August 24, 2025 • 63 mins
Have you ever wondered how one writer could change French literature and politics at the same time? That’s the story we tell in Émile Zola: The Life, Legacy, and Scandal of France’s Most Influential Writer. In this episode of the Join Us in France Travel Podcast, host Annie Sargent sits down with Elyse Rivin to explore the extraordinary life of Émile Zola.
Zola was not just a novelist. He was a social critic, a scandal-maker, and a public voice for justice. His Rougon-Macquart series, including the famous novel Germinal, revealed the lives of miners, shopkeepers, and workers in 19th-century France. His friendship with Paul Cézanne shaped his early years. His relationship with Jeanne Rozerot brought private scandal. And his article J’Accuse made him a hero during the Dreyfus Affair, even though it forced him into exile in England.
Annie and Elyse take you through the highlights of an Émile Zola biography in plain language. You’ll learn about his role in shaping the Naturalist movement, his courage to stand up against injustice, and why he rests today in the Panthéon in Paris alongside France’s greatest figures.
This episode isn’t just about books. It’s about history, politics, scandal, and courage. It’s about how one man’s words still echo in France today.
If you’re curious about French literature, Paris history, or the Dreyfus Affair, this episode is for you. You’ll walk away with stories you can share and a deeper understanding of France’s cultural heritage.
👉 Subscribe to the Join Us in France Travel Podcast today. You’ll get fresh episodes every week about French history, culture, and practical travel tips.
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(00:15):
This is Join Us in France,episode 560, cinq cent soixante.
Bonjour!
I'm Annie Sargent and Join Us inFrance is the podcast where we take
a conversational journey through thebeauty, culture and flavors of France.
Today, I bring you a conversationwith Elyse Rivin of Toulouse
Guided Walks about the remarkablelife and legacy of Emile Zola.
(00:37):
Discover why Zola remains one of France'smost influential writers, how his work
shaped literature and society, and thedramatic events that defined his career.
This one is for folks who want tolearn about French history and culture,
but we also talk about many placesthat had an impact on his life and
why you might want to visit them.
(00:58):
This podcast is supported by donorsand listeners who buy my tours and
services, including my ItineraryConsult 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.
The bookings are getting pretty busy forSeptember and October on these day trips,
so if you want to do that reach out soon.
(01:21):
And to find all of my services, you go tomy boutique: JoinUsinFrance.com/boutique.
And remember, Patreon supportersget the podcast ad-free,
and as soon as it's ready.
Click on the link in the shownotes to enjoy this Patreon reward
for as little as a $3 per month.
There won't be a magazine part of thepodcast today because this recording
(01:43):
ran long, we had so much to say aboutEmile Zola, but I do want to send my
thanks and a shoutout to new patreon,Ashley, who was also a boot camper.
To join the wonderful community offrancophiles and supporters of the
podcast, go to Patreon.com/JoinUs.
And to support Elyse, goto Patreon.com/ElysArt.
(02:12):
And thank you so much.
Next week on the podcast an episodeabout village hopping on the Dordogne
and beyond with Jackie Barnes and howto have a peaceful vacation in France.
I think you'll love it.
(02:35):
Bonjour, Elyse!
Bonjour, Annie.
We have a wonderful conversation linedup today about Emile Zola, the author.
And I was surprised by howmany wonderful things you came
up with, to discuss his life.
So, you're going to be doing the kindof biography part, and I'll interject
a little bit of the kind of literatureand things like that at some point.
(02:59):
But take it away because it's... I'm sureit's going to be a long conversation.
Yeah, I think it's going to... Ithink today we're going to have a long
one, but it's a very wonderful one.
And it is thanks to you, because it isyou that had thought of us doing him.
Emile Zola, of course, is a writer.
He was a very, very famous writerduring his lifetime, and he is still
considered to be one of the greatestwriters in France, certainly one of
(03:22):
the greatest writers of the secondhalf of the 19th century, and he
was an enormously prolific writer.
But he was also many, many, manymore things, and that is what we
both discovered in doing all of theresearch about him, which makes him
a quite astonishing human being.
So, Zola was born in Parisof a Venetian father.
(03:44):
His father was actuallyfrom Venice and had moved to
France to work as an engineer.
He was actually what was called amilitary engineer, but his specialty was
building canals, of all things, and atsome point met and married a Parisian
woman, and that was Emile Zola's mother.
And he was born in Paris in 1840,and several, three years later to
(04:07):
be exact, his father got a very,very good job to build a huge canal
that would bring drinkable water toAix-en-Provence, and so they moved down
to Aix-en-Provence, and at the age ofthree, Emile moved to a new neighborhood.
And it's interesting because even fromthe beginning, he was a bit complexed
(04:29):
about the fact that his father was aforeigner and he had a strange accent
and that he had this accent that wasnot considered to be a Provencal accent.
And he apparently was a relativelyshy child, and he was an only child.
And what happened was that the firstfew years of his life were quite
comfortable, I'm sure, but then hisfather very, very suddenly and brutally
(04:50):
died of pneumonia when he was justabout seven and a half, in 1848.
And his mother was left absolutelydestitute and in despair, and she
decided that the only thing shecould do was to go back up to Paris.
But Emile Zola did not want to go toParis because by that time, he had been
(05:11):
in a very special selective school inAix-en-Provence, had made friends with,
among other people, Paul Cézanne, andfound that the life in and around Aix was
what suited him because he loved goingout into the countryside, and he admired
greatly everything that he could see.
But his life as a child and into hisadolescence was rather difficult.
(05:33):
He felt responsible for his mother,even though apparently she had family.
I don't really know, and I couldn'tfind 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, whichmeant he stayed in the school overnight.
So, that's like a sleepawayschool, but we don't... We
usually use that term for camp.
(05:54):
The English have a ... aboarding [school].
Yes, a boarding school.
A boarding school.
Of course.
A boarding school.
So, he stayed.
He was left in Aix in this boardingschool, which is where he did his
middle school and most of his highschool studies, and his mother
moved back to Paris and went towork actually as a seamstress.
Even though she came from afamily that was apparently
(06:15):
middle class, they had no money.
And to add to the misery that theywere going through at that point,
she got bilked out of what would havebeen her inheritance for her husband's
part of his participation in a companythat 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
(06:39):
good lawyer and being a woman, theyfound ways of turning the contracts
around so that it turned, they madeit sure that they got all the money.
And she was left withnothing, absolutely nothing.
And Emile Zola talks about, or he talkedabout how miserable they were and how
scared she was of what was going to happento the two of them, and his entire life he
(07:02):
felt responsible for taking care of her.
He said that being poor and beinga foreigner were two things that
marked him for the rest of his life.
Right, those were defining moments asfar as his literature was concerned
because that's the people he wrote about.
That is exactly the people he wrote about.
(07:22):
That's exactly right.
Now, his friendship with PaulCézanne, who we talked a little bit
about in the podcast about Cézanne,was also very formative for him,
especially at that point of hislife because he admired artists.
And he said all his life thatwhat he tried to do with his
writing was to be a painter.
That is, to make images that wouldstick in people's minds down to
(07:45):
the very finest, tiny detail, justlike a magnificent, huge painting.
And he became friends with a wholegroup of impressionist artists when
he was a young adult and had movedback to Paris, and among those people,
of course, were Renoir and Pissarroand Manet, who were very good friends
with him, and who gave him the courageto work as a writer even though they
(08:09):
in fact were, of course, painters.
Right, and it's really strikingthat 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 andyou can, if you enjoy literature,
(08:30):
you will really enjoy the picturesthat it summons in your head.
And when you see the quotes thathe actually said about his style of
writing, aside from the fact that hewanted to help people to have compassion
and understand the lives of poorpeople, it is indeed like paintings.
The scenes are exactlylike magnificent paintings.
It makes me think of still lifepaintings with every petal of every
(08:53):
flower and every piece of fruitand things like that, you know?
Right.
And writers learn tobring in all the senses.
So the smells, the sights, thesounds, 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 hiswriting, but that's also what makes it a
(09:15):
little tough to read, because it's long.
It's long.
The other thing that happened that addedto what we could consider to be his
traumatisms that really developed intohis 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
(09:37):
even though- ... even though his motherwas French, I have no idea, you know,
what kind of accent his father was fromVenice, and came to France as an adult,
so he must have had a very strong accent.
Who knows exactly whatthey were speaking at home.
But he said later on that having takenthese exams twice and having failed
them, was... it made him ashamed andit was added to this list of things
(10:00):
that he said that people have to bearand you have to figure out how to
explain to people to have compassionfor things like that, you know?
That is really rich, thatZola failed his French.
He failed his French exam, yes.
And so he went back.
Because he's so... he's so good, but ofcourse he probably didn't fit the mold.
No, he didn't fit the mold, and that'sprobably one of the reasons he was
(10:23):
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.
But he was, he liked the factthat these were oddball people.
I think that was part of what happened.
He was rather shy, actually, Émile Zola.
And he was also someone who,he decided very early that he
(10:47):
did indeed want to be a writer.
Which is very interesting because hedidn't say, "Oh, I'm going to be a painter
like these people that I know." He wantedto be a writer, so language was very
important to him from very, very early on.
And sometimes, as I was reading hisbooks, I thought, "Why go into so
much detail?" But we have to rememberthat back then, people didn't have
(11:11):
TV, if they wanted music, theyneeded to go to a concert hall.
Entertainment was very, verydifferent from what we have today.
I mean, we all have endless entertainmentin our pockets with our cell phones.
Right.
And this was not the case.
If they wanted to be entertained,they had to sit down with a book, and
(11:32):
they had to go to the symphony, andthey had to go to the museums and to
the exhibits and things like that.
So life was very, very differentback then, and he was really giving
people a lot of entertainment,because these books are entertaining,
just like going to a beautifulexhibit is entertaining, you know?
(11:53):
Absolutely.
And what I find also interesting,I was thinking about that as
I was doing the research, butthis was true also for Cézanne.
In the middle of the 19th century,it was not considered to be
scandalous for a young man todecide to be an artist or a writer.
It was simply anotherlegitimate profession.
You had to work your way in.
(12:14):
You weren't guaranteed that you wouldbe successful, but it wasn't poo-hooed
even in the middle classes and it waslike, 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 awriter, in the case of Zola,
you study how to be a writer.
Right, and this is a society where theywould address a painter as 'maître'.
(12:37):
Yes.
Master.
Yes.
Just like you would a lawyer.
It was respectable.
Yes.
It was respectable andvery much respected.
Indeed, it was.
So finally what happened was, givingup on his schooling in Aix-en-Provence
when he was in his late teens, he wentback up to be with his mother in Paris.
He tried again to pass these examsin one of the two very, very good
(13:03):
and still very good, high schoolsin the center of Paris, and then
realized that he had to find work.
And thanks to connections that weremade through his family, he was
introduced to a man named Louis Hachette.
Now this is fascinating to me because-
Ding, ding, ding!
We know today that Hachette,H-A-C-H-E-T-T-E, is one of the biggest
(13:26):
publishing companies in France, andit was this Mr. Louis Hachette who was
the first one to create this publishinghouse, and it was a publishing house that
mostly published either dictionaries orscientific texts for popular consumption.
