One of the most potent documents a teacher can teach to a history class studying France in the late nineteenth century is Émile Zola’s open letter to L’Aurore, published in January 1898. Few other primary sources lend themselves to such drama and action in the classroom the way that Zola’s “J’Accuse … !” does for students. Reaching that point in the narrative of the Dreyfus Affair, students know the injustice that has played out. The French government used Alfred Dreyfus as the scapegoat for a military scandal that involved the selling of military secrets to the Germans. The controversy consumed France as it questioned the honor and reliability of the Republic and the French military. Students know that, within the story, other historical figures have gotten away with framing Dreyfus and condemning him to life on Devil’s Island. Yet, here arises a hero in France, calling out the institutions that have led the nation into scandal, and that hero is Émile Zola.
But, students may ask, who is this man who has come out in defense of Dreyfus and defied most of France? Who is this man that Anatole France declared “a moment in the history of the human conscience?” In his new biography, Émile Zola: A Determined Life, Robert Lethbridge sheds light on the writer who was to become the conscience of a nation in the midst of tumult. He skillfully and adeptly shows that Zola lived a full, determined life that encompassed so much in nineteenth-century France. The biography paints a portrait of one of the most active and creative lives to ever be lived.
Zola lived from 1840 to 1902, spending most of his life in France, writing novels and publishing articles on various subjects in many different newspapers. His father died when he was very young, and Lethbridge shows how Zola worked hard throughout the rest of his life to establish his father as a good man and his family name as a great name. After his father’s death, the writer and his mother lived in Aix-en-Provence, a place he grew to dislike. Eventually, the two of them moved to Paris. As a young man, Zola lived in relative poverty in Paris as he worked to find his place in the world. He worked a clerical job at the Paris docks before finding a place at the publishing firm of Hachette in March 1862. As Lethbridge shows, it was the four years working at Hachette that taught Zola many lessons regarding publishing, marketing, “the importance of making direct contact with reviewers, drafting enticing blurbs and exploiting opportunities for controversy.”
As Hachette published many of “the latest scientific and philosophical works” of the time, Zola met all the authors of these works as he worked for the firm. Generally, the writers attached to the publisher were liberal critics of Napoleon III and the Second French Empire—their views would greatly influence Zola’s. From Hachette, he went on to work in journalism, writing columns for most of his life after getting his start with the liberal outlets L’Événement, Le Petit Journal, and Le Figaro. Lethbridge, therefore, argues against misperceptions that Zola did not fully emerge as a writer until the Dreyfus Affair, that his work in these early years marked “a lifelong engagement with the political and cultural issues of his time.” Zola wrote scores of novels, plays, articles, criticism, and operas, and left behind a monumental legacy that Lethbridge beautifully uncovers.
Lethbridge goes to great lengths in his work to show the importance of Zola’s realism, as this is the lens through which Zola critiques every aspect of French life. Zola’s realism, as Lethbridge shows, comes without any of the radicalism that haunts France during the period in which Zola writes. Whether it was the Second Empire and Napoleon III or the Third Republic, Zola writes with the ability to hold a mirror up to the French people to show them their blemishes: government corruption, immorality, violence, extreme poverty, political extremism, and so on. His work found ways to exploit “opportunities for controversy” while maintaining a detachment that allowed him to create a realism without radicalism.
As Lethbridge shows, Zola’s political journalism was strong and opinionated as he espoused many of the ideas of a European liberal in the late eighteenth century. For all this fire in his political journalism, Zola never gave in to the radicalism of the age—socialism, communism, or anarchism. His realist experiments in literature tempered his political views, even if he expressed them strongly. As Lethbridge points out, for example, Zola refused to support universal manhood suffrage in France—a position which cut against his otherwise strong liberal views. But this again points to his lack of extremism in any direction.
Zola’s realism without radicalism can be seen in almost all of his novels. In Germinal, it can be seen in the poverty and hatred of capitalism by the mine workers, combined with the horrible excesses of communism and the workers’ strike, and its consequences. In Le Bête Humaine, it can be seen in the government corruption and horrible violence that fails to end the corruption in government. Lethbridge shows how Zola tried to use realist literature to guide France away from the extremism that was so prevalent in the Second Empire and the Third Republic.
