It is against the background of this history and experience that Florent, Gavard, and the others in the Les Halles of his novel almost casually conspire to launch armed revolution. There would have been nothing difficult to believe about this to contemporary readers. On the other hand, the fear with which Lisa and others in the neighborhood reject such plans and disdain such plotters is also understandable. In fact, the 1871 Commune finished off the French appetite for violent revolution. It was the last one. But a different kind of violent cycle had taken its place. To avenge their defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, which had set off the Commune uprising, the French leaped into World War I, defeated Germany, and imposed the punitive Versailles Treaty, an injustice, the denunciation of which brought Adolf Hitler to power. Germany got France, France got Germany, Germany got France, and then France was again liberated—two world wars and seventy-five years of bloody European history.
As might be expected from a late-nineteenth-century writer in the vanguard of the political thinking of his age, Zola was very interested in the status of women. To call him a feminist would be overstating it. In his own marriage, his wife, Alexandrine, like many of his women characters, came from a poor background and clung to the better life she had made by organizing and running everything, leaving Zola free for intellectual pursuits. It also gave him time for other pursuits, including a mistress with whom he had a second family. They all knew one another and, pleasantly for Emile, painfully for Alexandrine, they all spent time together.
The Belly of Paris has several examples of a smart, practical woman paired off with a good-natured, dreamy simpleton dependent on his woman's savvy, such as Lisa and Quenu and Cadine and Marjolin.
Few nineteenth-century novels portray women of the strength and complexity of Zola's women. Unlike those of Flaubert or Leo Tolstoy, Zola's are not so much the victims of an unfair society as women determined to be players. In The Belly of Paris Lisa scolds her husband for political activities, telling him, “If only you had asked my advice, if we had talked about it together. It's wrong to think that women don't understand politics … Do you want to know what I think? What my politics are?”
In both major and minor characters Zola shows an interest in the aspirations of women. When Clémence, herself a very minor character in The Belly of Paris, loses her job, she supports herself by giving French instruction to a young woman who is secretly trying to improve her education. We never learn anything more about this unnamed character, who is just a touch of set decoration in the picture he offers of society. Clémence herself holds her own in café political debates and is said to be manly.
Zola lived in a time when conservative politics and the Church supported the suppression of women while a new crop of progressives was denouncing the old ways. The subject fascinated young Zola, who continually wrote about it in letters to his friends. He seemed particularly influenced by the writings of Jules Michelet, a leading progressive who became a cultural hero of leftist youth after he was removed from his chair at the Collège de France because he refused to swear allegiance to the emperor in 1851. His books on women, L'Amour and La Femme, published in 1858 and 1859, when Zola was an impressionable teenager, called for a new role for women in society. To understand women, Michelet maintained, society had to free itself from the teachings of the Church and embrace science. Embracing science was the new religion of the time. Once women freed themselves of the slavery prescribed by the Church, they would become champions of progressive government, quite the opposite of Beautiful Lisa in The Belly of Paris, who proclaims, “I support a government that's good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don't want to know.” But the freedom that the future held for women, according to Michelet, could be achieved only by a good marriage. Only through the progressive thinking of the husband could the wife be completed.
Despite the seeming simplicity of such theories, the women, the marriages, the relationships between men and women in Zola's novels are complicated. There is a great deal of fiction and a great deal of love. Zola prided himself on realism. As a young man Zola's letters were full of reflections on relations between the sexes. In 1860, shortly after the two Michelet books were published, Zola wrote to Cézanne, “A husband has been given a major project, to reeducate his wife. It takes more than sleeping together to be married, they must also think in tandem.” And that same year to a different friend:
It is true that it is rare to see a happy couple. But that is because married people only know love in a superficial way. They are still strangers to the heart, and if they remain that way they will be unhappy all their lives. But if you put together a young man and a young woman, they are beautiful and they have physical love, but this is not yet love. Soon they discover each other's qualities and deficiencies, and little by little their personalities do not compete, because there are no unforgivable faults, they love with their souls, truly and entirely.
