Crime and the law being one of the many ‘inner’ worlds which went to form the larger, corporate world of the Second Empire, Zola had decided that it would be given a place of its own. Writing to his publisher, Lacroix, in 1868, Zola included in the list of ten novels that he initially envisaged as making up the series a novel set against the background of the law courts. Although at this stage Zola provided no details of plot, he had decided that the hero of the novel would be Étienne Lantier, whom he describes as ‘one of those born criminals who, although not mad, are suddenly driven by some animal instinct to commit murder’.4 The idea that murder is a product of some ‘animal instinct’ echoes Zola’s comments on Thérèse Raquin and the three women accused of poisoning in Marseille. But he now goes further; he sees Étienne Lantier’s propensity for crime as something which may also be explained by reference to heredity. Zola had situated Étienne Lantier on the illegitimate branch of the original Rougon-Macquart family tree, a fourth-generation descendant of the drunken smuggler Macquart and the neurotic and eventually insane Adélaïde Fouque. But by the time Zola came to write La Bête humaine some twenty years later, Étienne Lantier had been given a prominent role in another novel, Germinal (where he figures as the leader of a miners’ strike and does in fact commit murder) and was ear-marked for a role in the final novel in the series, Le Docteur Pascal. Zola needed a different protagonist for his novel about crime and he provided Étienne with an older brother, Jacques, a late addition to the Rougon-Macquart family tree, but one which ensured that his new hero would have the same degenerate forebears as his predecessor. Jacques Lantier, like his brother, would be a ‘born criminal’.
Zola’s thinking about crime during the period immediately preceding the writing of La Bête humaine was influenced by his reading of a number of recently published studies in criminology. The most notable of these was a work by the Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), L‘Uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man). Originally written in 1876, it had been translated into French as L’Homme criminel in 1887. Zola had read it carefully. Lombroso argued that most criminals were ‘born criminals’, drawn to crime by an atavistic instinct and by pathological characteristics which were often discernible in their physical appearance. Basing his account on a study of the physical characteristics of convicted criminals, he identified various ‘abnormalities’ (pronounced lower jaw, oversized hands, low forehead) which he claimed indicated a biological regression to a primitive animal state and even a predisposition to certain types of crime. A year before the appearance of the French translation of L’Uomo delinquente, the French criminologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) had published his La Criminalité comparée (Comparative Criminology). Tarde had read Lombroso’s work in the original Italian and sought to challenge the assumptions that he was making. Criminals, he argued, were not just ‘born’; nor could they be regarded as a purely biological throw-back to a primitive form of existence. Heredity and social environment also contributed to the making of the criminal. If the criminal displayed what might be termed ‘regressive’ patterns of behaviour, it was because the circumstances of birth and upbringing had upset the normal balance of inherited characteristics relating to the past history of the species. Tarde also insisted that whilst the human race had advanced intellectually and technologically, its moral development lagged far behind. Atavistic impulses had adapted themselves to changing conditions and to technological progress. Tarde had worked as a judge’s assistant and as an examining magistrate at Sarlat, in the Périgord, since 1867. His Comparative Criminology was written out of twenty years of practical experience of criminal investigation and it also had a practical objective. Tarde was concerned to ensure that the administration of justice did not consist merely in the application of summary sentences but that each case would be judged with reference to all the particularities of character and circumstance that attended it.
Echoes of this criminological debate are sensed in a number of ways in La Bête humaine. Most obvious is the suggestion, introduced early in the novel, that Jacques’s urge to kill is an atavistic impulse whose origins are lost in the remote past. ‘Was this the swollen legacy of a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave?’ Jacques asks himself (II). The question is never resolved. It returns insistently throughout the novel, tormenting Jacques’s conscience and calling for the reader’s attention. Yet however remote its possible origins, Jacques’s urge to kill is also perceived as the legacy of a more recent past, an unwanted bequest from the family of drunkards and delinquents into which he has been born and whose tainted blood he has inherited. Jacques gloomily reflects on the generations of Macquarts and Lantiers that have preceded him. ‘It couldn’t really be called a normal family. So many of them had some flaw, and he often thought he must have inherited this family flaw himself’ (II). It is this hereditary ‘flaw’ (the French ‘fêlure’ literally means ‘crack’) that allows resentments and obsessions which no longer find room in the conscious memory to seep through the walls of social conditioning into a supposedly more civilized modern world. The notion of heredity acting as a mediating agent for primitive impulse or as a catalyst for some latent genetic disorder is close to the thinking of Tarde.
