The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint)

  The great characteristic of the Rougon-Macquarts, the group or family I propose to study, is their ravenous appetites, the great upsurge of our age as it rushes to satisfy those appetites. Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts illustrate the gradual sequence of nervous and sanguine accidents that befall a race after a first organic lesion and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires, and passions—in sum, all the natural and instinctive manifestations of humanity—whose outcomes are conventionally described in terms of ‘virtue’ or ‘vice’.

  Zola is being deliberately clinical here, treating his human protagonists as biological organisms to be described medically, while the provocative placing of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ in quotation marks further adds to the image of the experimental scientist objectively noting and classifying his data. The comment echoes Taine’s famous assertion:

  It matters not what the facts may be, whether physical or moral, they always spring from causes; there are causes for ambition, for courage, for veracity, as well as for digestion, for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact grows out of the simple facts with which it is affiliated and on which it depends.3

  These are, from both Zola and Taine, controversial statements: to demystify the vague but religiously, morally, and ideologically charged notions of vice and virtue is to invite opprobrium from a variety of sources, as well as to risk accusations of reducing human complexity to a series of equations and formulae. Zola certainly was attacked from all quarters: by conservatives for his republicanism and opposition both to the royalists and the Imperial regime, but also by Republicans for presenting the working class as animalistic and self-destructive. Writers and critics of varying temperaments—classical, romantic, symbolist, idealist—condemned his ‘putrid’ literature for what they saw as its ugliness, squalor, and amorality, and the little room it left for humanity’s so-called higher or more spiritual aspirations.

  ‘The Experimental Novel’ and the Poetry of Naturalism

  Zola’s fiction is in part an ‘experiment’ in which the scientist-novelist places particular characters in particular places and with particular circumstantial dramas, and observes how, given their temperaments, medical histories, and emotional inclinations, they react. Sometimes he will add or subtract elements—a change of scene, a new person, a love interest or an enemy, an accident or a bankruptcy or an illness—and observe how this alters the course of events. In this respect, he is like all novelists, creating characters and then letting them loose. While novels such as The Conquest of Plassans and The Fortune of the Rougons have unambiguously ‘straight’ titles, novels like Germinal, La Bête humaine, Le Ventre de Paris are more evocative and lyrical, and hardly seem to fit with the ‘Naturalist’ label of plain or scientific factuality. Zola always allows room in his writing for a ‘poetic’ or mythical interpretation of his human characters and the events that befall them. We might consider, in this context, the great descriptive set-piece in Germinal, where Zola likens the mine swallowing up the miners to some great beast of the underworld gorging itself on the blood of the living; or the ‘bête humaine’ of the eponymous novel, the murderous inner beast which Zola links, symbolically, with the driverless train hurtling into the darkness. Closer to The Conquest of Plassans, there is the symbolic space of Plassans cemetery described in The Fortune of the Rougons, so full of bodies that the earth seems to push them back up to the surface. It is a powerful metaphor for the way in which the living are haunted by the dead, and for how the old ailments and defects resurface in the here and now. When the old cemetery is cleared and a new one designated, the bones are carted across town, scattering human remains along the streets.

  Aunt Dide is given a mythical grandeur in chapter 7 of The Fortune of the Rougons, just before her children commit her to the lunatic asylum. She foretells the death of her nephew Silvère (François Mouret’s brother), the young Republican idealist who is betrayed by his own family and murdered with their connivance:

  I brought nothing but wolves into the world . . . a whole family . . . a whole litter of wolves . . . There was just one poor lad, and they’ve eaten him up; they each had a bite at him, and their lips are covered with blood . . . Damn them! They are thieves and murderers. And they live like gentlemen. Damn them! Damn them!

