Germinal - Emile Zola [2]
1879 Nana appears in serial form, before publication in book form in the following year. The story of a high-class prostitute, the novel was to attract further scandal to Zola’s name.
1880 Publication of Les Soirées de Médan, an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his Naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant. Zola expounds the theory of Naturalism in Le Roman expérimental. In May, Zola’s literary mentor, the writer Gustave Flaubert, dies; in October, Zola loses his much-loved mother. A period of depression follows and he suspends writing the Rougon-Macquart for a year.
1882 Zola’s next book, Pot-Bouille, centres on an apartment house and the character of the bourgeois seducer, Octave Mouret. The novel analyses the hypocrisy of the respectable middle class.
1883 Mouret reappears in Au Bonheur des Dames, which studies the phenomenon of the department store. While on holiday in Brittany meets Alfred Giard, left-wing député for Valenciennes, who interests Zola in the miners’ cause.
1884 La Joie de vivre. At the invitation of Giard spends a week at the end of February visiting the mining community of Anzin, near Valenciennes, and goes down a working mine to research the realities of life underground. Law passed on 21 March legalizing trade unions. 2 April Zola begins writing Germinal, which starts to appear in Le Gil Blas in November and is published in book form the following year.
1886 L’Œuvre provides a revealing insight into Parisian artistic and literary life, as well as a reflection of contemporary aesthetic debates, drawing on Zola’s friendship with many leading painters and writers. However, Cézanne reacts badly to Zola’s portrait of him in the novel, and ends their friendship.
1887 La Terre, a brutally frank portrayal of peasant life, causes a fresh uproar and leads to a crisis in the Naturalist movement when five of his ‘disciples’ sign a manifesto against the novel.
1888 Publication of Le Rêve. Zola begins his liaison with Jeanne Rozerot, the mistress with whom he will have two children.
1890 La Bête humaine, the story of a pathological killer, is set against the background of the railways.
1891 L’Argent examines the world of the Stock Exchange.
1892 La Débâcle analyses the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the end of the Second Empire.
1893 The final novel in the cycle, Le Docteur Pascal, develops the theories of heredity which have guided Les Rougon-Macquart.
1894 With Lourdes, Zola starts a trilogy of novels, to be completed by Rome (1896) and Paris (1898), about a priest who turns away from Catholicism towards a more humanitarian creed. In December, a Jewish officer in the French Army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, is found guilty of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
1897 New evidence in the case suggests that Dreyfus’s conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice, inspired by anti-Semitism. Zola publishes three articles in Le Figaro demanding a retrial.
1898 Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse, in support of Dreyfus, addressed to Félix Faure, President of the Republic, is published in L’Aurore (13 January). It proves a turning point, making the case a litmus test in French politics: for years to come, being pro- or anti-Dreyfusard will be a major component of a French person’s ideological profile (with the nationalist Right leading the campaign against Dreyfus). Zola is tried for libel and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. In July, waiting for a retrial (granted on a technicality), he leaves for London, where he spends a year in exile.
1899 Zola begins a series of four novels, Les Quatre Évangiles, which would remain uncompleted at his death. They mark his transition from Naturalism to a more idealistic and utopian view of the world.
1902 29 September Zola is asphyxiated by the fumes from the blocked chimney of his bedroom stove, perhaps by accident, perhaps (as is still widely believed) assassinated by anti-Dreyfusards.