Emile Zola

From Philosopedia

Portrait by Edouard Manet

Zola, Émile Édouard Charles Antoine (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902)

Zola is the leading exemplar of literary naturalism, which utilized the methods of science to depict life as it really is. Many objected to the sordid details of his work, but his response was that he wished to present humans as they exist, not as the romanticists wish they would exist.

Alcoholism, disease, and degeneracy are shown in Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893). Lower-class life is shown in L’Assommoir (The Dram-Shop) (1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885), the latter a “proletarian” novel of life in a coal-mining area.

In 1886, he was quoted as saying,

• We have stopped believing in God, but not in our own immortality.

A noted anti-Catholic, Zola was added to the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading from 1894, for he was on record as believing that civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. When the clericals accused him of simply making money out of “immoral books,” according to Joseph McCabe, Zola retorted by exposing the hypocrisy of the Church in a trio of novels on Lourdes, Rome, and ecclesiastical Paris.

Because of his part in the Dreyfus Affair, writing an article, “J’accuse” (1898) in L’Aurore, he fled to England until an amnesty was arranged for his return to France. His publisher was imprisoned in 1888. Inasmuch as Zola had previously been thought to live only for his art, his surprising championing of the Dreyfus Affair, Henry James wrote, was “the act of a man with arrears of personal history to make up . . . treating itself at last to a luxury of experience.”

Zola, after the massacre of the Commune during which the regular army gunned down an estimated twenty thousand men and women in the streets of Paris, served as a nonpartisan journalist. In 1892, however, in the closing chapters of La Débâcle, he described the streets of unburied corpses and portrayed a fictitious Communard dying in the arms of a former comrade against the background of a Paris consumed in flames.

Zola was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association, and their initial appeals for £1,000 carried his signature.

Although a candidate twenty-four times, he never made the French Academy, which considered him a writer of pornography.

Inhaling fumes from a blocked fireplace chimney which had a defective flue, he was asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes in his sleep and died in 1902. This was four years before Dreyfus was rehabilitated. Zola’s remains were removed in 1908 to the Panthéon. On the centennial in 1998 of the publication of his J’accuse, France’s Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and others went to the Panthéon and saluted Zola’s having come to the defense of the Jewish captain in the French Army who had unjustly been convicted of treason in 1894. “Truth is on the march, and nothing can stop it,” Zola had written in his manifesto. “History proved him right,” Mr. Jospin said at the ceremony.

(See a biography, Zola, A Life, by Frederick Brown [1995])

{BDF; CE; CL; ILP; JM; RAT; TRI; TYD}