Marriage in Zola's novels, as in life, is a complicated relationship full of pettiness but also love, stifling at times but at others comforting. In The Belly of Paris the marriage of the weak and simple Quenu to the forceful Lisa, in the hands of a lesser writer would have been a tale of an Amazonian tyranny, but in Zola's gifted hands it is a relationship of love, spite, jealousy tenderness, support—a marriage that is both difficult and solid. Even a character such as Lisa, who symbolizes all that was wrong with the petite bourgeoisie—fat, selfish, complacent, indifferent to the suffering of others, and a maddening hypocrite, who, despite a complete absence of religious belief, has a priest at the ready to rubber-stamp what she knows are misdeeds—is still a complete woman, so fully drawn, so human and real, that we cannot quite hate her, though she infuriates us.
Zola sets us up. Just when we are ready to hate a character, he shows us a human side that melts us. The horrid old gossip Mademoiselle Saget takes such pleasure in damaging everyone else with her gossip, but then we see her buying table scraps to eat, trying to cheer herself with the idea that she is eating scraps from the aristocracy but hoping no one sees her buying them. And we feel sorry for her.
Curiously, Zola's strong women have strong smells, and he devotes substantial space to describing them. Though the fleshy Beautiful Norman is described as an extremely attractive woman, lengthy descriptions are given of the odors she gives off and finally it is concluded that she is too “strong-smelling” for Florent's tastes. But Zola was obsessed in all his writing with descriptions of tastes and smells. He loved good food and detested bad eating. The Belly of Paris, a novel of food, of tastes and smells, has often been described, especially by English-speaking admirers, as “strange” or “bizarre.” Zola's friend the writer Edmond de Goncourt was one who noted Zola's curious olfactory obsession. In his Journal he wrote, “The nose of Zola is a very articular nose, a nose that interrogates, that approves, that condemns, a nose that is gay, a nose that is sad, a nose that punctuates the physiognomy of its master; the nose of a true hunting dog.”
Today, in an age when gastronomic fiction has become fashionable, this book seems ahead of its time. But despite Zola's being a bourgeois who loved food and looked it, the social criticism in The Belly of Paris revolves around the graphically illustrated conceit that the bourgeoisie not only eats too much but has an unhealthy obsession with food.
Zola's father, an Italian immigrant, was an adventurer who had done everything from joining the French Foreign Legion when it was first formed to becoming an engineer and building a major dam in Provence. Emile Zola was born in 1840 during a brief stay in Paris not far from the Les Halles neighborhood that would be the setting for The Belly of Paris. But his family soon returned to Aix-en-Provence, where Emile grew up. Like the central characters in The Belly of Paris, Florent and Quenu, Zola grew up in Aix and went to Paris as a penniless student. Many of Zola's characters have their roots in Aix, a town always referred to in his fiction by the pseudonym Plassans.
In Paris people who had little money found small apartments on th
e upper floors, and Zola for a time lived in an eighth-floor apartment with a view of the rooftops of Paris. As an aging and respected writer he looked back and recalled this view and the vow it inspired: “It was then, from my twentieth year on, that I dreamed of writing a novel of which Paris, with its ocean of roofs, would be a principal character, something like the chorus of antique Greek tragedies.” Twelve years before publication, he was already laying the groundwork for Le Ventre de Paris.
He lived meagerly in those years; he had little to eat, often surviving on bread dipped in olive oil from Provence that friends and family sent him. Later in life, when he had money, he would make up for the lost meals.
The Paris Zola came to in 1858 was considerably different from the one he had been born in. The emperor Napoleon III wanted to leave his mark on France by remaking the capital, an act of publicly financed arrogance that would often be imitated. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and other French leaders have sought to leave their mark by changing Paris, but the most thorough remake was by Napoleon III. To accomplish this he brought in an architect, Georges Haussmann.
