The Debacle - Emile Zola [7]
Of course it is possible to have differing views about the Paris Commune. Some see it as a glorious manifestation of the fight of the workers for freedom. Not unexpectedly Karl Marx, in The Civil War in France (1871), proclaims that ‘working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.’ D. W. Brogan, less lyrical but no reactionary, points out that it was essential that the arrogance and tyranny of Paris over all the rest of France be beaten, above all in the interests of universal suffrage and real democracy. Others again see it as a sinister outburst of violent mob hysteria exploited by a few unscrupulous petty politicians for ends known only to themselves. Zola saw it as a degrading exhibition of human bestiality, with unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides, but his protest is against violence, cruelty and destruction in whatever form and from whatever side. But Zola had over these other commentators the advantage that he was there. He saw it all, for he was not only present but a journalist, having returned to Paris a few days before the revolution of 18 March, after a spell of reporting the doings of the Bordeaux government. He even got into trouble twice and in the atmosphere of indiscriminate killing might have lost his life. To that extent The Debacle is an eye-witness account.
One question remains. In spite of his efforts to be fair, and his genuine compassion for Napoleon III as a man, there is little doubt that Zola’s overriding object in this novel is to demonstrate that the collapse of France in 1870–71 was due, as he put it, to the rottenness of the tree. In his view the Second Empire had been doomed for years by its own corruption and inefficiency. Was he right? Was he even being fair? Was he playing the familiar political propaganda game? Or was he influenced by the climate of the time when he was writing the novel, and catering for the fashionable prejudices of 1892, that is to say for the inevitable witch-hunt for scapegoats which follows any national disaster? Let a modern historian express his view:
The defeat that wrote finis to the rule of Napoleon III was an external event not an internal development. The Second Empire was not ended by the will of the people. The last plebiscite gave the Emperor almost as large a majority as the first. It was not destroyed by a revolution: there was no revolutionary party with the power to overthrow it. The Empire had simply, in the person of a defeated, aged and ailing Emperor, been overthrown in war, and capitulated to the invader. Its disappearance, before no predestined successor, left only a void. France was thrust into a new age, not deliberately by its own action, or in the fullness of time by the presence of new social forces, but accidentally and prematurely by the fact of military defeat. The intense conservatism of French society in 1871 was revealed by the savage reaction to the Commune of Paris, as it had been in 1848 by the repression of the revolt of the June days. The aim of the ruling classes in 1871 remained what it had been when the Empire was set up, to preserve