The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4)
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Authors: Émile Zola
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE CONQUEST OF PLASSANS
É
MILE
Z
OLA
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.
H
ELEN
C
ONSTANTINE
has published three volumes of translated stories,
Paris Tales
,
French Tales
, and
Paris Metro Tales
, with OUP. She has also translated Balzac’s
The Wild Ass’s Skin
for Oxford World’s Classics, and Gautier’s
Mademoiselle de Maupin
and Laclos’s
Dangerous Liaisons
for Penguin.
P
ATRICK
M
C
G
UINNESS
is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. He is a poet and novelist, whose first novel,
The First Hundred Days
, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. He has translated Mallarmé, edited the works of Marcel Schwob, and written about Huysmans and other French authors.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Conquest of Plassans
Translated by
HELEN CONSTANTINE
With an Introduction and Notes by
PATRICK McGUINNESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
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Translation © Helen Constantine 2014
Editorial material © Patrick McGuinness 2014
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2014
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Impression: 1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013953523
ISBN 978–0–19–164189–3
Printed in Great Britain by
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Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword
.
É
MILE
Z
OLA
aspired to being more than a novelist: he wanted to be a world-maker in fiction, and his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle sought, in his words, to be ‘the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire’.
1
That Zola believed in making his fiction reflect the real does not mean that he aimed only to copy the real, but rather that he understood how much artistry and imagination were needed to do justice to it. Like Balzac but not (or not often) Flaubert, Zola paid the world the compliment of being amazed by it. He knew, also like Balzac, that conveying reality was not a matter of mere transcription, however much research it required, but of translation: to translate the real into the language of fiction so that the real might find new ways of being itself. The novelist, even the ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ one, does not simply lift reality up and carry it wholesale across the border into fiction. There needs to be a change of currency first: art and reality may share the same truths, but they express these in different languages. As Balzac, Zola’s inspiration for the huge Rougon-Macquart tableau of novels, wrote in his preface to
The Gallery of Antiquities
(1839): ‘the real in literature cannot be the real in nature’. Zola himself, in his 1880 essay on the theory and practice of the novel, ‘The Experimental Novel’, wrote that the work of art was ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’. The key word there is
temperament
.
It is important to insist on this from the start, because of Zola’s reputation as a novelist of documentary fact, full of social and historical detail, and with characters driven (or dragged) by an inescapable mix of heredity, habitat, and historical-biological time—the famous ‘race, moment, milieu’ of Hippolyte Taine, the hugely influential nineteenth-century positivist thinker, literary critic, and cultural historian. It has been too easy to categorize Zola as a slave to documentary reality, and to focus on his belief in the scientific and positivist
underpinning of his fiction to the detriment of his skill as a storyteller, an inventor of people, dramas, and situations, and the creator of some of the most powerfully poetic descriptions in nineteenth-century prose. All these qualities are to be found in
The Conquest of Plassans
, and whatever we may learn in terms of ‘social and natural history’, we must not forget that this, like all of Zola’s fiction, is also a novel of human truth told with drama, symbolism, lyricism, and imaginative power. Oriane de Guermantes, a perceptive and witty literary critic, when asked about Zola at a dinner party in Proust’s
The Guermantes Way
, pronounces: ‘But Zola is not a realist, Madame, he’s a poet! . . . He magnifies everything he touches.’ Zola himself, in a letter of 1885 to Henri Céard, puts it this way: ‘We all lie one way or another [. . .] I think that for my part I lie in the direction of the truth. I have hypertrophy when it comes to realist detail, I spring towards the stars from the trampoline of exact observation. Truth rises on a wingbeat towards the symbol.’
Part of the problem has been a tendency among critics and students to read Zola’s ‘theory’ as an explanation of the novels themselves, and to treat the famous preface he wrote to the Rougon-Macquart series as more than a manifesto: a manifesto outlines what a writer or artist (or politician)
wishes
to do, but does not necessarily explain what they have done, let alone what happens (to them, to the work itself ) while they are writing it. The tendency to slide back from the complex, difficult, and often rewardingly inconsistent work of art to a piece of explanatory theory that makes it easier to categorize, is understandable. It is important, of course, to consult what an author thinks, or claims to think, he is doing in order to clarify what he has actually done. But it must also be remembered that good art is always in excess of the theory that produces or supports it: if this were not the case, the theory would suffice, and the art would be mere illustration of principles and ideas better expressed elsewhere. This is never the case with Zola, even when his fiction appears most narrowly to obey the theory he brings to bear upon his project.
