The Drinking Den

by Emile Zola

  Zola’s defence is concerned first of all with those aspects of the novel that have been the subject of hostile criticism; it leaves aside questions of aesthetics, for example, in a novel that had been thought out and constructed with great care. More than its moral impact or its alleged indecency, The Drinking Den interested critics in the second half of the twentieth century because of its rigorous structure, and its symbolic or mythical dimensions, some of which Zola certainly intended us to find. There is always a lot more to Zola than appears. From the Goncourt brothers onwards, commentators on him have observed how difficult he was to pin down, both in his work and in his personality; he is a site of continual contradictions. Taking simply the question of the moral intentions of his work, one can see him in this novel preaching the most conventional bourgeois morality even as he works to challenge its assumptions, condemning Nana for her ‘vicious nature’ while patently sympathizing with her circumstances and her distaste for conventional hypocrisies, depicting Gervaise as at once a victim of her environment and of her own weaknesses, and so on. Throughout his life and work, Zola was torn between idealism and despair, a need to show the worst of life as he saw it and a need to express the human yearning for something higher and better. Zola the atheist coexists with Zola the religious enthusiast, Zola the scientist with Zola the artist.

  In the year after the scandal of The Drinking Den, Zola deliberately set about writing a novel that would contrast with it. Une page d’amour (1878) is the story of a middle-class woman who falls in love with a doctor after he has saved the life of her child, but eventually renounces him for reasons of convention and morality – ‘an interlude of tenderness and sweetness’, Zola called it; though he had doubts whether his readers would approve. They were not disappointed, however, in his next work, Nana (1880), which takes up the story of Anna Coupeau, the young woman whom they had already met in The Drinking Den and who, as was already clear from this novel, was destined for a life of high-class prostitution. The outcry from the bourgeois press at this glimpse of the underside of French society was even greater than it had been at the time of The Drinking Den, and the new novel sold more rapidly than its scandalous predecessor.

  *

  The Drinking Den, Une page d’amour and Nana were the seventh, eighth and the ninth in the cycle of novels called the Rougon-Macquart and subtitled ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. Zola had planned this panoramic survey of French society and started to write the first volume before the Franco-Prussian war, which, in 1870, marked the end of Napoleon III’s reign and the imperial regime. The whole cycle would eventually reach twenty volumes, ending in 1893 with Le Docteur Pascal.

  The aim of the Rougon-Macquart novels was to put into practice the concepts of Naturalism, the literary doctrine that Zola had started to elaborate as early as the 1860s. The Naturalist writer saw himself, in opposition particularly to the exponents of Romanticism, as comparable to a scientist or ‘natural philosopher’, observing the interaction between society and individuals, and describing the results of these observations in novels that would expound them with scientific rigour. Naturalism was therefore a development of Realism, which made use of scientific discoveries, including theories of heredity: the Rougon-Macquart as a whole was designed to illustrate the transmission of hereditary traits from one generation to the next in the families of the Rougons and the Macquarts, and the influence on individuals of this heredity, in conjunction with the social environment in which they happened to live: it was thus, in theory, to become in itself the working out of a complex ‘scientific’ experiment. Both families have a common ancestor, Adélaïde Fouque, whose son, Pierre Rougon, founds the respectable, legitimate, bourgeois branch, while her two illegitimate children, Antoine and Ursule, give rise to the working-class Macquarts. The whole cycle covers a wide spectrum of social classes and milieux, from the peasantry and the industrial working class, to the financial bourgeoisie, the priesthood, artistic circles, politics and the army; and from the countryside and provincial towns to the market district of Paris, a department store, a coal mine, theatres and cabarets, and the Stock Exchange.

