by Emile Zola
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ÉMILE ZOLA
Money
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
VALERIE MINOGUE
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
MONEY
ÉMILE ZOLA was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette, which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed, until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series, with the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.
VALERIE MINOGUE is an Emeritus Professor of French of the University of Wales, Swansea. She is a co-founding editor, with Brian Nelson, of Romance Studies, and edited the journal in various capacities from 1982 to 2004. She has published widely in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, including critical studies of Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann, Zola’s L’Assommoir, and the novels of Nathalie Sarraute; she co-edited the Pléiade edition of Sarraute’s works. She has been President of the London Émile Zola Society since 2005.
INTRODUCTION
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword.
IT was in 1868, at the age of twenty-eight, that Émile Zola hit on the idea of a series of novels based on one family, Les Rougon-Macquart, Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire (‘Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’), in which he would trace the influence of heredity on the various members of a family in their social and political setting. Zola was already the author of two volumes of short stories, several novels, poetry, and a good deal of journalism when he embarked on what was to become a total of twenty novels, of which Money (L’Argent) is the eighteenth.
Setting out to do for the Second Empire what Balzac had done for an earlier age in La Comédie humaine, Zola intended to give as complete a view as possible of French society from the coup d’état of 1851 to the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870—a time he called ‘a strange period of human folly and shame’.1 He had denounced the corruption and excesses of the imperial regime in articles for republican newspapers; in his novels he would do so on a grander scale. The series would constitute a natural history, in so far as it took account of genetic and physiological features, and a social history in its coverage of all classes of French society. Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851, which founded the Second Empire, also founded the fortunes of the Rougon-Macquart family, as Zola relates in the first novel of the series, The Fortune of the Rougons (1871).
As a realist and self-styled ‘naturalist’, Zola intended to present the unvarnished truth of life in the Second Empire. ‘Naturalism’ followed on from the realist traditions of Balzac and Flaubert, but with a new emphasis on science. Zola’s account of his fictional family would be supported by study of contemporary scientific discoveries and theories. His earlier novel, Thérèse Raquin, was strongly influenced by the determinist theories of Hippolyte Taine, stressing heredity, environment, and historical context as major factors in the shaping of human destiny. Further studies—including Darwin’s theories of evolution, Letourneau’s Physiologie des passions (1868), Prosper Lucas’s work on heredity (Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle, 1847)—were added to the scientific basis for Zola’s work. When he read the physiologist Claude Bernard’s work on Experimental Medicine (Introduction à l’étude de la médécine expérimentale, 1865), he was so impressed by its innovative vigour that he adopted its ideas to make a new theory of the novel, which he outlined in The Experimental Novel. This theory was greeted with some ridicule in so far as he appeared to be attempting to endow the novel with scientific authority, but Zola made it clear that he was well aware that a novel is not a laboratory, and that the ‘results’ of situations created by the writer’s imagination were not at all the same thing as the results of laboratory tests. However, if the writer takes due account of available scientific data in setting up his ‘experiments’, that is, in his creation of characters and situations, then his ‘results’ should be at least plausible outcomes. Like the scientist who examines his material, however ugly, in order to analyse and heal, so th
e novelist would observe and accurately represent social ills in the hope that they might be remedied.
Zola’s scientific and physiological studies provided him with a foundation and a discipline for his imaginative vision, but despite all his stress on the scientific approach, Zola’s poetic imagination would obstinately make what he called ‘the leap to the stars from the springboard of exact observation’. That ‘exactitude’ is itself open to question, for even in the act of observation his eye is inherently transformative, as is clear even in the preparatory notes for his novels, where metaphor and analogy constantly slide in to make each detail expressive rather than merely noted.
Throughout the Rougon-Macquart series Zola portrays the interaction of hereditary traits with external forces, creating a drama in which heredity plays an important role but does not work in straight lines, as is evident, for instance, in the shared heredity but very different characters of the three brothers Eugène, the government minister, Aristide (‘Saccard’), the extravagant banker of Money, and Pascal, the doctor of the final volume, Dr Pascal (1893). Members of the family resist, or succumb to, the pressures of their environment, and that environment is the social, political, and economic reality of life in the Second Empire.