So it was, it's now ahuge, Hachette is enormous.
It has so many different parts to it.
(13:47):
But he was given the opportunityto go to work for him and he
was, at this point, just about 20years old, and he was given a job.
It's very interesting because itturns out that he was very good at it.
He wasn't given a job as a writer.
He was basically given a job that isthe equivalent of being an attaché de
presse, which meant that he would goaround and he would basically talk about
(14:09):
the different things that were going tobe published by Hachette.... and he would
convince different people, differentstores to buy the books, and he became
familiar with the world of publishing.
And he said later on that this is oneof 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.
(14:30):
He did not write novels.
Right, and he occasionallycontinued to write pieces.
I mean, J'accuse!
he's famous for that.
Well, and that's of course much later.
But what's interesting is that hespent several years with Hachette,
and during this time he startedwriting short stories, but he became
known at first as being a critic.
(14:53):
That is, he wrote reviews.
He wrote reviews of art, for artists,he wrote reviews of theater pieces,
he wrote reviews of other people'sliterature, and he developed this
very distinctive style which wasbasically saying what he thought.
It is a wonder that at that point inhis life, he had not yet been attacked
(15:14):
for slander or for whatever it isthat you could attack people for,
because he was known very quicklyfor being someone who was, to use a
word that we use today, very cash.
He said what he thought about everything.
Well, in France we say that.
I don't know if you say that in
English.
Yeah, I think so.
I'm not sure what we do.
But basically, he became known asbeing very, very forthright, but he had
(15:36):
very specific political convictions.
He was very much a republican in thesense of believing in a republic, not
in a monarchy or an empire, and hewas also not particularly fond of the
Catholic Church because he considered tobe, that the Catholic Church was rather
repressive, and of course it was partof what is known as the Second Empire?
(15:57):
The Third Empire?
Third Empire?
I think it's the Third.
It's the Third.
It's the Third.
And so he allowed these politicalconvictions to seep through into
his commentary when he was writinghis criticisms about things.
So, he started to gain recognitionas a journalist, and he was
eventually given a column.
By the time he was in his mid-20s,he was relatively well-known for
(16:21):
having a column in a newspaperand he was publishing stories in
various magazines and newspapers.
And he said that he was finally veryhappy to be recognized as a writer.
What he wanted, of all things, wasto be able to say he was a writer,
and that he was published all over.
And he wrote a total of approximately100 short stories at this time.
(16:45):
And in 1865, so we imagine in1865, he is 25, he met and became
very good friends with the entiregroup of impressionist artists.
He, at that point, wasstill very close to Cézanne.
He particularly appreciated Pissarroand Renoir, and became a bit friends
with Manet, who was a little bit older.
And he also met the woman,Alexandrine, who would become his
(17:10):
wife, and who basically stayedwith him for the rest of his life.
Now, what I find interesting isthat, again, she was, nobody really
knows how she entered his life.
She was apparently maybe a modelfor some of the artists, maybe not.
Maybe she was a dressmaker.
She was definitely notfrom the middle classes.
She was from a working class environment.
(17:31):
And his mother was not particularly happythat he had brought himself a woman of
the working class back to the house.
And because his mother did notapprove of her, he found another
little apartment for the two of them.
But it wasn't until five yearslater, in 1870, that they
actually officially got married.
So, for five years, she worked littlejobs to help support the two of them
(17:55):
while he started to do his writing.
This is very much like the couple ClaudeD- has in L'Œuvre, one of his books,
which I'm just in the middle of right now.
To correct what you said, itwas the fall of Napoleon III
which was the Second Empire.
It's confusing.
It's confusing, between the empiresand the kings and the.., it is, sorry,
(18:18):
sorry out there, it is confusing.
So, this takes us up to the year 1870.
He is 30 years old.
He has actually made himself agood reputation as a journalist.
He's already started toalso make some enemies.
Enemies in the sense that thereare certainly a number of people,
particularly people with conservativeideas, who do not like his writing.
(18:41):
They do not like his franc-parler, as theywould say in French, which means he really
said what he thought about everything.
He was extremely honest, and he basicallytold everybody, whether they were on the
left side of the political spectrum or theright, that he wasn't going to change what
he thought and he wasn't going to hidewhat he thought, and this is basically
(19:02):
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 whothought it was a good or bad thing.
Right, right.
And so what happens in 1870 is that wehave this mini war that I will admit
very honestly I find very complex and notsure that I completely understand, but
(19:26):
suddenly France is at war with Prussia.
And the Prussians invade Paris, andbecause of that there is the very famous
Paris Commune which of course takesplace, it's a group of people who try to
defend part of Paris which is the partof Paris that is Montmartre, against the
Prussians after the French governmentgives in to the Prussians immediately.
(19:48):
Echoes of this, of course, laterin World War II, which is very
premonitory, I guess you could say.
So, to clarify just a little bit, most ofhis writing happens, it starts in 1870....
the saga of the Rougon-Macquart which it's20 books in 22 years, is what he wrote.
And so it begins with the fallof Napoleon III, which is the,
(20:14):
you know, in the Second Empire.
The Franco-Prussian War and theParis 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, butthe Franco-Prussian War and the Paris
(20:38):
Commune were huge, and we should, youknow, learn more about it and talk about
it at some point because, especially inMontmartre, the Commune was a big deal.
And I mention it in my tour ofMontmartre, but it didn't last very
long, but it made a lasting impression.
It made a lasting impression.
And it is indeed starting in1870 that Zola stops being a
(21:01):
journalist and becomes a writerof novels, and he says it himself.
He said that what happened duringthe Commune, first of all, he was
attacked by the Communards becausehe disagreed with some of the things
that they were doing in spite of thefact that he believed in a republic.
His position, and he said, "I will neverbelong to a political party, I will never
(21:24):
identify myself as being this, this,or this. I am Emile Zola. This is what
I think and this is what I will say."
And that was something that causeda lot of grief for him because he
always was honest with himself, and hesaid, "I will be honest with whoever
wants to read whatever it is I write."
And so it was from then on, asyou mentioned, that he began this
(21:47):
series of books, which he called,interestingly enough, as the subtitle,
A Social and Natural History of aFamily During the Second Empire.
Right, so it's kind of a saga, but atthe same time it's not, because although
some characters reappear, it's actuallylike a genealogical... so it starts
(22:10):
with a family, it starts with a manwho has some children with his wife,
but he also has some children with amistress, and the two branches they
appear in different books, but they'reall related somehow to this one man.
It's not a soap opera, becausea soap opera you really see the
same characters all the time.
(22:31):
But it has that kind of... It'sgoing in that direction because he
could... like Claude, the painter,appears in several books, right?
He's not necessarily a bigcharacter in several books.
He's the main character in L'Œuvre,which in English is called:
I think it's called The Artist in English.
So they come in and out, but they'reall related to the original guy.
(22:54):
He wanted to show the whole spectrumof life of an extended family, at this
particular time, and use that as a way oftalking about all the conditions of the
different statuses of society, you know?
Right.
And if you want to understandFrench history without reading a
history book, reading that serieswould be really, really good.
(23:15):
Would really be good.
And Zola, from this point on, ofcourse, becomes famous, and he is
part of a group of writers thatare called Writers of Naturalism.
And Naturalism was a big movementin writing, not necessarily in
painting, interestingly enough.
Because it was very different, becausethis is the time of the impressionists
and the post-impressionistswho are certainly not what you
(23:35):
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.
And he said that thisis what he wanted to do.
He wanted to portray the realityof the lives of those who were at
(23:58):
the bottom of the social system,and to show the conditions under
which they lived, worked, and died.
And he says this several times becauseeach of the different books and, of
course, each one takes a part of thisworld and talks about certain occupations.
Germinal, which is of course the onlyone that I really know very well, it
(24:18):
talks about miners and the life of thecoal miners in Northern France, which
was absolutely horrific, you know?
And he describes, down to the tiniestdetail, what they ate, how they
dressed, what their lives were likewhen they went down into the mines.
The movements that they tried tocreate to get better conditions,
everything from the beginning to end.
(24:39):
And at the same time, this movement ofNaturalism, one of the things that I
find interesting, and this is lookingat it from the perspective of the 21st
century, is that it was with compassionthat he wrote all of this, but at the
time people didn't think you could everchange the situation that you were in.
You basically were what you were borninto, and this is what he really shows
(25:02):
in the books at the same time, you know?
Right, so it's just the way... Yeah, it'sa fatalism, there's nothing you can do.
You were born, and you know, to someextent the easiest to... I mean,
the best way to become rich todayis to have a rich daddy, you know?
I mean, that's just... still in some ways.
But...
Or to invent something, you know?
Yeah, but back then you werereally defined by your class.
(25:24):
You were defined by your class, yeah.
He said (25:26):
"I want to write novels that will be the first novels about the
people," the people meaning the poorpeople, "that doesn't lie, that has
the odor of the poor in the writing."
I thought that was really interesting.
It's not condescending.
It's really his ability or hisdesire to make you feel like you
(25:50):
can walk into the page and be inthe world that they're in by the
tiniest little details that he gives.
Yeah, so, one example of this inLe Ventre de Paris, The Belly of
Paris, so this is about life in andaround Les Halles, in Paris, back
when it was all in central Paris.
There's a time when childrenare abandoned, so people who
(26:15):
can't feed their kids anymore,young toddlers, two-year-old,
one-year-old, would just take themto Les Halles and just leave them.
Leave them and tell them, "I'llbe back," and never come back.
This was actually pretty common.
It happened.
In the book, he describes two suchchildren who end up being cared for
(26:35):
by the workers of Les Halles, andwho 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 incestbecause they're not...
They're not really related.
Right, but they were raised that way.
And then the boy, there's a rape scene.
(26:59):
He doesn't really rape her, but...No, another woman, another worker.
He doesn't really rape herbecause she hits him in the
head, and leaves him for dead.
But it's all really, really,like, vivid and sordid.
This is hardly the only plotof the book, obviously, but
(27:19):
it's really... It grabs you.
I wouldn't say that thesebooks are plot-driven, ever.
They are more like the vicissitudes.
Yeah, they're character-driven becauseit'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?
(27:40):
The Masterpiece, apparently.
Okay, I read that it was called TheArtist, but it could be The Masterpiece.
This is the one that supposedly madeCézanne stop speaking to him, you know.
For a while, yeah.
For a while, but it turns out that at theend of his life, he did talk to him again.
What's interesting to know, too, isthat like Dickens, in England, although
Dickens was not considered to be anaturalist because his books were
(28:00):
much more fantastical and there wasa certain amount of humor in them.
But both of them became successfulby publishing a chapter at a
time every week in magazines.
And this is fascinating to me becauseI like the idea that if you're going
to be a writer, it gives you a littlebit of breathing space, you know?
It's like, "Okay, I've got to do achapter a week, but I've got a whole week
(28:21):
to think about the chapter," you know?
"I don't have to come up withall of it at the same time."
And this is what he did.
We're talking about 20 books that haveI 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 reviewsand magazines, and then eventually,
(28:44):
of course, at the same time when hebecame really famous, they were also
published as books in bookstores.
Right.
The serial publication wascalled feuilleton, which
means, you know, a series.
Like a feuilleton, like a...
