Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [8]
By that time, the Naturalist school had been formally constituted, with Zola presiding over a coterie of slightly younger writers, of whom Joris-Karl Huysmans and Guy de Maupassant became the most prominent. Besides writing a series of critical works—Le Roman experimental (The Experimental Novel), the bible of Naturalism, was published in 1880, and the following year saw the publication of no fewer than four volumes of critical essays—he was issuing novels in the Rougon-Macquart series at a clip of nearly one per year. Pot-Bouille (1882; Restless House), the tenth, took the facade off a fashionable apartment building, unraveling the tangled lives within. Au Bonheur des dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight or A Ladies’ Paradise) , the eleventh, chronicled the life of a large department store. The thirteenth, Germinal (1885), was an uncompromising exposition of the misery of coal miners, and it galvanized the European labor movement. The fifteenth, La Terre (1887; Earth or The Soil), was his chronicle of the peasantry; its relative frankness about sexuality and bodily functions was enough to cause some of the more delicate Naturalists to separate themselves from their master. La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast or The Beast in Man) , the seventeenth, was inspired by Zola’s turn at jury duty; it is a study of homicidal pathology, set against the background of the railroads. The nineteenth, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle or The Collapse), his novel of war, was in its time the greatest success of the whole series.
His energy did not flag. After completing the Rougon-Macquart series he immediately embarked on Les Trois Villes (The Three Cities): Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898), the first two of which targeted the Catholic Church. Although Zola had at one point accepted an assignment from the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, causing a flurry of denunciations by the socialist press, he was by then unambiguously identified with the left; it was a period of sharply polarized political divisions that extended into nearly every aspect of French life. Clearly, although he was the country’s preeminent novelist and had been unopposed in that rank since the death of Flaubert in 1880, he would never be elected to the Académie Française. He had a broad base of popular support, but few allies at the top; although he was a rich man, his candor and moral resoluteness set him apart and made him anathema to the power brokers.
Thus it was that in 1898 he embarked upon the most significant episode of his life, which was only tangentially connected to literature. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a career officer, was accused of spying for the Germans, convicted, and sent to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Very soon indications began to turn up that Dreyfus had been falsely accused, targeted because he was Jewish. The incriminating documents had, it appeared, been forged by a certain Major Esterhazy. Zola, who examined the evidence, became convinced of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’s innocence. After Esterhazy was cleared by the military of any wrongdoing, Zola wrote an open letter to the president, Félix Faure, published on the front page of the newspaper L‘Aurore and given the resounding title “J’Accuse ... !” Zola directly accused the government of conspiracy in having tried and sentenced Dreyfus on the basis of forged evidence while deliberately concealing the existence of exculpatory material. In response, the government accused Zola of libel; his trial featured a parade of superior officers who accused him, in effect, of treason. Zola was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. He appealed, but the appeal languished,