Table of Contents for this Episode
Category: French Culture
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 560, cinq cent soixante.
Annie: Bonjour! I’m Annie Sargent and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture and flavors of France.
[00:00:29] Today on the podcast
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about the remarkable life and legacy of Emile Zola.
Annie: Discover why Zola remains one of France’s most influential writers, how his work shaped literature and society, and the dramatic events that defined his career.
Annie: This one is for folks who want to learn about French history and culture, but we also talk about many places that had an impact on his life and why you might want to visit them.
[00:00:58] Podcast supporters
Annie: This podcast is supported by donors and listeners who buy my tours and services, including my Itinerary Consult Service, my GPS self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, or take a day trip with me around the southwest of France in my electric car.
Annie: The bookings are getting pretty busy for September and October on these day trips, so if you want to do that reach out soon.
Annie: And to find all of my services, you go to my boutique: JoinUsinFrance.com/boutique.
Annie: And remember, Patreon supporters get the podcast ad-free, and as soon as it’s ready. Click on the link in the show notes to enjoy this Patreon reward for as little as a $3 per month.
[00:01:39] Magazine segment
Annie: There won’t be a magazine part of the podcast today because this recording ran long, we had so much to say about Emile Zola, but I do want to send my thanks and a shoutout to new patreon, Ashley, who was also a boot camper.
Annie: To join the wonderful community of francophiles and supporters of the podcast, go to Patreon.com/JoinUs.
Annie: And to support Elyse, go to Patreon.com/ElysArt. And thank you so much.
[00:02:14] Next week on the podcast
Annie: Next week on the podcast an episode about village hopping on the Dordogne and beyond with Jackie Barnes and how to have a peaceful vacation in France. I think you’ll love it.
[00:02:34] Annie and Elyse about Emile Zola
Annie: Bonjour, Elyse!
Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: We have a wonderful conversation lined up today about Emile Zola, the author. And I was surprised by how many wonderful things you came up with, to discuss his life.
Annie: So, you’re going to be doing the kind of biography part, and I’ll interject a little bit of the kind of literature and things like that at some point. But take it away because it’s… I’m sure it’s going to be a long conversation.
Elyse: Yeah, I think it’s going to… I think today we’re going to have a long one, but it’s a very wonderful one. And it is thanks to you, because it is you that had thought of us doing him.
Elyse: Emile Zola, of course, is a writer. He was a very, very famous writer during his lifetime, and he is still considered to be one of the greatest writers in France, certainly one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 19th century, and he was an enormously prolific writer.
Elyse: But he was also many, many, many more things, and that is what we both discovered in doing all of the research about him, which makes him a quite astonishing human being.
[00:03:39] Early Life and Family Struggles
Elyse: So, Zola was born in Paris of a Venetian father. His father was actually from Venice and had moved to France to work as an engineer. He was actually what was called a military engineer, but his specialty was building canals, of all things, and at some point met and married a Parisian woman, and that was Emile Zola’s mother.
Elyse: And he was born in Paris in 1840, and several, three years later to be exact, his father got a very, very good job to build a huge canal that would bring drinkable water to Aix-en-Provence, and so they moved down to Aix-en-Provence, and at the age of three, Emile moved to a new neighborhood.
Elyse: And it’s interesting because even from the beginning, he was a bit complexed about the fact that his father was a foreigner and he had a strange accent and that he had this accent that was not considered to be a Provencal accent. And he apparently was a relatively shy child, and he was an only child.
Elyse: And what happened was that the first few years of his life were quite comfortable, I’m sure, but then his father very, very suddenly and brutally died of pneumonia when he was just about seven and a half, in 1848.
Elyse: And his mother was left absolutely destitute and in despair, and she decided that the only thing she could do was to go back up to Paris.
Elyse: But Emile Zola did not want to go to Paris because by that time, he had been in a very special selective school in Aix-en-Provence, had made friends with, among other people, Paul Cézanne, and found that the life in and around Aix was what suited him because he loved going out into the countryside, and he admired greatly everything that he could see.
Elyse: But his life as a child and into his adolescence was rather difficult. He felt responsible for his mother, even though apparently she had family. I don’t really know, and I couldn’t find any information about her more than that, and at some point she said, “Okay, you stay here in this what it’s called in French, a pensionnat, which meant he stayed in the school overnight.
Elyse: So, that’s like a sleepaway school, but we don’t… We usually use that term for camp.
Annie: The English have a … a boarding [school].
Elyse: Yes, a boarding school. A boarding school. Of course. A boarding school. So, he stayed. He was left in Aix in this boarding school, which is where he did his middle school and most of his high school studies, and his mother moved back to Paris and went to work actually as a seamstress. Even though she came from a family that was apparently middle class, they had no money.
Elyse: And to add to the misery that they were going through at that point, she got bilked out of what would have been her inheritance for her husband’s part of his participation in a company that had been founded to build this canal by the two other partners. She took them to court and unfortunately, probably did not have a very, very good lawyer and being a woman, they found ways of turning the contracts around so that it turned, they made it sure that they got all the money.
Elyse: And she was left with nothing, absolutely nothing.
Elyse: And Emile Zola talks about, or he talked about how miserable they were and how scared she was of what was going to happen to the two of them, and his entire life he felt responsible for taking care of her. He said that being poor and being a foreigner were two things that marked him for the rest of his life.
Annie: Right, those were defining moments as far as his literature was concerned because that’s the people he wrote about.
Elyse: That is exactly the people he wrote about. That’s exactly right.
[00:07:23] Friendship with Paul Cézanne and Artistic Influences
Elyse: Now, his friendship with Paul Cézanne, who we talked a little bit about in the podcast about Cézanne, was also very formative for him, especially at that point of his life because he admired artists.
Elyse: And he said all his life that what he tried to do with his writing was to be a painter. That is, to make images that would stick in people’s minds down to the very finest, tiny detail, just like a magnificent, huge painting.
