Zola, ÉMILE, the most celebrated, if not the best, French novelist of the last quarter of the 19th century, is not a Frenchman by extraction, his father having been an Italian engineer, who, however, executed works in France. The son was born in Paris on 2d April 1840, but passed most of his early life in Provence, returning to the capital for his school education. His father had died when he was a small boy, and when he left school he entered the publishing house of Hachette as a clerk. He became an active journalist pretty early, and engaged not merely in fiction, but in criticism both of art and literature. Here he was almost uniformly unfortunate—indeed the rather silly title, Mes Haines, under which his chief critical articles have been reprinted, shows his weakness; for you do not become or continue a critic by hating, but by loving. Like other journalists, he had to deal with politics, and was not much more fortunate here; while later he attempted the drama with equal lack of success. The truth is that M. Zola, for good or for ill, was a novelist born: and after early beginning his immense work in this department he by degrees confined himself to it. It is not a little noteworthy that among his earliest work figure the charming Contes à Ninon, collected and published when he was four-and-twenty, which have none of the faults of his later and larger works, and have sometimes been thought, not always by the least competent critics, to show him at his very best. This faculty for short stories showed itself again and again in Nouveaux Contes à Ninon, published ten years later (1874), in the still more recent collections, entitled from their chief tales Le Capitaine Burle and Nais Micoulin, and most of all in the splendid Attaque du Moulin, the first piece of a collection of stories by himself and his chief disciples entitled Les Soirées de Médan (M. Zola's country house), and published in the year 1880. Long before this latter date, however, the author had become one of the most prominent and contested figures in the French literature of his day. In the later years of the empire he had formed with Flaubert, Daudet, the Goncourts, and the Russian novelist Turgeneff a sort of informal society, which discussed all things literary, and which tended in the persons of its younger members to form what is called the Naturalist school—a name, of which, in contradistinction to 'Realist,' M. Zola claims the copyright. Among other works he published in 1867 a book, Thérèse Raquin, in which again others have seen his greatest work, and which certainly is a very powerful and remarkable picture of the effects of remorse.
But it was not until after the war that, in imitation to a certain extent of Balzac, he began the great series of novels generally called Les Rougon-Macquart. It is seldom that two years have passed without an addition to this series, which now contains, with branches and complements, a score or so of volumes, not proceeding in strict chronological order, but all connected by the appearance, more or less, of the same or different members of the family. This singular collection of books is, in the strictest sense, a collection of novels with a purpose—or with several purposes. It is a curious fact that the southern nations, which have originated few of the scientific or philosophical ideas of these later ages, have seized hold of them with a rather undisciplined avidity. The two 'mother-ideas' of M. Zola's Comédie Naturaliste, or as some would unkindly say, 'Comédie Bestiale,' have been the idea of heredity and the idea of a certain cerebral infirmity, which determines in different ways the fate of individuals. But in working this theory into practice M. Zola has imported a notable difference. It has been his intention to apply it in the widest manner to the study of the document humain—the records real or supposed of actual lives—and in order to do this he has taken the most extraordinary pains to master the technical details of most professions, occupations, and crafts, together with the history of recent and actual events in France. He began with a sort of general sketch and introduction called La Fortune des Rougon, and then he diverged into specialist paths. La Curée and Son Excellence Eugène Rougon dealt, or were supposed by the author to deal, with the society and official life of the later days of the Second Empire. La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret attacked the life of the country clergy and the results of celibacy, and, like La Conquête de Plassaus, a vivid study of provincial life, has some special admirers. Le Ventre de Paris busied itself with the lowest, or almost the lowest, strata of the Parisian population, the life-history of the halles or markets—a theme which was later and somewhat differently treated in the most famous of the author's earlier works, L'Assommoir, a book specially depicting the vice of drunkenness; in Pot-Bouille, which dealt with the lower bourgeoisie and their servants; in Au Bonheur des Dames, which handled shops. Une Page d'Amour (much affected by some) and La Joie de Vivre (not successful as a whole, but very powerful in parts) were more generally and ambitiously human. Nana, the 'success of scandal' of the whole, was devoted exclusively to the cult of that great goddess, Lubricity, of whom we have all heard, and who certainly has her followers in France and elsewhere. L'Œuvre, the opening of which, at least, obtained praise from critics not very fond of him, dealt with art and literature. La Terre (the beastliest of the whole, unless that proud pre-eminence be allotted to Germinal, which dealt with mining) was conse- crated to the French peasant. La Bête Humaine contains much minute information as to the working of railways; Le Rêve displayed a remarkable acquaintance with the details of church ritual; L'Argent exploited financial crashes; and La Débâcle grappled with the great disaster of 1870. Dr Pascal (1893) is 'a story of the emotions'; Lourdes (1894), dealing with faith-healing, can hardly be described as a novel; Rome (1896) is an elaborate (and critical) study of the Papal court and its surroundings; and this trilogy includes a volume entitled Paris (1898). Fecondité was a work of 1899. M. Zola has repeatedly been a candidate for a chair in the Academy.
No space at command here would suffice to criticise in detail M. Zola's books, or to set forth, except in shorthand, the objections which have been taken to them, and the replies which have been made to the objections. We must content ourselves with the 'heads' of both. The panegyrists of M. Zola say that convention had reigned long enough in literature; that it was time for an uncompromising and scientific view of human nature to take the place of superficial observation and romantic idealism; and that M. Zola has heralded and led this transformation with extraordinary vigour and skill. The adversary has urged from the beginning (and, while fully admitting the immense industry and remarkable power of the novelist, continues to urge) that his whole conception of art and nature is radically wrong. It is pointed out that M. Zola in the first place seems to confine his attention, by preference and deliberation, to sides of human nature which, though admittedly existent, are intermittent and exceptional; that where he attempts other sides, as in Le Rêve, he is more conventional and unreal than the most clair-de-lune sentimentalist; that he has no notion or grasp of human nature as a whole. It is further urged that his attempt to turn the encyclopædia into a novel, and to load his books with technical information, leads occasionally to blunders which do not very much matter, and constantly to a stiff and inartistic presentation which matters very much.
In 1897 M. Zola came conspicuously before his country and the world as a sufferer for conscience' sake. He took up with splendid courage the cause of Captain Dreyfus (q.v.), impeached the military methods, declared the trial unfair and the result a scandal, denounced anti-Semitism, and maintained the innocence of Dreyfus. M. Zola was tried and found guilty, but the verdict was annulled on technical grounds; condemned on a second trial to twelve months' imprisonment and a fine of 3000 francs, he escaped to England, but returned after the decision of the Cour de Cassation in 1899. He opposed (in vain) as unjust to the innocent the amnesty law of 1900, meant to bring to an end all the causes connected with Dreyfus.
See studies by Sherard (1893), Toudouze (Paris, 1896), and Vizetelly.