The Debacle - Emile Zola [6]
It is this all-embracing humanity, perhaps not sufficiently noticed by some critics, Zola’s care to bring in the devotion and beauty of human beings as well as their passions, weaknesses and depravity, that at first sight makes one omission surprising. Here is a novel about soldiers in the demoralizing atmosphere of a campaign, a battle and the subsequent social and political disintegration. Yet although these men are a coarse lot, and some of their language is typically rough, Zola keeps out of their lives almost all sexual behaviour. The man who had recently outraged the respectable with pageants of human lust and bestiality like La Terre and La Bête humaine now, when dealing with soldiers in wartime, a notorious recipe for sexual looseness, reserves such things for civilians, traitors or Germans. The only Frenchman to have a relationship with a woman is carrying on a pre-war affair, and he is killed a few hours after leaving his mistress’s bed. The symbolism of all this hardly needs underlining. Men fighting for their lives not only against the enemy but also against exhaustion, starvation and disease have little inclination for dalliance. That is left to the others.
What of the civilians? They are either innocent victims or motivated by self-interest, and to the latter the war seems either a tiresome interruption of their normal lives or a new chance to do well out of the misfortunes of others. Fouchard, uncle of Maurice and Henriette, will even refuse to sell (let alone give) food or drink to the starving French soldiers because he can get more out of the Germans, yet has the effrontery to claim to be patriotic because he swindles the enemy by selling them rotten meat at exorbitant prices. The mill-owner Delaherche was a Bonapartist before the war and had enthusiastically voted for the régime in the notorious plebiscite, but he becomes disaffected, anti-Bonapartist and potentially pro-German because to go on fighting is so bad for trade. His second wife, Gilberte, is frivolous, promiscuous, irresponsible, exercising her charms on friend and foe alike. A good time is her chief concern.
But Silvine is different. She symbolizes the deepest meaning of the book. In the most gruesome chapter in the whole novel we see her German seducer being slowly bled to death like a pig by the local band of guerrillas brought in to do so by Silvine. She watches it all and their child sees it too. A country violated and laid waste by an invader, or even beaten in war, will never forget and never rest until it has had its revenge. From 1871 until 1914 the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde was shrouded in mourning, and France was to dream of La Revanche. From 1919 until 1939 Hitler’s Germany was to do the same thing the other way round. Such is the futility of war.
In spite of the apparent optimism of the last page, when Jean goes forth to build a new France (and to what end, one might ask, if not to grow strong again and smash the Germans?), this is a profoundly disturbing book in its prophetic vision of the grim realities of the twentieth-century world. All these people are swept along by forces beyond their comprehension and control. Mass movements push the mobs hither and thither, and the individual has little or no freedom or power. Some of the figures in the Commune may possibly have been motivated by patriotic indignation at what they felt was the craven surrender of the Provisional Government of Thiers in the face of Germany’s demands, but they certainly were not concerned with the fact that every day of their theatrical heroics prolonged the agony of millions of other Frenchmen