OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
HIS EXCELLENCY EUGèNE ROUGON
Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette, which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed, until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series, with the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.
Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor (French Studies and Translation Studies) at Monash University, Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations of Zola’s Earth (with Julie Rose), The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The Kill, Pot Luck, and The Ladies’ Paradise. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation in 2015. His most recent critical work is The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature (2015).
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Oxford World’s Classics
Émile Zola
His Excellency Eugène Rougon
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
Brian Nelson
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Contents
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Émile Zola
Family Tree of the Rougon-Macquart
HIS EXCELLENCY EUGèNE ROUGON
Explanatory Notes
Introduction
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword
The main achievement of Émile Zola (1840–1902) as a writer was his twenty-volume novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), in which the fortunes of a family are followed over several decades. The various family members spread throughout all levels of society, and through their lives Zola examines methodically the social, sexual, and moral landscape of the late nineteenth century, creating an epic sense of social transformation. The Rougons represent the hunt for wealth and position, their members rising to commanding positions in the worlds of government and finance; the Macquarts, the illegitimate branch, are the submerged proletariat, with the exception of Lisa Macquart (The Belly of Paris/Le Ventre de Paris, 1873); the Mourets, descended from the Macquart line, are the bourgeois tradesmen and provincial bourgeoisie. Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity, understood as a time of tumultuous change. The motor of change was the rapid growth of capitalism, with all that it entailed in terms of the transformation of the city, new forms of social practice and economic organization, and heightened political pressures. Zola was fascinated by change, and specifically by the emergence of a new mass society.
Converted from a youthful romantic idealism to realism in art and literature, Zola began to promote a ‘scientific’ view of literature inspired by the aims and methods of experimental medicine. He called this new form of realism ‘Naturalism’. The subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, ‘A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, suggests his interconnected aims: to use fiction as a vehicle for a great social chronicle; to demonstrate a number of ‘scientific’ notions about the ways in which human behaviour is determined by heredity and environment; and to exploit the symbolic possibilities of a family with tainted blood to represent a diseased society — the corrupt yet dynamic France of the Second Empire (1852–70), the regime established on the basis of a coup d’état by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte on 2 December 1851 and which would last until its collapse in 1870 in the face of military defeat by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan. The ‘truth’ for which Zola aimed could only be attained, he argued, through meticulous documentation and research. The work of the novelist, he wrote, represented a form of practical sociology, complementing the work of the scientist; their common hope was to improve the world by promoting greater understanding of the laws that determine the material conditions of life.
Zola’s commitment to the value of truth in art is above all a moral commitment; and his concern with integrity of representation meant a commitment to the idea that the writer must play a social role: to represent the sorts of things — industrialization, the growth of the city, the birth of consumer culture, the workings of the financial system, the misdeeds of government, crime, poverty, prostitution — that affect people in their daily lives. And he wrote about these things not simply forensically, as a
would-be scientist, but ironically and satirically. Naturalist fiction represents a major assault on bourgeois morality and institutions. It takes an unmitigated delight — while also seeing the process as a serious duty — in revealing the vices, follies, and corruption behind the respectable façade. The last line of The Belly of Paris is: ‘Respectable people… What bastards!’ Zola opened the novel up to entirely new areas of representation. The Naturalist emphasis on integrity of representation entailed a new explicitness in the depiction of sexuality and the body; and in his sexual themes he ironically subverts the notion that the social supremacy of the bourgeoisie is a natural rather than a cultural phenomenon. The more searchingly he investigated the theme of middle-class adultery, the more he threatened to uncover the fragility and arbitrariness of the whole bourgeois social order. His new vision of the body is matched by his new vision of the working class, combining carnivalesque images with serious analysis of its sociopolitical condition. In L’Assommoir (1877) he describes the misery of the working-class slums behind the public splendour of the Empire, while in Germinal (1885) he shows how the power of mass working-class movements had become a radically new, and frightening, element in human history. Zola never stopped being a danger to the established order. Representing the most liberal, reforming side of the bourgeoisie, he was consciously, and increasingly, a public writer. It was entirely appropriate that in 1898 he crowned his literary career with a political act, a frontal attack on state power and its abuse: ‘J’accuse… !’, his famous open letter to the President of the Republic in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason.
