Emile Zola

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola, better known as Émile Zola (Paris, April 2, 1840-Paris, September 29, 1902), was a French writer, novelist, journalist, playwright, considered the father and greatest representative of literary naturalism and a major contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his famous opinion piece titled “J'accuse…!”, which cost him exile from his country. Zola was a candidate for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.

Biography

Émile Zola was born in Paris, the son of François Zola, a naturalized Venetian engineer, and Frenchwoman Émilie Aubert. His family moved to Aix-en-Provence and he had serious financial problems after the early death of his father. He had Paul Cézanne as a schoolmate, with whom he would maintain a long and brotherly friendship. He returned to Paris in 1858. In 1859, Émile Zola failed the baccalaureate exam twice. Since he did not want to continue being a burden to his mother, he dropped out of school in order to look for work.

Emile Zola portrayed by Manet (1868).

In 1862 he went to work at the Hachette bookstore as a clerk. He wrote his first text and contributed to the literary columns of several newspapers. Starting in 1866, he cultivated the friendship of personalities such as Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and the Goncourt brothers.

In 1868 he conceived the project for Les Rougon-Macquart, which began in 1871 and ended in 1893. His aspiration was to produce a "physiological" novel, to which he attempted to apply some of the theories of Taine on the influence of race and environment on the individual and Claude Bernard on heredity. «I want to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, behaves in a society, developing to give rise to ten or twenty individuals who seem, at first sight, profoundly different, but who analysis shows to be closely linked to each other. to the others», Zola will say in the preface to the first novel in the saga, which follows, although only in part, the model of Honoré de Balzac in the Human Comedy. The subtitle of the series reads Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.

The work consists of twenty novels and begins with La fortuna de los Rougon in 1871, a social portrait that, following the scheme of naturalism, has high doses of violence and drama and was sometimes too explicit in his descriptions for the taste of the time. The novels, however, were imaginatively crafted, despite the data he had previously sought.

Emile Zola (c. 1880).

He married Alexandrine Mélay in 1870. Starting in 1873, he was associated with Gustave Flaubert and Alphonse Daudet. He met Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Alexis, Léon Hennique and Guy de Maupassant who became regulars at Médan evenings, a place near Poissy where Zola had had a cottage since 1878. He became the leader of the naturalists. A collective volume born of those evenings appeared two years later.

In 1886, Zola and Cézanne fell apart, something that has been attributed, although with little foundation, to the parallels between Paul Cézanne, the friend and painter, and the character Claude Lantier, a failed painter of Zola's work. The fundamental difference is that only some personality traits—for example, the character's habits, evaluations, and way of working—were inspired on the basis of Zola's notes on the life of his friend. However, Claude Lantier's fictional plastic work is inspired by an interpretation of Zola himself by a group of painters he knew well, including Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe; as a fan of contemporary art that he was, he presented a conventional analysis of this work by Manet, attributing it to a character with artistic ideas, a character, expectations and customs completely opposite to those of Cézanne, in addition to endowing it with a tragic and dramatic story.. Contrary to what was believed at the time, they did not correspond to Paul's life, but although the whole set of circumstances described in the novel evoked very different elements from those that actually corresponded to him, they were partly significant for life and the work of Paul Cézanne.

He regularly criticized the criteria used in the official art exhibitions of the 19th century, in which new impressionist works were continually rejected.

On the other hand, the publication of La tierra raised controversy. The "Manifesto of the Five" marked the criticism of young naturalist writers. He became the lover of Jeanne Rozerot in 1888, with whom he will have two children.In 1890, he was refused entry to the French Academy. In 1894 the Holy See decreed the inclusion of all his work in the Index of Prohibited Books of the Catholic Church.

The Dreyfus Affair

Cover L'Aurore of 13 January 1898 with the letter J’accuse...! from Zola.

Since 1897, Zola was involved in the Dreyfus case, a French soldier, of Jewish origin, falsely accused of being a spy.

The novelist intervened in the debate given the anti-Semitic campaign, and supported the cause of French Jews. He wrote several articles, where the phrase "the truth is on the way and no one will stop it" (12-1897) appears. Finally, he published in the newspaper L & # 39; Aurore his famous J’accuse…! (Letter to the President of the Republic), 1898, with three hundred thousand copies, which caused the revision process to take a sharp turn, since the true traitor (the one who spied) was Commander Walsin Esterházy, which was denounced in a War Council on January 10, 1898, but without success.

The full version in Spanish of the plea in favor of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, directed by Émile Zola through that open letter to the French President M. Felix Faure, and published by the newspaper L'Aurore, on January 13, 1898, on its front page, is the following:

I accuse Lieutenant Colonel Paty of Clam as a laborer—I want to assume unconscious—of the judicial error, and for having defended his nefarious work three years later with ruined and guilty machinations.