  Time has disproved some of the scientific ideas on which Zola based the overall design of the work – though, when it came down to it, these notions proved to be less prominent in the design than he had originally expected them to be. But, while time may have detracted from the value of the Rougon-Macquart series as a scientific experiment, it has compensated by greatly enhancing its interest as an imaginative evocation of a particular period in nineteenth-century French history, based on personal observation and sociological research. Zola started to plan The Drinking Den in detail as early as 1875. In the autumn of that year, he returned to Paris from his summer holiday in Normandy and at once set about walking the streets and visiting working people, in order to gather material for the novel.

  Every street through which the characters pass is named; the events of the story can be followed precisely on a contemporary map of Paris. Details of prices and wages, living conditions and language, working practices, drinking habits and delirium tremens are taken from observation or the best available sources. Zola’s notebooks survive and show how meticulously he recorded details concerning localities and trades (for example, how laundresses were paid and the different kinds of flat-iron or other tools that they used). The action of the novel is situated, year by year, with occasional references to contemporary events such as the assumption of power by Louis Bonaparte, the building of the Lariboisière Hospital or the huge urbanization programme of Baron Haussmann. Not that this is any dry sociological record; on the contrary, central to Zola’s Naturalistic literary method was the use of language to convey the sights, smells and sounds of the novel’s locations with the greatest possible precision. Few writers convey so vivid and immediate a sense of what it felt like to live in a particular place, at a particular moment in history.

  The historical moment is vital. The Second Empire was to be a discrete interlude in French history, twenty years of imperial rule sandwiched between two republics; and even at the time, without the benefit of hindsight, it often appeared arbitrary or inconsequential – the very opposite of rational government for a positive and scientific age.3 Its leader, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon I, was a slightly eccentric, rootless, even bohemian figure. He had spent many years as an exile in England, becoming the hereditary leader of the Bonapartists after the death of Napoleon’s son in 1832. Returning to Paris after the Revolution of 1848, he was elected a deputy to the National Assembly under the Second Republic, then its President. In

  December 1851, he carried out a putsch to make himself head of state without any constitutional constraints and proclaimed himself Emperor a year later, in December 1852.

  An aura of dissolution and corruption hovered around Louis Bonaparte’s government. Republicans, naturally, hated and despised it for its illegitimacy and arbitrary exercise of power. It was characterized, too, by its ostentation and pretensions to grandeur. Abroad, the years of the Second Empire were marked by colonial expansion (in Africa, Indochina and the Pacific) and by the war in the Crimea. At home, France was at the height of an industrial revolution. Typical of the regime’s grandiose posturing, as well as its energy, were the public works carried out in Paris under Haussmann, which involved massive slum clearance and the creation of the wide boulevards that give modern Paris much of its personality. Perhaps designed to encourage gentrification of areas that might otherwise have remained solidly working class – and having the effect of making access to such areas easier for the Army and the police, in the event of popular uprisings – these ‘improvements’ also made the city more hygienic and pleasant to live in. They are specifically referred to in The Drinking Den (especially in Chapter 11).

  The Empire ended after the French defeat by the Prussians at Sedan in September 1870, when Napoleon III abdicated. The following year saw the attempt to install a radical Socialist regime un
der the Paris Commune, which was harshly repressed by the government of Adolphe Thiers. Zola, who had spent part of the period of the Commune in Paris, continued to work hard on La Curée, the second novel in the cycle of the Rougon-Macquart; the first, La Fortune des Rougon, was about to appear as the Commune fell.

  Even the most casual reader is likely to become aware that there is a structure underlying The Drinking Den. The outline of the plot is relatively simple: the rise and fall of the laundress Gervaise Macquart, in thirteen chapters (a deliberately sinister number). The culmination of the story occurs halfway through, in Chapter 7, with the great feast that Gervaise holds to celebrate her Saint’s-day. This is her triumph, but it already contains in it the seeds of her downfall, signalled by the reappearance of her lover, Lantier.