  Like some ancient prophetess, whose madness is also her lucidity and whose foresight goes unheeded, Dide curses the whole pack of Rougon-Macquart wolves. That curse too is a metaphor, just like the animal metaphors that run through Zola’s fiction and Naturalist writing generally, and a further endorsement of those who viewed his fiction as humanly diminishing. It is in keeping, of course, with the ‘natural history’ dimension of Zola’s plan to treat his characters with the detachment of the scientist observing animals in their habitats, but it also provides, paradoxically, an opportunity for him to use the imagery of a nature red in tooth and claw for poetic ends. The Rougon-Macquarts themselves are described as predators and opportunists, cunning and watchful as wolves. Antoine Macquart for instance is frequently called a wolf, while Félicité is described, in The Fortune of the Rougons, as having ‘the keenest scent in the whole family’. While their machinations might be subtle and complex, we are never far, with the Rougon-Macquarts, from animal instinct and the law of the jungle.

  Marthe and François Mouret and their children are the only characters we feel sympathy for. Perhaps in the case of Mouret, who tries, albeit half-heartedly, to stand up for his principles and set himself against the town’s hypocritical bourgeois, we even feel something like affection, and are moved by his helpless descent into humiliation and insanity. Mouret has Republican sympathies, and Zola takes care to depict him as harmless but weak, well-meaning but changeable and compulsive. As with his wife and cousin, Marthe Rougon, we are given from the start small proleptic indications of the mental decline to come: Mouret is rash then apathetic, indecisive and then decisive in the wrong direction; he wavers, changes his mind, punishes his wife, and sends his children away but fails to notice the way in which he himself is being sidelined, manipulated, humiliated, and finally destroyed. Marthe is presented as weak-minded, yearning, passive, and unfulfilled. She is, as Faujas rightly surmises, ready to be lured into religion, a focal point for her hysterical tendencies and thwarted sexuality. Marthe’s faith is obsessive and erotic, and she becomes Faujas’s creature in ways that alienate her from her husband and children and help further the schemes of Faujas and Félicité.

  Faujas conquers the town through religion, and he conquers it through the women, first by encouraging them to donate to a project, a religious centre, the ‘Work of the Virgin’, for the protection of working-class young girls, and then by using his hold over the women to attain power over their husbands, who are, by a symmetrical process, encouraged to start up a youth club. One of the great literary figures Zola evokes in The Conquest of Plassans is Molière’s classic figure of Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite who poses as a man of faith in order to win over the gullible Orgon and gain his daughter’s hand and her inheritance. Tartuffe, like Faujas, is a lodger who gradually gains control over the household, though unlike Faujas, Tartuffe only fools Orgon and his devout mother. Tartuffe is a comedy that ends well, whereas The Conquest of Plassans is a tragedy that ends in melodramatic catastrophe. At one point in this novel, Mouret even calls Faujas ‘le tartuffe’, and the name is still used in French to designate a religious fraud with ulterior motives that are in fact worldly, materialistic, and wholly unspiritual.4

  The secondary characters in Plassans, a small-town bourgeois society and its minor aristocracy, are presented as hypocritical, sour, vain, and greedy, riddled with snobbery, poisoned by rivalry, two-faced and weak. While they are capable of low cunning, they too become instruments in Félicité’s and Faujas’s game. Zola held Napoleon III and those who served him in contempt, and his own politics were Republican. He never hid his disgust, in
fiction or in journalism, for the Imperial regime, and much like Marx (who in Eighteenth Brumaire excoriated the corruption and dictatorialism of Napoleon III), saw it not just as a reactionary low point in post-Revolutionary France but also as a masquerade of pomp and sleaze, aping the lost grandeur of Napoleon. The Conquest of Plassans shows the regime, as it were, from the margins and from the ground: while Paris might be the centre of national politics, the towns and provinces have their own branchlines of corruption and power. Much as Balzac divided his novels between Parisian centre and provincial edges, so Zola reveals the connections between the different levels of national life, which seem so far apart but are in fact intimately linked. We may also think of the Russian novelists Gogol and Dostoevsky, who paint the banal dramas of provincial life in all their cut-throat absurdity and ruthlessness, with their political functionaries and their rival families, ugly microcosms of the country itself. We have the reprobate Monsieur de Condamin and his flighty but scheming wife; the ugly and resentful, but easily-bought, Paloque couple; and the cynical Doctor Porquier who allows Mouret to be committed to the asylum. There is Monsieur de Rastoil and his family, Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies, and the town’s mayor, Monsieur Delangre. Some are Bonapartists, some Legitimists, and, as Mouret explains to the newly arrived Faujas: ‘on my right, I have at the Rastoils’ the flower of the Legitimists, and on my left, at the sub-prefect’s, the bigwigs of the Empire’ (p. 36). With a dramatic irony Zola is fond of, Mouret warns Faujas not to get involved in politics . . . Amid this melee we also have rival priests and a lazy, ineffectual bishop, a docile layer of bourgeois and business interests, and a marginalized working and peasant population outside town and beyond the narrative’s parameters.

