Oxford World’s Classics

by Emile Zola

  Background: Napoleon III and His Regime

  In February 1848 a ban on a so-called reform banquet organized by the liberal opposition led to demonstrations. Barricades went up, and a surge of revolutionary activity led to the abdication of the king, Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–48). A Republic was declared, and political clubs sprang up to debate ideas for radical social reform. The demands of the revolutionary crowds quickly made themselves felt. On 25 February armed workmen interrupted the deliberations of the provisional government and demanded that the right to work should be guaranteed. This led to the creation of ‘national workshops’ for the benefit of unemployed workers. On 5 March universal male suffrage was declared to exist. The electorate leapt from 250,000 to 9,000,000. For a while the idea of the revolution — socialist, romantic, utopian — captured everyone’s imagination. But when elections took place on 23 April, the majority of those elected to the National Assembly were moderates, drawn mainly from the provincial bourgeoisie, including more than seventy nobles. Leaders of extremist socialist groups were imprisoned, and both Karl Marx and the historian Alexis de Tocqueville described the situation as being one of class warfare. When the government decided, on 21 June, to disband the expensive national workshops, which provided money for the unemployed, workers and students took to the streets in protest. The government decided on brutal repression. The army and the National Guard killed thousands of protesters; 1,500 were shot without trial, 25,000 arrested, and 11,000 imprisoned or deported.

  On 12 November a new constitution was established. Its most notable feature was the election of a president for a four-year term by universal male suffrage. A Legislative Assembly would also be elected, but the balance of power between President and Assembly remained unclear. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, had returned from exile, and presented himself as one of the six presidential candidates. An enigmatic figure, appearing above politics, he became a focus for those who wished to protest against the disorder of the last few years. He campaigned by offering something to everyone: order and security to conservatives, amnesty to socialists, freedom of schooling to Catholics, and the revival of the economy to all. But it was above all the magic of his name that brought in the votes. He won the election on 10 December by a large majority. Elections to the Legislative Assembly (13 May 1849) confirmed the swing to the right. Most of those elected were monarchists; the Republicans were in a minority. Political and personal freedoms were curbed by a number of measures, including laws to reduce freedom of the press and of political assembly, to restrict the suffrage, and to give the Catholic Church a dominant role in education. As president, Louis-Napoleon began by playing along with the legislature, but when it became clear that he would be unable to revise the constitution to renew his term as president, he began to dissociate himself from the Assembly, pointing to his position as the representative of the people. When, on 2 December 1851, his carefully planned and neatly executed coup d’état dissolved the Assembly, it was possible for this seizure of power to be presented as a democratic measure. It was announced that universal suffrage was restored and that the people would be asked by plebiscite to accept or reject what had happened. There were armed movements of revolt, especially in the south, and the repression involved the killing of some 1,200 innocent citizens and the imprisonment of about 30,000 more; 10,000 were deported, and sixty deputies were expelled from France. Louis-Napoleon’s seizure of power was thus achieved by fraud, duress, and murder, but it had the overwhelming backing of the French people. The plebiscite gave its approval to Louis-Napoleon’s overthrow of the Assembly by 7,350,000 to 650,000. Following a triumphal tour of the provinces and some stage-managed petitions, a second plebiscite, on 21 November, gave overwhelming support to the restoration of the Empire. On 2 December 1852, the anniversary of the coup d’état (and also the anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coronation as emperor and of his great military victory at Austerlitz), Louis-Napoleon formally became the Emperor Napoleon III.

