The Beast Within - Emile Zola [4]
At an early stage in his planning of the Rougon-Macquart cycle Zola had made provision for including a novel about crime and the law. The eminent critic and literary historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-93), whose opinion Zola had sought in connection with Thérèse Raquin, had urged him to reach beyond the closet world of private, domestic conflict and to write novels which, in the manner of Honoré de Balzac’s (1799- 1850) La Comédie humaine, would be a mirror of society. Taine’s advice undoubtedly prompted Zola to broaden the scope of his family history. The novels would still focus upon individual members of the Rougon-Macquart family and describe their personal fortunes, but they would also be directed outwards to demonstrate the social context in which these personal stories occurred. The series, when completed, would offer a panoramic view of Second Empire society as a whole.
Crime and the law being one of the many ‘inner’ worlds which went to form the larger, corporate world of the Second Empire, Zola had decided that it would be given a place of its own. Writing to his publisher, Lacroix, in 1868, Zola included in the list of ten novels that he initially envisaged as making up the series a novel set against the background of the law courts. Although at this stage Zola provided no details of plot, he had decided that the hero of the novel would be Étienne Lantier, whom he describes as ‘one of those born criminals who, although not mad, are suddenly driven by some animal instinct to commit murder’.4 The idea that murder is a product of some ‘animal instinct’ echoes Zola’s comments on Thérèse Raquin and the three women accused of poisoning in Marseille. But he now goes further; he sees Étienne Lantier’s propensity for crime as something which may also be explained by reference to heredity. Zola had situated Étienne Lantier on the illegitimate branch of the original Rougon-Macquart family tree, a fourth-generation descendant of the drunken smuggler Macquart and the neurotic and eventually insane Adélaïde Fouque. But by the time Zola came to write La Bête humaine some twenty years later, Étienne Lantier had been given a prominent role in another novel, Germinal (where he figures as the leader of a miners’ strike and does in fact commit murder) and was ear-marked for a role in the final novel in the series, Le Docteur Pascal. Zola needed a different protagonist for his novel about crime and he provided Étienne with an older brother, Jacques, a late addition to the Rougon-Macquart family tree, but one which ensured that his new hero would have the same degenerate forebears as his predecessor. Jacques Lantier, like his brother, would be a ‘born criminal’.
Zola’s thinking about crime during the period immediately preceding the writing of La Bête humaine was influenced by his reading of a number of recently published studies in criminology. The most notable of these was a work by the Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), L‘Uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man). Originally written in 1876, it had been translated into French as L’Homme criminel in 1887. Zola had read it carefully. Lombroso argued that most criminals were ‘born criminals’, drawn to crime by an atavistic instinct and by pathological characteristics which were often discernible in their physical appearance. Basing his account on a study of the physical characteristics of convicted criminals, he identified various ‘abnormalities’ (pronounced lower jaw, oversized hands, low forehead) which he claimed indicated a biological regression to a primitive animal state and even a predisposition to certain types of crime. A year before the appearance of the French translation of L’Uomo