  Zola is a skilful novelist of foreboding: from the moment we see the Mourets, we know that their peace is fragile, and when we meet the sinister, silent Abbé Faujas himself, arriving early and inopportunely to take up his room in their household, we sense a darkness we cannot quite define. While nothing can prepare us for the novel’s violent ending, the signs accumulate from the start: the house and garden, the family unit that is fraught with imprecise unease, the distracted, languid Marthe and her unstable husband, the mention of the asylum in the first few pages, the unwelcome intrusion of the inscrutable priest and his looming mother . . . all of these factors are choreographed by Zola with a skill that is the hallmark of a novelist and not a mere recorder of facts. For a writer who rarely stinted on description and documentation, Zola was also able to make it all count on the narrative, the symbolic, or the psychological levels too. In his own way, Zola is a novelist of economy: he makes the apparent excess of information and description germane to the reader’s experience, a skill he shares with Balzac. Sometimes doing less with more—catching the world’s overspill and channelling it towards a coherent but unreductive end—is just as good as the more conventionally admired skill of doing more with less. Zola does not always economize on words; his novels are voraciously inclusive—of data, facts and figures, descriptions and details—but he rarely repeats himself. While it is true that The Conquest of Plassans is, by Zola’s standards, a lean and plot-driven novel, it is also full of lyrical description and recurring symbolic motifs.

  Faujas, whose name contains the French for ‘false’, faux, is a strict and unmaterialistic priest who installs himself in the Mouret house and makes it his centre of operations. Faujas is the cuckoo in the nest, and the Mourets’ house and garden are chosen because they lie between two opposing political camps that Faujas must reconcile in order to put forward his masters’ candidate for election. This candidate, revealed towards the end of the book, is to be a yes-man who, when elected, votes with the majority and thus helps maintain the status quo. But there is no status quo for the novel itself, which powers towards its terrible ending. The Mourets lose their reputation, their children, their sanity, and finally their property, which has become the symbolic battleground on which the human and political drama is played out. To understand how Zola merges the symbolic and mythic dimension with the naturalistic and documentary, we need only think of the Mourets’ garden, the place Mouret calls, again with dramatic irony, his ‘little corner of paradise’ (p. 36). On the one hand, Zola is so precise in his preparation for the scenes he paints that he drew detailed diagrams of the house and garden, right down to the vegetable patches and paths; and on the other, he makes the fate of the house and garden into the symbolic marker of Faujas’s rise and the Mourets’ fall. Partway through the book, Faujas’s greedy and deceitful sister and brother-in-law, the Trouches, arrive and join him in the Mourets’ house. Gradually, they take it over, stealing food, money, and objects, using the kitchen, and even, at the end, sleeping in the Mourets’ bed. They are truly repellent characters, and the reader follows helplessly as they thieve and lie their way to dominance of Mouret’s realm. They are also, with the help of the doctor and the connivance of Faujas, instrumental in having Mouret declared insane, using a law—that Zola researched fully—which allowed people to be committed to asylums with frighteningly little evidence of madness. By the end of the book, Mouret really is mad, something else that Zola researched: the way in which people who suffered from depression or melancholy, or who simply became inconvenient to their families, finally succumbed to clinical madness in the very institutions which were supposed to care for them. In his short story, ‘Histoire d’un fou’ (‘Story of a Madman’—first published in 1868), Zola told the tale of a husband, Maurin, who is committed to an insane asylum by his wife and her lover, a doctor, in order to get him out of the way. The wife pretends her husband has been attacking her while the townspeople tell increasingly incriminating stories about the poor man, until, like Mouret, he is taken away in the dead of night and thrown into the asylum. Zola had originally intended to make Marthe fake her attacks the way Maurin’s wife does, but he changed his mind because he felt that such planning and deceit were inconsistent with her character as he had created it. There was even a very early plan to make her Faujas’s lover, but this too, and for the same reasons, was abandoned. Zola instead prefers to trace, as a sort of parallel narrative to her husband’s, Marthe’s own descent into insanity in ways that chimed with his own interest in female hysteria.