The ones I watch everynight on television.
Right, exactly.
Like the TV, yeah.
That's what it is.
And then very often, they would come outas a book like a year later or something.
(29:06):
So L'Assommoir, for example,which is in English " The Dram
Shop" or "The Drinking Den".
The Drinking... it's a veryhard word to translate.
That was published in '77.
That's right, that's right.
So that one it was serialized inthe newspaper Le Bien Public in 1876
before it came out as a book in 1877.
(29:30):
Nana, another one of his bestsellers,it was published in Le Voltaire,
a magazine, in 1879 before beingpublished as a novel in 1880.
Right.
So it just... it was common atthe time, and you know, it helped
them have regular income and alsogive him time to think about...
(29:53):
Yeah.
It's true.
I mean, 20 books in 22 years is amazing.
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.
So hang on, hang on, hang on.
It starts with La
(30:16):
Fortune des Rougon, TheFortune of the Rougon.
La Curée is the second, that's The Kill.
Le Ventre de Paris is thethird, Belly of Paris.
Fourth is La Conquête des Plassans,The Conquest of the Plassans.
La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret isfifth, The Sin of Abbe Mouret.
Six is
(30:38):
Son Excellence Eugene Rougon,His Excellency Eugene Rougon.
And seventh is L'Assommoir, which isThe Dram Shop or The Drinking Den.
And that one, so, think about this, he'sturned out one a year, and this one is
the very first that is a super bestseller.
And it is the one that made himrich, and it was thanks to this book
(31:00):
that he was able to do nothing butwrite 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 ofhis mother very well.
He could do whatever he wanted to do.
He wrote down somewhere thatin order to be a writer, you
must have enormous discipline.
(31:21):
And he never, ever, even when hewas in exile, stopped writing.
He just wrote every single day, and hekept up the quota of the certain number of
pages every day from 1870 until his death.
I mean, this is how hewas with his writing.
He was obsessed with the fact that hehad to produce as much as he could.
So, it is really remarkable.
(31:42):
And then, of course, that's number seven.
And we have all these others.
Shall I keep going?
Shall I finish my list?
You want to read all of them?
Sure, sure, sure.
Une Page d'Amour, A Love Episode.
That was number eight.
Number nine, Nana, which isalso called Nana in English.
That's number nine.
That was in 1880.
Pot-Bouille, The Potluck orPiping Hot, 1882 was number 10.
(32:06):
Au Bonheur des Dames, The Ladies'Paradise, which is also quite famous.
It's very famous, and it'sabout department store workers.
Right, so that's 11.
12, La Joie de Vivre, The Joy of Life.
1884. Germinal, 1885.
That's one that we all readat school, pretty much.
You can easily see in amovie, in fact, you know.
Yeah, it was a movie.
(32:27):
Number 14 is L'Œuvre,The Masterpiece, in 1886.
La Terre, The Earth, 1887, number 15.
Le Rêve, The Dream, was number 16 in
1888.
La Bête Humaine, number 17, The BeastWithin or The Human Beast in 1890.
That's one that I read as a kidand did not understand at all.
(32:50):
Number 18, L'Argent, Money.
Number 19, La Débâcle, TheDownfall or The Debacle.
And number 20, the conclusion, is LeDocteur Pascal, Doctor Pascal, in 1893.
In
1893.
So this is a massive amount of work.
And in the midst of all of this, firstin 1880, his mom died, which apparently
(33:14):
was very, very difficult moment for him.
And then he's entering into his 40s.
And this is a man who has basicallydevoted his life to being honorable,
to telling the truth of, his versionof the truth, of what he thinks should
be done from a political point of view.
It's morality without beingreligious, is what he was going after.
(33:37):
Right.
But I think it's also that, I mean,he never hides the fact that, he never
says this, "Other people need to thinkthis way. I think this way." This is
his opinion about everything, you know?
He was very much involved withthe idea of showing his opinion.
But also, I think he was very investedin being honest and honorable, those two
words which are, of course, connected.
(33:57):
And yet what happens, and this isbasically 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 youngwoman of 21 who has been hired by his
devoted wife, who has unfortunatelybeen unable to have children, and who
(34:19):
has really devoted her life to him.
I mean, she's really spent herentire life helping him and advising
him and being as close as youcould possibly be to your partner.
And she's the one who hired this youngwoman because she needed, they were
wealthy, I mean, they had domestic help.
And within the space of several months,he was in a situation where he admitted
(34:40):
to several of his friends that he wasstarting to fantasize about young women.
It was, he hadn't done anything aboutit, but he felt that he shouldn't.
But he was actually at that pointwhere 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 seeon internet of the two of them, because
(35:01):
at the end of his life, he took a lotof photographs of his new second family.
And lo and behold, he began an affairwith this young woman named Eugène,
Jeanne in English.
Eugène, I always have trouble with that.
And it would have probably not beena very long-term relationship, except
that she became pregnant, and inthe end, she wound up having the two
(35:27):
children that he had always wantedto have and that he had not been able
to have with his wife, Alexandrine.
And so he began whatliterally was a double life.
And it was a little bit afterthe birth of the first child
that his wife found out about it.
I personally can't imagine that shedidn't know about it beforehand, but
whatever, it doesn't make any difference.
(35:49):
But she basically, his wife basicallysaid, "I do not want you to leave me.
I do not want to have a divorce. IfI must, I will accept that this other
woman exists with these children, but youplease, I mean, basically, stay with me."
And he said that thatwas what he would do.
And so for the rest of his life,he basically had two families, and
(36:14):
he had, he set up a house for thiswoman, Jeanne Rozerot, and he would
go over and visit her and spend timewith the children because he was very
happy, suddenly to become a father.
And little by little, his wife acceptedtheir existence, and even at times,
took care of the children and evenactually had them in the house with them.
(36:37):
And he continued to lead thisdouble life until his death in 1902.
Well, I mean, I guess that's very Frenchof me, but, you know, that's making the
best of a difficult situation, I guess?
Well, you know, it's interesting becausehe's quoted as saying nearer the end
of his life, "I did what I could tomake everyone happy, but I am the
(37:01):
one who is not happy leading a doublelife." And so somehow, he did it.
He did it, I think, out of asense of honor and a sense of not
wanting to really hurt his wife.
At the same time, he did not wantto give up this second family.
And yes, it is very French, I must say,to have considered that it's almost normal
(37:22):
to do something like that, you know?
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.
You can, but I do... I mean, this is anaside 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
(37:47):
at a certain age that they have halfbrothers and sisters that were made
somewhere, usually by their father.
And it is not that uncommon.
It really is not, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And French law has provisions for this.
Today, it doesn't matter ifyou're a natural born child or
born in within wedlock, you willinherit from your parents from...
(38:11):
If you can prove that theyare your parents, Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All of this to say that in themidst of all of this enormous
amount of work and the success, hewas a workaholic, let's face it.
I mean, he was obsessed with his writing.
He was an incredibly successful writer.
He had, remember, stoppedbeing a journalist.
He was now a full-time novelist.
He was involved at that point in his lifebetween 1880 and the end of the 1890s,
(38:38):
involved in, at the same time, balancingthis private life that was getting a
little bit more complicated, you know?
Right.
So being a famous author, obviously hewas recognized and he was invited and he
went to place... to events and things.
Yeah, it would fill up a life a lot.
It would fill up a life a lot.
And then the last major, verysignificant event of his life that
(39:04):
happened starting with the DreyfusAffair, which began in 1894.
Starting in 1894, Zola, who was inherentlysomeone who believed in justice and
tolerance, he became aware of throughvarious friends and because of the
(39:25):
writings that were being put into variousvery conservative newspapers, he became
aware of the fact that there was anextremely, extremely virulent, antisemitic
atmosphere taking hold in France.
This is a reality.
In the 1890s in France, antisemitismwas so bad that there were actually
two newspapers that had as headlines,"The Anti-Jewish Newspaper." And this
(39:50):
was part of what was going on in Paris.
It was really... I don't knowexactly the reasons why this
happened at this particular time.
And so one of the major events whichhas gone down, of course, as a major
event in the history in France iswhat is known as the Dreyfus Affair.
There was a colonel in the army, ayoung man named Alfred Dreyfus, who was
(40:11):
from the Alsatian area, who was a veryrespected officer in the army, and who
happened to be from a Jewish family.
And without going into the details becausethat there's... doesn't concern us.
It concerns us more with what happenedwith Zola in relation to this.
But this man, Dreyfus, was accused ofbeing a spy and a traitor in service
of the Germans, of the Prussians,and he was put before a trial.
(40:35):
He was taken to trial, a court-martialtrial, and he was convicted of being a
spy and sent to what is called Le Bagne.
And I had somebody the other dayasked 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...
It's forced labor in a verydifficult to reach, isolated place.
(41:01):
Cayenne was one, whichis in South America.
The islands of Marseillewere considered to be Bagne.
And so this is starting in the 1890s.
And by 1894, Zola has becomesensitive to all of this.
He actually did not follow theDreyfus Affair very, very carefully.
(41:21):
That was not something that was verymuch a part of his life, until he was
contacted by several people, one ofwhom was a very important member of the
Alsatian government, because Alsace waskind of a separate... has separate rules.
It's very complicated to explain,but there was a member of the
government from Alsace whose namewas Auguste Scheher-Kestner, who
(41:44):
was apparently someone who admiredZola enormously and had remembered
all of his journalistic output andremembered how honest he was and how...
Straightforward.
Straight shooter.
Thank you.
Thank you.
How straightforward he was in sayingblack is black and white is white.
And he had... he went to him, and hewrote to him, and he asked him if he
(42:08):
would meet with a group of people,including several lawyers who were
preparing a campaign to start a newtrial in an appeals court, to revise
the verdict against Colonel Dreyfus.
And that was at this point that Zolabegan to read everything that had
(42:28):
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 basicallyone of those farces.
It was a travesty of justicefrom the beginning to the end.
(42:49):
And just as an aside, in spite of my notparticularly admiring him as a person,
Roman Polanski, the filmmaker, madea movie that came out two years ago
called J'Accuse!, which is absolutelywonderful, and it is very accurate in
describing the entire period of thetrial of Dreyfus and what happened
(43:11):
from the beginning to the end.
It doesn't specifically include a lotabout 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 todive into enormous amounts of historical
paper, that is the movie to see.
I haven't seen it.
It's really excellent, I have to admit.
And when you read about it, you realizethat he really followed, with accuracy
(43:35):
exactly what happened, you know.
So Zola decides that he will takeon this cause, and one of the things
that they ask him to do is to begina journalistic campaign to help them.
So suddenly, here he is again asa journalist after all these years
(43:56):
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'sinnocence and of the need to
convince the general public of themiscarriage of justice that he delves
(44:17):
into it with his heart and soul.
And one of the people that actuallyhelps him, believe it or not, is
Clemenceau, who eventually of coursewinds up becoming president, but
unfortunately, it's after Zola's death.
And Clemenceau encourages him towrite an article, and actually it is
Clemenceau who gives him the idea ofgiving the title of the article, the
(44:41):
J'Accuse!, which of course is writtenin bold letters across the top of
this enormous, enormous, long article.