  The Second Empire, as it was established in the 1850s under the personal rule of Louis Napoleon, was highly authoritarian. David Harvey, in his book Paris, Capital of Modernity, writes:

  The French state at midcentury was in search of modernization of its structures and practices that would accord with contemporary needs … Louis Napoleon came to power on the wreckage of an attempt to define those needs from the standpoint of workers and a radicalized bourgeoisie. As the only candidate who seemed capable of imposing order on the ‘reds,’ he swept to victory as President of the Republic. As the only person who seemed capable of maintaining that order, he received massive support for constituting the Empire. Yet the Emperor was desperately in need of a stable class alliance that would support him (rather than see him as the best of bad worlds) and in need of a political model that would assure effective control and administration. The model he began with (and was gradually forced to abandon in the 1860s) was of a hierarchically ordered but popularly based authoritarianism.1

  The regime maintained an elaborate system of surveillance and control that included a network of informers and spies;2 the press was effectively muzzled; propaganda for the regime was widely deployed; censorship extended to literature,3 and even street singers and entertainers had to be licensed; the workers’ right to strike was suppressed. Normal political life practically ceased. The local prefects kept tight control over the conduct of election campaigns, and openly canvassed for the ‘official’ candidates. In 1858 the ‘Orsini Affair’ (an assassination attempt made on the Emperor and Empress by the Italian patriot Felice Orsini) provided the government with an opportunity to clamp down further on Republicans. A ‘Law of Public Safety’ was passed, and over 300 Frenchmen were deported, mainly to Algeria, on the flimsiest of evidence.

  The Emperor was very fortunate that his coming to power coincided with a period of great economic growth. World trade was buoyant, boosted by a gold-mining boom in California and Australia. Industrial production leapt forward. There was a major shift to steam power and a huge expansion of the rail network. Trains carried half of internal trade in 1870, whereas in 1850 they had carried one-tenth. The rail boom stimulated the growth of the iron, steel, and coal industries, and boosted exchange; foreign trade trebled. A modern banking system was developed, offering credit more widely than ever before.4 It was an era of heavy investment, the government leading the way by financing enormous public works, most notably the spectacular redevelopment of Paris itself by Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine. The ‘Haussmannization’ of Paris not only gave immense opportunities to investors, speculators, and entrepreneurs5 but also provided work for those evicted from the national workshops. The opposition party made some small gains in the legislative elections of 1857, but not enough to threaten the security of the government, which was bringing an unaccustomed measure of order and prosperity to the country.

  In the 1860s the Emperor began to introduce liberal reforms. Discontent with the regime was growing. The Catholics felt that he had given insufficient support to the temporal power of the Pope in Italy. Industrialists were fearful that the free trade treaty signed with Britain in 1860 would undermine the French economy, which was beginning to falter. But the fundamental reason for the shift towards a liberal Empire was, as Theodore Zeldin6 and David Harvey have argued, that the authoritarian political system of Louis-Napoleon was ill adapted to a burgeoning capitalism. To quote David Harvey again:

  Napoleon III’s strategy for maintaining power was simple: ‘Satisfy the interests of the most numerous classes and attach to oneself the upper classes.’ Unfortunately, the explosive force of capital accumulation tended to undermine such a strategy. The growing gap between the rich (who supported the Empire precisely because it offered protection against socialistic demands) and the poor led to mounting antagonism between them. Every move the Emperor made to attach to the one simply alienated the other. Besides, the workers remembered as fact (adorned with growing fictions) that there h
ad once been a Republic that they had helped to produce and that had voiced their social concerns. The demand for liberty and equality in the market also tended to emphasize a republican political ideology within segments of the bourgeoisie. This was as much at odds with the authoritarianism of Empire as it was antagonistic to plans for the social republic.7

  To live up to his own rhetoric that he was not a mere tool of the bourgeoisie, the Emperor’s tactic, argues Harvey, was to try to co-opt Paris workers by conceding the right to strike (1864) and the rights of public assembly and association (1868). In 1862 the government had actually sponsored a delegation of working men to go to London to meet English workers; out of this meeting was born in 1864 the International Working Men’s Association, which, under the influence of Karl Marx, was to become a powerful force in international socialism. Furthermore, an amnesty was granted for many political offenders, freedom of speech was allowed to deputies, together with the right of publication of parliamentary debates, and press censorship was relaxed (the Parisian press grew from a circulation of 150,000 in 1852 to more than a million in 1870). But these reforms and gestures were unable to arrest the falling popularity of the government. In the elections of 1867, its majority was drastically reduced and the combined opposition of Catholics, Republicans, and Socialists polled more than three million votes.