People, Place, and Politics
The Conquest of Plassans
, which appeared in 1874 though is set more than a decade earlier, is the fourth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. It follows on from the first novel,
The Fortune of the Rougons
(1871), in which Zola lays the foundations for his cycle by introducing the two branches of the family—the Rougons and the Macquarts—in a work that follows parallel but also intertwined family ‘fortunes’ (Zola puns on financial fortune and fortune as fate). Zola also spends an important portion of that novel delving into pre-Revolutionary France in order to explore the historical, social, and even medical backgrounds of the characters who will people the cycle as it ramifies, like a family tree, down and along the byways of nineteenth-century France. He embeds Rougons and Macquarts into the very fabric of French history, and works them into every level of French society. We have, on the one hand, high-powered politicians, ministers, and businessmen, and, on the other, factory workers, miners, shopkeepers. As well as these, Zola also gives us Rougon-Macquarts whose professions lie outside the conventional social hierarchies, but allow them to move up and down the social ladder: the doctor, the priest, and, memorably in
Nana
, the prostitute.
The Conquest of Plassans
traces the gradual but unstoppable ascent of Abbé Faujas, sent by his political masters in Paris to conquer the town of Plassans for the Bonapartist side. The abbé manipulates his way to political power through religious influence, especially over the town’s women, and the mix of politics and religion makes this Zola’s most overtly anticlerical novel. These political masters are kept, as in many Zola novels, shadowy and out of the narrative picture: they are alluded to, suggested, mentioned in whispers, but never shown, though we know one of their leaders is Eugène Rougon, a cynical and ambitious schemer first encountered in
The Fortune of the Rougons
. Nor is the recent malfeasance of Faujas in Besançon explained, though it too is referred to on several occasions. It is part of his dark aura, and we note that when Zola describes Faujas he emphasizes the darkness of his clothes, the shadowy unreadability of his expression, and his looming, watchful silences. The town of Plassans, which seems to be the whole world of many of the characters, is merely a pawn in a larger game. Plassans, we know from
The Fortune of the Rougons
, had already been won for the Bonapartist side by Pierre Rougon, whose son Eugène (who has his own novel, the 1876
His Excellency Eugène Rougon
), a politician loyal to Napoleon III, helps his father and his mother, the devious and manipulative Félicité, to gain control of Plassans in the aftermath of the 1851
coup d’état
. It is a bloody victory, full of betrayal and double-dealing, in
which the Rougons are responsible even for the murder of their own flesh and blood.
By the beginning of this novel, however, political control has slipped to the Legitimists, in other words, to the royalists, who support the succession of the Bourbon dynasty against both the Orléanist dynasty that had ruled France from 1830 to 1848, and the Imperial regime of Napoleon III. This grand and complex political drama might seem foreign to us, but to Zola’s readers these contexts were alive and relevant:
The Conquest of Plassans
was published in 1874 and, though it describes events that took place more than a decade before, Zola gave his readers an insight into their near past; a near past, moreover, whose consequences didn’t just affect their present but defined and even explained it. The novel appeared three years after the Paris Commune and four years after the defeat by Prussian forces of Napoleon III at Sedan, a symbol of French national humiliation—two crucial dates in French history. It depicts a triumphant Imperial regime, but was published when that regime was in tatters and Napoleon III in exile. Today’s reader does not need any special knowledge of the historical and political contexts to enjoy the book, however, because Zola makes sure that his scheming politicians and their parasitical, cowardly, and self-interested followers are sufficiently universal to be recognizable regardless of time, place, or political system. Nonetheless, the novel’s political background is worth establishing, since the plot moves so fast that there is little chance for the reader to stop and pick apart the threads.
