Germinal (1885)
La Bête Humaine (1890)
Émile Zola's reputation as a novelist of the French left rests both on his campaign for justice over the Dreyfus affair and his monumental novel Germinal. To Madame Dreyfus (wife of the Alsatian-Jewish artillery officer who was court-marshalled, controversially, in 1894 for passing military secrets to the German army), Zola wrote: "Once again it is up to us poets to nail the guilty to the eternal pillory." Zola's conception of a writer's political obligation to fight prejudice and oppression landed him a prison sentence that he evaded only through exile in England.
Germinal demonstrates a different kind of political engagement. It is the 13th novel in Zola's 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which he subtitled: A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire. Each novel in the series is discrete but there are blood-ties between the protagonists and Zola intended that, laid side by side, his books would provide a panoramic view of life under Napoleon III.
Germinal, in the naturalist and realist traditions, draws on extensive documentation and research into the exploitation of miners in northern France in the second half of the 19th century. It also fictionalises conversations Zola had with Turgenev about Anarchist challenges to Marx's ideas. But the novel is far from a dry treatise on socialist theory. Instead we follow Étienne Lantier on a journey through the working community that brings him face to face with violence and despair, without ever destroying his belief in a better world.
La Bête Humaine (1890) comes later (17th) in the Rougon-Macquart series, and presents a bleaker view. The novel returns to the theme of sexually-motivated violence that inspired Thérèse Raquin (1867) at the start of Zola's career when he imagined "a powerful man and a dissatisfied woman, to search out the beast in them, and nothing but the beast". In La Bête Humaine, Jacques Lantier (Étienne's elder brother), is beset by a hereditary psychosis that conflates sexual desire with the urge to kill women: "Whereas other boys coming to puberty dream of possessing a woman, the only thing that had excited him was the thought of killing one." This character was largely modelled on Jack the Ripper, whose crimes Zola followed with rapt interest, alongside the author's reading of criminology and the novels of Dostoevsky. Where, Zola asks, does the urge to kill come from?
La Bête Humaine includes five murders, all arising from sexual frustration. It is set in the milieu of the expanding railways that transformed 19th-century France into a better-connected, more integrated nation, but also one in which a criminal might easily flee, travelling anonymously at high speed from one end of the country to the other. France was proud of the Second Empire's technological advances. Zola, more ambivalent, saw the dark side of progress.