Some of the physical features which Lombroso had identified as distinguishing marks of the criminal also find their way into Zola’s description of characters in the novel. Roubaud is given a low forehead and short, hairy fingers; Jacques’s otherwise handsome appearance is marred by a pronounced lower jaw. This should not be taken to imply that the novel simply endorses Lombroso’s ideas and reduces the physical appearance of characters to a series of ready-made hallmarks of criminal types. Zola does not allow these supposedly ‘criminal’ features to go unchallenged. When Cabuche stands before the judge at the final trial, accused, according to the examining magistrate’s interpretation of events, not only of murder but of an act of necrophilia, Zola provides him, in a manner that verges on caricature, with the ‘enormous fists and carnivorous jaws’ appropriate to the crime committed. The well-dressed ladies crowding the reserved balcony of the courtroom eager to catch a glimpse of this monster of sexual depravity need no further convincing. Zola ensures, however, that the reader of the novel knows that Cabuche is perfectly innocent. More than this, Cabuche is the one character in the novel who displays any true generosity of spirit. His physical appearance thus belies his true nature; if he lives as a recluse in a hovel in the woods, it is partly because social prejudice against a man of his ‘type’ forces him to do so.
If the novel places a question mark against Lombroso’s criminal stereotyping, it appears more readily to embrace Tarde’s thinking on the ability of the criminal instinct to adapt itself to changing social conditions. This is seen in the way in which murderous intent exploits opportunities afforded by the new technology of the age, namely the railway. Both Roubaud and Flore are railway employees, and their lives are to a large extent regulated by the demands of their employment. Flore, it is true, manages from time to time to escape her duties and discovers a form of liberation and independence by roaming the nearby countryside. Yet she must always return to her job. It therefore comes as no surprise that when she and Roubaud plan their separate murders, they both think spontaneously of the railway as a means of achieving their end. Roubaud kills his victim in a reserved compartment on board an express train. Flore, considerably more resourceful and more calculating than Roubaud, thinks of three different ways of causing a train crash before chance provides her with an even better one. Pecqueux’s plan to murder Jacques also exploits the opportunity provided by his job with the railway company; he flings Jacques from the footplate of a locomotive travelling at speed. For Roubaud, Flore and Pecqueux, murder is conceived as an act of revenge, and as such their crimes proceed from the most ancient of motives. But in each instance revenge comes in ‘modern’ guise. The ancient crime proves itself to be abreast if not ahead of technological progress. As Aunt
Phasie comments cynically in one of her rare moments of lucidity, ‘You can go on inventing better machines till the cows come home. It won’t change a thing. In the end we’re at the mercy of beasts’ (II). The novel thus engages with a sharply divided contemporary debate on the nature and causes of criminal behaviour.
In April 1888, this debate was given a particularly gruesome focus by the first in a series of murders of women prostitutes in London’s East End. In September 1888 a letter signed by ‘Jack the Ripper’ was passed to the London police, laying claim to these murders and promising that they would continue. The murders in fact continued during the whole period that Zola was preparing and writing his novel and for another year after the novel was published. They involved throat-cutting and in many cases severe mutilation of the victim’s body. ‘Jack the Ripper’ achieved instant notoriety, and his unsavoury exploits brought home the reality and urgency of the criminological debate, in a way that theoretical discussion could never do, to ordinary citizens going about their daily lives not only in London but in cities throughout the world. In an interview given to the Italian newspaper Tribuna in November 1889, shortly after the publication of the first three instalments of La Bête humaine, Zola speaks of Jacques Lantier as a criminal ‘cast in the same mould as “Jack the Ripper”’.5 Jacques has a psychopathic desire to kill women, and it is this terrifying compulsion that provides the central impetus of La Bête humaine. The name Zola gives his protagonist could not have failed to connect him in the reader’s mind with the legendary perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders (in French ‘Jacques l’Éventreur’). Like ‘Jack the Ripper’, Jacques Lantier’s preferred weapon is the knife. Like ‘Jack the Ripper’, his desire to murder is prompted by female sexuality, and he discovers that one murder is insufficient to satisfy his urge to kill. The novel thus goes beyond the well-trodden path of personally motivated murder and embarks on an exploration of the mind of a potential serial killer.
