The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  The other soldiers in the squad are well differentiated types, each heavily charged with symbolism and political significance, possibly a little overdrawn in consequence, but none the less recognizable.

  Loubet is the smart-aleck Parisian cockney, a jack of all trades, full of bright ideas and gadgets, the artful dodger but also the wit of the party. Lapoulle is the sheer clodhopper, physically magnificent but slow-witted, amiable and a willing beast of burden, but potentially very dangerous, because he can be cruel and bestial, like the peasants in La Terre, and his invincible ignorance and super-stitiousness make him a tool for the unscrupulous. Pache, also from the country, is the pious one who furtively says his prayers and is the natural butt of the others. Meek and mild and consequently a bad soldier who breaks down under hardship and conceals some food, he is denounced by Chouteau, who significantly leaves the actual murdering, for a crust of bread, to the brutish Lapoulle. Finally Chouteau, who could be described in three words : a bloody-minded skunk. He is the professional agitator and trouble-maker, the political pub-orator, the demonstrator against everything, who never does anything except to feather his own nest. He escapes from a prisoner-of-war column by causing his best friend Loubet to be done to death, predictably turns up in Paris as a fire-raising and looting Communard, but quickly changes his coat when the other side looks like winning. Chouteau is another example of Zola’s consistent hatred and contempt for the violent left-wing agitator type, the thoroughly unsatisfactory workman who is a parasite thriving on the hopes and fears of his fellow-men – Lantier in L’Assommoir, Pluchart in Germinal – who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.

  Similarly the officers, almost always seen through the eyes of the common soldiers or civilians, fall naturally into the categories of careerists, like Bourgain-Desfeuilles, or brave, old-fashioned diehards still living out the glories of old France or Napoleon’s Grande Armée, like Rochas and Colonel de Vineuil. Most of the higher officers are real historical figures, shown to be incompetent, ambitious and jealous of each other. On his lonely peak is the Emperor Napoleon III, a puppet driven by forces beyond his control, hounded on by Paris and his megalomaniac Empress, ignored by his own military commanders, in constant pain from a mortal illness, a painted figurehead seeking an honourable end but rejected even by death, finding some sort of dignity and strength only at the end when he insists on surrender to avoid further bloodshed.

  Zola’s treatment of the Emperor is a remarkable example of his attempts, all through his career as a novelist, except perhaps in his final, ‘evangelical’ stage, to be as fair as possible even to those with whom he has no ideological sympathy. Just as the anti-Catholic found room to bring in some good Christians and saintly priests in the name of the law of averages, if nothing else, so, although himself politically to the left of centre, he had refused to take the facile black-or-white way of demagogues and, for instance in Germinal, treat all employers as capitalist oppressors and all workers as innocent victims, but had depicted some good and just employers and some lazy and selfish workers. So, once again, in spite of the tendency throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels to attack retrospectively the Second Empire, Zola cannot bring himself, in common fairness, to overlook the personal tragedy of Napoleon III or the criminal hooliganism of many of the Paris Communards, who are out for destruction, loot and personal power and use for their own ends such starry-eyed idealists as Maurice. Not that Zola holds any brief for the Maurice type, for none is more inhumanly bloodthirsty than the blind intellectual fanatic. Lovable though he may be at times, Maurice has in him the stuff of a Robespierre.

  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 who did not happen to live in Paris. The millions are exploited by violent extremists out for their own ends. Urban guerrilla warfare is the cruellest and most cowardly form of so-called social action, involving blackmail of the worst kind, death of innocent men, women and children, intimidation and murder of hostages, looting and destruction of property and art treasures and the pursuance of purely personal vendettas. It brings out the beast in human beings. In our own age, when destruction, fire-raising and murder in crowded cities, always under the cloak of some high-sounding ideological, social, racial or even religious ideal, has become a part of the daily scene almost boring in its regularity, it is perhaps of interest to see into the workings of one of the earliest examples.

  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 the fabric of society unchanged; not to make a new France but to save the old one. This was the task which the National Assembly at Bordeaux, elected to get France out of the German war as soon as possible, took upon itself.*

  The reader must decide for himself why in Zola’s novel the ‘intense conservatism of French society in 1871’ is personified in Jean, the intelligent, thoughtful working man.

  The text used for this translation is the most recent scholarly one in volume 6 of the Oeuvres complètes of Émile Zola, published under the general editorship of Henri Mitterand, Paris, Cercle du Livre Précieux, Fasquelle, 1967. The text in the paperback Livre de Poche edition, also published by Fasquelle, is very corrupt, with some grotesque misprints and some whole sentences omitted.

