The Debacle - Emile Zola [5]
The other soldiers in the squad are well differentiated types, each heavily charged with symbolism and political significance, possibly a little overdrawn in consequence, but none the less recognizable.
Loubet is the smart-aleck Parisian cockney, a jack of all trades, full of bright ideas and gadgets, the artful dodger but also the wit of the party. Lapoulle is the sheer clodhopper, physically magnificent but slow-witted, amiable and a willing beast of burden, but potentially very dangerous, because he can be cruel and bestial, like the peasants in La Terre, and his invincible ignorance and super-stitiousness make him a tool for the unscrupulous. Pache, also from the country, is the pious one who furtively says his prayers and is the natural butt of the others. Meek and mild and consequently a bad soldier who breaks down under hardship and conceals some food, he is denounced by Chouteau, who significantly leaves the actual murdering, for a crust of bread, to the brutish Lapoulle. Finally Chouteau, who could be described in three words : a bloody-minded skunk. He is the professional agitator and trouble-maker, the political pub-orator, the demonstrator against everything, who never does anything except to feather his own nest. He escapes from a prisoner-of-war column by causing his best friend Loubet to be done to death, predictably turns up in Paris as a fire-raising and looting Communard, but quickly changes his coat when the other side looks like winning. Chouteau is another example of Zola’s consistent hatred and contempt for the violent left-wing agitator type, the thoroughly unsatisfactory workman who is a parasite thriving on the hopes and fears of his fellow-men – Lantier in L’Assommoir, Pluchart in Germinal – who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.
Similarly the officers, almost always seen through the eyes of the common soldiers or civilians, fall naturally into the categories of careerists, like Bourgain-Desfeuilles, or brave, old-fashioned diehards still living out the glories of old France or Napoleon’s Grande Armée, like Rochas and Colonel de Vineuil. Most of the higher officers are real historical figures, shown to be incompetent, ambitious and jealous of each other. On his lonely peak is the Emperor Napoleon III, a puppet driven by forces beyond his control, hounded on by Paris and his megalomaniac Empress, ignored by his own military commanders, in constant pain from a mortal illness, a painted figurehead seeking an honourable end but rejected even by death, finding some sort of dignity and strength only at the end when he insists on surrender to avoid further bloodshed.
Zola’s treatment of the Emperor is a remarkable example of his attempts, all through his career as a novelist, except perhaps in his final, ‘evangelical’ stage, to be as fair as possible even to those with whom he has no ideological sympathy. Just as the anti-Catholic found room to bring in some good Christians and saintly priests in the name of the law of averages, if nothing else, so, although himself politically to the left of centre, he had refused to take the facile black-or-white way of demagogues and, for instance in Germinal, treat all employers as capitalist oppressors and all workers as innocent victims, but had depicted some good and just employers and some lazy and selfish workers. So, once again, in spite of the tendency throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels to attack retrospectively the Second Empire, Zola cannot bring himself, in common