The Debacle - Emile Zola [1]
INTRODUCTION
La Débâcle, the nineteenth and last but one of the Rougon-Macquart series of novels, the first of which was published in 1871, is in some respects the logical end, the Götter dämmerung, of the great saga of the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire, for the final novel, Le Docteur Pascal, will be largely a clearing-up and killing-off of outstanding questions and characters, ending with a vision of the brave new world of science and progress about to be born. The subject is the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and its destruction on the funeral pyre of the Paris Commune of 1871. Its publication in 1892 was an immense sales success, not only because it was a great war novel and documentary reviving memories in the minds of all but the quite young, but because it was an expression of the painful self-examination still going on in France after the most traumatic humiliation any country had so far received in modern times.
The 1870 war and its sequel in 1871 is one of the watersheds of European history. For a century and a half, from Louis XIV to Napoleon I, the armies of France had ravaged Europe, and the various German states had been invaded, traversed and plundered almost continuously during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But French arrogance overreached itself when Napoleon III deliberately and unnecessarily provoked Prussia and declared war on 15 July 1870. Seven weeks later, on 1 and 2 September, the French suffered a disastrous defeat at Sedan and Napoleon gave himself up to King William. Why such a total calamity? Leaving aside the various political or psychological factors, which are largely a matter of speculation and point of view and tell us more about the judge than the judged, there are the obvious military reasons. France was unprepared; for years the political opposition had bitterly attacked any attempts at modernization of armaments, and of course immediately after defeat was to round on the régime for being unprepared. The Germans had accurate breech-loading guns made by Krupp, with percussion shells. The French muzzleloaders, of which Zola gives a detailed description, fired shells which more often than not burst harmlessly in the air. The French rifle, the chassepot, was good, but the mitrailleuse, an ancestor of the machine-gun, was still on the ‘secret’ list until shortly before mobilization and the army had no experience of how to use it. Technical incompetence and backwardness were made so much more dangerous by the complacency and over-confidence of all in authority, a small example of which was the issue to officers of maps of Germany whereas they had no information on the topography of the difficult mountain terrain of the part of their own country where fighting was bound to occur, and were lured into all sorts of ambushes by highly organized mobile detachments of Germans. And of course rivalries and divided counsels among the commanders were not checked by the weak and sick Emperor. The dash, swagger and bravery of individual French soldiers were no match for the scientific skill and accuracy of the Germans. Flamboyant cavalry charges have no chance against modern technology. In this respect as well as in many others, the 1870 war was the clash of the past and the future, and its lessons were learned by the Germans and ignored by the French.
Zola’s novel is the story of this seven-week war and its sequel, and its connection with the Rougon-Macquart saga is tenuous to the point of unimportance, for Jean Macquart, the hero, serves simply as a point of view, or rather, as one of the many points of view. The Debacle is unique in Zola’s work because it is a strictly historical novel. The other Zola novels may have much factual documentation, some of their characters and incidents may be clearly suggested by known people or events, or the setting may be in a known place described with meticulous accuracy, but the plot is pure invention. The Debacle, on the other hand, is the narrative of a very