Emile Zola

Emile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840, the only child of Francesco Zola, an Italian-born civil engineer, and Emilie Aubert, the daughter of a French tradesman ^[1]. When the boy was three the family moved to Aix-en-Provence, where his father had won the contract to build a dam and canal to supply the town with water. Francesco Zola died of pneumonia in 1847 before the project was finished, leaving his widow and seven-year-old son with debts, lawsuits, and a name attached to an unfinished public work ^[1].

The years in Aix shaped Zola more than any later address. His mother's finances declined steadily, and the family shifted from house to cheaper house, yet the boy roamed the Provencal countryside with schoolfriends, among them Paul Cezanne, the future painter, with whom he formed a friendship that lasted for decades ^[2]. At the College Bourbon in Aix he was a capable student who won prizes and read Hugo and Musset with enthusiasm.

In 1858 mother and son returned to Paris in search of legal remedies and work. The move went badly for the eighteen-year-old. Transplanted into the Lycee Saint-Louis, he twice failed the baccalaureat examination, once in Paris and once in Marseille, and left formal education without a degree ^[1]. The failure closed the professions to him and pushed him toward the only trades open to a penniless young man with a good prose style: clerking, hack writing, and eventually journalism.

After two lean years of odd jobs and near poverty, Zola found a post in 1862 in the shipping department of the publishing house Hachette, where he was soon promoted to head of publicity ^[1]. The job was an education in the literary marketplace. He learned how books were advertised, reviewed, and sold, and he used the position to place his own early work, including the story collection Contes a Ninon in 1864 and the autobiographical novel La Confession de Claude in 1865 ^[3].

He left Hachette in 1866 to live by his pen, writing book reviews and art criticism for Parisian newspapers. His combative defense of Edouard Manet and the painters later called Impressionists, published in reviews of the Salon exhibitions, made his name notorious before his fiction did ^[2]. In 1867 he published Therese Raquin, a grim study of adultery and murder among Parisian shopkeepers. In the preface to its second edition he answered hostile critics by describing his method as that of an anatomist working on living flesh, an early statement of the doctrine he would call naturalism ^[3].

The decisive project took shape in 1868 and 1869, when Zola drew up the plan for a cycle of novels tracing one family through the France of Napoleon III. Inspired in part by Balzac's Comedie humaine and by contemporary theories of heredity, he proposed to follow the legitimate and illegitimate descendants of a single ancestor across every level of society ^[1]. The publisher Lacroix accepted the scheme, and the first volume, La Fortune des Rougon, began serialization in 1870, just as the Franco-Prussian War brought down the very empire the cycle was designed to dissect.

Between 1871 and 1893 Zola published the twenty novels of Les Rougon-Macquart, subtitled the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire ^[1]. The cycle ranged across Parisian food markets in Le Ventre de Paris, financial speculation in La Curee and L'Argent, department store commerce in Au Bonheur des Dames, peasant life in La Terre, railways in La Bete humaine, and war in La Debacle. Zola prepared each book with dossiers of notes, site visits, and interviews, a documentary method that became a model for later realist writers ^[3].

The breakthrough came in 1877 with L'Assommoir, a novel of alcoholism and slow ruin in a working-class district of Paris. The book scandalized critics with its slang and its unsparing detail, and it sold in numbers that made Zola wealthy and famous ^[1]. Nana, published in 1880, followed the career of a courtesan through the pleasure economy of the empire and became another enormous commercial success. With the proceeds Zola bought a country house at Medan on the Seine, which became a gathering place for younger writers including Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose joint story collection Les Soirees de Medan appeared in 1880 ^[3].

Many readers of an Emile Zola biography ask which single book best represents him, and the usual answer is Germinal of 1885, his novel of a coal miners' strike in northern France. Zola went down a working pit at Anzin during a real strike to gather material, and the book's crowd scenes and portrait of industrial misery gave European labor movements a lasting literary emblem ^[4]. Alongside the fiction he codified his theory in essays, most notably Le Roman experimental of 1880, which argued, borrowing from the physiologist Claude Bernard, that the novelist should observe and experiment upon characters as a scientist does upon nature ^[3]. Any list of Emile Zola achievements must also include his role as a critic who helped the public accept modern painting, and his creation of a publicity-conscious authorship that treated literature as both art and public argument.

In 1894 a French army captain of Jewish origin, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of passing military secrets to Germany and deported to Devil's Island. Evidence later pointed to another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, yet the army protected its verdict, and Esterhazy was acquitted by court-martial in January 1898 ^[5]. Zola, by then France's most famous novelist, had already published articles defending Dreyfus. Two days after the acquittal he escalated dramatically.