Historical Background
The history of the Second Empire can be briefly told. Following the abdication of King Louis-Philippe in 1848 a republic was declared; the workers demanded that the right to work should be guaranteed, and national workshops were created to help the large numbers of unemployed. The spirit of revolutionary reform, however, proved short-lived. Elections in April 1848 returned a mainly reactionary government, whose actions, which included discontinuing the national workshops and restricting the suffrage, provoked widespread protests which were brutally suppressed, with hundreds of thousands killed, arrested, imprisoned, or deported. In November a new constitution was established which provided for the election of a president with a fixed four-year term of office. In December, Louis-Napoleon, then aged forty, was elected President of the Second Republic by a huge majority (5.4 million votes), thanks largely to his being Napoleon I’s nephew. To avoid losing his presidency in 1852 at the end of his four-year term, Louis-Napoleon dissolved the Assembly with a coup d’état on 2 December 1851. Presenting himself as a liberal and a defender of the people, he restored universal (male) suffrage and promised a plebiscite to accept or reject his seizure of power. Protests broke out but were suppressed, once more with widespread killings, imprisonment, and deportation. Leaders of the insurgents, Victor Hugo among them, were forced to flee. In the plebiscite that followed, the people gave Louis-Napoleon its overwhelming approval. One year later, on the same date of 2 December, which was also the anniversary of the coronation of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte, he was crowned Emperor as Napoleon III,2 ruler of the Second Empire.
When Zola started to plan the Rougon-Macquart series in 1868 it was possible to imagine that the Second Empire would last some considerable time. It seemed solid enough despite various contemporaneous upheavals, such as the Italian Wars of Independence and Bismarck’s aggressive moves toward the unification of Germany. But in 1870 Napoleon III was goaded by Prussia over the issue of the Spanish Succession, for which Prussia was proposing a Habsburg prince. Napoleon, facing growing troubles on the home front and not wanting to see France sandwiched between Prussia and a Prussian-dominated Spain, declared war, a war that ended in the humiliating defeat at Sedan, when Napoleon III and his entire army were captured.
A Third Republic was then declared. It continued the war for some months, but after a long siege Paris fell to the better-organized and better-equipped Prussian forces. The Second Empire, meant to endure for at least a goodly number of Rougon-Macquart novels, had come to an abrupt end. The Franco-Prussian War and the civil war of the Commune that followed are the subject of the novel that comes after Money, La Débâcle (1892). This early end of the Empire caused some problems for Zola, who had to squeeze a great number of lives and events into its unexpectedly short time-frame.
The Context of 1890, the Banking World, and Anti-Semitism
By the time Zola came to write Money in 1890 France had undergone a period of great industrialization and expansion. Railways were springing up everywhere, the press was growing in importance every day, and investment banks were thriving. New ideas were abroad: Karl Marx’s Das Kapital had been published in 1867, and Marxist ideas had taken root. All these developments are reflected in the plot of Money. The Republic had suffered a series of government scandals, and there was a great deal of social unrest. The Suez Canal, the subject of much animated discussion and speculation (in both senses) in the first chapter of the novel, had been opened by the Empress in 1869. In 1890 it was the Panama Canal that was occupying people’s minds. The Panama Canal Company, in spite of huge contributions from French investors, went into administration in February 1889, and one of the biggest financial scandals of the nineteenth century was just breaking. Hundreds of thousands of investors were ruined, and the government was accused of bribery and corruption. Jewish involvement in the bribery inflamed the already widespread French anti-Semitism, and Drumont’s La France Juive (1886), a two-volume, 1,200-page, violently anti-Semitic work, enjoyed a huge commercial success. The new flare-up of anti-Semitism in the 1880s was much the same as the anti-Semitism of the previous era, when there had been deep resentment of the powerful Jewish bankers, particularly of Baron James Mayer de Rothschild, whose role in the banking world is the model for that of Saccard’s great rival, the Jewish financier Gundermann.
