Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [4]
1894 Lourdes, the first installment of Zola’s idealistic trilogy Les Trois Villes (The Three Cities), is published. Sadi Carnot, president of the French republic, is assassinated, and Jean Casimir-Périer becomes president. Spurred by virulent anti-Semitism in the military, the public, and the press, the French government without clear justification convicts Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the French army, of giving secret information to a German military attaché.
1896 Rome, the next book in the Three Cities trilogy, is published.
1897 Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac debuts.
1898 Paris, the last book of the Three Cities trilogy, is published. New evidence leads to the reopening of the Dreyfus case, and Zola publishes his famous open letter in defense of Dreyfus, “J’Accuse,” in the newspaper L’Aurore. He accuses the army of deception and coverup; found guilty of libeling the army, he is fined 3,000 francs and sentenced to a year in prison. He flees to England.
1899 Zola returns to Paris. Dreyfus is reconvicted at a second court martial but is granted a presidential pardon. Zola publishes Fécondité (Fecundity), the first installment of a new series, Les Quatre Évangiles (The Four Gospels).
1901 Travail (Labor), the next in the Four Gospels series, is published.
1902 Zola dies, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes resulting from a blocked chimney in his Paris apartment building. Many speculate that he was deliberately killed because of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. When he is buried at Montmartre Cemetery, his funeral is attended by 50,000 people.
1903 Vérité (Truth), the last of the Four Gospels novels that Zola completed, is published. The final volume, Justice, was not finished at the time of his death.
1906 Dreyfus is exonerated from any wrongdoing.
1908 In recognition of Zola’s achievements, his remains are transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.
1937 The Life of Émile Zola, a film directed by William Dieterle, wins three Academy Awards.
Introduction
For about a hundred years, novelists were seized with the desire to replicate the entire world. Beginning with Honoré de Balzac in the early nineteenth century and ending rather less memorably in the first few decades of the twentieth century with the likes of Jules Romains and John Galsworthy, this tendency saw the production of sweeping multi-volume series in which societies were sectioned up into thematic units and teeming masses of characters were assigned sociologically appropriate fates by their godlike authors. Balzac, who set the tone and the challenge, composed his Comédie humaine of some ninety novels and novellas, grouped together primarily according to their settings: private life, provincial life, city life, country life, military life, and so on. Characters sometimes overlapped from one book to another, and stories embryonically suggested in one volume would be fully developed in another. Balzac’s intention was to account for the entirety of life in France in his time, with all of its contrasts and variations. Although Balzac lived and wrote during a time of herculean production by writers of fiction, few followed his lead at first. While novelists all over Europe might comfortably issue two or three triple-decker epics a year, many ranging broadly in their focus all across the surface of their time, none was inclined toward Balzac’s systematic chronicle of society, not even Dickens, who came the closest.
It was not until two decades after Balzac’s death in 1850 that his heir presumptive announced himself. In 1871 Émile Zola published the first installment in what was to be a twenty-volume series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, an examination of the whole of French society through the lens of the family named in the collective title. Zola intended to go Balzac one better in the way of rigor. His chronicle would be founded on strict scientific principles derived from the work of Charles Darwin and his disciples. Mere realism was no longer sufficient; a methodical, experimental procedure was required, as firmly controlled and emotionally