Now, he presented it to The Figaro,which by the way, is still a newspaper
that is a politically moderatenewspaper in France, a daily newspaper.
But that's not where it appeared, is it?
No, because they refused.
They refused because they did notwant to alienate the conservative
(45:05):
reading public that they had.
And he took it to a newspapercalled L'Aurore, which means,
L'Aurore, which means The Dawn.
I mean, when I was young,we still had L'Aurore.
Oh, you still had it?
Right.
I don't think it exists anymore.
Oh, that's... I didn't even know that.
Okay, that's really interesting.
No, I mean, I've read L'Aurore.
You've read it, huh.
But I don't know when it stopped.
(45:27):
So Zola was so convinced of Dreyfus'sinnocence and of the obvious dishonesty
of the trial, that he stopped doingeverything else and just went to
work on helping not only write thisarticle, but making a campaign.
It was a travesty of justice.
There's nothing beyond that to say becausethe proofs were there that this man was
(45:51):
indeed innocent, but the antisemiticatmosphere and the conservative government
was such that they refused to accept it.
So there was a second trial,and the article J'Accuse!
was so inflammatory that thepresident of France at the time,
a man named Felix Faure, basicallyaccused Zola of defamation.
(46:14):
And his supporters, all of these peoplewho had been encouraging him to write
this article, told him that if he lostthis case of defamation, because he
was taken to court, and he was takento court almost immediately after
the publication of J'Accuse!, thathe was going to be in trouble, and he
would wind up being sent to prison,and that is exactly what happened.
(46:36):
And so the day he was convicted,his friends told him that he
had to leave France, literally.
He was convicted and sentenced toone year in prison, and to a fine of
3,000 francs, which I assume was acertain amount of money in relation
to what money would be today, Idon't really know exactly how much.
(46:56):
And they put him on a train.
He had nothing with him.
They literally said, "You have toget out of here." And they put him
on a train and sent him to England.
And he spent 11 months in Englandhiding, because they were worried about
him being assassinated by people whowere arch conservatives who considered
that he had insulted the government andinsulted the military, which in a way,
(47:19):
he probably had by, because he accusedthem of being collusion and of lying
outright to make Dreyfus a scapegoat.
And they told him that he shouldn'tshow his face until he could come
back, and that was 11 months later.
Yup.
Yup.
And it's interesting that one ofthe reasons why this letter was
(47:43):
so powerful is because he keptit sho- well, short, I mean, it's
long but the sentences are short.
So every sentence starts withJ'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 formatthat made it so powerful.
(48:05):
And Félix Faure didn't enjoy.
He was the president at the time,like you noted, did not enjoy this.
No, he didn't enjoy it at all.
And it is a fact that it createdsuch a stir that they said,
"Okay, we will have another trialagain." And guess what happens?
In this third trial, they...actually there were two trials.
(48:26):
There was one where they brought to trialthe real traitor, the real spy who was
a man named Esterházy, who was also acolonel and who it was indeed the person
who was really spying for the Prussians.
And they created false proofso that he would be acquitted.
The trial was literallywhat we call a monkey trial.
(48:47):
It didn't even last a week.
They said this is absurd.
They produced all of this whatturned out to be absolutely false
proof, and he was acquitted.
And then they brought Dreyfusback, and he was convicted again.
And it wasn't until after all ofthis was over that there was another
trial, and instead of convincing thepublic that he was innocent, they
(49:11):
simply decided to pardon Dreyfus.
Right.
It was easier than to admit thatit had been a sham all along.
That it had been a sham all along.
It was a traumatism for the country.
It was basically a traumatism for allof the people involved in the trial.
And I think for Zola, it did somethingto him, because in spite of the fact
(49:32):
that he continued to write, his healthwas not very good once he came back.
And he came back in 1898, he was broughtback, and he published the first two
of four books that were going to bea new series called The Four Gospels.
Oh, like the Bible?
Like the Bible.
Les Quatre Evangiles.
Yep.
Wow.
The first one is called Fécundité...
(49:54):
Okay.
... which is kind of strange.
And he actually wrote...
Well, that's where it starts.
If you don't got babies,you don't got nothing.
Exactly.
And that he literally wrote in the11 months he was in exile in England.
It was ready to be published.
He published it in 1899.
The second one is called Work.
Sure, you got to work, yep.
And that was published in 1901.
And what's the other two?
(50:14):
I don't remember.
I don't remember becausethey were never published.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah.
The third one he worked on amanuscript, and it was about to
be published when in fact he died.
And then the fourth one there wasno finished manuscript at all.
But this is what happened.
So here he is, in 1900, heis 60 years old, which is
(50:35):
moderately old, but not that old.
He was used up, I think, by the amountof attacks against him about the fact
that he had spent basically almost thelast seven or eight years trying to
convince the public that the travesty ofjustice was also a travesty of justice
(50:57):
in terms of the politics of the country.
He was so angry at the world inFrance for being racist, for being
antisemitic, for being dishonest.
He couldn't admit that thiswas the world that he lived in.
And at the same time, he had whatwas basically a relatively happy
(51:20):
home life because by this time, hiswife, Alexandrine, had more or less
accepted the fact that there wasthis other part of the family and had
largely integrated it into his world.
He had a son, and he had a daughter, andhe had this other woman who was devoted
to him that he spent some time with.
And so he was preparing to do the thirdvolume of this new series of books.
(51:44):
He and his wife went onvacation to Normandy, as they
often did in the summertime.
This is in 1902.
And when he came back which was September29th of 1902, they asked the house
staff to heat up the house a littlebit because it was a relatively cool
fall day at the end of September.
(52:06):
And they said, "Please heat up the housea little bit for us before we get back."
And when they got back to the housethe staff closed off the flues that, of
course, bring up... because it was gasheating that they had through this house.
It was relatively modern for the time.
He was very much into modern things.
And theoretically all of the flueswith the gas were turned off,
(52:27):
and he and his wife went to bed.
And at some point, in the middle ofthe night, his wife woke him, and she
said, "I think I smell gas." And hewas apparently exhausted from the trip,
and he said to her... basically itwas kind of like he sniffed around and
he said, no, you're imagining things.
I don't smell anything."
(52:47):
But she for some reason was worried, andshe got up, and she actually left the
room and went to sleep somewhere else.
And when she went back to the roomthe next morning, he was lying on
the floor, and he was already dead.
He had apparently gotten up at somepoint in the middle of the night
and tried to leave but had inhaledso much of the poisonous gas that
(53:10):
he could not move, and he was lyingthere and nobody knew, of course.
At that time, how longit had taken him to die.
Don't mess with gas orventilation when you have gas.
However, it is a fact, and moreand more, people do believe
that it was an assassination.
Yeah.
Well, whatever.
(53:30):
It is not possible to know for sure.
But-
I mean, people die of badventilation all the time.
This is not rare, unfortunately.
It's true, however, he had hadso many death threats, so many.
He had.
And he had stirred up so much animositythat the right-wing newspapers were
(53:51):
calling for his death all the time.
And this is already a year ortwo 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...
There were motives.
... there were real motives.
And there were really lots of people thatbelieved that that was what happened.
(54:13):
And recently, I was reading more ofthis, there is more and more question
of whether or not they could find proof.
How old was he?
He was 62.
Yeah, that's young.
He was young.
Cézanne, who didn't die for anotherfew years, most of the other people
around him, I mean, his wife livedanother, I think, 15 years or
something like that before she died.
There really, even at the moment ofhis death, some of the conservative
(54:36):
newspapers rejoiced that he was dead.
He created such animosity inhis defense of the truth that
it is possible to imagine thatsomebody tried to kill him, yeah.
Yeah, it's possible to imagine, yes.
Yes, it is.
And so, of course, you have his funeral.
And at his funeral, you have AnatoleFrance, who was both a writer and
(54:59):
I believe he was also a politician.
Yeah, politician, yes.
Who said, as one of the men whospoke at his funeral, he said,
"Émile Zola was for a moment inhistory, the conscience of humanity."
Hmm.
And I thought that that wasabsolutely wonderful, that that
was what he said about him.
(55:20):
He was initially buried inMontmartre Cemetery, and then very
soon he was taken to the Panthéon.
In 1908, his ashes weretaken to the Panthéon.
And at the ceremony, at thePanthéon in 1908, Dreyfus, who
was there, because Dreyfus didn'tdie until 1925, he was shot.
(55:43):
Oh.
He was not killed, but he was actuallyshot by one of the extreme right-wing
military people who couldn't stand thefact that he was still alive and was free.
To just show how divided and bitterthe country was at that time because
of this issue, because of this.
Yeah, France went through a good 50years of just terrible political turmoil.
(56:10):
And I mean, of course, it soldnewspapers, but it was pretty bad.
Yeah.
In any event, his death washonored 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 greatestwriters that France has ever had.
(56:32):
He said, that he believed in truth,art, liberty of expression, and
the world of the common folk.
Mm-hmm.
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.
(56:53):
But I would really recommend it for peoplewho are very much into French history and
also beautiful, beautiful descriptions.
Don't read them because you want action.
There isn't much.
There isn't much.
I mean, there are things happening, butit's not like, you know, it's not going
to keep you on the edge of your seat.
(57:14):
You need to be taken by thedescriptions and by the kind of the
life of the 1800s in France is whatcarries you through these books.
And if you don't have the courage toread the books, just know that there
are five versions of The Assommoir.
Oh, wow.
In film.
(57:34):
In film?
In film.
That there are fourversions of La Bête Humaine.
Wow.
There are five versions of Germinal.
There are six versions of Nana andsix versions of Thérèse Raquin.
Wow.
Yeah, and you know, when I wasgrowing up in France, we read
at least Germinal in school.
(57:55):
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.
I need to read it because it has todo with this whole relationship that
he had with Cézanne and what happened.
(58:15):
It's a painter that is just... He'snot successful, but won't quit.
Mm-hmm.
He's waiting for genius toenter him or something, and he
has a pretty miserable life.
He and the woman he marries, andtheir child clearly had some health
issues, but was never taken to adoctor and dies at the age of 12.
(58:40):
It's very unhappy.
I'm not sure how the book ends becauseI'm not far from the end, but I didn't
quite finish it before we recorded.
But honestly, it's not a... It's notan, you know, it doesn't make you happy.
Le Vendre de Paris is very... even thoughit finishes badly, but there's more
optimism in it, more kind of rejoicing inthe food, and the artisans, and the work.
(59:08):
I, personally, I think that ' Germinal'may be one of the most abordable ones,
because even though it's grim in talkingabout the conditions of the miners, it's
something that even today we can relate toin terms of parts of the world and things
like that, and you can really get a feelof the fight between the miners and their
families and the people who run the mines.
(59:31):
The unions and the bosses.
And really, we should do an episodeabout the mining history in France.
We should.
Yes, and before I will rereadGerminal, because that's really
the standard description of that.
And just one last little thingthat has to do with the family.
It was his wife, after he died, whoabsolutely insisted and helped the other
(59:55):
woman, make sure that her children,they not only inherited his money, but
that they were legally given the nameof Zola, and it was her idea finally.
She said that that was what he wouldhave wanted, and that was her final
tribute to her husband, to make surethat the courts changed the last
name of the children so that theybecame Zolas, and they lived into the
(01:00:19):
20th century and both had children.