The story takes place between 1858 and 1864, and Zola immerses us in the ongoing consequences of
coup d’état
of 2 December 1851, in which Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, came to power through intrigue, deceit, demagoguery, and brute violence. He further embedded his rule through two plebiscites, in which he overwhelmingly won approval for his dissolution of the National Assembly, and, on 2 December 1852, the restoration of the Empire, which lasted until Napoleon III’s ignominious defeat in 1870, dramatized by Zola in the penultimate Rougon-Macquart novel,
La Débâcle
(
The Debacle
, 1892). In
The Fortune of the Rougons
, we had seen Pierre Rougon receive the
Légion d’honneur
for his own efforts, backed by Eugène and Félicité, to conquer Plassans for the Emperor. Opposition dogged the Empire, however, in the form of the two royalist parties: the Legitimists, united behind the Bourbon Comte de Chambord, and the divided
Orléanists, a branch of which supported the Empire until 1860. The other opposition group, the Republicans, played an important role in the politics of the period, but is less prominent in
The Conquest of Plassans
itself. Plassans is a bourgeois and reactionary town, and the power struggle will be between supporters of the Emperor and Legitimists. Moreover, as we see, these struggles are not ideological or even political, if by politics we mean driven by questions of principle and belief, but purely pursued in self-interest. Personal advancement and self-preservation are the only ‘politics’ we see in this novel which, on the surface, appears to be all ‘about’ politics.
In the days before what we now understand by democracy, let alone universal suffrage, politics was a matter of back-room deals, of buying and selling allegiances, and, as here, of buying and selling entire constituencies. Though later Zola novels, such as
Germina
l and
Paris
, explore the radical politics of socialism and anarchism against a background of working-class struggle, this novel is about the closed politics of a corrupt and divided establishment. Though corruption is the same everywhere, there are always particular hues and special varieties of rot that the novelist can bring to light, and here Zola traces the rise to power of a man who is as darkly subtle as he is devastatingly brutal. Faujas, a small-town Machiavellian schemer, knows how to turn the cowardice and self-interest that already exists in Plassans to his own political ends. But Faujas, for all his cunning, is also just a cog in a larger machine, and he too, as we discover, is expendable. Félicité is the power behind the Rougon throne, ready to sacrifice her family to regain control of Plassans. It is she who arranges for Faujas to lodge with her daughter and son-in-law, Marthe Rougon and François Mouret, and she who takes him in hand as he extends his influence across town. She is doing the bidding of the Bonapartist faction in Paris, but she is also trying to regain her own lost position in the town. She tells Faujas that she has already conquered Plassans once and will do it again, with or without him. Zola shifts the balance of power in the novel quite unexpectedly: where, to start with, Faujas is inscrutable and efficient and Félicité appears to be falling in line with his schemes, the tables are turned. Faujas is the instrument of the downfall of the Mouret family, but he becomes the instrument of his own. It is Félicité who is still standing at the end: the town is hers, though at a cost she could not anticipate.
Plassans is a fictional town closely based on Aix-en-Provence,
where Zola lived for fifteen years as a child and young man.
2
It is the cradle of the Rougon-Macquarts, their power base. The Rougon-Macquart dynasty begins with Adélaïde Fouque, the woman we know, in
The Conquest of Plassans
, as Aunt Dide, now resident of the lunatic asylum in Les Tulettes. Though Dide does not appear in person in this book, she looms over it, a figure from the family’s history but also an omen of what is to come: madness, alienation, internment. Zola has Adélaïde live from 1768 to 1873, spanning a hundred years of history and all twenty of the Rougon-Macquart novels, dying in the last novel in the series,
Doctor Pascal
, at the age of 105. It is with Adélaïde Fouque that the Rougon-Macquarts begin, both the legitimate strand she produces from her marriage to Rougon, with whom she has a child, Pierre Rougon, in 1787, and the illegitimate strand she engenders with her lover, the drunkard and smuggler Macquart, which produces two children, Antoine and Ursule.
The Conquest of Plassans
follows the lives of Aunt Dide’s children and grandchildren and their families: Félicité and Pierre Rougon, their daughter Marthe, her husband François Mouret (son of Ursule Macquart and thus also Marthe’s cousin), and Antoine Macquart, a wily drunkard who lives comfortably near Les Tulettes on a pension granted to him by Pierre Rougon for having betrayed his Republican comrades in the
coup d’état
. While Zola may be fascinated by the Rougons’ and the Macquarts’ energy and resourcefulness, it is clear that they are not a sympathetic crew. We admire them as we might admire rats or cockroaches: for being ruthless, tenacious, parasitical, tough, and indestructible. But however efficient the Rougon-Macquarts are as a collective, the individuals within that collective carry, to a greater or lesser extent, the hereditary defects that will determine their lives here and in the novels to come. As Zola writes in his preface to
The Fortune of the Rougons
:
