Émile Zola (1840 - 1902) was a French novelist, playwright and journalist, the principal theorist and practitioner of literary naturalism. [1] His twenty-volume cycle Les Rougon-Macquart traced a single family through the Second Empire and brought working-class life into the centre of the French novel, while his open letter J'Accuse...! made him the decisive public voice in the Dreyfus affair. [2]
Early life
Zola was born in Paris on 2 April 1840 and raised largely in Aix-en-Provence, where his father, an engineer of Italian origin, had undertaken the construction of a canal. His father's death in 1847 left the family in financial difficulty, and Zola failed his baccalaureate examinations after returning to Paris. [1]
He took clerical work at the publishing house Hachette, where he moved into the publicity department and began writing criticism for the press. His early art journalism was notable for its defence of Édouard Manet and the painters who would become the Impressionists, among them his boyhood friend Paul Cézanne. [2]
Naturalism and Les Rougon-Macquart
Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin (1867) announced his method: fiction conceived as a form of experiment, with characters treated as products of heredity, environment and physiological drive. He set out the programme explicitly in the essay collection Le Roman expérimental (1880). [2]
From 1871 he devoted himself to Les Rougon-Macquart, subtitled a natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. The twenty novels, completed in 1893, moved across French society from peasantry to high finance. L'Assommoir (1877) depicted alcoholism among the Paris poor and brought him commercial success; Nana (1880) examined prostitution and the demi-monde; Germinal (1885), set in a northern coal-mining strike, became his most widely read work; and La Bête humaine (1890) turned to the railways and to criminal pathology. [1]
The Dreyfus affair
In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the French army, was convicted of treason on forged evidence and deported to Devil's Island. As doubts about the conviction mounted and the army closed ranks, Zola published an open letter to the President of the Republic in the newspaper L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, under the headline J'Accuse...!, naming officers he held responsible for the miscarriage of justice. [3]
The letter was deliberately framed to provoke a libel prosecution and so force the evidence into open court. Zola was convicted and, facing imprisonment, fled to England, returning in 1899 after the case was reopened. Dreyfus was eventually pardoned and, in 1906, fully exonerated. [3]
Death and legacy
Zola died in Paris on 29 September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney flue. The death was ruled accidental, though the possibility that it was the work of political enemies has been raised repeatedly since. [1] In 1908 his remains were transferred to the Panthéon.
Zola's naturalism shaped novelists across Europe and the Americas and remains a reference point for socially engaged fiction. J'Accuse...! is regarded as a founding document of the modern intellectual's intervention in public affairs, and the phrase itself has passed into general use. [2]