Zola lived a determined life—not in the sense of fatalism, but rather as a man truly determined to do something great for his beloved country.
As Lethbridge draws this out, he weaves together the political and social events of nineteenth-century France and their connections to Zola’s fiction. He demonstrates through journal entries, notes, and letters that Zola was involved in every part of the life of France—and that this is what made him a master of literary realism. He masterfully shows what reality was like for every category of person, and this is why Zola was such a master at the realism that he wanted to portray in his work.
Two of Zola’s works in particular demonstrate his commitment to providing a complete image of how people truly lived in his time. In L’Assommoir, Lethbridge writes, Zola used “dictionaries of proletarian slang” to create “a vocabulary so colorful, vulgar and otherwise incomprehensible that modern editions of the novel have to provide a lexical appendix.” And in Germinal, Lethbridge points out, readers “are virtually saturated with prosaic information: about mineshafts, tunnelling techniques, the price of coal, wages, accidents, respiratory diseases, the sleeping and eating habits of miners.” To get this information, Zola kept hundreds of pages of notes from his research trips, which included going deep into a mine shaft at a coal mine in France, in spite of his deeply seated claustrophobia.
Given this historical texture, Lethbridge paints an intricate portrait of Zola’s life as an author and participant in the life of France as it went through the tumultuous times of the Second French Empire, the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune of Paris, and then finally the Dreyfus Affair. Lethbridge writes, “The time he [Zola] devoted to his writing for the press can be measured by the bare figures of his output: 109 articles in La Cloche in 1872; 21 in L’Avenir national the following year; some 250 in Le Bien public and Le Voltaire in 1876–7; 52 in Le Figaro in 1881. More occasional pieces were published elsewhere.”
Zola, while writing all those articles for the press, was at the same time writing his series of Rougon-Macquart novels. They required extensive research and travel, and yet, he was still able to produce an unfathomable amount of work for the press with his political and art criticism. He also knew and interacted with the major artists in France, and created a country retreat for them at his home in Médan. Lethbridge shows that in this place, Zola was able to become the conscience of culture in France through his influence, not only in literature, but also in painting. This country haven also helped play a role in Zola’s removal from the radicalism that so dominated the age in France.
Lethbridge is clearly a master of the documents when it comes to Zola. This is true of the literary works, the political articles, the art criticism, the journals, and the novel notes. The drawback here, of course, is that readers—especially those not familiar with Zola’s more obscure works—might get lost in Lethbridge’s analysis of all the intricate twists and turns of the novels. There are twenty in the Rougon-Macquart series alone, and some of them are hard to find in English translation, meaning that many readers will certainly not have read most of these books. That said, the biography still gives a sense of the feats of literary engineering that went into Zola’s work.
At the end of the biography, Lethbridge returns to his question about whether Zola determined the France he lived in or whether the France of Zola’s time determined him. In the end, the answer to this question seems not to ultimately matter. Lethbridge concludes that “Zola was either the victim of chance, subject to a set of arbitrary circumstances so inexplicable as to personalize insights in his fiction at odds with deterministic principles; or, as was his life, his death too was indirectly determined by the social and political forces of his time.” In the end, it seems more of a give-and-take. Zola played a strong role in forming the France that he lived in through his unbelievable number of publications, both fiction and nonfiction. But France, in all of its tumult from 1852 to 1902, played a hand in shaping Zola and his work.
Lethbridge’s final analysis of Zola and the Dreyfus Affair amounts to the Affair being a singular moment that was significant but not more or less significant than Zola’s other contributions to his beloved France, especially his art: novels, plays, operas, and the realism that was the foundation of those works. As important as the Dreyfus Affair was for France and as important as Zola believed his actions to be, there was so much more to the determined life of Emile Zola than the Affair. Lethbridge does a great service in showing this with his work.
The ultimate conclusion is that Zola lived a determined life—not in the sense of fatalism, but rather as a man truly determined to do something great for his beloved country. The portrait that Lethbridge so skillfully paints is one of a writer, determined to portray reality in his fiction at all costs and to call France to something higher in his political journalism and criticism. Lethbridge shows Zola at his best, criticizing the corruption of the Second French Empire with his fiction. The reader is left with a sense of awe at the determination of Zola to create a beautiful legacy with his words, and the reader will ultimately have a desire to go read those words after reading Lethbridge’s work.