Zola’s ‘scientific’ representation of society corresponds to a writing method informed by systematic research and fieldwork. While preparing Germinal, for example, Zola went down a mine in northern France and observed the labour and living conditions of the miners and their families; for La Bête humaine (1890), he arranged to travel on the footplate of a locomotive, engaged in lengthy correspondence with railway employees, and read several technical works on the railways. The texture of his novels is infused with an intense concern with concrete detail, and the planning notes he assembled for each novel represent a remarkable stock of documentary information about French society in the 1870s and 1880s. But documentary detail, though it helps to create ethnographically rich evocations of particular milieux and modes of life, is not an end in itself. The observed reality of the world is the foundation for a poetic vision. In his narrative practice, Zola combines brilliantly the particular and the general, the everyday and the fantastic. The interaction between people and their environments is evoked in his celebrated physical descriptions. These descriptions are not, however, mechanical products of his aesthetic credo; rather, they express the very meaning, and ideological tendencies, of his narratives. For example, the lengthy descriptions of the luxurious physical decor of bourgeois existence — houses, interiors, social gatherings — in The Kill (La Curée, 1872) are marked syntactically by the eclipse of human subjects by abstract nouns and things, expressing a vision of a society which, organized under the aegis of the commodity, turns people into objects. Similarly, the descriptions of the sales in The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883), with their cascading images and rising pitch, suggest loss of control, the female shoppers’ quasi-sexual abandonment to consumer dreams, at the same time mirroring the perpetual expansion that defines the economic principles of consumerism. Emblematic features of contemporary life — the market, the machine, the tenement building, the mine, the apartment house, the department store, the stock exchange, the city itself — are used as giant symbols of urban and industrial modernity. Through the play of imagery and metaphor Zola magnifies the material world, giving it a hyperbolic, hallucinatory quality.
After reading Nana (1880), Flaubert wrote enthusiastically to Zola that Nana ‘turns into a myth without ceasing to be real’ — thus identifying an important feature of Zola’s work: the mythic resonance of his writing. The pithead in Germinal, for example, is a modern figuration of the Minotaur, a monstrous beast that breathes, devours, digests, and regurgitates. Heredity not only serves as a general structuring device, but also has great dramatic force, allowing Zola to give a mythical dimension to his representation of the human condition. Reality is transfigured into a theatre of archetypal forces; and it is the mythopoeic dimension of Zola’s work that helps to make him one of the great figures of the European novel. Heredity and environment pursue his characters as relentlessly as the forces of fate in an ancient tragedy. His use of myth is inseparable, moreover, from his vision of history, and is essentially Darwinian (a complete translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859, appeared in French in 1865). His conception of society is shaped by a biological model informed by the struggle between the life instinct and the death instinct: an endless cycle of life–death–life. This vision reflects an ambivalence characteristic of modernity itself. Despite his faith in science, Zola’s vision is marked by the anxiety that accompanied industrialization. The demons of modernity are figured in images of catastrophe: the collapsing pithead in Germinal, the runaway locomotive in La Bête humaine (1890), the stock market crash in Money (L’Argent, 1891). A myth of catastrophe is opposed by a myth of hope, degeneration by regeneration. At the end of Earth (La Terre, 1887), Zola’s novel of peasant life, the protagonist, Jean Macquart, reflects, as he walks away from the peasant village, that even the crimes and violence perpetrated by human beings may play their part in the evolutionary process, humanity shrinking, like so many tiny insects, within the great scheme of Nature. The novel closes as it opens, with the image of men sowing seeds: an image of eternal renewal.