The wide boulevards and squares with resplendent monuments designed by Haussmann are much admired today, but at the time were regarded by many as the destruction of Paris. Haussmann himself was nicknamed “the great destroyer.” Paris had been a medieval city of narrow, winding streets, a teeming maze. Within these crowded and nearly unnavigable neighborhoods lived the Parisian masses that had risen up against Napoleon III's despotic rule on several bloody occasions.
It is not by chance that the layout of today's Paris bespeaks power and militarism. To many at the time, the emperor was simply bulldozing neighborhoods and building streets through them in which troops could quickly be deployed. A wide boulevard, later known as the boulevard Saint-Michel after a statue that was erected in a central square, cut a wide swath through the Latin Quarter. The same reshaping took place on the right bank. Poor people were evicted, neighborhoods were leveled, boulevards and monuments were built.
By the time Zola returned to Paris, the area around Les Halles was unrecognizable to him just as it is to Florent in the opening of The Belly of Paris. Paris streets were renamed after men of power, and only a few names remain today, mostly in the former Les Halles neighborhood—rue de la Ferronerie (Foundry), pas du Mule (Mule Path)—to remind Parisians not only of the old Paris names but of what the old Paris was. The gentrification and destruction of working-class neighborhoods is a theme that runs through The Belly of Paris and many other Zola novels. In Au Bonheur des dames, published ten years later, in 1883, a department store opens and an entire neighborhood of shops is put out of business. It is a process that has, sadly, continued in Paris, but The Belly of Paris is set at the dramatic beginning of this process.
Zola writes about longing for the little remaining of old Paris, “les belles rues d'autrefois” the beautiful old-fashioned streets, and as an example he cites rue de la Ferronerie. I remember feeling the same way a hundred years later, after they tore down Les Halles and it was just a hole in the ground and some of these same streets, including rue de la Ferronerie, were all that was left of the old neighborhood. It is all gone now, of course.
Not only public works but also poverty expanded in the Paris of Napoleon III. Inflation dramatically reduced the spending power of the average Parisian. Many of Paris's 1.7 million people were near starvation. The average worker spent between a third and two thirds of his income on bread. At the same time conspicuous displays of gluttony were made fashionable for the ruling class, encouraged by the emperor. Peace was maintained by police repression. As many as 35,000 Parisians were arrested for vagrancy in a single year.
In 1866, things grew even worse when Haussmann was caught skimming funds from his enormous public works budget and fired. The work stopped, and perhaps as many as 100,000 workers who had been rebuilding the city were thrown out of work.
While much of the city starved, the new boulevards were packed with restaurants and cafés offering gaudy displays of gourmandism. This was especially true in 1867, when Napoleon hosted a universal exposition and threw almost daily galas for visiting dignitaries.
In 1858, when Zola as a young man returned to the Paris of his birth, the final touches were being put on the first six pavilions of the newly redesigned Les Halles Centrales, the central market. The market had already been there for seven hundred years. An irony for Zola, whose novel is so much about the connection between Les Halles and fat people, the market was started in the twelfth century under Louis VI, who was known as Louis the Fat.
Napoleon I had planned to redesign it but was defeated by the British before the plans could get under way. The look of the new pavilions was something no Parisians had ever seen. In the plans it was called “a veritable palace of iron and crystal.” Some disapproved, but others, like Claude the painter in Le Ventre de Paris, thought it was the only original building of the century that “has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times.”
It most definitely was a product of the times. In 1845, Victor Baltard, a leading Paris architect and son of a prominent Paris neoclassical architect and artist, Louis-Pierre Baltard, was commissioned along with his partner, Félix Callet, an older but less-known architect, to redesign Les Halles. Their plan called for eight pavilions of various sizes with stone walls and metal roofs. In 1848, construction was halted by the revolution. In 1851, the new president of the republic, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, laid the first stone. The Baltard-Callet stone buildings were massive in appearance, and Parisians sneeringly called the design the “Les Halles fortress.” In 1853, Bonaparte, now emperor, stopped the construction and searched for a new idea, which he said should be “vast but light, like the new train stations.” He called for buildings that resembled umbrellas. Amazingly, the winning design was by the rejected team of Baltard and Callet, with ten iron-and-glass pavilions (an additional two were not completed until 1936). It was a state-of-the-art innovation of the Industrial Revolution.
