INTRODUCTION

La Débâcle, the nineteenth and last but one of the Rougon-Macquart series of novels, the first of which was published in 1871, is in some respects the logical end, the Götter dämmerung, of the great saga of the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire, for the final novel, Le Docteur Pascal, will be largely a clearing-up and killing-off of outstanding questions and characters, ending with a vision of the brave new world of science and progress about to be born. The subject is the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and its destruction on the funeral pyre of the Paris Commune of 1871. Its publication in 1892 was an immense sales success, not only because it was a great war novel and documentary reviving memories in the minds of all but the quite young, but because it was an expression of the painful self-examination still going on in France after the most traumatic humiliation any country had so far received in modern times.

The 1870 war and its sequel in 1871 is one of the watersheds of European history. For a century and a half, from Louis XIV to Napoleon I, the armies of France had ravaged Europe, and the various German states had been invaded, traversed and plundered almost continuously during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But French arrogance overreached itself when Napoleon III deliberately and unnecessarily provoked Prussia and declared war on 15 July 1870. Seven weeks later, on 1 and 2 September, the French suffered a disastrous defeat at Sedan and Napoleon gave himself up to King William. Why such a total calamity? Leaving aside the various political or psychological factors, which are largely a matter of speculation and point of view and tell us more about the judge than the judged, there are the obvious military reasons. France was unprepared; for years the political opposition had bitterly attacked any attempts at modernization of armaments, and of course immediately after defeat was to round on the régime for being unprepared. The Germans had accurate breech-loading guns made by Krupp, with percussion shells. The French muzzleloaders, of which Zola gives a detailed description, fired shells which more often than not burst harmlessly in the air. The French rifle, the chassepot, was good, but the mitrailleuse, an ancestor of the machine-gun, was still on the ‘secret’ list until shortly before mobilization and the army had no experience of how to use it. Technical incompetence and backwardness were made so much more dangerous by the complacency and over-confidence of all in authority, a small example of which was the issue to officers of maps of Germany whereas they had no information on the topography of the difficult mountain terrain of the part of their own country where fighting was bound to occur, and were lured into all sorts of ambushes by highly organized mobile detachments of Germans. And of course rivalries and divided counsels among the commanders were not checked by the weak and sick Emperor. The dash, swagger and bravery of individual French soldiers were no match for the scientific skill and accuracy of the Germans. Flamboyant cavalry charges have no chance against modern technology. In this respect as well as in many others, the 1870 war was the clash of the past and the future, and its lessons were learned by the Germans and ignored by the French.

Zola’s novel is the story of this seven-week war and its sequel, and its connection with the Rougon-Macquart saga is tenuous to the point of unimportance, for Jean Macquart, the hero, serves simply as a point of view, or rather, as one of the many points of view. The Debacle is unique in Zola’s work because it is a strictly historical novel. The other Zola novels may have much factual documentation, some of their characters and incidents may be clearly suggested by known people or events, or the setting may be in a known place described with meticulous accuracy, but the plot is pure invention. The Debacle, on the other hand, is the narrative of a very complicated moment in French history so recent that all the events were clearly remembered by all Zola’s readers over the age of forty, or even younger, and many details could be immediately verified or challenged. When the book appeared in 1892 the events it described were more recent than those of the 1939–45 war are today. Zola could not risk being caught out on a point of fact, date, time or place, and many of the real persons, soldiers or politicians, mentioned in the story were still there, or their representatives were, and could answer back. Now this peculiar necessity for accuracy in reporting events of extreme complexity, many of them simultaneous and apparently confused but cumulatively of inexorable logic, carries with it the danger that the book might become a tedious chronicle of endless to-ings and fro-ings, comings and goings, to say nothing of repetitions and recapitulations, a sort of game of chess with commentary. All the more so because Zola wanted to make all aspects of the national disaster clear – the causes going back into the Second Empire, the mistakes and miscalculations, incompetence and sheer bad luck, with the resulting demoralization of the troops and the effects upon the lives of civilians of all kinds. How does he achieve clearness while avoiding the dullness of the minute-by-minute list of events? Mainly by skill in construction and by frequently changing the point of view, at the risk of seeming specious and contrived. It is as though he felt compelled by the very complexity of his material to present it in an arrangement remarkably regular and symmetrical even by his own standards, for many of his novels have some orderly arrangement of chapters or parts. Here there are three parts, each of eight chapters, and each part is a very distinct act in the drama.

Act I. The trap. From 6 August, near Mulhouse, we follow the movements of the 7th army corps, mostly through the eyes of one squad of its increasingly weary and demoralized soldiers, as it is moved back through Belfort, by train to Paris but immediately forward again to Rheims, its advance as far. as Vouziers, the fatal waste of time there and the false advance and return to Vouziers, then on to Remilly in the Meuse valley and thence into Sedan, surrounded by hills and narrow defiles, every one of which was occupied or dominated by German forces or artillery. And at every stage muddles, supplies sent to wrong places, fuel sent where there was nothing to cook, raw meat where there was no fuel, fodder where there were no horses, guns in one place and ammunition in another, marches and counter-marches. The civilian elements are brought in as the march proceeds, and the exhaustion, hunger and exasperation of the troops become increasingly serious. The stages of this terrible progress from Rheims to Sedan can be followed very easily on the Michelin maps of France, sheets 56 and 53. I have adopted Zola’s method of distinguishing between French and German forces by using arabic figures or roman respectively, e.g. 7th army corps (French), IXth army corps (German).