Right, because back then if your daddidn't recognize you, you had no rights.
You had no rights.
But by now, that's not how it works, and Ithink she definitely did the right thing.
She did the right thing.
You know, she knew who thesechildren were and that's life.
And just, I have to say that with all thisresearch and all this reading, I don't
(01:00:41):
know how much I love his work, but I thinkhe must've been an incredibly great man.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Elyse.
That was really fascinating.
You are welcome, Annie.
It certainly was for us to do.
Au revoir.
Bye.
(01:01:02):
The Join Us in France travelpodcast is written, hosted, and
produced by Annie Sargent, andCopyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance.
It is released under a CreativeCommons attribution, non-commercial,
no derivatives license.
This is Join Us in France,episode 560, cinq cent soixante.
Bonjour!
I'm Annie Sargent and Join Us inFrance is the podcast where we take
a conversational journey through thebeauty, culture and flavors of France.
Today, I bring you a conversationwith Elyse Rivin of Toulouse
Guided Walks about the remarkablelife and legacy of Emile Zola.
(00:37):
Discover why Zola remains one of France'smost influential writers, how his work
shaped literature and society, and thedramatic events that defined his career.
This one is for folks who want tolearn about French history and culture,
but we also talk about many placesthat had an impact on his life and
why you might want to visit them.
(00:58):
This podcast is supported by donorsand listeners who buy my tours and
services, including my ItineraryConsult 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.
The bookings are getting pretty busy forSeptember and October on these day trips,
so if you want to do that reach out soon.
(01:21):
And to find all of my services, you go tomy boutique: JoinUsinFrance.com/boutique.
And remember, Patreon supportersget the podcast ad-free,
and as soon as it's ready.
Click on the link in the shownotes to enjoy this Patreon reward
for as little as a $3 per month.
There won't be a magazine part of thepodcast today because this recording
(01:43):
ran long, we had so much to say aboutEmile Zola, but I do want to send my
thanks and a shoutout to new patreon,Ashley, who was also a boot camper.
To join the wonderful community offrancophiles and supporters of the
podcast, go to Patreon.com/JoinUs.
And to support Elyse, goto Patreon.com/ElysArt.
(02:12):
And thank you so much.
Next week on the podcast an episodeabout village hopping on the Dordogne
and beyond with Jackie Barnes and howto have a peaceful vacation in France.
I think you'll love it.
(02:35):
Bonjour, Elyse!
Bonjour, Annie.
We have a wonderful conversation linedup today about Emile Zola, the author.
And I was surprised by howmany wonderful things you came
up with, to discuss his life.
So, you're going to be doing the kindof biography part, and I'll interject
a little bit of the kind of literatureand things like that at some point.
(02:59):
But take it away because it's... I'm sureit's going to be a long conversation.
Yeah, I think it's going to... Ithink today we're going to have a long
one, but it's a very wonderful one.
And it is thanks to you, because it isyou that had thought of us doing him.
Emile Zola, of course, is a writer.
He was a very, very famous writerduring his lifetime, and he is still
considered to be one of the greatestwriters in France, certainly one of
(03:22):
the greatest writers of the secondhalf of the 19th century, and he
was an enormously prolific writer.
But he was also many, many, manymore things, and that is what we
both discovered in doing all of theresearch about him, which makes him
a quite astonishing human being.
So, Zola was born in Parisof a Venetian father.
(03:44):
His father was actuallyfrom Venice and had moved to
France to work as an engineer.
He was actually what was called amilitary engineer, but his specialty was
building canals, of all things, and atsome point met and married a Parisian
woman, and that was Emile Zola's mother.
And he was born in Paris in 1840,and several, three years later to
(04:07):
be exact, his father got a very,very good job to build a huge canal
that would bring drinkable water toAix-en-Provence, and so they moved down
to Aix-en-Provence, and at the age ofthree, Emile moved to a new neighborhood.
And it's interesting because even fromthe beginning, he was a bit complexed
(04:29):
about the fact that his father was aforeigner and he had a strange accent
and that he had this accent that wasnot considered to be a Provencal accent.
And he apparently was a relativelyshy child, and he was an only child.
And what happened was that the firstfew years of his life were quite
comfortable, I'm sure, but then hisfather very, very suddenly and brutally
(04:50):
died of pneumonia when he was justabout seven and a half, in 1848.
And his mother was left absolutelydestitute and in despair, and she
decided that the only thing shecould do was to go back up to Paris.
But Emile Zola did not want to go toParis because by that time, he had been
(05:11):
in a very special selective school inAix-en-Provence, had made friends with,
among other people, Paul Cézanne, andfound that the life in and around Aix was
what suited him because he loved goingout into the countryside, and he admired
greatly everything that he could see.
But his life as a child and into hisadolescence was rather difficult.
(05:33):
He felt responsible for his mother,even though apparently she had family.
I don't really know, and I couldn'tfind 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, whichmeant he stayed in the school overnight.
So, that's like a sleepawayschool, but we don't... We
usually use that term for camp.
(05:54):
The English have a ... aboarding [school].
Yes, a boarding school.
A boarding school.
Of course.
A boarding school.
So, he stayed.
He was left in Aix in this boardingschool, which is where he did his
middle school and most of his highschool studies, and his mother
moved back to Paris and went towork actually as a seamstress.
Even though she came from afamily that was apparently
(06:15):
middle class, they had no money.
And to add to the misery that theywere going through at that point,
she got bilked out of what would havebeen her inheritance for her husband's
part of his participation in a companythat 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
(06:39):
good lawyer and being a woman, theyfound ways of turning the contracts
around so that it turned, they madeit sure that they got all the money.
And she was left withnothing, absolutely nothing.
And Emile Zola talks about, or he talkedabout how miserable they were and how
scared she was of what was going to happento the two of them, and his entire life he
(07:02):
felt responsible for taking care of her.
He said that being poor and beinga foreigner were two things that
marked him for the rest of his life.
Right, those were defining moments asfar as his literature was concerned
because that's the people he wrote about.
That is exactly the people he wrote about.
(07:22):
That's exactly right.
Now, his friendship with PaulCézanne, who we talked a little bit
about in the podcast about Cézanne,was also very formative for him,
especially at that point of hislife because he admired artists.
And he said all his life thatwhat he tried to do with his
writing was to be a painter.
That is, to make images that wouldstick in people's minds down to
(07:45):
the very finest, tiny detail, justlike a magnificent, huge painting.
And he became friends with a wholegroup of impressionist artists when
he was a young adult and had movedback to Paris, and among those people,
of course, were Renoir and Pissarroand Manet, who were very good friends
with him, and who gave him the courageto work as a writer even though they
(08:09):
in fact were, of course, painters.
Right, and it's really strikingthat 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 andyou can, if you enjoy literature,
(08:30):
you will really enjoy the picturesthat it summons in your head.
And when you see the quotes thathe actually said about his style of
writing, aside from the fact that hewanted to help people to have compassion
and understand the lives of poorpeople, it is indeed like paintings.
The scenes are exactlylike magnificent paintings.
It makes me think of still lifepaintings with every petal of every
(08:53):
flower and every piece of fruitand things like that, you know?
Right.
And writers learn tobring in all the senses.
So the smells, the sights, thesounds, 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 hiswriting, but that's also what makes it a
(09:15):
little tough to read, because it's long.
It's long.
The other thing that happened that addedto what we could consider to be his
traumatisms that really developed intohis 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
(09:37):
even though- ... even though his motherwas French, I have no idea, you know,
what kind of accent his father was fromVenice, and came to France as an adult,
so he must have had a very strong accent.
Who knows exactly whatthey were speaking at home.
But he said later on that having takenthese exams twice and having failed
them, was... it made him ashamed andit was added to this list of things
(10:00):
that he said that people have to bearand you have to figure out how to
explain to people to have compassionfor things like that, you know?
That is really rich, thatZola failed his French.
He failed his French exam, yes.
And so he went back.
Because he's so... he's so good, but ofcourse he probably didn't fit the mold.
No, he didn't fit the mold, and that'sprobably one of the reasons he was
(10:23):
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.
But he was, he liked the factthat these were oddball people.
I think that was part of what happened.
He was rather shy, actually, Émile Zola.
And he was also someone who,he decided very early that he
(10:47):
did indeed want to be a writer.
Which is very interesting because hedidn't say, "Oh, I'm going to be a painter
like these people that I know." He wantedto be a writer, so language was very
important to him from very, very early on.
And sometimes, as I was reading hisbooks, I thought, "Why go into so
much detail?" But we have to rememberthat back then, people didn't have
(11:11):
TV, if they wanted music, theyneeded to go to a concert hall.
Entertainment was very, verydifferent from what we have today.
I mean, we all have endless entertainmentin our pockets with our cell phones.
Right.
And this was not the case.
If they wanted to be entertained,they had to sit down with a book, and
(11:32):
they had to go to the symphony, andthey had to go to the museums and to
the exhibits and things like that.
So life was very, very differentback then, and he was really giving
people a lot of entertainment,because these books are entertaining,
just like going to a beautifulexhibit is entertaining, you know?
(11:53):
Absolutely.
And what I find also interesting,I was thinking about that as
I was doing the research, butthis was true also for Cézanne.
In the middle of the 19th century,it was not considered to be
scandalous for a young man todecide to be an artist or a writer.
It was simply anotherlegitimate profession.
You had to work your way in.
(12:14):
You weren't guaranteed that you wouldbe successful, but it wasn't poo-hooed
even in the middle classes and it waslike, 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 awriter, in the case of Zola,
you study how to be a writer.
Right, and this is a society where theywould address a painter as 'maître'.
(12:37):
Yes.
Master.
Yes.
Just like you would a lawyer.
It was respectable.
Yes.
It was respectable andvery much respected.
Indeed, it was.
So finally what happened was, givingup on his schooling in Aix-en-Provence
when he was in his late teens, he wentback up to be with his mother in Paris.
He tried again to pass these examsin one of the two very, very good
(13:03):
and still very good, high schoolsin the center of Paris, and then
realized that he had to find work.
And thanks to connections that weremade through his family, he was
introduced to a man named Louis Hachette.
Now this is fascinating to me because-
Ding, ding, ding!
We know today that Hachette,H-A-C-H-E-T-T-E, is one of the biggest
(13:26):
publishing companies in France, andit was this Mr. Louis Hachette who was
the first one to create this publishinghouse, and it was a publishing house that
mostly published either dictionaries orscientific texts for popular consumption.
So it was, it's now ahuge, Hachette is enormous.
It has so many different parts to it.
(13:47):
But he was given the opportunityto go to work for him and he
was, at this point, just about 20years old, and he was given a job.
It's very interesting because itturns out that he was very good at it.
He wasn't given a job as a writer.
He was basically given a job that isthe equivalent of being an attaché de
presse, which meant that he would goaround and he would basically talk about
(14:09):
the different things that were going tobe published by Hachette.... and he would
convince different people, differentstores to buy the books, and he became
familiar with the world of publishing.
And he said later on that this is oneof 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.
(14:30):
He did not write novels.
Right, and he occasionallycontinued to write pieces.
I mean, J'accuse!
he's famous for that.
Well, and that's of course much later.