Elyse: And he became friends with a whole group of impressionist artists when he was a young adult and had moved back to Paris, and among those people, of course, were Renoir and Pissarro and Manet, who were very good friends with him, and who gave him the courage to work as a writer even though they in fact were, of course, painters.
Annie: Right, and it’s really striking that in his writing he will go into details about, I don’t know, a radish. And will describe the colors, the smells, the setting. It’s really, really detailed and you can, if you enjoy literature, you will really enjoy the pictures that it summons in your head.
Elyse: And when you see the quotes that he actually said about his style of writing, aside from the fact that he wanted to help people to have compassion and understand the lives of poor people, it is indeed like paintings. The scenes are exactly like magnificent paintings. It makes me think of still life paintings with every petal of every flower and every piece of fruit and things like that, you know?
Annie: Right. And writers learn to bring in all the senses. So the smells, the sights, the sounds, the wind, the emotions, and he really brings it all together, but even to the smallest details. That’s one of the things I enjoy about his writing, but that’s also what makes it a little tough to read, because it’s long.
Elyse: It’s long.
[00:09:19] Challenges and Failures in Education
Elyse: The other thing that happened that added to what we could consider to be his traumatisms that really developed into his writing skills is that he failed his exams at the end of high school twice. And one of the exams he failed was French, and of course that was partly because even though- … even though his mother was French, I have no idea, you know, what kind of accent his father was from Venice, and came to France as an adult, so he must have had a very strong accent. Who knows exactly what they were speaking at home.
Elyse: But he said later on that having taken these exams twice and having failed them, was… it made him ashamed and it was added to this list of things that he said that people have to bear and you have to figure out how to explain to people to have compassion for things like that, you know?
Elyse:
Annie: That is really rich, that Zola failed his French.
Elyse: He failed his French exam, yes.
Elyse: And so he went back.
Annie: Because he’s so… he’s so good, but of course he probably didn’t fit the mold.
Elyse: No, he didn’t fit the mold, and that’s probably one of the reasons he was such good friends with Paul Cézanne, because he describes Cézanne as being, you know, someone who was asocial, and who was really kind of grumpy, and he himself was not like that.
Elyse: But he was, he liked the fact that these were oddball people. I think that was part of what happened. He was rather shy, actually, Émile Zola.
Elyse: And he was also someone who, he decided very early that he did indeed want to be a writer. Which is very interesting because he didn’t say, “Oh, I’m going to be a painter like these people that I know.” He wanted to be a writer, so language was very important to him from very, very early on.
Annie: And sometimes, as I was reading his books, I thought, “Why go into so much detail?” But we have to remember that back then, people didn’t have TV, if they wanted music, they needed to go to a concert hall. Entertainment was very, very different from what we have today. I mean, we all have endless entertainment in our pockets with our cell phones.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: And this was not the case. If they wanted to be entertained, they had to sit down with a book, and they had to go to the symphony, and they had to go to the museums and to the exhibits and things like that. So life was very, very different back then, and he was really giving people a lot of entertainment, because these books are entertaining, just like going to a beautiful exhibit is entertaining, you know?
Elyse: Absolutely. And what I find also interesting, I was thinking about that as I was doing the research, but this was true also for Cézanne.
Elyse: In the middle of the 19th century, it was not considered to be scandalous for a young man to decide to be an artist or a writer. It was simply another legitimate profession. You had to work your way in. You weren’t guaranteed that you would be successful, but it wasn’t poo-hooed even in the middle classes and it was like, okay, it’s a legitimate thing. If you want to be a painter, you study to be a painter. And if you want to be a writer, in the case of Zola, you study how to be a writer.
Annie: Right, and this is a society where they would address a painter as ‘maître’.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: Master.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: Just like you would a lawyer.
Elyse: It was respectable.
Annie: Yes. It was respectable and very much respected.
Elyse: Indeed, it was.
[00:12:47] Rise as a Journalist and Critic
Elyse: So finally what happened was, giving up on his schooling in Aix-en-Provence when he was in his late teens, he went back up to be with his mother in Paris. He tried again to pass these exams in one of the two very, very good and still very good, high schools in the center of Paris, and then realized that he had to find work.
Elyse: And thanks to connections that were made through his family, he was introduced to a man named Louis Hachette. Now this is fascinating to me because-
Annie: Ding, ding, ding!
Elyse: We know today that Hachette, H-A-C-H-E-T-T-E, is one of the biggest publishing companies in France, and it was this Mr. Louis Hachette who was the first one to create this publishing house, and it was a publishing house that mostly published either dictionaries or scientific texts for popular consumption.
Elyse: So it was, it’s now a huge, Hachette is enormous. It has so many different parts to it. But he was given the opportunity to go to work for him and he was, at this point, just about 20 years old, and he was given a job. It’s very interesting because it turns out that he was very good at it.
Elyse: He wasn’t given a job as a writer. He was basically given a job that is the equivalent of being an attaché de presse, which meant that he would go around and he would basically talk about the different things that were going to be published by Hachette…. and he would convince different people, different stores to buy the books, and he became familiar with the world of publishing.
Elyse: And he said later on that this is one of the things that he considered to be the first step of becoming a writer, because in fact, the first 15 years of his life, he was a journalist. He did not write novels.
Annie: Right, and he occasionally continued to write pieces. I mean, J’accuse! he’s famous for that.
Elyse: Well, and that’s of course much later. But what’s interesting is that he spent several years with Hachette, and during this time he started writing short stories, but he became known at first as being a critic. That is, he wrote reviews. He wrote reviews of art, for artists, he wrote reviews of theater pieces, he wrote reviews of other people’s literature, and he developed this very distinctive style which was basically saying what he thought. It is a wonder that at that point in his life, he had not yet been attacked for slander or for whatever it is that you could attack people for, because he was known very quickly for being someone who was, to use a word that we use today, very cash. He said what he thought about everything.