  Further information about Zola and this intensely interesting period in French and European history can be found in:

  F. W. J. Hemmings, Emile Zola, revised edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966.

  D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France (1870–1939), London, Hamish Hamilton, 1940 and many later editions. A standard work, with information about almost all the personalities mentioned by Zola.

  Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871, London, Gollancz, 1937. A typical statement of the left-wing point of view.

  Robert Baldick, The Siege of Paris, London, Batsford, 1964. A day-by-day account, with much contemporary matter and pictures, of the period between September 1870 and January 1871, ‘the last full-scale siege of a European capital, the first occasion of the indiscriminate bombardment of a civilian population, the source of immense hardship and suffering, and the origin of a division in the French nation which has still not been healed.’

  Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris, London, Macmillan, 1965. The fullest recent account. Not only covers the siege and Commune, but has a clear, concise chapter on the six-week Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

  Alistair Horne, The Terrible Year. The Paris Commune 1871, London, Macmillan, 1971. A ‘coffee-table’ book to mark the centenary of the Commune. Excellent short text and lavish illustrations, including many contemporary photographs.

  It is no mere convention to thank my wife for her tireless help.

  October 1971

  L. W. T.

  Map 1: The country around Sedan

  Map 2: Central Paris

  PART ONE

  1

  CAMP had been set up two kilometres from Mulhouse, nearer the Rhine, in the middle of the fertile plain. Towards nightfall on this August evening, under an angry sky with heavy clouds, the shelter-tents stretched out and piled arms gleamed, regularly spaced along the battle front, while the sentries with loaded rifles stood watch, motionless, their unseeing eyes staring out at the purple mists of the distant horizon rising from the river.

  They had reached there from Belfort at about five. It was now eight and the men had only just got the provisions. But the firewood must have been mislaid, for none had been issued. No way of lighting a fire and making some stew. They had had to make do with chewing some biscuit cold, helped down with generous lashings of brandy, which finally put paid to legs already giving way with fatigue. But just behind the piled rifles, near the cookhouse, two soldiers were doggedly trying to ignite a heap of green sticks, trunks of young saplings they had slashed down with their bayonets, and which obstinately refused to catch. Dense smoke was rising black and slow into the evening air, infinitely depressing.

  There were only twelve thousand men there, all General Fielix Douay had with him out of the 7th army corps. The first division had been summoned the day before and had set off for Froeschwiller; the third was still in Lyons, and he had decided to leave Belfort and advance like this with the second division, the reserve artillery and a division of cavalry not up to full strength. Lights had been reported at Lorrach. A wire from the sub-prefect of Schlestadt said that the Prussians were about to cross the Rhine at Markolsheim. Feeling he was too isolated from the extreme right flank of the other corps and out of communication, the general had been all the more anxious to speed up his advance towards the frontier because news had come the previous day of the disastrous surprise at Wissembourg. At any moment, unless he was himself occupied in repulsing the enemy, he might have reason to fear being called on to support the 1st corps. On that uneasy thundery Saturday, 6 of August, there must have been fighting somewhere over in the Froeschwiller direction: you could see it in the anxious, louring sky, across which great shudderings and sudden gusts of wind passed, heavy with foreboding. And for the last two days the division had thought it was marching into battle, the soldiers had expected to see the Prussians there in front of them at the end of this long forced march from Belfort to Mulhouse.

  The light was fading and retreat was heard in some distant corner of the camp, a drum-roll and sound of bugles, still faint and carried away into the air. And Jean Macquart, who had been busy strengthening the tent by driving the pegs further in, straightened up. At the first rumour of war he had left Rognes, the wound still raw from the drama in which he had lost his wife Françoise and the land she had brought as dowry. He had re-enlisted at the age of thirty-nine, got back his corporal’s stripes and been at once drafted to the 106th foot, which was then being brought up to full strength, and he was still amazed sometimes to find himself once again with his cape on his shoulders, for he had been overjoyed to get out of the services a
fter Solferino and not be a sword-waver and killer any more. But what is a chap to do when he hasn’t a job, a wife or a bean left under the sun and his heart is turning over inside him with grief and rage? You might just as well have it out on the enemy if they get you down. And now he recalled the exclamation he had made – Oh bugger it, as he hadn’t got the guts left to till this old French soil he might as well defend it!