Jacques’s urge to kill is set within a broader context of violence and crime. The novel describes a total of five murders, each of which has its roots in various forms of sexually related discontent or frustration. Roubaud’s killing of Grandmorin, in the early part of the novel, is a crime of passion, conceived in the space of half an hour by an insanely jealous husband after discovering that his wife, Séverine, has been abused as a child. The immediate cause of Roubaud’s anger is a sense of outrage towards the man who has supposedly molested his wife, coupled with a feeling of resentment towards his wife at having concealed the incident from him. The violence of his reaction, however, is a product of his own unstable and irascible character. Roubaud is capable of excessive fits of rage for the most trivial of reasons and at such moments he is transformed instantly into a creature of brutal and murderous instinct. He suffers from a sense of his social inferiority to his wife and from the fact that he is fifteen years older than her. He is puzzled by her sexual reticence towards him. The discovery of what he clearly considers to be a form of pre-marital sexual licence on the part of his wife (only minutes after she has resisted his own sexual advances towards her) prompts a reaction of unbridled fury.
Séverine is forced against her will to assist Roubaud in the murder of Grandmorin. Strictly speaking, she is an accomplice to murder rather than a murderer in her own right. Yet her involvement in the killing of Grandmorin emboldens her to instigate and assist in a second murder when she decides that the time has come to be rid of her husband. On the two occasions that this murder is planned she proves herself to be more calculating, fearless and resolute than her partner in crime.
Flore’s attempt to murder Séverine and Jacques is also the product of a lover’s fury. She is jealous of her rival in love and feels bitter towards the man who has spurned her. For Flore, as for Roubaud, murder is an act of revenge. But for Flore revenge is more than an act of personal retribution; it is conceived on a cataclysmic scale as a destruction of everything around her. It proceeds from the nihilistic, suicidal conviction that, having been rejected by Jacques, her life is no longer worth living. She sees no reason why, if her own life is at an end, other lives, and even perfectly innocent lives, should not end too. Flore inhabits a world of her own. Fiercely independent and proud of her womanhood, she scorns the company of men, preferring to be alone and to roam the countryside. The name ‘Flore’ emphasizes her separateness from the man’s world of technological progress. Yet she is certainly no Botticellian goddess of flowers and springtime. She is a bringer of death and destruction. She has an aggressive, even warlike character. The seemingly impossible exploits she is credited with (such as singlehandedly stopping a runaway railway wagon on an incline) stand as manly, even super-manly, intrusions by a woman into the male-dominated world of the railway. When she is rejected by Jacques she loses the one opportunity she has ever had to form a pact with the man’s world. The train crash which she plans as an act of revenge on the two people who have destroyed her hopes of happiness is also a gesture of defiance towards the male-driven concept of material progress.
The murder of Aunt Phasie by her husband Misard seems on the face of it to be murder of a different sort. It is a calculated, callous and secretive murder by poisoning which has been going on for some time before the novel begins. Misard’s motive for murdering his wife is ostensibly to lay his hands on the 1,000 francs she has inherited from her father, but the conflict between Misard and his wife has evolved into a strange contest as to which of the two will outwit and outlive the other. Even here, then, murder is the product of a perverted form of sexual rivalry. Misard, having shown no interest in the sexual side of his marriage, takes an insidious delight in slowly destroying a once vivacious and sexually attractive woman, whilst his wife, even though she is at death’s door, comforts herself with thoughts of her earlier flirtations and the knowledge that her husband’s plan to acquire her money will never succeed.