  A Political Novel

  Zola modelled the characters, events, and settings of His Excellency Eugène Rougon on real people and events, on journalistic and other sources, and on information provided by friends (Flaubert, who had once spent two weeks as a guest of the Emperor at Compiègne, was particularly helpful). A book by Paul Dhormoys entitled La Cour à Compiègne: Confidences d’un valet de chambre (1866) gave him details of Imperial ceremonial and the domestic life of the Imperial Household. He read works on the Second Empire by the contemporary historians Ernest Hamel and Taxile Delord. He examined back numbers of Le Moniteur universel, the official record of parliamentary debates. He also drew heavily on his own experience in 1870 as secretary to the Republican deputy Alexandre Glais-Bizoin and as a journalist and parliamentary reporter in 1869–71 for the opposition newspapers La Tribune, Le Rappel, and La Cloche. Not only the Emperor but dozens of the other leading political figures of the Second Empire are evoked in the novel. Rougon is a composite character, modelled on General Espinasse (Minister of the Interior in the aftermath of the Orsini Affair), the Duc de Persigny, Jules Baroche, Adolphe Billault, and, especially, Eugène Rouher, the ‘strong man’ of the Empire, sometimes referred to as the ‘vice-Emperor’.

  Zola’s depiction of the political machinery, leading figures, and outward forms of the Second Empire, as well as some key episodes in its history, is systematic in its breadth and detail. But the novel is not a mere chronicle. Zola’s representation of politics is itself political. The satirical thrust of His Excellency Eugène Rougon lies in its depiction of a culture of political repression and in its concentration on what Emily Apter calls politics ‘small p’,8 that is, what happens in the corridors of power: the rivalries, the scheming, the jockeying for position, the ups and downs, the play of interests, the lobbying and gossip, the patronage and string-pulling, the bribery and blackmail, the manipulation of language for political purposes. The novel is a satire, moreover, of all forms of authoritarian government and of politics ‘small p’ everywhere.

  The description in Chapter 4 of the christening of the Prince Imperial, and the celebrations thereof, is punctuated (and concluded) by three allusions to a single image:

  But what could be seen from all sides, from the embankments, the bridges, and the windows, on the blank wall of a six-storey building in the distance, on the Île Saint-Louis, was a gigantic grey frock coat painted in profile. The left sleeve was folded at the elbow, as if the garment had kept the shape and stance of a body which had disappeared. In the sunlight, above the swarm of onlookers, this monumental advertisement seemed to take on extraordinary significance. (p. 72)

  In the distance, above the bridge, as background to the scene, rose the monumental advertisement painted on the wall of the six-storey buiding on the Île Saint-Louis, the giant grey frock coat, without a body inside it, illuminated by the sun in a supreme blaze of glory.

  Gilquin noticed the coat as it loomed over the two coaches.

  ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Look at uncle over there!’ (p. 82)

  A light mist was rising from the Seine, and in the distance, at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis, the only thing that stood out in the grey expanse of the housefronts was the giant frock coat, the monumental advertisement, as if hung on a nail on the skyline, the cast-off, bourgeois clothing of some Titan whose limbs had been blown away by lightning. (p. 93)