But what's interesting is that hespent several years with Hachette,
and during this time he startedwriting short stories, but he became
known at first as being a critic.
(14:53):
That is, he wrote reviews.
He wrote reviews of art, for artists,he wrote reviews of theater pieces,
he wrote reviews of other people'sliterature, and he developed this
very distinctive style which wasbasically saying what he thought.
It is a wonder that at that point inhis life, he had not yet been attacked
(15:14):
for slander or for whatever it isthat you could attack people for,
because he was known very quicklyfor being someone who was, to use a
word that we use today, very cash.
He said what he thought about everything.
Well, in France we say that.
I don't know if you say that in
English.
Yeah, I think so.
I'm not sure what we do.
But basically, he became known asbeing very, very forthright, but he had
(15:36):
very specific political convictions.
He was very much a republican in thesense of believing in a republic, not
in a monarchy or an empire, and hewas also not particularly fond of the
Catholic Church because he considered tobe, that the Catholic Church was rather
repressive, and of course it was partof what is known as the Second Empire?
(15:57):
The Third Empire?
Third Empire?
I think it's the Third.
It's the Third.
It's the Third.
And so he allowed these politicalconvictions to seep through into
his commentary when he was writinghis criticisms about things.
So, he started to gain recognitionas a journalist, and he was
eventually given a column.
By the time he was in his mid-20s,he was relatively well-known for
(16:21):
having a column in a newspaperand he was publishing stories in
various magazines and newspapers.
And he said that he was finally veryhappy to be recognized as a writer.
What he wanted, of all things, wasto be able to say he was a writer,
and that he was published all over.
And he wrote a total of approximately100 short stories at this time.
(16:45):
And in 1865, so we imagine in1865, he is 25, he met and became
very good friends with the entiregroup of impressionist artists.
He, at that point, wasstill very close to Cézanne.
He particularly appreciated Pissarroand Renoir, and became a bit friends
with Manet, who was a little bit older.
And he also met the woman,Alexandrine, who would become his
(17:10):
wife, and who basically stayedwith him for the rest of his life.
Now, what I find interesting isthat, again, she was, nobody really
knows how she entered his life.
She was apparently maybe a modelfor some of the artists, maybe not.
Maybe she was a dressmaker.
She was definitely notfrom the middle classes.
She was from a working class environment.
(17:31):
And his mother was not particularly happythat he had brought himself a woman of
the working class back to the house.
And because his mother did notapprove of her, he found another
little apartment for the two of them.
But it wasn't until five yearslater, in 1870, that they
actually officially got married.
So, for five years, she worked littlejobs to help support the two of them
(17:55):
while he started to do his writing.
This is very much like the couple ClaudeD- has in L'Œuvre, one of his books,
which I'm just in the middle of right now.
To correct what you said, itwas the fall of Napoleon III
which was the Second Empire.
It's confusing.
It's confusing, between the empiresand the kings and the.., it is, sorry,
(18:18):
sorry out there, it is confusing.
So, this takes us up to the year 1870.
He is 30 years old.
He has actually made himself agood reputation as a journalist.
He's already started toalso make some enemies.
Enemies in the sense that thereare certainly a number of people,
particularly people with conservativeideas, who do not like his writing.
(18:41):
They do not like his franc-parler, as theywould say in French, which means he really
said what he thought about everything.
He was extremely honest, and he basicallytold everybody, whether they were on the
left side of the political spectrum or theright, that he wasn't going to change what
he thought and he wasn't going to hidewhat he thought, and this is basically
(19:02):
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 whothought it was a good or bad thing.
Right, right.
And so what happens in 1870 is that wehave this mini war that I will admit
very honestly I find very complex and notsure that I completely understand, but
(19:26):
suddenly France is at war with Prussia.
And the Prussians invade Paris, andbecause of that there is the very famous
Paris Commune which of course takesplace, it's a group of people who try to
defend part of Paris which is the partof Paris that is Montmartre, against the
Prussians after the French governmentgives in to the Prussians immediately.
(19:48):
Echoes of this, of course, laterin World War II, which is very
premonitory, I guess you could say.
So, to clarify just a little bit, most ofhis writing happens, it starts in 1870....
the saga of the Rougon-Macquart which it's20 books in 22 years, is what he wrote.
And so it begins with the fallof Napoleon III, which is the,
(20:14):
you know, in the Second Empire.
The Franco-Prussian War and theParis 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, butthe Franco-Prussian War and the Paris
(20:38):
Commune were huge, and we should, youknow, learn more about it and talk about
it at some point because, especially inMontmartre, the Commune was a big deal.
And I mention it in my tour ofMontmartre, but it didn't last very
long, but it made a lasting impression.
It made a lasting impression.
And it is indeed starting in1870 that Zola stops being a
(21:01):
journalist and becomes a writerof novels, and he says it himself.
He said that what happened duringthe Commune, first of all, he was
attacked by the Communards becausehe disagreed with some of the things
that they were doing in spite of thefact that he believed in a republic.
His position, and he said, "I will neverbelong to a political party, I will never
(21:24):
identify myself as being this, this,or this. I am Emile Zola. This is what
I think and this is what I will say."
And that was something that causeda lot of grief for him because he
always was honest with himself, and hesaid, "I will be honest with whoever
wants to read whatever it is I write."
And so it was from then on, asyou mentioned, that he began this
(21:47):
series of books, which he called,interestingly enough, as the subtitle,
A Social and Natural History of aFamily During the Second Empire.
Right, so it's kind of a saga, but atthe same time it's not, because although
some characters reappear, it's actuallylike a genealogical... so it starts
(22:10):
with a family, it starts with a manwho has some children with his wife,
but he also has some children with amistress, and the two branches they
appear in different books, but they'reall related somehow to this one man.
It's not a soap opera, becausea soap opera you really see the
same characters all the time.
(22:31):
But it has that kind of... It'sgoing in that direction because he
could... like Claude, the painter,appears in several books, right?
He's not necessarily a bigcharacter in several books.
He's the main character in L'Œuvre,which in English is called:
I think it's called The Artist in English.
So they come in and out, but they'reall related to the original guy.
(22:54):
He wanted to show the whole spectrumof life of an extended family, at this
particular time, and use that as a way oftalking about all the conditions of the
different statuses of society, you know?
Right.
And if you want to understandFrench history without reading a
history book, reading that serieswould be really, really good.
(23:15):
Would really be good.
And Zola, from this point on, ofcourse, becomes famous, and he is
part of a group of writers thatare called Writers of Naturalism.
And Naturalism was a big movementin writing, not necessarily in
painting, interestingly enough.
Because it was very different, becausethis is the time of the impressionists
and the post-impressionistswho are certainly not what you
(23:35):
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.
And he said that thisis what he wanted to do.
He wanted to portray the realityof the lives of those who were at
(23:58):
the bottom of the social system,and to show the conditions under
which they lived, worked, and died.
And he says this several times becauseeach of the different books and, of
course, each one takes a part of thisworld and talks about certain occupations.
Germinal, which is of course the onlyone that I really know very well, it
(24:18):
talks about miners and the life of thecoal miners in Northern France, which
was absolutely horrific, you know?
And he describes, down to the tiniestdetail, what they ate, how they
dressed, what their lives were likewhen they went down into the mines.
The movements that they tried tocreate to get better conditions,
everything from the beginning to end.
(24:39):
And at the same time, this movement ofNaturalism, one of the things that I
find interesting, and this is lookingat it from the perspective of the 21st
century, is that it was with compassionthat he wrote all of this, but at the
time people didn't think you could everchange the situation that you were in.
You basically were what you were borninto, and this is what he really shows
(25:02):
in the books at the same time, you know?
Right, so it's just the way... Yeah, it'sa fatalism, there's nothing you can do.
You were born, and you know, to someextent the easiest to... I mean,
the best way to become rich todayis to have a rich daddy, you know?
I mean, that's just... still in some ways.
But...
Or to invent something, you know?
Yeah, but back then you werereally defined by your class.
(25:24):
You were defined by your class, yeah.
He said (25:26):
"I want to write novels that will be the first novels about the
people," the people meaning the poorpeople, "that doesn't lie, that has
the odor of the poor in the writing."
I thought that was really interesting.
It's not condescending.
It's really his ability or hisdesire to make you feel like you
(25:50):
can walk into the page and be inthe world that they're in by the
tiniest little details that he gives.
Yeah, so, one example of this inLe Ventre de Paris, The Belly of
Paris, so this is about life in andaround Les Halles, in Paris, back
when it was all in central Paris.
There's a time when childrenare abandoned, so people who
(26:15):
can't feed their kids anymore,young toddlers, two-year-old,
one-year-old, would just take themto Les Halles and just leave them.
Leave them and tell them, "I'llbe back," and never come back.
This was actually pretty common.
It happened.
In the book, he describes two suchchildren who end up being cared for
(26:35):
by the workers of Les Halles, andwho 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 incestbecause they're not...
They're not really related.
Right, but they were raised that way.
And then the boy, there's a rape scene.
(26:59):
He doesn't really rape her, but...No, another woman, another worker.
He doesn't really rape herbecause she hits him in the
head, and leaves him for dead.
But it's all really, really,like, vivid and sordid.
This is hardly the only plotof the book, obviously, but
(27:19):
it's really... It grabs you.
I wouldn't say that thesebooks are plot-driven, ever.
They are more like the vicissitudes.
Yeah, they're character-driven becauseit'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?
(27:40):
The Masterpiece, apparently.
Okay, I read that it was called TheArtist, but it could be The Masterpiece.
This is the one that supposedly madeCézanne stop speaking to him, you know.
For a while, yeah.
For a while, but it turns out that at theend of his life, he did talk to him again.
What's interesting to know, too, isthat like Dickens, in England, although
Dickens was not considered to be anaturalist because his books were
(28:00):
much more fantastical and there wasa certain amount of humor in them.
But both of them became successfulby publishing a chapter at a
time every week in magazines.
And this is fascinating to me becauseI like the idea that if you're going
to be a writer, it gives you a littlebit of breathing space, you know?
It's like, "Okay, I've got to do achapter a week, but I've got a whole week
(28:21):
to think about the chapter," you know?
"I don't have to come up withall of it at the same time."
And this is what he did.
We're talking about 20 books that haveI 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 reviewsand magazines, and then eventually,
(28:44):
of course, at the same time when hebecame really famous, they were also
published as books in bookstores.
Right.
The serial publication wascalled feuilleton, which
means, you know, a series.
Like a feuilleton, like a...
The ones I watch everynight on television.
Right, exactly.
Like the TV, yeah.
That's what it is.
And then very often, they would come outas a book like a year later or something.
(29:06):
So L'Assommoir, for example,which is in English " The Dram
Shop" or "The Drinking Den".
The Drinking... it's a veryhard word to translate.
That was published in '77.
That's right, that's right.
So that one it was serialized inthe newspaper Le Bien Public in 1876
before it came out as a book in 1877.
(29:30):
Nana, another one of his bestsellers,it was published in Le Voltaire,
a magazine, in 1879 before beingpublished as a novel in 1880.
Right.
So it just... it was common atthe time, and you know, it helped
them have regular income and alsogive him time to think about...
(29:53):
Yeah.