I accuse General Mercier for having become accomplice, at least for weakness, of one of the greatest iniquities of the century.

I accuse General Billot of having in his hands the proofs of Dreyfus' innocence, and not having used them, thus being guilty of the crime against humanity and against justice for a political purpose and to save the committed Major General.

I accuse General Boisdeffre and General Gonse for having become accomplices of the same crime, one by clerical fanaticism, the other by spirit of body, which makes War offices a holy, inacable ark.

I accuse General Pellieux and Commander Ravary for having made infamous information, a partly monstrous information, in which the second has broken the imperishable monument of his audacity.

I am in charge of the three qualifying experts, Mr. Belhomme, Mr. Varinard and Couard, for their misleading and fraudulent reports, unless an optional examination declares them victims of blindness and judgment.

I come to the war offices for having done in the press, particularly in L'Éclair and L'Echo from Paris an abominable campaign to cover his fault, diverting public opinion.

And finally, I accuse the first War Council, for having condemned an accused, based on a secret document, and the second War Council, for having covered this illegality, committing the legal crime of consciously absolving a guilty person.

I do not ignore that, in formulating these accusations, I have drawn upon myself articles 30 and 31 of the Press Act of 29 July 1881, which refer to defamation offences. And I voluntarily make myself available to the Tribunals.

As for the people I accuse, I must say that I do not know them, nor have I ever seen them, nor do I feel particularly for them grudge or hatred. I consider them as entities, as spirits of social evil. And the act I perform here is only a revolutionary means of activating the explosion of truth and justice.

Only one feeling moves me, I only wish the light to be made, and I implore it in the name of humanity, which has suffered so much and has the right to be happy. My burning protest is nothing but a cry of my soul. That you dare take me to the Tribunals and judge me publicly.

I hope so."

Emile Zola, Paris, January 13, 1898.

Zola caricature, characterized as a pig, in Musée des Horreurs a series of anti-dreyfusist and anti-Semite cartoons published in France between 1899 and 1900.

It was the first synthesis of the process, and it was read all over the world. The government's reaction was immediate. A hectic defamation process (with great violence, hundreds of witnesses, inconsistencies and concealment by the prosecution) sentenced him to one year in prison and a fine of 7,500 francs (including expenses), paid by his friend and writer Octave Mirbeau.

Overwhelmed by the upheaval his trial caused, Zola went into exile in London, where he lived in secret. Upon his return, he published in La Vérité en marche his articles on the case. Only in June 1899, with the continuation of the process, he was able to return to his country. But Alfred Dreyfus was convicted, with extenuations, and Zola wrote to him as soon as he arrived. Zola acquired a great social and political dimension, but he had great economic problems (the court seized his assets) and was pilloried by highly influential media.

Latest Books

He eventually wrote two more cycles of novels, despite his health. The first was the thick series of The Three Cities, a trilogy made up of Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), Paris (1898). The second was the tetralogy that he called The Four Gospels, made up of Fecundity (1899), Work (1901), Truth i> (1903)and the unfinished Justice.

In a long and famous article, a writer so different, Henry James, who came to know him, pointed out the mechanical and weak character of these last works, but made the following overall balance: "Our author was truly great to deal with matters that were appropriate. If the others, matters of a personal or intimate order, more or less inevitably made him "betray" himself, he nevertheless had the great honor that the more promiscuous and collective he could be, even the more he could illustrate our great natural portion of health., sincerity and rudeness (to repeat my challenge), the more he could impress us as penetrating and truthful. It was not an easy honor to achieve nor is it likely that his name will lose it in a short time ».

Death

Zola could not finish that cycle of Les quatre évangiles, because on September 29, 1902, he died at home, supposedly suffocated, but more likely murdered by someone who covered the chimney of a stove (one of Dreyfus' lawyers, Fernand Labori, had already suffered an assassination attempt).

Zola and his wife, after having dinner and chatting about the latest edition of the first three volumes of Les quatre évangiles, went to bed. At dawn, his wife found herself ill, she went to the bathroom and when she returned she found Zola awake and also unwell. When he got up he fell to the floor and his wife tried to call the service, but she collapsed on the bed.

His funeral was held on Sunday, October 5, with a huge crowd in attendance. The Nobel Prize for Literature Anatole France proclaimed a speech that ended like this: «We do not pity him for having suffered; let's envy him. Erected on the accumulation of outrages that stupidity, ignorance and malice have ever caused. His glory reaches an inaccessible height. Let's envy him, his destiny and his heart gave him the greatest reward: it was a moment of human consciousness ».

He was buried for six years in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, but his remains were transferred to the Panthéon on June 4, 1908, the highest honor in France.

Alfred Dreyfus was rehabilitated late in 1906.

Works

Zola tomb in the Montmartre Cemetery.

Zola burial in the Pantheon of Paris.