  The satirical implications of these allusions can be better understood with reference to Victor Hugo (1802–85). Hugo was revered by many of his contemporaries as the greatest writer of the nineteenth century; but he was also an iconic political figure. As a deputy for Paris, he played an active part in the 1848 Revolution on the side of the Republicans. He supported Louis-Napoleon for the presidency, but the more the President moved towards an authoritarianism of the right, the more Hugo moved towards the left. When Louis-Napoleon staged his coup d’état, Hugo tried to organize resistance, and then, fearing for his life, fled to Brussels disguised as a worker. From Brussels he went to the Channel Islands, where he remained, in self-imposed exile, until the fall of the Empire in 1870, when he returned to France a national hero. He devoted the first writings of his exile to satire: Napoleon the Little (Napoléon le Petit, 1852) was an incandescent political pamphlet excoriating Louis-Napoleon for betraying the idea of the Republic, committing the ‘crime’ of the coup d’état, duping the French people, and instituting a police state. The pamphlet was smuggled into France in myriad ways. It was even carried across the Channel in balloons. Forty thousand copies were circulating by the end of 1852. At the centre of the pamphlet (which would have been present in the minds of many of Zola’s first readers) was the contrast, which Zola undoubtedly wished to play on, between Louis-Napoleon, portrayed as a trickster and arch-criminal, and his legendary uncle. Napoleon III exploited the myth of Napoleon I as part of a political strategy defined by subterfuge and sham. He was a man as empty as the giant frock coat described by Zola.9

  The novel’s satire is not simply a question of theme (the exposure of the hollowness of the regime), but also of mode. The ‘realistic’ texture of the novel is blended with techniques of hyperbole, distortion, and caricature that project a strongly ironic attitude towards the objects of representation. This combination of realism and sur-realism is one of the hallmarks of Zola’s art. Rougon and Clorinde — he, demiurgic, titanic, engaging in fantasies of omnipotence; she, a huntress, a goddess, a serpent, a sphinx, living ‘in a world of endless, unfathomable intrigue’ (p. 268) — are as much figures of myth as reflections of real historical models, while the minor characters play caricatural roles in the general narrative of greed and ambition. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that the swaggering bully Théodore Gilquin, Rougon’s associate in his ‘political work’ (p. 79) before the coup d’état and his occasional spy and henchman afterwards, was consciously conceived as a drunken version of ‘Ratapoil’, a character created by Honoré Daumier (1808–79). The ‘Michelangelo of caricature’, Daumier famously satirized the bourgeoisie, the justice system, politicians, and government officials through the emerging medium of lithography. Between March 1850 and December 1851, in the satirical magazine Le Charivari, Daumier published about thirty lithographs10 illustrating Ratapoil, who was intended to represent the shady agents who worked to help Louis-Napoleon rise to power. Oliver Larkin describes Ratapoil thus: The man’s ramshackle body swings insolently on the pivot of a burly club which supports one hip, the movement of the figure both nonchalant and sinister. From boot tips aggressively turned up, through knee-bagged and drooping pantaloons to a shapeless frock coat straining at one button, to his mean eyes, broken nose and br
istling moustache and goatee, and the battered top hat aslant his bony, birdlike skull, Ratapoil writhes with evil intention and is falsely debonair. This is the creature sent ahead when Louis Napoleon traveled, to cheer him at railway stations, dispatched to the farms where peasants needed to be convinced, and sent into alleys to club unlucky republicans.11‘While Rougon and his clique shared out the cake,’ says Gilquin, ‘he was kicked out of the door’ (p. 179). It is in the treatment of the relationship between Rougon and his gang that the satire assumes a particularly fantastic, surrealist quality. The gang’s campaign to get Rougon back into power is described thus:

  Every day they would launch out …, determined to win support for the cause. … The whole of Paris was drawn into the plot. In the most remote parts of the city there were people now yearning for Rougon’s triumph, without exactly knowing why. The gang, ten or a dozen in number, held the city in its grip. (p. 165)

  When Rougon is back in power, his greatest satisfaction is to bask in the admiration of his entourage:

  His office was open to his intimates at all hours, and they had free reign there, sprawling in the armchairs, even sitting at his desk. He said he was happy to have them around him, like faithful pets. It was not he alone who was the Minister, they all were, as if they were appendages of himself. (p. 195)