Annie: Well, in France we say that. I don’t know if you say that in English.
Elyse: Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure what we do.
Annie: But basically, he became known as being very, very forthright, but he had very specific political convictions. He was very much a republican in the sense of believing in a republic, not in a monarchy or an empire, and he was also not particularly fond of the Catholic Church because he considered to be, that the Catholic Church was rather repressive, and of course it was part of what is known as the Second Empire? The Third Empire? Third Empire? I think it’s the Third.
Elyse: It’s the Third. It’s the Third. And so he allowed these political convictions to seep through into his commentary when he was writing his criticisms about things.
Elyse: So, he started to gain recognition as a journalist, and he was eventually given a column.
Elyse: By the time he was in his mid-20s, he was relatively well-known for having a column in a newspaper and he was publishing stories in various magazines and newspapers.
Elyse: And he said that he was finally very happy to be recognized as a writer.
Elyse: What he wanted, of all things, was to be able to say he was a writer, and that he was published all over. And he wrote a total of approximately 100 short stories at this time.
Elyse: And in 1865, so we imagine in 1865, he is 25, he met and became very good friends with the entire group of impressionist artists. He, at that point, was still very close to Cézanne. He particularly appreciated Pissarro and Renoir, and became a bit friends with Manet, who was a little bit older.
Elyse: And he also met the woman, Alexandrine, who would become his wife, and who basically stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Elyse: Now, what I find interesting is that, again, she was, nobody really knows how she entered his life. She was apparently maybe a model for some of the artists, maybe not. Maybe she was a dressmaker. She was definitely not from the middle classes. She was from a working class environment.
Elyse: And his mother was not particularly happy that he hadbrought himself a woman of the working class back to the house. And because his mother did not approve of her, he found another little apartment for the two of them.
Elyse: But it wasn’t until five years later, in 1870, that they actually officially got married. So, for five years, she worked little jobs to help support the two of them while he started to do his writing.
Annie: This is very much like the couple Claude D- has in L’Œuvre, one of his books, which I’m just in the middle of right now. To correct what you said, it was the fall of Napoleon III which was the Second Empire.
Elyse: It’s confusing. It’s confusing, between the empires and the kings and the.., it is, sorry, sorry out there, it is confusing.
Elyse: So, this takes us up to the year 1870. He is 30 years old. He has actually made himself a good reputation as a journalist. He’s already started to also make some enemies. Enemies in the sense that there are certainly a number of people, particularly people with conservative ideas, who do not like his writing. They do not like his franc-parler, as they would say in French, which means he really said what he thought about everything.
Elyse: He was extremely honest, and he basically told everybody, whether they were on the left side of the political spectrum or the right, that he wasn’t going to change what he thought and he wasn’t going to hide what he thought, and this is basically the leitmotif of his entire life. He said what he wanted to say, he said what he thought, and he really didn’t care about who thought it was a good or bad thing.
Annie: Right, right.
Elyse: And so what happens in 1870 is that we have this mini war that I will admit very honestly I find very complex and not sure that I completely understand, but suddenly France is at war with Prussia. And the Prussians invade Paris, and because of that there is the very famous Paris Commune which of course takes place, it’s a group of people who try to defend part of Paris which is the part of Paris that is Montmartre, against the Prussians after the French government gives in to the Prussians immediately. Echoes of this, of course, later in World War II, which is very premonitory, I guess you could say.
Annie: So, to clarify just a little bit, most of his writing happens, it starts in 1870…. the saga of the Rougon-Macquart whichit’s 20 books in 22 years, is what he wrote. And so it begins with the fall of Napoleon III, which is the, you know, in the Second Empire.
Annie: The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune happened in 1870, 1871. The establishment of the Third Republic, not Empire, but that now it’s a republic, changes everything, 1870 onwards. Things were constantly changing, but the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune were huge, and we should, you know, learn more about it and talk about it at some point because, especially in Montmartre, the Commune was a big deal. And I mention it in my tour of Montmartre, but it didn’t last very long, but it made a lasting impression.
Elyse: It made a lasting impression.
[00:20:56] Transition to Novel Writing: Les Rougon-Macquart
Elyse: And it is indeed starting in 1870 that Zola stops being a journalist and becomes a writer of novels, and he says it himself.
Elyse: He said that what happened during the Commune, first of all, he was attacked by the Communards because he disagreed with some of the things that they were doing in spite of the fact that he believed in a republic. His position, and he said, “I will never belong to a political party, I will never identify myself as being this, this, or this. I am Emile Zola. This is what I think and this is what I will say.”
Elyse: And that was something that caused a lot of grief for him because he always was honest with himself, and he said, “I will be honest with whoever wants to read whatever it is I write.”
Elyse: And so it was from then on, as you mentioned, that he began this series of books, which he called, interestingly enough, as the subtitle, A Social and Natural History of a Family During the Second Empire.
Annie: Right, so it’s kind of a saga, but at the same time it’s not, because although some characters reappear, it’s actually like a genealogical… so it starts with a family, it starts with a man who has some children with his wife, but he also has some children with a mistress, and the two branches they appear in different books, but they’re all related somehow to this one man.
Annie: It’s not a soap opera, because a soap opera you really see the same characters all the time. But it has that kind of… It’s going in that direction because he could… like Claude, the painter, appears in several books, right? He’s not necessarily a big character in several books. He’s the main character in L’Œuvre, which in English is called:
Annie:
Elyse: I think it’s called The Artist in English.
Annie: So they come in and out, but they’re all related to the original guy.
Elyse: He wanted to show the whole spectrum of life of an extended family, at this particular time, and use that as a way of talking about all the conditions of the different statuses of society, you know?
Annie: Right. And if you want to understand French history without reading a history book, reading that series would be really, really good.
Elyse: Would really be good.
