Germinal - Emile Zola [4]
Les Rougon-Macquart was intended, as its subtitle states, to present ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, and Émile Zola (1840–1902) was only in his late twenties when he submitted a book proposal to the publisher Lacroix in 1869 outlining the project. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five he had been working for the major Parisian publishing house Hachette, at first in the dispatch department and then in marketing, where he quickly rose to become head of publicity. There he learned the ‘business’ of being a professional writer: how to write, what to write, how to sell what you write. Notoriety helps, and the racy bedroom scenes of his first novel La Confession de Claude (1865) soon made his name widely known. The sex and violence of Thérèse Raquin (1867) caused an even greater stir, and in the following year controversy was further fuelled by his uncompromising Preface to its second edition. Rejecting all charges of sensationalism and pornography he roundly defended the ‘scientific’ purpose of the book: namely, a physiological rather than psychological analysis of the ‘love’ that brings two people of differing ‘temperaments’ together and an attempt to present the ‘remorse’ which follows their murder of an inconvenient husband as an entirely physical, ‘natural’ process.
By the time, therefore, that Zola submitted his book proposal to Lacroix he was a distinctly marketable commodity, and the project itself did not disappoint: a series of ten novels which would trace the effects of heredity and environment on the successive generations of one family while presenting an exposé of French society under the rule of the Emperor Napoleon III. Something like Balzac’s Comédie humaine therefore (which reflects the earlier decades of the century), but more ‘scientific’ – especially in its study of the effects of heredity – and also less coloured by the subjective opinions of its author. After an opening novel which traced the origins of the family and its division into a respectable and wealthy branch (the Rougons) and an illegitimate and genetically flawed branch (the Macquarts, from whom Gervaise Lantier and her children are descended), the remaining nine novels would focus in turn on the separate worlds of fashionable upper-class youth, banking and financial chicanery, government and the civil service, the Church, the army, the working class, the demi-monde, bohemia and the legal profession. A lucrative contract was secured.
Fortuitously the Second Empire ended – with the Franco-Prussian War and the disastrous defeat at Sedan on 1 September 1870 – just as Zola was writing the first of these ten novels, so that his new saga at once became the record of a fallen dynasty and a vanished world. At the same time his enthusiasm for the project grew, with the result that within a year or so he was already conceiving of a further seven novels for the series. Perhaps because of his experience of the Commune when republican elements took control of the city of Paris between March and May 1871, he now intended that one of these extra novels should focus on the domain of left-wing politics. In his earlier plan he had envisaged that his novel on the working class – which became L’Assommoir – would depict the appalling conditions in which the new urban proletariat was forced to live and work and how the demands and pressures of such an existence rendered it a prey to the alcohol which was so cheaply available and so injurious to health, resolve and marital harmony. Now he wanted to write another novel about working-class life, which would chart the contemporary manifestations of the revolutionary currents that – in France at least – had sprung to view in 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871. Germinal would be that novel, the people’s novel.
When L’Assommoir was published in 1877 (as the seventh novel in the series), it earned Zola large royalties and vociferous reviews.