On January 13, 1898, the newspaper L'Aurore printed Zola's open letter to the president of the Republic under the headline J'accuse, in which he named the officers he held responsible for the wrongful conviction and the cover-up that followed ^[5]. The letter sold hundreds of thousands of copies and split French opinion into warring camps of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Zola intended to provoke a prosecution that would reopen the case in open court, and he succeeded: he was tried for libel in February 1898, convicted, and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine ^[5].

Rather than serve the sentence while appeals were exhausted, Zola fled to England in July 1898 and lived there in seclusion for eleven months ^[6]. The gamble worked in the end. The case against Dreyfus unraveled when Colonel Hubert Henry confessed to forging a key document and killed himself in August 1898. Dreyfus was retried in 1899, pardoned that year, and fully exonerated in 1906. Zola returned to France in June 1899, his libel conviction never enforced, and the phrase J'accuse entered the world's political vocabulary as shorthand for the public denunciation of injustice ^[5].

Zola married Alexandrine Meley, a seamstress he had met during his years of poverty, in 1870, and she remained his wife until his death ^[1]. The marriage produced no children, and Alexandrine managed his household and his social life through the decades of his fame. Zola was a creature of routine who wrote every morning under the motto Nulla dies sine linea, not a day without a line, and he collected antiques, bicycles, and eventually cameras, becoming a skilled amateur photographer in his final decade ^[6].

In 1888 Zola began a relationship with Jeanne Rozerot, a young laundress employed in his household, and she bore him two children, Denise in 1889 and Jacques in 1891 ^[1]. When Alexandrine discovered the affair the marriage nearly broke, but an arrangement gradually formed: Zola divided his time between the two households, and after his death Alexandrine helped the children take the Zola name. Denise Le Blond-Zola later wrote a memoir of her father that remains a source for biographers ^[1].

The long friendship with Cezanne ended sourly. Zola's 1886 novel L'Oeuvre centered on a failed painter, and Cezanne, who recognized elements of himself in the character, sent a stiff letter of thanks for the book and let the correspondence lapse ^[2]. The episode is often cited among Emile Zola facts as evidence of how directly he mined his own life for fiction.

After completing the Rougon-Macquart in 1893, Zola turned to more openly ideological fiction. The trilogy Les Trois Villes, comprising Lourdes, Rome, and Paris, appeared between 1894 and 1898 and examined the crisis of faith in modern life ^[3]. He then began Les Quatre Evangiles, a planned tetralogy of utopian novels. Fecondite appeared in 1899 and Travail in 1901; Verite, a transposition of the Dreyfus Affair into the schools, was published after his death in 1903, and the fourth volume, Justice, was never written ^[3].

Repeated candidacies for the Academie francaise all failed, a rejection generally attributed to the scandal attached to his name and, after 1898, to the politics of the affair ^[1]. Honors of another kind came instead: he had been made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1888, though the decoration was suspended during the Dreyfus prosecution.

On the night of September 28 to 29, 1902, Zola and Alexandrine slept in their Paris apartment on the rue de Bruxelles in the 9th arrondissement with a coal fire burning. The chimney was blocked, and Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the early hours of September 29; Alexandrine survived ^[1]. An inquiry ruled the death accidental, but suspicion of foul play by anti-Dreyfusards persisted, and decades later a roofer was reported to have confessed to blocking the flue deliberately, a claim that has never been proven ^[6]. Zola's funeral at Montmartre cemetery drew immense crowds, and Anatole France, delivering the eulogy, called him a moment of the human conscience.

Anyone asking who was Emile Zola confronts a double reputation: the systematizer of naturalism in fiction and the citizen-writer of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1908 the French state transferred his remains to the Pantheon, where he lies near Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas; during the ceremony a journalist named Louis Gregori fired a revolver at Alfred Dreyfus, wounding him slightly, a reminder of how raw the affair remained ^[5].

Zola's literary influence spread far beyond France. Naturalist method shaped writers as different as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris in the United States, Vicente Blasco Ibanez in Spain, and George Moore in Britain, while Germinal became a touchstone for socially engaged fiction worldwide ^[4]. His novels have never left print and have fed a long line of adaptations, from Jean Renoir's film of La Bete humaine in 1938 to repeated versions of Germinal and Therese Raquin for cinema and television ^[3].

The house at Medan is preserved as a museum devoted to Zola and to the Dreyfus Affair, and his papers and photographs are held in French public collections ^[6]. More than a century after his death, J'accuse still supplies the template for the intellectual's public protest, and the Rougon-Macquart remains one of the most ambitious portraits of a single society ever completed by one writer.