There had been so many disasters in financial institutions that Zola had no lack of models for Saccard’s ‘Universal Bank’. One was Mirès’s innovative bank, the ‘Caisse centrale des chemins de fer’ (‘Central Bank of Railways’), founded in 1850, which collapsed in 1861; then in 1852 the brothers Émile and Isaac Péreire founded the ‘Crédit Mobilier’, a bank expressly intended, like Saccard’s Universal, to foster large enterprises. It played an important part in the economic surge of the period up to 1857, when a financial panic affected the Bourse, the London Stock Exchange, and even Wall Street. The shares of the Crédit Mobilier had risen with amazing rapidity, but the bank crashed disastrously in 1870. A third—and the principal—model for the Universal was the Union Générale of Paul Eugène Bontoux. Founded in 1878, it lay well outside the time-frame of Money, which covers the period from May 1864 to the spring of 1868, but Zola decided to overlook the anachronism since the Bontoux crash was similar to that of the Crédit Mobilier which had happened under the Second Empire. Indeed, history repeated itself sufficiently for Zola to push many features of the Third Republic back into the Second Empire without too grossly offending vraisemblance. Bontoux’s bank, strongly supported by Catholics and monarchists, grew extremely rapidly; it financed and built Serbia’s first railway, bought up insurance companies, and financed schemes in North Africa and Egypt, all the while speculating on the stock market and providing impressive dividends for shareholders. However, prices began to fall in 1880–1 and the bank set about buying its own shares, as Saccard would do, to try to avert disaster; but in January 1882 the Union Générale suspended payments and crashed, the fate that lies in store for Saccard’s Universal.
The failure of Bontoux’s Catholic bank further inflamed resentment of the Jewish banks, especially when Bontoux, with little justification, blamed an ‘Israelite Syndicate’ for bringing down his Union Générale. Zola, who closely followed the fortunes of Bontoux’s bank and the accounts of his trial, and who had read Bontoux’s history of the Union Générale,3 also preserved his anti-Semitism, passing it on to Saccard in the guise of a quasi-hereditary feature: ‘Ah, the Jews! Saccard had that ancient racial resentment of the Jews that is found especially in the south of France’ (p. 78). That resentment is often expressed in extreme and stereotyped terms of hatred of ‘unclean Jewry’ (p. 15). There is a great deal of ugly and angry defamation of Jews in the novel, an unpleasant but accurate reflection of the feeli
ngs of the time. Zola did not disguise it, though he was very far from agreeing with it. In his articles, such as ‘Pour les Juifs’,4 and most strikingly in his defence of Dreyfus, Zola shows his abhorrence of such attitudes. In his open letter ‘J’accuse’, published in L’Aurore on 21 February 1898, he succeeded in reopening the case of the Jewish officer wrongly accused and convicted of treason and espionage. Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus case led to his being himself threatened with imprisonment, which he avoided by fleeing to temporary exile in England. The very outrageousness of Saccard’s anti-Semitism underlines its stupidity. Its unreasonableness is further demonstrated by the fact that Saccard cannot help admiring, as well as envying, the Jewish banker Gundermann, the king of the Bourse. And if the behaviour of the Jewish Busch earns derogatory epithets, the same cannot be said for his equally Jewish brother, the Marxist philosopher Sigismond. The unbalanced anti-Semitism of Saccard is also tellingly opposed by the balanced and reasonable views of Madame Caroline, his mistress, who finds Saccard’s views astonishing: ‘For me, the Jews are just men like any others’ (p. 358).
Money
‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about money. It’s cold, icy, lacking in interest …’, Zola remarked in an interview in April 1890. Money, greed, and ambition are the driving forces in the novel, and Zola was determined to avoid what he felt had become a conventional diatribe against money and speculation. He would not speak ill of money, he wrote in his preparatory notes, but would ‘praise and exalt its generous and fecund power, its expansive force’. He embarked on a particularly onerous period of research, studying books and documents,5 as well as interrogating suitably qualified persons, such as Eugène Fasquelle (an associate and son-in-law of Zola’s publisher, Charpentier), who had spent some years working in brokerage. Few novels had been as much trouble to prepare; Zola meticulously annotated the papers of the Bontoux trial, as well as those of Mirès and the Péreires, and studied every detail of the layout of the Bourse, visiting it almost every day for a month.