[00:23:16] Naturalism and Literary Success
Elyse: And Zola, from this point on, of course, becomes famous, and he is part of a group of writers that are called Writers of Naturalism. And Naturalism was a big movement in writing, not necessarily in painting, interestingly enough. Because it was very different, because this is the time of the impressionists and the post-impressionists who are certainly not what you would call realistic painters. But he was part of this very, very important movement in writing that included writers in England, of showing reality down to the very finest, tiny little details.
Elyse: And he said that this is what he wanted to do. He wanted to portray the reality of the lives of those who were at the bottom of the social system, and to show the conditions under which they lived, worked, and died. And he says this several times because each of the different books and, of course, each one takes a part of this world and talks about certain occupations.
Elyse: Germinal, which is of course the only one that I really know very well, it talks about miners and the life of the coal miners in Northern France, which was absolutely horrific, you know? And he describes, down to the tiniest detail, what they ate, how they dressed, what their lives were like when they went down into the mines. The movements that they tried to create to get better conditions,everything from the beginning to end.
Elyse: And at the same time, this movement of Naturalism, one of the things that I find interesting, and this is looking at it from the perspective of the 21st century, is that it was with compassion that he wrote all of this, but at the time people didn’t think you could ever change the situation that you were in. You basically were what you were born into, and this is what he really shows in the books at the same time, you know?
Annie: Right, so it’s just the way… Yeah, it’s a fatalism, there’s nothing you can do. You were born, and you know, to some extent the easiest to… I mean, the best way to become rich today is to have a rich daddy, you know? I mean, that’s just… still in some ways. But…
Elyse: Or to invent something, you know?
Annie: Yeah, but back then you were really defined by your class.
Elyse: You were defined by your class, yeah. He said: “I want to write novels that will be the first novels about the people,” the people meaning the poor people, “that doesn’t lie, that has the odor of the poor in the writing.”
Elyse: I thought that was really interesting. It’s not condescending. It’s really his ability or his desire to make you feel like you can walk into the page and be in the world that they’re in by the tiniest little details that he gives.
Annie: Yeah, so, one example of this in Le Ventre de Paris, The Belly of Paris, so this is about life in and around Les Halles, in Paris, back when it was all in central Paris. There’s a time when children are abandoned, so people who can’t feed their kids anymore, young toddlers, two-year-old, one-year-old, would just take them to Les Halles and just leave them. Leave them and tell them, “I’ll be back,” and never come back. This was actually pretty common. It happened.
Annie: In the book, he describes two such children who end up being cared for by the workers of Les Halles, and who do well, you know, especially the girl is very… It’s a boy and a girl. And they grow up like brother and sister, but there’s an incestual relationship. Well, it’s not really incest because they’re not…
Elyse: They’re not really related.
Annie: Right, but they were raised that way. And then the boy, there’s a rape scene. He doesn’t really rape her, but… No, another woman, another worker. He doesn’t really rape her because she hits him in the head, and leaves him for dead. But it’s all really, really, like, vivid and sordid.
Annie: This is hardly the only plot of the book, obviously, but it’s really… It grabs you. I wouldn’t say that these books are plot-driven, ever. They are more like the vicissitudes. Yeah, they’re character-driven because it’s the vicissitudes of real people who run out of money regularly, like, L’Œuvre. So I’m in the middle of reading L’Œuvre. What did you say it was called? The Masterpiece, no?
Annie: The Masterpiece, apparently.
Elyse: Okay, I read that it was called The Artist, but it could be The Masterpiece. This is the one that supposedly made Cézanne stop speaking to him, you know.
Annie: For a while, yeah.
Elyse: For a while, but it turns out that at the end of his life, he did talk to him again. What’s interesting to know, too, is that like Dickens, in England, although Dickens was not considered to be a naturalist because his books were much more fantastical and there was a certain amount of humor in them. But both of them became successful by publishing a chapter at a time every week in magazines.
Elyse: And this is fascinating to me because I like the idea that if you’re going to be a writer, it gives you a little bit of breathing space, you know? It’s like, “Okay, I’ve got to do a chapter a week, but I’ve got a whole week to think about the chapter,” you know? “I don’t have to come up with all of it at the same time.”
Elyse: And this is what he did. We’re talking about 20 books that have I don’t know how many thousands of pages if you put them all together. And all through this period of time, from 1870 until 1893, they were first published in chapter form in reviews and magazines, and then eventually, of course, at the same time when he became really famous, they were also published as books in bookstores.
Annie: Right. The serial publication was called feuilleton, which means, you know, a series. Like a feuilleton, like a…
Elyse: The ones I watch every night on television. Right, exactly.
Annie: Like the TV, yeah. That’s what it is. And then very often, they would come out as a book like a year later or something. So L’Assommoir, for example, which is in English ” The Dram Shop” or “The Drinking Den”.
Elyse: The Drinking… it’s a very hard word to translate.
Elyse: That was published in ’77.
Elyse:
Annie: That’s right, that’s right. So that one it was serialized in the newspaper Le Bien Public in 1876 before it came out as a book in 1877. Nana, another one of his bestsellers, it was published in Le Voltaire,a magazine, in 1879 before being published as a novel in 1880.
Annie: Right.
Annie: So it just… it was common at the time, and you know, it helped them have regular income and also give him time to think about…
Elyse: Yeah. It’s true.
Annie: I mean, 20 books in 22 years is amazing.
Elyse: It’s amazing. And they are big books. These are not little books. This is not sparse writing, you know. But what’s fascinating to me is that… So Assommoir is actually, I think, it’s the third or fourth in the series.
