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By Root 1326 0

It ran three and a half months at the Théâtre de Paris, not a spectacular success. The play has never been published. He coauthored it with William Busnach, with whom he had done his other adaptations. Letters from Busnach to Zola indicate that the stage adaptation had been thrown together hastily. Reviewers seemed to feel that the production relied more on spectacular settings—Les Halles at daybreak was singled out—than on true dramatic moments. But even Zola's most successful play the stage adaptation of Thérèse Raquin, comes off as a melodrama. Although Zola never achieved the triumph as a playwright that he did as a novelist, his novels are conspicuously theatrical. He develops characters and sets scenes and always gives rich visual backdrops. Almost every novel he wrote could easily be adapted to film.

To fully comprehend this novel, it must be understood that at the time Zola was writing it, France, and Paris in particular, had experienced more than eighty years of regular violent street uprisings. These events were considerably bloodier than the demonstrations brutally crushed by the police during the Algerian war or the skirmishes of May 1968. These were pitched battles on the streets between well-armed and -trained, war-hardened troops and armed rebels in which hundreds died. Though the would-be revolutionaries of Le Ventre de Paris make reference to the uprisings of 1848 and 1852 and even the violence of the 1830s and the late-eighteenth-century Revolution, in which 19,000 people were killed in the year-and-a-half-long “terror” of 1793–94, no doubt what Zola and his readers thought about was the recent events. In 1871, the uprising following the Franco-Prussian War claimed more lives than any battle of the war. While 900 of the 130,000 Versailles troops sent to crush the uprising were killed and another 6,500 were wounded, it is not even known how many Parisians they slaughtered on the streets during the six-day siege known as la semaine sanglante, the bloody week. A widely accepted estimate is between 25,000 and 30,000 dead. Many of them were executed by firing squads. Bodies were piled up around Paris. Gutters literally ran red with blood, and in places so did the Seine. Zola witnessed this, writing unsigned letters for a Parisian newspaper, La Cloche, and for Le Sémaphore de Marseille, a newspaper for which he wrote about 1,500 articles in the 1870s. Surveying the piles of corpses, he wrote, “Never will I forget the heartache I experienced at the sight of that frightful mound of bleeding human flesh thrown haphazardly on the two paths, heads and limbs mingled in horrible dislocation.”

It is against the background of this history and experience that Florent, Gavard, and the others in the Les Halles of his novel almost casually conspire to launch armed revolution. There would have been nothing difficult to believe about this to contemporary readers. On the other hand, the fear with which Lisa and others in the neighborhood reject such plans and disdain such plotters is also understandable. In fact, the 1871 Commune finished off the French appetite for violent revolution. It was the last one. But a different kind of violent cycle had taken its place. To avenge their defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, which had set off the Commune uprising, the French leaped into World War I, defeated Germany, and imposed the punitive Versailles Treaty, an injustice, the denunciation of which brought Adolf Hitler to power. Germany got France, France got Germany, Germany got France, and then France was again liberated—two world wars and seventy-five years of bloody European history.

As might be expected from a late-nineteenth-century writer in the vanguard of the political thinking of his age, Zola was very interested in the status of women. To call him a feminist would be overstating it. In his own marriage, his wife, Alexandrine, like many of his women characters, came from a poor background and clung to the better life she had made by organizing and running everything, leaving Zola free for intellectual