It's true.
I mean, 20 books in 22 years is amazing.
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.
So hang on, hang on, hang on.
It starts with La
(30:16):
Fortune des Rougon, TheFortune of the Rougon.
La Curée is the second, that's The Kill.
Le Ventre de Paris is thethird, Belly of Paris.
Fourth is La Conquête des Plassans,The Conquest of the Plassans.
La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret isfifth, The Sin of Abbe Mouret.
Six is
(30:38):
Son Excellence Eugene Rougon,His Excellency Eugene Rougon.
And seventh is L'Assommoir, which isThe Dram Shop or The Drinking Den.
And that one, so, think about this, he'sturned out one a year, and this one is
the very first that is a super bestseller.
And it is the one that made himrich, and it was thanks to this book
(31:00):
that he was able to do nothing butwrite 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 ofhis mother very well.
He could do whatever he wanted to do.
He wrote down somewhere thatin order to be a writer, you
must have enormous discipline.
(31:21):
And he never, ever, even when hewas in exile, stopped writing.
He just wrote every single day, and hekept up the quota of the certain number of
pages every day from 1870 until his death.
I mean, this is how hewas with his writing.
He was obsessed with the fact that hehad to produce as much as he could.
So, it is really remarkable.
(31:42):
And then, of course, that's number seven.
And we have all these others.
Shall I keep going?
Shall I finish my list?
You want to read all of them?
Sure, sure, sure.
Une Page d'Amour, A Love Episode.
That was number eight.
Number nine, Nana, which isalso called Nana in English.
That's number nine.
That was in 1880.
Pot-Bouille, The Potluck orPiping Hot, 1882 was number 10.
(32:06):
Au Bonheur des Dames, The Ladies'Paradise, which is also quite famous.
It's very famous, and it'sabout department store workers.
Right, so that's 11.
12, La Joie de Vivre, The Joy of Life.
1884. Germinal, 1885.
That's one that we all readat school, pretty much.
You can easily see in amovie, in fact, you know.
Yeah, it was a movie.
(32:27):
Number 14 is L'Œuvre,The Masterpiece, in 1886.
La Terre, The Earth, 1887, number 15.
Le Rêve, The Dream, was number 16 in
1888.
La Bête Humaine, number 17, The BeastWithin or The Human Beast in 1890.
That's one that I read as a kidand did not understand at all.
(32:50):
Number 18, L'Argent, Money.
Number 19, La Débâcle, TheDownfall or The Debacle.
And number 20, the conclusion, is LeDocteur Pascal, Doctor Pascal, in 1893.
In
1893.
So this is a massive amount of work.
And in the midst of all of this, firstin 1880, his mom died, which apparently
(33:14):
was very, very difficult moment for him.
And then he's entering into his 40s.
And this is a man who has basicallydevoted his life to being honorable,
to telling the truth of, his versionof the truth, of what he thinks should
be done from a political point of view.
It's morality without beingreligious, is what he was going after.
(33:37):
Right.
But I think it's also that, I mean,he never hides the fact that, he never
says this, "Other people need to thinkthis way. I think this way." This is
his opinion about everything, you know?
He was very much involved withthe idea of showing his opinion.
But also, I think he was very investedin being honest and honorable, those two
words which are, of course, connected.
(33:57):
And yet what happens, and this isbasically 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 youngwoman of 21 who has been hired by his
devoted wife, who has unfortunatelybeen unable to have children, and who
(34:19):
has really devoted her life to him.
I mean, she's really spent herentire life helping him and advising
him and being as close as youcould possibly be to your partner.
And she's the one who hired this youngwoman because she needed, they were
wealthy, I mean, they had domestic help.
And within the space of several months,he was in a situation where he admitted
(34:40):
to several of his friends that he wasstarting to fantasize about young women.
It was, he hadn't done anything aboutit, but he felt that he shouldn't.
But he was actually at that pointwhere 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 seeon internet of the two of them, because
(35:01):
at the end of his life, he took a lotof photographs of his new second family.
And lo and behold, he began an affairwith this young woman named Eugène,
Jeanne in English.
Eugène, I always have trouble with that.
And it would have probably not beena very long-term relationship, except
that she became pregnant, and inthe end, she wound up having the two
(35:27):
children that he had always wantedto have and that he had not been able
to have with his wife, Alexandrine.
And so he began whatliterally was a double life.
And it was a little bit afterthe birth of the first child
that his wife found out about it.
I personally can't imagine that shedidn't know about it beforehand, but
whatever, it doesn't make any difference.
(35:49):
But she basically, his wife basicallysaid, "I do not want you to leave me.
I do not want to have a divorce. IfI must, I will accept that this other
woman exists with these children, but youplease, I mean, basically, stay with me."
And he said that thatwas what he would do.
And so for the rest of his life,he basically had two families, and
(36:14):
he had, he set up a house for thiswoman, Jeanne Rozerot, and he would
go over and visit her and spend timewith the children because he was very
happy, suddenly to become a father.
And little by little, his wife acceptedtheir existence, and even at times,
took care of the children and evenactually had them in the house with them.
(36:37):
And he continued to lead thisdouble life until his death in 1902.
Well, I mean, I guess that's very Frenchof me, but, you know, that's making the
best of a difficult situation, I guess?
Well, you know, it's interesting becausehe's quoted as saying nearer the end
of his life, "I did what I could tomake everyone happy, but I am the
(37:01):
one who is not happy leading a doublelife." And so somehow, he did it.
He did it, I think, out of asense of honor and a sense of not
wanting to really hurt his wife.
At the same time, he did not wantto give up this second family.
And yes, it is very French, I must say,to have considered that it's almost normal
(37:22):
to do something like that, you know?
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.
You can, but I do... I mean, this is anaside 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
(37:47):
at a certain age that they have halfbrothers and sisters that were made
somewhere, usually by their father.
And it is not that uncommon.
It really is not, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And French law has provisions for this.
Today, it doesn't matter ifyou're a natural born child or
born in within wedlock, you willinherit from your parents from...
(38:11):
If you can prove that theyare your parents, Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All of this to say that in themidst of all of this enormous
amount of work and the success, hewas a workaholic, let's face it.
I mean, he was obsessed with his writing.
He was an incredibly successful writer.
He had, remember, stoppedbeing a journalist.
He was now a full-time novelist.
He was involved at that point in his lifebetween 1880 and the end of the 1890s,
(38:38):
involved in, at the same time, balancingthis private life that was getting a
little bit more complicated, you know?
Right.
So being a famous author, obviously hewas recognized and he was invited and he
went to place... to events and things.
Yeah, it would fill up a life a lot.
It would fill up a life a lot.
And then the last major, verysignificant event of his life that
(39:04):
happened starting with the DreyfusAffair, which began in 1894.
Starting in 1894, Zola, who was inherentlysomeone who believed in justice and
tolerance, he became aware of throughvarious friends and because of the
(39:25):
writings that were being put into variousvery conservative newspapers, he became
aware of the fact that there was anextremely, extremely virulent, antisemitic
atmosphere taking hold in France.
This is a reality.
In the 1890s in France, antisemitismwas so bad that there were actually
two newspapers that had as headlines,"The Anti-Jewish Newspaper." And this
(39:50):
was part of what was going on in Paris.
It was really... I don't knowexactly the reasons why this
happened at this particular time.
And so one of the major events whichhas gone down, of course, as a major
event in the history in France iswhat is known as the Dreyfus Affair.
There was a colonel in the army, ayoung man named Alfred Dreyfus, who was
(40:11):
from the Alsatian area, who was a veryrespected officer in the army, and who
happened to be from a Jewish family.
And without going into the details becausethat there's... doesn't concern us.
It concerns us more with what happenedwith Zola in relation to this.
But this man, Dreyfus, was accused ofbeing a spy and a traitor in service
of the Germans, of the Prussians,and he was put before a trial.
(40:35):
He was taken to trial, a court-martialtrial, and he was convicted of being a
spy and sent to what is called Le Bagne.
And I had somebody the other dayasked 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...
It's forced labor in a verydifficult to reach, isolated place.
(41:01):
Cayenne was one, whichis in South America.
The islands of Marseillewere considered to be Bagne.
And so this is starting in the 1890s.
And by 1894, Zola has becomesensitive to all of this.
He actually did not follow theDreyfus Affair very, very carefully.
(41:21):
That was not something that was verymuch a part of his life, until he was
contacted by several people, one ofwhom was a very important member of the
Alsatian government, because Alsace waskind of a separate... has separate rules.
It's very complicated to explain,but there was a member of the
government from Alsace whose namewas Auguste Scheher-Kestner, who
(41:44):
was apparently someone who admiredZola enormously and had remembered
all of his journalistic output andremembered how honest he was and how...
Straightforward.
Straight shooter.
Thank you.
Thank you.
How straightforward he was in sayingblack is black and white is white.
And he had... he went to him, and hewrote to him, and he asked him if he
(42:08):
would meet with a group of people,including several lawyers who were
preparing a campaign to start a newtrial in an appeals court, to revise
the verdict against Colonel Dreyfus.
And that was at this point that Zolabegan to read everything that had
(42:28):
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 basicallyone of those farces.
It was a travesty of justicefrom the beginning to the end.
(42:49):
And just as an aside, in spite of my notparticularly admiring him as a person,
Roman Polanski, the filmmaker, madea movie that came out two years ago
called J'Accuse!, which is absolutelywonderful, and it is very accurate in
describing the entire period of thetrial of Dreyfus and what happened
(43:11):
from the beginning to the end.
It doesn't specifically include a lotabout 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 todive into enormous amounts of historical
paper, that is the movie to see.
I haven't seen it.
It's really excellent, I have to admit.
And when you read about it, you realizethat he really followed, with accuracy
(43:35):
exactly what happened, you know.
So Zola decides that he will takeon this cause, and one of the things
that they ask him to do is to begina journalistic campaign to help them.
So suddenly, here he is again asa journalist after all these years
(43:56):
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'sinnocence and of the need to
convince the general public of themiscarriage of justice that he delves
(44:17):
into it with his heart and soul.
And one of the people that actuallyhelps him, believe it or not, is
Clemenceau, who eventually of coursewinds up becoming president, but
unfortunately, it's after Zola's death.
And Clemenceau encourages him towrite an article, and actually it is
Clemenceau who gives him the idea ofgiving the title of the article, the
(44:41):
J'Accuse!, which of course is writtenin bold letters across the top of
this enormous, enormous, long article.
Now, he presented it to The Figaro,which by the way, is still a newspaper
that is a politically moderatenewspaper in France, a daily newspaper.
But that's not where it appeared, is it?
No, because they refused.
They refused because they did notwant to alienate the conservative
(45:05):
reading public that they had.
And he took it to a newspapercalled L'Aurore, which means,
L'Aurore, which means The Dawn.
I mean, when I was young,we still had L'Aurore.
Oh, you still had it?
Right.
I don't think it exists anymore.
Oh, that's... I didn't even know that.
Okay, that's really interesting.
No, I mean, I've read L'Aurore.
You've read it, huh.
But I don't know when it stopped.
(45:27):
So Zola was so convinced of Dreyfus'sinnocence and of the obvious dishonesty
of the trial, that he stopped doingeverything else and just went to
work on helping not only write thisarticle, but making a campaign.