[00:30:11] Books in the Rougon-Macquart Series
Annie: So hang on, hang on, hang on. It starts with La Fortune des Rougon, The Fortune of the Rougon. La Curée is the second, that’s The Kill. Le Ventre de Paris is the third, Belly of Paris. Fourth is La Conquête des Plassans, The Conquest of the Plassans. La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret is fifth, The Sin of Abbe Mouret. Six is Son Excellence Eugene Rougon, His Excellency Eugene Rougon. And seventh is L’Assommoir, which is The Dram Shop or The Drinking Den.
Elyse: And that one, so, think about this, he’s turned out one a year, and this one is the very first that is a super bestseller.
Elyse: And it is the one that made him rich, and it was thanks to this book that he was able to do nothing but write and not have to worry about it, and did become quite wealthy. I mean, he was really, from this point on, he was a very, very comfortably off man. He could take care of his mother very well. He could do whatever he wanted to do. He wrote down somewhere that in order to be a writer, you must have enormous discipline. And he never, ever, even when he was in exile, stopped writing. He just wrote every single day, and he kept up the quota of the certain number of pages every day from 1870 until his death. I mean, this is how he was with his writing. He was obsessed with the fact that he had to produce as much as he could. So, it is really remarkable. And then, of course, that’s number seven. And we have all these others.
Annie: Shall I keep going?
Annie: Shall I finish my list?
Elyse: You want to read all of them?
Annie: Sure, sure, sure. Une Page d’Amour, A Love Episode. That was number eight. Number nine, Nana, which is also called Nana in English. That’s number nine. That was in 1880. Pot-Bouille, The Potluck or Piping Hot, 1882 was number 10. Au Bonheur des Dames, The Ladies’ Paradise, which is also quite famous.
Elyse: It’s very famous, and it’s about department store workers.
Annie: Right, so that’s 11. 12, La Joie de Vivre, The Joy of Life. 1884. Germinal, 1885. That’s one that we all read at school, pretty much.
Elyse: You can easily see in a movie, in fact, you know.
Annie: Yeah, it was a movie. Number 14 is L’Œuvre, The Masterpiece, in 1886. La Terre, The Earth, 1887, number 15.
[00:32:28] Zola’s Later Works and Personal Struggles
Annie: Le Rêve, The Dream, was number 16 in 1888. La Bête Humaine, number 17, The Beast Within or The Human Beast in 1890. That’s one that I read as a kid and did not understand at all. Number 18, L’Argent, Money.
Annie: Number 19, La Débâcle, The Downfall or The Debacle. And number 20, the conclusion, is Le Docteur Pascal, Doctor Pascal, in 1893.
Elyse: In 1893. So this is a massive amount of work. And in the midst of all of this, first in 1880, his mom died, which apparently was very, very difficult moment for him. And then he’s entering into his 40s. And this is a man who has basically devoted his life to being honorable, to telling the truth of, his version of the truth, of what he thinks should be done from a political point of view.
Annie: It’s morality without being religious, is what he was going after.
Elyse: Right.
Elyse: But I think it’s also that, I mean, he never hides the fact that, he never says this, “Other people need to think this way. I think this way.” This is his opinion about everything, you know? He was very much involved with the idea of showing his opinion.
Elyse: But also, I think he was very invested in being honest and honorable, those two words which are, of course, connected.
[00:33:57] A Double Life: Zola’s Affair and Family Dynamics
Elyse: And yet what happens, and this is basically an aside to his career, but it does change everything afterwards, is that in 1888, at the age of 48, he takes up with the maid, a young woman of 21 who has been hired by his devoted wife, who has unfortunately been unable to have children, and who has really devoted her life to him. I mean, she’s really spent her entire life helping him and advising him and being as close as you could possibly be to your partner. And she’s the one who hired this young woman because she needed, they were wealthy, I mean, they had domestic help.
Elyse: And within the space of several months, he was in a situation where he admitted to several of his friends that he was starting to fantasize about young women. It was, he hadn’t done anything about it, but he felt that he shouldn’t. But he was actually at that point where the almost 50-year-old, and he’s starting to look at these young women, and apparently she was very beautiful. There are actually some photos you can see on internet of the two of them, because at the end of his life, he took a lot of photographs of his new second family.
Elyse: And lo and behold, he began an affair with this young woman named Eugène, Jeanne in English. Eugène, I always have trouble with that. And it would have probably not been a very long-term relationship, except that she became pregnant, and in the end, she wound up having the two children that he had always wanted to have and that he had not been able to have with his wife, Alexandrine.
Elyse: And so he began what literally was a double life. And it was a little bit after the birth of the first child that his wife found out about it. I personally can’t imagine that she didn’t know about it beforehand, but whatever, it doesn’t make any difference.
Elyse: But she basically, his wife basically said, “I do not want you to leave me. I do not want to have a divorce. If I must, I will accept that this other woman exists with these children, but you please, I mean, basically, stay with me.”
Elyse: And he said that that was what he would do. And so for the rest of his life, he basically had two families, and he had, he set up a house for this woman, Jeanne Rozerot, and he would go over and visit her and spend time with the children because he was very happy, suddenly to become a father. And little by little, his wife accepted their existence, and even at times, took care of the children and even actually had them in the house with them. And he continued to lead this double life until his death in 1902.
Annie: Well, I mean, I guess that’s very French of me, but, you know, that’s making the best of a difficult situation, I guess?
Elyse: Well, you know, it’s interesting because he’s quoted as saying nearer the end of his life, “I did what I could to make everyone happy, but I am the one who is not happy leading a double life.” And so somehow, he did it.
Elyse: He did it, I think, out of a sense of honor and a sense of not wanting to really hurt his wife. At the same time, he did not want to give up this second family. And yes, it is very French, I must say, to have considered that it’s almost normal to do something like that, you know?
Annie: Well, I didn’t say it was normal. I just say that if it happens, then you can make it worse by being obtuse about it.
Elyse: You can, but I do… I mean, this is an aside that has nothing to do necessarily with Zola, but I know several people, not you Annie, but I do know several people who in their… and you know, people alive now, who have discovered at a certain age that they have half brothers and sisters that were made somewhere, usually by their father. And it is not that uncommon. It really is not, you know?
