougon-Macquart
Les Rougon-Macquart
Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to a cycle of twenty novels by French writer Émile Zola. Subtitled Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire , it follows the life of a fictional family living during the Second French Empire and is an example of French...
series), emphasizes the squalid aspects of the human environment and upon the seamy side of human nature.
The optimist is that other face of the scientific experimenter, the man with an unshakable belief in human progress. Zola bases his optimism on innéité and on the supposed capacity of the human race to make progress in a moral sense. Innéité is defined by Zola as that process in which “se confondent les caractères physiques et moraux des parents, sans que rien d'eux semble s’y retrouver”; it is the term used in biology to describe the process whereby the moral and temperamental dispositions of some individuals are unaffected by the hereditary transmission of genetic characteristics. Jean Macquart and Pascal Rougon are two instances of individuals liberated from the blemishes of their ancestors by the operation of the process of innéité.
Evident in Le Docteur Pascal, and again in Fécondité (which is not part of the Rougon-Macquart series), is Zola's conviction that as scientific research makes progress step by step and from generation to generation, so by slow degrees but in a similarly steadfast manner the moral progress of the human race will be achieved as the environmental faults of particular societies are swept away, as (through innéité) the hereditary failings of particular families are overcome and as on a universal scale – in novels beyond the framework of the Rougon-Macquart series – humanity unites in brotherhood.
See also
- The Life of Émile ZolaThe Life of Emile ZolaThe Life of Emile Zola is a 1937 American biographical film about French author Émile Zola. Set in the mid through late 19th century, it depicts his friendship with noted painter Paul Cézanne, and his rise to fame through his prolific writing, with particular focus on his involvement in the Dreyfus...
(1937) - J'accuse (letter)J'accuse (letter)"J'accuse" was an open letter published on January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L'Aurore by the influential writer Émile Zola.In the letter, Zola addressed President of France Félix Faure, and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General...
- Naturalism (literature)Naturalism (literature)Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
External links
- Dreyfus Rehabilitated
- Émile Zola at InterText Digital Library
- Émile Zola at Livres & Ebooks
- Émile Zola exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de FranceBibliothèque nationale de FranceThe is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
- Livres audio gratuits pour Emile Zola
- Works about Émile Zola at the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...