It was a travesty of justice.
There's nothing beyond that to say becausethe proofs were there that this man was
(45:51):
indeed innocent, but the antisemiticatmosphere and the conservative government
was such that they refused to accept it.
So there was a second trial,and the article J'Accuse!
was so inflammatory that thepresident of France at the time,
a man named Felix Faure, basicallyaccused Zola of defamation.
(46:14):
And his supporters, all of these peoplewho had been encouraging him to write
this article, told him that if he lostthis case of defamation, because he
was taken to court, and he was takento court almost immediately after
the publication of J'Accuse!, thathe was going to be in trouble, and he
would wind up being sent to prison,and that is exactly what happened.
(46:36):
And so the day he was convicted,his friends told him that he
had to leave France, literally.
He was convicted and sentenced toone year in prison, and to a fine of
3,000 francs, which I assume was acertain amount of money in relation
to what money would be today, Idon't really know exactly how much.
(46:56):
And they put him on a train.
He had nothing with him.
They literally said, "You have toget out of here." And they put him
on a train and sent him to England.
And he spent 11 months in Englandhiding, because they were worried about
him being assassinated by people whowere arch conservatives who considered
that he had insulted the government andinsulted the military, which in a way,
(47:19):
he probably had by, because he accusedthem of being collusion and of lying
outright to make Dreyfus a scapegoat.
And they told him that he shouldn'tshow his face until he could come
back, and that was 11 months later.
Yup.
Yup.
And it's interesting that one ofthe reasons why this letter was
(47:43):
so powerful is because he keptit sho- well, short, I mean, it's
long but the sentences are short.
So every sentence starts withJ'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 formatthat made it so powerful.
(48:05):
And Félix Faure didn't enjoy.
He was the president at the time,like you noted, did not enjoy this.
No, he didn't enjoy it at all.
And it is a fact that it createdsuch a stir that they said,
"Okay, we will have another trialagain." And guess what happens?
In this third trial, they...actually there were two trials.
(48:26):
There was one where they brought to trialthe real traitor, the real spy who was
a man named Esterházy, who was also acolonel and who it was indeed the person
who was really spying for the Prussians.
And they created false proofso that he would be acquitted.
The trial was literallywhat we call a monkey trial.
(48:47):
It didn't even last a week.
They said this is absurd.
They produced all of this whatturned out to be absolutely false
proof, and he was acquitted.
And then they brought Dreyfusback, and he was convicted again.
And it wasn't until after all ofthis was over that there was another
trial, and instead of convincing thepublic that he was innocent, they
(49:11):
simply decided to pardon Dreyfus.
Right.
It was easier than to admit thatit had been a sham all along.
That it had been a sham all along.
It was a traumatism for the country.
It was basically a traumatism for allof the people involved in the trial.
And I think for Zola, it did somethingto him, because in spite of the fact
(49:32):
that he continued to write, his healthwas not very good once he came back.
And he came back in 1898, he was broughtback, and he published the first two
of four books that were going to bea new series called The Four Gospels.
Oh, like the Bible?
Like the Bible.
Les Quatre Evangiles.
Yep.
Wow.
The first one is called Fécundité...
(49:54):
Okay.
... which is kind of strange.
And he actually wrote...
Well, that's where it starts.
If you don't got babies,you don't got nothing.
Exactly.
And that he literally wrote in the11 months he was in exile in England.
It was ready to be published.
He published it in 1899.
The second one is called Work.
Sure, you got to work, yep.
And that was published in 1901.
And what's the other two?
(50:14):
I don't remember.
I don't remember becausethey were never published.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah.
The third one he worked on amanuscript, and it was about to
be published when in fact he died.
And then the fourth one there wasno finished manuscript at all.
But this is what happened.
So here he is, in 1900, heis 60 years old, which is
(50:35):
moderately old, but not that old.
He was used up, I think, by the amountof attacks against him about the fact
that he had spent basically almost thelast seven or eight years trying to
convince the public that the travesty ofjustice was also a travesty of justice
(50:57):
in terms of the politics of the country.
He was so angry at the world inFrance for being racist, for being
antisemitic, for being dishonest.
He couldn't admit that thiswas the world that he lived in.
And at the same time, he had whatwas basically a relatively happy
(51:20):
home life because by this time, hiswife, Alexandrine, had more or less
accepted the fact that there wasthis other part of the family and had
largely integrated it into his world.
He had a son, and he had a daughter, andhe had this other woman who was devoted
to him that he spent some time with.
And so he was preparing to do the thirdvolume of this new series of books.
(51:44):
He and his wife went onvacation to Normandy, as they
often did in the summertime.
This is in 1902.
And when he came back which was September29th of 1902, they asked the house
staff to heat up the house a littlebit because it was a relatively cool
fall day at the end of September.
(52:06):
And they said, "Please heat up the housea little bit for us before we get back."
And when they got back to the housethe staff closed off the flues that, of
course, bring up... because it was gasheating that they had through this house.
It was relatively modern for the time.
He was very much into modern things.
And theoretically all of the flueswith the gas were turned off,
(52:27):
and he and his wife went to bed.
And at some point, in the middle ofthe night, his wife woke him, and she
said, "I think I smell gas." And hewas apparently exhausted from the trip,
and he said to her... basically itwas kind of like he sniffed around and
he said, no, you're imagining things.
I don't smell anything."
(52:47):
But she for some reason was worried, andshe got up, and she actually left the
room and went to sleep somewhere else.
And when she went back to the roomthe next morning, he was lying on
the floor, and he was already dead.
He had apparently gotten up at somepoint in the middle of the night
and tried to leave but had inhaledso much of the poisonous gas that
(53:10):
he could not move, and he was lyingthere and nobody knew, of course.
At that time, how longit had taken him to die.
Don't mess with gas orventilation when you have gas.
However, it is a fact, and moreand more, people do believe
that it was an assassination.
Yeah.
Well, whatever.
(53:30):
It is not possible to know for sure.
But-
I mean, people die of badventilation all the time.
This is not rare, unfortunately.
It's true, however, he had hadso many death threats, so many.
He had.
And he had stirred up so much animositythat the right-wing newspapers were
(53:51):
calling for his death all the time.
And this is already a year ortwo 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...
There were motives.
... there were real motives.
And there were really lots of people thatbelieved that that was what happened.
(54:13):
And recently, I was reading more ofthis, there is more and more question
of whether or not they could find proof.
How old was he?
He was 62.
Yeah, that's young.
He was young.
Cézanne, who didn't die for anotherfew years, most of the other people
around him, I mean, his wife livedanother, I think, 15 years or
something like that before she died.
There really, even at the moment ofhis death, some of the conservative
(54:36):
newspapers rejoiced that he was dead.
He created such animosity inhis defense of the truth that
it is possible to imagine thatsomebody tried to kill him, yeah.
Yeah, it's possible to imagine, yes.
Yes, it is.
And so, of course, you have his funeral.
And at his funeral, you have AnatoleFrance, who was both a writer and
(54:59):
I believe he was also a politician.
Yeah, politician, yes.
Who said, as one of the men whospoke at his funeral, he said,
"Émile Zola was for a moment inhistory, the conscience of humanity."
Hmm.
And I thought that that wasabsolutely wonderful, that that
was what he said about him.
(55:20):
He was initially buried inMontmartre Cemetery, and then very
soon he was taken to the Panthéon.
In 1908, his ashes weretaken to the Panthéon.
And at the ceremony, at thePanthéon in 1908, Dreyfus, who
was there, because Dreyfus didn'tdie until 1925, he was shot.
(55:43):
Oh.
He was not killed, but he was actuallyshot by one of the extreme right-wing
military people who couldn't stand thefact that he was still alive and was free.
To just show how divided and bitterthe country was at that time because
of this issue, because of this.
Yeah, France went through a good 50years of just terrible political turmoil.
(56:10):
And I mean, of course, it soldnewspapers, but it was pretty bad.
Yeah.
In any event, his death washonored 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 greatestwriters that France has ever had.
(56:32):
He said, that he believed in truth,art, liberty of expression, and
the world of the common folk.
Mm-hmm.
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.
(56:53):
But I would really recommend it for peoplewho are very much into French history and
also beautiful, beautiful descriptions.
Don't read them because you want action.
There isn't much.
There isn't much.
I mean, there are things happening, butit's not like, you know, it's not going
to keep you on the edge of your seat.
(57:14):
You need to be taken by thedescriptions and by the kind of the
life of the 1800s in France is whatcarries you through these books.
And if you don't have the courage toread the books, just know that there
are five versions of The Assommoir.
Oh, wow.
In film.
(57:34):
In film?
In film.
That there are fourversions of La Bête Humaine.
Wow.
There are five versions of Germinal.
There are six versions of Nana andsix versions of Thérèse Raquin.
Wow.
Yeah, and you know, when I wasgrowing up in France, we read
at least Germinal in school.
(57:55):
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.
I need to read it because it has todo with this whole relationship that
he had with Cézanne and what happened.
(58:15):
It's a painter that is just... He'snot successful, but won't quit.
Mm-hmm.
He's waiting for genius toenter him or something, and he
has a pretty miserable life.
He and the woman he marries, andtheir child clearly had some health
issues, but was never taken to adoctor and dies at the age of 12.
(58:40):
It's very unhappy.
I'm not sure how the book ends becauseI'm not far from the end, but I didn't
quite finish it before we recorded.
But honestly, it's not a... It's notan, you know, it doesn't make you happy.
Le Vendre de Paris is very... even thoughit finishes badly, but there's more
optimism in it, more kind of rejoicing inthe food, and the artisans, and the work.
(59:08):
I, personally, I think that ' Germinal'may be one of the most abordable ones,
because even though it's grim in talkingabout the conditions of the miners, it's
something that even today we can relate toin terms of parts of the world and things
like that, and you can really get a feelof the fight between the miners and their
families and the people who run the mines.
(59:31):
The unions and the bosses.
And really, we should do an episodeabout the mining history in France.
We should.
Yes, and before I will rereadGerminal, because that's really
the standard description of that.
And just one last little thingthat has to do with the family.
It was his wife, after he died, whoabsolutely insisted and helped the other
(59:55):
woman, make sure that her children,they not only inherited his money, but
that they were legally given the nameof Zola, and it was her idea finally.
She said that that was what he wouldhave wanted, and that was her final
tribute to her husband, to make surethat the courts changed the last
name of the children so that theybecame Zolas, and they lived into the
(01:00:19):
20th century and both had children.
Right, because back then if your daddidn't recognize you, you had no rights.
You had no rights.
But by now, that's not how it works, and Ithink she definitely did the right thing.
She did the right thing.
You know, she knew who thesechildren were and that's life.
And just, I have to say that with all thisresearch and all this reading, I don't
(01:00:41):
know how much I love his work, but I thinkhe must've been an incredibly great man.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Elyse.
That was really fascinating.
You are welcome, Annie.
It certainly was for us to do.
Au revoir.
Bye.
(01:01:02):
The Join Us in France travelpodcast is written, hosted, and
produced by Annie Sargent, andCopyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance.
It is released under a CreativeCommons attribution, non-commercial,
no derivatives license.
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