Les Halles were the first buildings in France—and among the first in the world—to display their metalwork; all of the struts and arches were clearly visible since the construction was an entirely glass-covered metal frame. Almost no one in Paris, Zola included, had ever seen such buildings, and they were a sight to wonder at.
Baltard's Les Halles was one of the great successes of architectural history, a huge step forward in the development of metal architecture. It seemed so light and airy, even transparent, yet offered the strength of metal construction. Soon more train stations, the new phenomenon of department stores, and exhibition halls copied the idea. It became fashionable for buildings to have iron-and-glass roofs. It became the leading design for markets around the world.
In 1959, the government, after years of debate about the grubby market clogging traffic with trucks in the center of Paris, built a market in the southern suburbs of Rungis and La Villette. By the late 1960s only the meat market remained. In 1967, Janet Flanner, the celebrated American chronicler of prewar Paris, wrote a sad article in Life magazine, referring to Le Ventre de Paris and bemoaning that “the market smells of gasoline fumes. It used to smell of horses.” In March 1969, by order of President Charles de Gaulle, the market was officially closed over the protests of students, who by then had considerable practice protesting de Gaulle. Life magazine ran another article titled “‘The Belly of Paris,’ Les Halles, Closes Forever.”
By 1973, the market was completely gone and the emperor Napoleon's vision of a central Paris devoid of working-class neighborhoods began to be completed. Les Halles and its market people were replaced by a shopping mall and the surrounding neighborhoods were rebuilt to be expensive and fashionable and stripped of their charm. One of Baltard's pavilions, completed in 1854, was classified as a historic monument and moved up the Seine to Nogent-sur-Marne, where it is now known as the Pavillon Baltard.
This period of the empire, from the 1848 uprising to the 1871 uprising, is the setting of t
he Rougon-Macquart saga. The Belly of Paris takes place over one year from 1858 to 1859 and, like most of the other books, has a very strong sense of the political issues of the time. So it is not surprising that the lead character is a bagnard, a convict from the newly established penal colony of French Guiana.
France has never known what to do with its possession on the northeast shoulder of South America. There was a widely circulated legend in sixteenth-century Europe that somewhere in the continent of South America was a huge city holding astounding quantities of gold and other mineral riches. The Spanish called this never-seen city El Dorado. In 1595, the British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh published a report on his visit to the South American coast, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, in which he claimed to have found El Dorado. This created considerable interest in the area. The French, the British, and the Dutch ended up with slices of the region, and although some gold could be panned in the rivers—and still is—no one has found anything comparable to the legend of El Dorado.
Every attempt to settle French Guiana has failed. A seventeenth-century effort was led by a man who appears to have gone mad and ruled with arbitrary brutality. The original colony of Cayenne, on the coast, was taken over by indigenous warriors, who, according to contemporary reports, ate the settlers. Slaves were imported from Africa for plantations, but they constantly rebelled and ran away to the interior. In the eighteenth century, Louis XV sent 14,000 settlers. Ten thousand of them died of disease so rapidly that their bodies were dumped into the sea because there was no longer manpower available for burial. The remaining settlers fled to three offshore islands, which they called the Iles du Salut, the healthy islands, because they had less malaria and other diseases.
When Louis-Napoléon came to power, he was interested in the problem of settling this territory. Slavery, which had never worked well in Guiana, was abolished in all French territories in 1848. So he sent several boatloads of indentured Chinese laborers to work the land. They were not farmers, and they moved to Cayenne and set up shops. Their descendants still operate shops in Cayenne. Once their labor had fled, many plantation owners, recognizing a good idea, abandoned their land, and they too moved to Cayenne.