Pecqueux’s killing of Jacques is another crime of passion which results in a violent physical attack on the victim. In this case the violence is exacerbated by drink. Pecqueux murders Jacques as a reprisal for having, as he sees it, seduced his mistress, although he does not live to savour his revenge, for in killing Jacques he also succeeds in killing himself.
A further act of sexually related violence lurks in the shadows cast by these other crimes. The incident is only alluded to and is never fully explained, but it seems to have involved a savage assault by Grandmorin on Flore’s younger sister, Louisette, as a result of which she subsequently dies. The implication is that Grandmorin, as well as being guilty of sexual assault, a crime to which officialdom and certain members of his own family are quite prepared to turn a blind eye, is also guilty, along with Roubaud, Séverine, Flore, Pecqueux and Jacques, of murder.
Like that of the novel’s other murderers, Jacques’s urge to kill is sexually driven, and is described as a desire to exact reprisal. In Jacques’s case, however, reprisal is directed not at any one individual but at women in general. Jacques is prompted by a desire to right a cumulative wrong, to settle a grudge which he vaguely senses has been passed from man to man from time immemorial. When the urge to kill comes upon him, it requires a particular victim, but the victim can be any woman who happens to be around at the time, and in this sense his urge to kill is indiscriminate. One of the more chilling episodes in the novel depicts Jacques, knife in hand, stalking potential victims in the streets of Paris early one winter’s morning - a girl of fourteen, a frail and impoverished woman on her way to work and finally a pretty young mother whom he follows on to a train. Although Jacques’s urge to kill is described as having been inherited at birth, it is not until puberty that it has manifested itself. It is thus related to Jacques’s sexual coming of age. ‘Whereas other boys coming to puberty dreamed of possessing a woman, the only thing that had excited him was the thought of killing one’ (II). Even though the urge to kill may have its roots in the remote past, what immediately triggers it is sexual arousal, and it reveals itself as a perverse for
m of sexual desire. Early in the novel Jacques stands beside the body of the murdered Grandmorin, and his craving to kill grows more intense ‘like lust that is denied gratification’ (II). When, in what is probably the most climactic scene in the novel, Jacques murders Séverine, the act is presented as the result of sexual enticement on the part of Séverine and as an act of sexual possession on the part of Jacques. ‘The fearful door that guarded the dark abyss of sexual desire lay open. If she loved him she must die. To possess her fully he must kill her’ (XI). When the deed is done, Jacques experiences an orgasmic sense of completion. ’An extraordinary feeling of elation bore him aloft. He savoured the long-awaited fulfilment of his desire’ (XI).
If, miraculously, at the age of twenty-six, Jacques has managed to avoid killing anyone it is mainly because he immerses himself in his job. Just as Flore eschews the company of men by escaping into the wild countryside near by, so Jacques avoids contact with women by spending every minute he can in the company of his locomotive. When he is not actually driving it, he attends to its needs, cleaning it and checking that it is in good working order. This exemplary commitment to his job is presented as a redirection and transference of Jacques’s sexual energies. The locomotive becomes his ‘mistress’. It is referred to not as ‘it’ but as ‘she’. Not only does Jacques love and care for her, he also learns how to ‘handle’ her, to master her and make her do his bidding. The locomotive is described as a creature with a mind of her own, who has to be properly looked after but whose whims must ultimately be subjugated to his will. It is no coincidence that Jacques’s murderous instinct resurfaces so dramatically on the day that the locomotive is taken away from him to be repaired and he is given an unexpected holiday from work. Zola seems to suggest that the only way of dealing with an inherited obsession is to construct an alternative obsession. At the point at which the novel begins, this tactic appears to have worked. But it has clearly not been easy. Although he cannot fully understand his affliction, Jacques has a keen sense of his own vulnerability; he knows that he is at risk day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. When he is not performing his professional duties he must immure himself ‘like a monk’ (II) in his little attic room in the Rue Cardinet, at a safe distance from the teeming life of the city, a form of self-imposed sequestration and celibacy that complements the isolation provided by his job of work. It is against his will and better judgement that he is drawn from this life of voluntary exile.