Annie: Yeah. Yeah. And French law has provisions for this. Today, it doesn’t matter if you’re a natural born child or born in within wedlock, you will inherit from your parents from…
Elyse: If you can prove that they are your parents, Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Elyse: All of this to say that in the midst of all of this enormous amount of work and the success, he was a workaholic, let’s face it. I mean, he was obsessed with his writing. He was an incredibly successful writer. He had, remember, stopped being a journalist. He was now a full-time novelist. He was involved at that point in his life between 1880 and the end of the 1890s, involved in, at the same time, balancing this private life that was getting a little bit more complicated, you know?
Annie: Right. So being a famous author, obviously he was recognized and he was invited and he went to place… to events and things. Yeah, it would fill up a life a lot.
Elyse: It would fill up a life a lot.
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[00:38:57] The Dreyfus Affair: Zola’s Fight for Justice
Elyse: And then the last major, very significant event of his life that happened starting with the Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894.
Elyse: Starting in 1894, Zola, who was inherently someone who believed in justice and tolerance, he became aware of through various friends and because of the writings that were being put into various very conservative newspapers, he became aware of the fact that there was an extremely, extremely virulent, antisemitic atmosphere taking hold in France.
Elyse: This is a reality. In the 1890s in France, antisemitism was so bad that there were actually two newspapers that had as headlines, “The Anti-Jewish Newspaper.” And this was part of what was going on in Paris. It was really… I don’t know exactly the reasons why this happened at this particular time. And so one of the major events which has gone down, of course, as a major event in the history in France is what is known as the Dreyfus Affair.
Elyse: There was a colonel in the army, a young man named Alfred Dreyfus, who was from the Alsatian area, who was a very respected officer in the army, and who happened to be from a Jewish family.
Elyse: And without going into the details because that there’s… doesn’t concern us. It concerns us more with what happened with Zola in relation to this. But this man, Dreyfus, was accused of being a spy and a traitor in service of the Germans, of the Prussians, and he was put before a trial. He was taken to trial, a court-martial trial, and he was convicted of being a spy and sent to what is called Le Bagne. And I had somebody the other day asked me how to translate into English, and it’s basically… I don’t even know how to do it. It’s prison but on a… like an island, like the…
Annie: It’s forced labor in a very difficult to reach, isolated place. Cayenne was one, which is in South America.
Elyse: The islands of Marseille were considered to be Bagne. And so this is starting in the 1890s. And by 1894, Zola has become sensitive to all of this. He actually did not follow the Dreyfus Affair very, very carefully. That was not something that was very much a part of his life, until he was contacted by several people, one of whom was a very important member of the Alsatian government, because Alsace was kind of a separate… has separate rules. It’s very complicated to explain, but there was a member of the government from Alsace whose name was Auguste Scheher-Kestner, who was apparently someone who admired Zola enormously and had remembered all of his journalistic output and remembered how honest he was and how…
Annie: Straightforward. Straight shooter.
Elyse: Thank you. Thank you. How straightforward he was in saying black is black and white is white. And he had… he went to him, and he wrote to him, and he asked him if he would meet with a group of people, including several lawyers who were preparing a campaign to start a new trial in an appeals court, to revise the verdict against Colonel Dreyfus.
Elyse: And that was at this point that Zola began to read everything that had occurred and read all the papers, and discovered, which apparently was easy relatively to discover, who had lied, who had given false information, who had created false proof. All of this was basically one of those farces. It was a travesty of justice from the beginning to the end. And just as an aside, in spite of my not particularly admiring him as a person, Roman Polanski, the filmmaker, made a movie that came out two years ago called J’Accuse!, which is absolutely wonderful, and it is very accurate in describing the entire period of the trial of Dreyfus and what happened from the beginning to the end.
Elyse: It doesn’t specifically include a lot about Zola, except of course when he writes the article at the end, but it’s, if you want to see a movie that will give you a good explanation without having to dive into enormous amounts of historical paper, that is the movie to see.
Annie: I haven’t seen it.
Elyse: It’s really excellent, I have to admit. And when you read about it, you realize that he really followed, with accuracy exactly what happened, you know.
Elyse: So Zola decides that he will take on this cause, and one of the things that they ask him to do is to begin a journalistic campaign to help them. So suddenly, here he is again as a journalist after all these years having made his fame as a novelist, and he takes it on with full heart. That’s about the only way I can put it. He becomes so convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence and of the need to convince the general public of the miscarriage of justice that he delves into it with his heart and soul. And one of the people that actually helps him, believe it or not, is Clemenceau, who eventually of course winds up becoming president, but unfortunately, it’s after Zola’s death. And Clemenceau encourages him to write an article, and actually it is Clemenceau who gives him the idea of giving the title of the article, the J’Accuse!, which of course is written in bold letters across the top of this enormous, enormous, long article.
Elyse: Now, he presented it to The Figaro, which by the way, is still a newspaper that is a politically moderate newspaper in France, a daily newspaper.
Annie: But that’s not where it appeared, is it?
Elyse: No, because they refused. They refused because they did not want to alienate the conservative reading public that they had. And he took it to a newspaper called L’Aurore, which means, L’Aurore, which means The Dawn.
Annie: I mean, when I was young, we still had L’Aurore.
Elyse: Oh, you still had it?
Annie: Right. I don’t think it exists anymore.
Elyse: Oh, that’s… I didn’t even know that. Okay, that’s really interesting.
Annie: No, I mean, I’ve read L’Aurore.
Elyse: You’ve read it, huh.
Annie: But I don’t know when it stopped.
Elyse: So Zola was so convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence and of the obvious dishonesty of the trial, that he stopped doing everything else and just went to work on helping not only write this article, but making a campaign.