His Excellency Eugène Rougon
The early novels of Les Rougon-Macquart are political in the sense that Zola’s presentation of the Second Empire is strongly marked by satire. The Fortune of the Rougons (La Fortune des Rougon, 1871), a novel of political intrigue, treachery, and murder, describes the bloody beginnings of the Imperial regime as reflected in the way Pierre and Félicité Rougon turn Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état to their own advantage. The Kill is a powerful picture of the large-scale financial corruption, involving the government, that accompanied the Haussmannization of Paris (the description in Chapter 7 of His Excellency Eugène Rougon (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, 1876) of the fight for the spoils of the hunt, the offal thrown to the dogs, recalls the central thematic image of The Kill, which allegorizes the greed and competitiveness of the Second Empire). The Belly of Paris centres on the ensnarement of a would-be insurrectionist, the idealistic Florent Quenu, whose actions threaten to disrupt the prosperous existence of his sister-in-law, Lisa, embodiment of the small shopkeepers who support the Empire because they think it is good for business. The Conquest of Plassans (La Conquête de Plassans, 1874) shows the Bonapartist regime, through the agency of a priest, Faujas, establishing its hold over the provinces. His Excellency Eugène Rougon, the sixth novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, takes political power itself as its theme. The novel is set in the world of professional politicians, ministerial offices, and the Imperial Court. It follows the career of Eugène Rougon, the eldest son of Pierre and Félicité Rougon. Eugène is first introduced in The Fortune of the Rougons as a key player in the coup d’état of 1851. By providing his parents with crucial information about the political situation in Paris, he enables them to establish control over the town of Plassans and lay the foundations of the family fortune. His brother Aristide (protagonist of The Kill ) lusts for money; his brother Pascal (Doctor Pascal/Le Docteur Pascal, 1893) thirsts for knowledge; Eugène’s passion is power. He is the embodiment of the Empire: ‘I made the Empire and the Empire made me’ (p. 64).
The novel opens in 1856 with Rougon’s career at a low ebb. He has just resigned from his position as president of the Council of State, following conflict with the Emperor over an inheritance claim involving a relative of the Empress. His ‘gang’ of han
gers-on are aghast, for they count on his political influence to win various personal favours. Rougon becomes intrigued by a beautiful and eccentric political adventuress (‘Mademoiselle Machiavelli’, as Rougon calls her), Clorinde Balbi, who desires power as much as Rougon does. She suggests that they marry, but he rejects the idea, saying that two such strong personalities would inevitably destroy each other. He marries her off to an acolyte of his, a nonentity named Delestang. She is deeply hurt, but prepares the ground for Rougon’s return to power. Rougon learns of an assassination plot against the Emperor, a bomb attack, but decides to do nothing about it. In consequence, after the attempt is made, the Emperor makes him minister of the interior with power to maintain order at any cost. Rougon uses this as an opportunity to punish his enemies, deport anti-imperialists, and reward his cronies. The prime example in the novel of the corrupt relationship between government and private industry is the story of a new railway line between Niort and Angers. Monsieur Kahn, a Jewish deputy, is anxious for the line to be diverted, so that it will run through Bressuire, where he owns some blast furnaces, the value of which will greatly increase with the new transportation link. Rougon approves Kahn’s request soon after his appointment as minister of the interior. As his power expands, however, his cronies begin to desert him, encouraged to do so by the scheming Clorinde, who establishes a ‘liberal’ salon with these same, fickle cronies. Eventually, Rougon is involved in several scandals caused by his ‘friends’. As his power has grown, so has Clorinde’s, until, through a mixture of sex and intrigue, she wields influence at the highest level and on an international scale. She becomes the Emperor’s mistress, and is able to punish Rougon for his refusal to marry her. To silence opposition, he submits his resignation to the Emperor, confident that it will not be accepted. However, it is accepted, and Clorinde’s husband replaces Rougon as minister of the interior. The novel ends three years later, in 1862. The Emperor has again recalled Rougon to office, this time as minister without portfolio, representing the Emperor in parliament, charged with defending new, liberal policies. To satisfy his insatiable appetite for power, Rougon cynically abandons his authoritarian stance and makes a resounding speech in favour of parliamentary government, astounding everyone.