  The rise of Gervaise towards this summit is mirrored in her subsequent descent from it, the chapter that precedes this turning-point describing the formation of the family and the establishment of the business, those that follow showing the progressive collapse of the business and the family, the plot describing a curve with Chapter 7 at its apex. From her victory over Virginie in the fight at the wash-house to her marriage to Coupeau and the setting up of the laundry, Gervaise has struggled successfully to acquire a position in the community around the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or and to secure the future of her family. She is respected, relatively prosperous and well liked by most of her neighbours; but her weak husband and selfish former lover are about to unravel the tidy pattern that Gervaise has tried to weave. She will lose her reputation, her business, her daughter, her husband and, finally, her life. Her dreams and aspirations come to seem bitterly ironic:

  You might think that she had asked heaven for an income of thirty thousand francs and a position in life! Well, it’s true, in this life, however modest your wishes, you may still end up penniless. Not even a crust and a bed – that’s the common lot of humanity. And what made her laugh even more was to recall her fine hopes of retiring to the country, after twenty years in the laundry business. Well, the countryside was where she was headed; she wanted her little patch of greenery in the Père Lachaise [that is, in the cemetery]. (Chapter 12).4

  One reason that the novel may have been disturbing to middle-class readers is that Gervaise’s aspirations are so eminently acceptable. She has weaknesses, certainly, but they are, if anything, ‘respectable’ ones. She is slightly greedy and self-indulgent; she is too tolerant of her husband’s frailties and generally too easygoing; most of all, she fails to apprehend the extent of the threat that Lantier represents to her happiness. But these are minor faults. There is no inherent vice in Gervaise (as Zola insistently tells us there is in Nana). She is clearly a victim of circumstances.

  These circumstances can and ought to be changed: this is the moral that Zola wanted readers to draw from the book, as he insisted in his letter to Albert Millaud (written in response to Millaud’s article in Le Figaro on 7 September 1876):

  … if you wish to know the lesson that will emerge by itself from The Drinking Den, I would put it more or less into the following terms: teach the worker in order to give him morals, remove him from the poverty in which he lives, strive against overcrowding and promiscuity in the slums where the air is thickened and poisoned, and above all prevent drunkenness which decimates the common people by killing the mind and the body.

  Again, in an extensive letter to Yves Guyot, editor of Le Bien public (published in that paper on 13 February 1877): ‘If I were absolutely obliged to do so, I would say that the whole of The Drinking Den might be summed up in this sentence: Shut the drinking-houses, open schools…’

  The question of housing is crucial, he goes on to say: the stenches, the overcrowding, the tiny rooms in which fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters sleep side-by-side… The evil is compounded by heavy work that turns men into animals, and low wages that deprive them of hope, filling the drinking dens and the brothels: ‘Yes, the people are like that, but because society accepts it.’ Even though Zola insists (to Millaud) that his book ‘is not a work of propaganda’, he also claims (to Guyot) that it is ‘a useful work’ – and the importance of the message is illustrated by the fact that the writer’s very first outline for the Rougon-Macquart, given to his publisher in 1869, speaks of a novel that will show the decline of the Parisian workman ‘because of the deplorable influence of… the drinking dens’ and a demand for ‘air, light and education for the lower classes’. From the very start, this was intended to be a book directed at the social conscience of its readers. The underlying motive is not to excite feelings of repulsion or horror at the grotesqueness of an underclass that is defined as other, as alien and threatening, to be made safe through repression or repentance. On the contrary, these are human beings who are suffering ills brought on by identifiable and preventable causes.