Elyse: It was a travesty of justice. There’s nothing beyond that to say because the proofs were there that this man was indeed innocent, but the antisemitic atmosphere and the conservative government was such that they refused to accept it.
Elyse: So there was a second trial, and the article J’Accuse! was so inflammatory that the president of France at the time, a man named Felix Faure, basically accused Zola of defamation. And his supporters, all of these people who had been encouraging him to write this article, told him that if he lost this case of defamation, because he was taken to court, and he was taken to court almost immediately after the publication of J’Accuse!, that he was going to be in trouble, and he would wind up being sent to prison, and that is exactly what happened.
[00:46:36] Exile and Return: Zola’s Final Years
Elyse: And so the day he was convicted, his friends told him that he had to leave France, literally. He was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison, and to a fine of 3,000 francs, which I assume was a certain amount of money in relation to what money would be today, I don’t really know exactly how much. And they put him on a train. He had nothing with him. They literally said, “You have to get out of here.” And they put him on a train and sent him to England.
Elyse: And he spent 11 months in England hiding, because they were worried about him being assassinated by people who were arch conservatives who considered that he had insulted the government and insulted the military, which in a way, he probably had by, because he accused them of being collusion and of lying outright to make Dreyfus a scapegoat. And they told him that he shouldn’t show his face until he could come back, and that was 11 months later.
Annie: Yup. Yup. And it’s interesting that one of the reasons why this letter was so powerful is because he kept it sho- well, short, I mean, it’s long but the sentences are short. So every sentence starts with J’accuse!, and then he repeats that dozens of times, and he makes a point. And then he goes on, j’accuse, blah, blah, blah. And really it’s the format that made it so powerful.
Annie: And Félix Faure didn’t enjoy. He was the president at the time, like you noted, did not enjoy this.
Elyse: No, he didn’t enjoy it at all. And it is a fact that it created such a stir that they said, “Okay, we will have another trial again.” And guess what happens? In this third trial, they… actually there were two trials. There was one where they brought to trial the real traitor, the real spy who was a man named Esterházy, who was also a colonel and who it was indeed the person who was really spying for the Prussians. And they created false proof so that he would be acquitted. The trial was literally what we call a monkey trial.It didn’t even last a week. They said this is absurd. They produced all of this what turned out to be absolutely false proof, and he was acquitted. And then they brought Dreyfus back, and he was convicted again. And it wasn’t until after all of this was over that there was another trial, and instead of convincing the public that he was innocent, they simply decided to pardon Dreyfus.
Annie: Right. It was easier than to admit that it had been a sham all along.
Elyse: That it had been a sham all along.
Elyse: It was a traumatism for the country. It was basically a traumatism for all of the people involved in the trial. And I think for Zola, it did something to him, because in spite of the fact that he continued to write, his health was not very good once he came back. And he came back in 1898, he was brought back, and he published the first two of four books that were going to be a new series called The Four Gospels.
Annie: Oh, like the Bible?
Elyse: Like the Bible.
Annie: Les Quatre Evangiles.
Elyse: Yep.
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: The first one is called Fécundité…
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: … which is kind of strange. And he actually wrote…
Annie: Well, that’s where it starts. If you don’t got babies, you don’t got nothing.
Elyse: Exactly.
Elyse: And that he literally wrote in the 11 months he was in exile in England. It was ready to be published. He published it in 1899. The second one is called Work.
Annie: Sure, you got to work, yep.
Elyse: And that was published in 1901.
Annie: And what’s the other two?
Elyse: I don’t remember. I don’t remember because they were never published.
Annie: Oh, okay. Well, yeah.
Elyse: The third one he worked on a manuscript, and it was about to be published when in fact he died. And then the fourth onethere was no finished manuscript at all.
[00:50:29] Legacy and Final Thoughts on Zola
Elyse: But this is what happened. So here he is, in 1900, he is 60 years old, which is moderately old, but not that old. He was used up, I think, by the amount of attacks against him about the fact that he had spent basically almost the last seven or eight years trying to convince the public that the travesty of justice was also a travesty of justice in terms of the politics of the country.
Elyse: He was so angry at the world in France for being racist, for being antisemitic, for being dishonest. He couldn’t admit that this was the world that he lived in.
Elyse: And at the same time, he had what was basically a relatively happy home life because by this time, his wife, Alexandrine, had more or less accepted the fact that there was this other part of the family and had largely integrated it into his world. He had a son, and he had a daughter, and he had this other woman who was devoted to him that he spent some time with. And so he was preparing to do the third volume of this new series of books.
Elyse: He and his wife went on vacation to Normandy, as they often did in the summertime. This is in 1902. And when he came back which was September 29th of 1902, they asked the house staff to heat up the house a little bit because it was a relatively cool fall day at the end of September. And they said, “Please heat up the house a little bit for us before we get back.” And when they got back to the house the staff closed off the flues that, of course, bring up… because it was gas heating that they had through this house. It was relatively modern for the time. He was very much into modernthings. And theoretically all of the flues with the gas were turned off, and he and his wife went to bed. And at some point, in the middle of the night, his wife woke him, and she said, “I think I smell gas.” And he was apparently exhausted from the trip, and he said to her… basically it was kind of like he sniffed around and he said, no, you’re imagining things. I don’t smell anything.”
Elyse: But she for some reason was worried, and she got up, and she actually left the room and went to sleep somewhere else. And when she went back to the room the next morning, he was lying on the floor, and he was already dead. He had apparently gotten up at some point in the middle of the night and tried to leave but had inhaled so much of the poisonous gas that he could not move, and he was lying there and nobody knew, of course. At that time, how long it had taken him to die.
Annie: Don’t mess with gas or ventilation when you have gas.
Elyse: However, it is a fact, and more and more, people do believe that it was an assassination.
Annie: Yeah. Well, whatever.