  Meanwhile, Faujas colonizes the garden, and even the Mourets’ housekeeper, Rose, is suborned by the Faujas clan. As the Mourets’ home is invaded and its inhabitants manipulated and turned against each other, so Plassans too is ‘conquered’. The two spaces reflect each other: public life and domestic life are infiltrated and undermined by the same forces and in a sort of symmetrical movement. This symmetry is designed not just to show the close collaboration, a collaboration seen by Zola as born of self-serving and based on hypocrisy, between the Imperial regime and the religious establishment, but also to emphasize the link between the characters’ inner life and the world which they both shape and are shaped by. It also, on the more practical level, helps to hold together the various plots and subplots of the story. Zola was often called, by admirers and critics alike, a ‘constructeur de romans’, a ‘builder of novels’, and in a book with so much intrigue, so many characters, and so many different parts, Zola’s deep understanding of how to structure complex narratives is impressive. This sturdiness of plotting complements something else too: a profound understanding of how to deploy a symbolic structure and a poetic, not to say lyrical, style. Zola choreographs symbolically charged scenes in which, for instance, a game of shuttlecock between children becomes an opportunity for Faujas to bring the (self-)interests of the two opposing factions into line with his own plan. Later in the novel, Mouret’s insanity and fall is symbolized by the way he returns to find his beloved vegetable garden has been pulled up and turned by Trouche, Faujas’s brother-in-law, into a vulgar and showy flower garden. Though Zola relied on documentation and textbooks to plot the different madnesses of Marthe and François Mouret, and even uses examples from contemporary medicine when he has Doctor Porquier cite case files of insane
people, there is a powerful symbolic meaning to the couple’s fates. Mouret dies in the fire he starts which destroys his house, the place he loves, and has, in his insane way, reclaimed by killing the Faujas clan, while Marthe dies in her mother’s house, catching sight of her son Serge’s soutane in the red light of the flames as they flicker across the room. These are tragic homecomings, but they are homecomings nonetheless: they fit together, and we might even say they ‘rhymed’. Even the novel’s ending casts ahead: Serge himself, drawn to religion by Faujas and his mother’s favourite child, will return with his own tragedy in the novel that immediately follows this one: The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875). Like many of Zola’s books, this one thus ends on the cusp of the next instalment: people beget people, novels beget novels.

  The Scientific Novel

  ‘Heredity, like gravity, has its laws,’ wrote Zola in the preface to The Fortune of the Rougons, for which he proposed, revealingly, an alternative ‘scientific title’ with a deliberately Darwinian flavour: ‘Origins’.5 Zola believed that art had a responsibility to understand its period and to show solidarity with its times. Later, Zola’s solidarity would become overtly political, with his famous ‘J’Accuse’ pamphlet during the Dreyfus case, in which he showed that political idealism was by no means incompatible with a deep and often pessimistic understanding of reality. Zola was also a materialist in the specific sense that he believed that what happened in the world was explicable by means of that world. This does not, as we have seen, prevent him from bringing his novels to melodramatic and symbolic climaxes—on the contrary, it suggests that these great melodramatic denouements, for all their excess, are firmly fixed in causes and effects that are rooted in sturdy plotting.