Tales of the New Babylon
Uploaded by JarJarBinks on Jul 05, 2004
Zola’s La Débcle, first planned in 1868, was the penultimate chapter in Les Rougon-Macquart. Warfare was something Zola had always meant to give full play in Les Rougon-Macquart, and his 1868 scheme had provided for "a novel that will have the military world as its framework…; an episode in [Napoleon III’s] Italian campaign." But after the calamitous Franco-Prussian War, this installment acquired special significance. What had originally been envisaged as one tale among others came to be seen as the denouncement of the entire saga. Zola decided almost immediately to recount in La Débcle not only the virtual annihilation of half the Army of the Rhine but the bungled opportunities, political maneuvers, and missed cues that brought about this disaster.
The two-month Paris Commune ensued when the Republicans of Paris staged a bloodless revolution and proclaimed the establishment of the Third Republic shortly after this fall of the Loius Napoleon. As far as Marx was concerned, he felt that at the Commune was merely "the rising of a city under exceptional conditions and its majority was in no wise socialist nor could it be." However Marx emphasised that its "great social measure…was its own existence."
In this essay I will discuss La Débcle, and Zola’s apparent lecturing tone. For while Zola exposed many social sores he had never previously attempted to put forward ideas for healing them. I will discuss how Zola felt that it was not the Prussians who brought down the Second Empire, but the corrupt society of France, and its epicentre, Paris. This will bring me onto the Paris Commune, where I will introduce Marx’s theories into the fold.
The research and documentation carried out in preparation for La Débcle was immensely in depth, and although overburdened with the sheer weight of the documentary material, Zola took great care not to lose sight of the individual in the vast panorama. Conscious of the danger of having the two armies emerge as his heroes, he constructed the novel in such a way as to protect the individuality of several dozen characters through whose eyes the action would be seen : "each character represents one état d’me psychologique of the France of the day" . He did this by ascribing to each of these characters a national trait: the pleasure-seeking France, the despairing France, France the volatile enthusiast, France doomed to disaster.
"These characters would thus symbolize types who, by their...