Elyse: It is not possible to know for sure. But-
Annie: I mean, people die of bad ventilation all the time. This is not rare, unfortunately.
Elyse: It’s true, however, he had had so many death threats, so many. He had. And he had stirred up so much animosity that the right-wing newspapers were calling for his death all the time. And this is already a year or two after the Dreyfus affair has basically calmed down. It hasn’t ended, but it has calmed down. And so there really were important, it wasn’t that there was proof, but…
Annie: There were motives.
Elyse: … there were real motives. And there were really lots of people that believed that that was what happened. And recently, I was reading more of this, there is more and more question of whether or not they could find proof.
Annie: How old was he?
Elyse: He was 62.
Annie: Yeah, that’s young.
Elyse: He was young. Cézanne, who didn’t die for another few years, most of the other people around him, I mean, his wife lived another, I think, 15 years or something like that before she died.
Elyse: There really, even at the moment of his death, some of the conservative newspapers rejoiced that he was dead. He created such animosity in his defense of the truth that it is possible to imagine that somebody tried to kill him, yeah.
Annie: Yeah, it’s possible to imagine, yes. Yes, it is.
Elyse: And so, of course, you have his funeral. And at his funeral, you have Anatole France, who was both a writer and I believe he was also a politician.
Annie: Yeah, politician, yes.
Elyse: Who said, as one of the men who spoke at his funeral, he said, “Émile Zola was for a moment in history, the conscience of humanity.”
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: And I thought that that was absolutely wonderful, that that was what he said about him. He was initially buried in Montmartre Cemetery, and then very soon he was taken to the Panthéon. In 1908, his ashes were taken to the Panthéon. And at the ceremony, at the Panthéon in 1908, Dreyfus, who was there, because Dreyfus didn’t die until 1925, he was shot.
Annie: Oh.
Elyse: He was not killed, but he was actually shot by one of the extreme right-wing military people who couldn’t stand the fact that he was still alive and was free. To just show how divided and bitter the country was at that time because of this issue, because of this.
Annie: Yeah, France went through a good 50 years of just terrible political turmoil.
Annie: And I mean, of course, it sold newspapers, but it was pretty bad.
Elyse: Yeah. In any event, his death was honored in all of the countries of Europe, in the United States. His writings are, to this day, among the most read in the world. He’s considered to be one of the greatest writers that France has ever had. He said, that he believed in truth, art, liberty of expression, and the world of the common folk.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Annie: Wow. And if you, should you decide, listeners, to read his books, understand that you don’t need to read them in order. They are self- contained novels. But I would really recommend it for people who are very much into French history and also beautiful, beautiful descriptions. Don’t read them because you want action. There isn’t much.
Elyse: There isn’t much.
Annie: I mean, there are things happening, but it’s not like, you know, it’s not going to keep you on the edge of your seat. You need to be taken by the descriptions and by the kind of the life of the 1800s in France is what carries you through these books.
Elyse: And if you don’t have the courage to read the books, just know that there are five versions of The Assommoir.
Annie: Oh, wow.
Elyse: In film.
Annie: In film?
Elyse: In film. That there are four versions of La Bête Humaine.
Annie: Wow.
Elyse: There are five versions of Germinal. There are six versions of Nana and six versions of Thérèse Raquin.
Annie: Wow.
Annie: Yeah, and you know, when I was growing up in France, we read at least Germinal in school. I tried… I was an avid reader, and so I tried reading many more of them, several more of them. Not the whole series. I had never read Le Ventre de Paris. I’ve since read it three times, I think. And L’Œuvre. I don’t like L’Œuvre as much.
Elyse: I need to read it because it has to do with this whole relationship that he had with Cézanne and what happened.
Annie: It’s a painter that is just… He’s not successful, but won’t quit.
Elyse: Mm-hmm.
Annie: He’s waiting for genius to enter him or something, and he has a pretty miserable life. He and the woman he marries, and their child clearly had some health issues, but was never taken to a doctor and dies at the age of 12. It’s very unhappy.
Annie: I’m not sure how the book ends because I’m not far from the end, but I didn’t quite finish it before we recorded. But honestly, it’s not a… It’s not an, you know, it doesn’t make you happy.
Annie: Le Vendre de Paris is very… even though it finishes badly, but there’s more optimism in it, more kind of rejoicing in the food, and the artisans, and the work.
Elyse: I, personally, I think that ‘ Germinal’ may be one of the most abordable ones, because even though it’s grim in talking about the conditions of the miners, it’s something that even today we can relate to in terms of parts of the world and things like that, and you can really get a feel of the fight between the miners and their families and the people who run the mines.
Annie: The unions and the bosses.
Annie: And really, we should do an episode about the mining history in France.
Elyse: We should.
Annie: Yes, and before I will reread Germinal, because that’s really the standard description of that.
Elyse: And just one last little thing that has to do with the family. It was his wife, after he died, who absolutely insisted and helped the other woman, make sure that her children, they not only inherited his money, but that they were legally given the name of Zola, and it was her idea finally.
Elyse: She said that that was what he would have wanted, and that was her final tribute to her husband, to make sure that the courts changed the last name of the children so that they became Zolas, and they lived into the 20th century and both had children.
Annie: Right, because back then if your dad didn’t recognize you, you had no rights.
Elyse: You had no rights.
Annie: But by now, that’s not how it works, and I think she definitely did the right thing.
Elyse: She did the right thing.
Annie: You know, she knew who these children were and that’s life.
Elyse: And just, I have to say that with all this research and all this reading, I don’t know how much I love his work, but I think he must’ve been an incredibly great man.
Annie: Yeah.
Annie: Thank you so much, Elyse.
Annie: That was really fascinating.
Elyse: You are welcome, Annie. It certainly was for us to do.
Annie: Au revoir.
Elyse: Bye.
[01:01:02] Copyright
Annie: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent, and Copyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.
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Episode PageCategory: French Culture