Émile Zola

Émile Zola (1840-1902), French novelist, essayist, and critic, the chief advocate and practitioner in France of a movement known as naturalism. Naturalist writers aimed at an objective depiction of life and regarded human behavior as determined by hereditary instincts and emotions and the social and economic environment, rather than by free human choice.

Born in Paris, Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola spent his formative years in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Although Zola’s father died when Émile was seven, Émile and his mother remained in Aix until poverty forced them to move to Paris in 1858. There the young Zola eked out a living working as a clerk for the publishing house Hachette and writing literary and political articles for newspapers. His knowledge and understanding of poverty, evident in his later novels, was due in part to personal experience.

Zola’s published work began with a collection of stories, Contes à Ninon (1864; translated as Stories for Ninon, 1888), and a full-length novel, La confession de Claude (1865; Claude’s Confession, 1882). Neither received much attention, but in 1867 Zola achieved notoriety with Thérèse Raquin (translated 1962), a lurid tale of lust and murder.

Inspired in part by La comédie humaine (1842-1848; The Human Comedy, 1895-1900), a vast cycle of novels by French writer Honoré de Balzac, Zola then conceived of a series of 20 novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, which would relate the history of a single family during the reign of French Emperor Napoleon III (1852-1870). In these novels he sought to imitate the scientific method through detailed, objective observation of his characters under controlled conditions. He also sought to incorporate ideas on the ways in which heredity and the environment shaped human character and determined human behavior—ideas that he had encountered in his reading of French critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, British scientist Charles Darwin, and French scientist Prosper Lucas. Zola considered heredity modified by environment to have the force of fate.

Zola accomplished his great task, beginning in 1871 with La fortune des Rougon (The Fortune of the Rougons, 1886) and ending in 1893 with Le docteur Pascal (Doctor Pascal, 1957). After publishing the seventh of these novels he read Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865; An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 1927) by French physiologist Claude Bernard and tried to adapt this scientific method of observation and experimentation in the remainder of his work. In 1880 Zola published the essay “Le roman expérimental” (“The Experimental Novel,” 1893), in which he developed these ideas and articulated his concept of naturalism and the naturalistic novel. He further explored these ideas in “Les romanciers naturalistes” (The Naturalist Novelists, 1881).

Zola visited the locations in which the action of his books took place, observed closely, and took copious notes. In his novels he introduced characters inspired by his research, studied their hereditary backgrounds (often familiar to readers of earlier novels in the cycle), and observed how their lives played out in their world. Although Zola’s science sometimes seems amateur, it lent coherence to the enormous cycle of novels. Some think it fortunate that Zola’s epic imagination often eclipses his scientific aspirations.

Although Les Rougon-Macquart includes many excellent novels, two works in this series are recognized as among the best French novels of the 19th century: L’assommoir (1877; translated 1879) and Germinal (1885; translated 1885). The protagonist of L’assommoir, Gervaise Macquart, a launderer in a cheap quarter of Paris, is abandoned by Étienne Lantier, the father of her two illegitimate children. She seems to have a change of luck when she meets and marries the roofer Coupeau and acquires her own laundry facility. She prospers until Coupeau falls from a roof, takes to drink, and carries her with him in his decline into moral depravity. The French word assommoir means a club or sledgehammer used to fell something by a blow; in slang it means a low-life tavern. In L’assommoir it refers to Colombe’s cheap saloon that houses a distilling apparatus, which Zola transforms into a fantastic beast, an evil monster spouting steam and chomping furiously as if to devour the world. This distillery becomes the emblem for alcoholism in the novel. Both Coupeau and Lantier are genetically predisposed to the disease, and their environment and circumstances leave them little chance of escape. Despite the baseness of these characters and their world, Macquart is genuinely appealing, and the reader is moved to compassion by her fate.

Germinal, which takes place among a community of exploited miners, examines such issues as unionization and the economic and political doctrine known as socialism. The son of Gervaise Macquart, Étienne Lantier, wanders into this community, which is on the verge of a strike. He finds work in the mine pits (which are depicted as a voracious monster devouring human bodies) and is befriended by Toussaint Maheu, with whose daughter, Catherine, he falls in love. Lantier, predisposed by heredity to homicidal violence and alcoholism but fundamentally a moral and good man, soon becomes a leader of the miners. His emerging socialist sympathies are reinforced by the surrounding misery, his reading of socialist literature, and his acquaintance with Souvarine, an exiled Russian revolutionary. Zola contrasts the degradation and suffering of the Maheu family with the complacency and prosperity of the Grégoire family, who own stock in the mines. Near the end of Germinal, the head of the Maheu family strangles the Grégoires’ only child, and Catherine Maheu dies in the mines. During the course of the novel the miners stage an unsuccessful strike and return to the pits, humiliated and desperate, and Lantier returns to the road that had brought him to the mining community. Despite the pessimism of this ending, it is spring and the world is germinating, offering the hope of “a revolutionary April, a flight of a decrepit, sick society into the springtime.”

Zola is also famous as the author of “J’accuse” (“I accuse”), an open letter to the president of France (published in the newspaper L’aurore in 1898), in which he denounced French army officials for lying in their effort to convict Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, of treason. Dreyfus was later found innocent. Zola wrote a fictional account of the case in his novel Vérité (1903; Truth, 1903).

Zola died accidentally of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902. The streets of Paris were lined with mourners as his casket passed through the city. He had come to be known as a champion of the innocent, an upholder of justice, and a defender of the downtrodden. As novelist Anatole France declared in his eulogy, Zola had become “the conscience of mankind.”