  What Zola carefully avoids is the suggestion that depravity has much to do with the misery he describes. Other writers about the urban working class had described the poor quarters of the city and told of the crime and degradation that festered in them in a way that would cause a little frisson of excitement in respectable drawing-rooms: Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, for example. Zola’s novel excites pity, not anxiety; and he quite justifiably protests (in his letter to Le Bien public) against the charge that he has depicted working-class characters who are all uniformly debased and vile. On the contrary, he insists, there is only one real scoundrel in The Drinking Den, and that is Lantier – and even he is not a workman, but wears a jacket instead of a smock and has pretensions to gentility. As for the other characters, the Lorilleux may be miserly, but they are not idlers or drunkards; they show what happens to ‘the slaves and victims of the sweat shop’; nor are the Boches or the Poissons idlers and drunkards; and as for Goujet, he is ‘the perfect worker, clean, thrifty, honest, who loves his mother and does not miss a day’s work, but remains great and pure to the last…’

  So, are Gervaise and Coupeau idlers and drunkards?

  Not at all: they become idlers and drunkards, which is a different thing altogether… Gervaise is the most appealing and the sweetest character that I have ever created; she remains good and kind to the end. Even Coupeau, in the frightful illness that gradually takes hold of him, preserves the good-natured side to his personality. They are patients, nothing more.

  In other words, alcoholism, poverty and the despair they breed are social diseases.

  It may sound, by now, as if Zola was being slightly disingenuous in protesting that his novel was not a work of propaganda; but consider the means that he uses to convey his message and to gain our sympathy for his characters. Critics of the book were quick to attack its use of slang, especially of taboo terms or obscenities. In doing so, they overlooked the novel’s most original linguistic feature, which is the use of the device known as style indirect libre, a form of narrative that stands somewhere between direct and indirect (or reported) speech: ‘Gervaise didn’t want a big wedding. What was the sense in spending all that money?’ (Chapter 3) – where the second sentence (my italics) conveys Gervaise’s opinion on the matter without the addition of ‘she thought’, ‘she asked herself or any similar phrase.

  One might imagine that having more than one narrator would be confusing; but Zola achieves the effect of a single, harmonious narrative by the rapidity of his transitions between this form of subjective narrative and the more usual objective narrative – that is to say, between the words of an authorial narrator and the voice (or, more often, inner voice) of one of the characters:

  As it happened, the Boches had left the Rue des Poissonniers on the quarterly rent-day in April, to become the concierges at the big house in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. What a small world it was! One of Gervaise’s main worries, after living in peace without a concierge in her place in the Rue Neuve, was that she would once again fall under the tyranny of some fierce dragon with whom she would have to argue over a little spilled water or a door closed too noisily one evening. Concierges are su
ch a vile breed! But with the Boches, it would be a pleasure. They knew each other and always got along well. They were like family. (Chapter 5)

  The subtlety of the proceeding is well illustrated by this paragraph, where almost every sentence could be said to represent a different form of narration from the preceding one: a mere statement of fact is followed by an interjection (‘What a small world it was!’) not attributed to any narrator; then an omniscient author’s explanation of how his character feels (‘One of Gervaise’s main worries… was…’), then what, in the light of these feelings, is clearly an exclamation by Gervaise herself (‘Concierges are such a vile breed!’); and, finally, three short sentences in which the voice shades gently from Gervaise’s into one that could just as well be the author’s (‘But with the Boches, it would be a pleasure… They were like family.’).

  If the voice of the omniscient narrator in most nineteenth-century fiction has the effect of making us feel that we can observe the central characters’ reactions and feelings, here the smooth flow from one voice to another invites us to share them. Gervaise’s mind mediates the action, not in the somewhat artificial way of a first-person narrator, who is supposed to be telling us the story as it happens, but with the immediacy of an omniscient author, from moment to moment abolishing the distance between the novelist and his character. Zola is the facilitator who allows Gervaise to tell us her story – and this, of course, is precisely how he wanted us to see him, as the artist whose work serves to give a voice to those who cannot express themselves, the cry of the silent masses, those who in most nineteenth-century fiction are depicted as mindless, grotesque or comic. The proceeding is all the more shocking to his bourgeois readers because it reveals the inner life of this woman whom most of them would suppose to have none. Can a laundress think and feel and hope? Can a laundress be touching and lovable? Can a laundress be tragic?