Act II. The disaster. The battle of Sedan, fought on the outskirts of the town and in surrounding villages. The whole action takes place in just over twenty-four hours, from very early in the morning of 1 September until 6 a.m. on the 2nd. The problem is to see clearly the different actions going on in different neighbourhoods and at the same time what was going on inside the town itself in all its complicated detail and from different points of view, and to keep the eye on all these things as they move on simultaneously towards the inevitable catastrophe in which a huge French army, with its wounded, guns, material and horses, is rolled back into a small town quite incapable of feeding or housing it. See map 1.

Act III. The aftermath. 3 September 1870 until May 1871. First, the horrors of the battlefield and captivity of the whole French army in a loop of the river Meuse, the Iges peninsula, where for a week, mostly in bad weather, they had no shelter, next to no food, and droves of captured horses, maddened by hunger, stampeded continually up and down. Even the river water, polluted by corpses, caused terrible dysentery, and the stench was unbearable. Jean Macquart and his friend Maurice Levasseur, whose family had always lived in the region, eventually escape and go to earth at the farm of the latter’s uncle, where his twin sister Henriette, whose husband has been shot by the Germans, is also living. Maurice goes back to Paris intending to fight on, is caught in the siege of Paris, is fired by the fever of the insurrection, deserts and becomes a Communard. But Jean, whom Maurice had brought to the farm wounded and almost dying, has to stay there in hiding for months while being nursed back to health by Henriette. They grow to love each other, but the full implications of their feelings are unrecognized even by themselves. Ultimately Jean also makes his way to Paris, re-enlists in the regular (Government) army, and fate decrees that Maurice, now a fanatical Communard, is mortally wounded by Jean during the last desperate resistance when the Communards, and various criminal elements posing as such, set fire to the whole of the centre of Paris. The curtain goes down on the holocaust and Jean’s departure, all hope of happiness with Henriette gone, to help build a new France.

Such are the barest bones of the story. But it is clothed with countless incidents, both in military and civilian life, countless authentic facts patiently gathered by Zola, who personally followed out the whole of the route taken in Part I, questioned any local people he could find with personal memories, such as a doctor in Sedan who had helped with the wounded, peasants and notables in and around the town, and in particular Charles Philippoteaux, brother of Auguste Philippoteaux, mayor of Sedan in 1870, and himself mayor of Givonne. He personally conducted Zola to all the places in the battle area and told him of his own glimpse of the Emperor at the farm of Baybel. He is the original of Delaherche, though not necessarily of the latter’s fussy officiousness.

The result is one of the best examples of Zola’s peculiar gift for taking masses of accurate, verifiable facts or documents and breathing into them life and a formal artistic pattern. Each little incident really happened (local tradition has it that everything in the novel is based on fact except the murder of Goliath, which is Zola’s invention), but still the characters are live people with motives and emotions. Zola’s art consists in the arrangement and the aesthetic and symbolical value, even as thousands of single notes are combined by a musical mind into a symphony.

But this formal aspect does raise a question in the reader’s mind: is it not contrived, does not Zola stretch the long arm of coincidence too far for credibility? It may be objected, and with some justification, that everyone happens to run into the appropriate person exactly when the next twist in the story or next pieces in the jigsaw are required, and that therefore many of the ‘fortuitous’ meetings are foreseeable, however improbable in real life. Some may feel that the works are visible if not creakingly audible. That may well be. But it is nearly a thousand years since this island of ours experienced invasion and occupation by a foreign power. The sceptical reader should try to picture, say, the clash of the defending English army with the invading Welsh in and around a small town in a river valley traversing a region of wooded hills, such as Bewdley on the Severn or Ross-on-Wye. All that is then needed is that one English soldier should hail from those parts, have local knowledge and relations and friends still living there, and the rest of the meetings and coincidences must follow in such a restricted environment, where everyone knows everyone else. If you place the small town near a frontier (and the Sedan area has been one of the cockpits of Europe all down the ages), there will be traitors who fraternize with the enemy, locals who see a chance of moneymaking, the underground resistance movements and guerrilla bands, the enemy repressions and penalties. Moreover in a frontier region there are bound to be divided loyalties, families with a foot in both camps, population torn by conflicting linguistic, religious, racial and traditional stresses and strains. Such has always been the painful position of Alsace, Germanic in language and many of its customs, intensely French emotionally, yet often treated with the most tactless lack of understanding by Paris, with its mania for domination and impatience of what it dismisses as la province. In a word, as in any drama, the symbolism, real meaning and significant confrontations are more important to the artist than plausibility in the narrow sense. The subject, after all, is war and how it poisons and deforms all human relationships.

Hence not only the apparent speciousness but also the choice of characters and points of view. In a historical novel it is unwise to challenge real history by placing well-known figures in the principal roles, but it is equally unwise to omit all known historical figures and try to give a slice of life in another period or setting, for that will produce a boring archaeological reconstruction. Zola avoids these traps by introducing Napoleon III, MacMahon, Bazaine, Thiers, Gambetta and many others episodically or indirectly, as seen through the eyes of lesser mortals. But the front-rank characters in the novel are typical soldiers or civilians representing various kinds of victims or beneficiaries of war.

In a sense the principal part is a dual one, a pair incarnating the two eternal and irreconcilable facets of the French national character: Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur. Jean is balanced, reasonable, hard-working, law-abiding and conservative; Maurice is highly intelligent (although his behaviour makes one wonder), but mercurial, brilliant at chicanery and destructive criticism but less so at construction, nervy, dashing, effervescent, but fatally inclined to collapse hysterically under stress. France has ever been thus, one half practising moderation and common sense, the other flying to the most violent extremes. Jean is not young, he is thirty-nine and has been through personal tragedy. He is, though there is little resemblance, brother of the smug, self-centred Lisa Quenu (Le Ventre de Paris) and of the pathetic Gervaise (L’ Assommoir). But the two girls left home early and went to Paris while he stayed in Provence as a carpenter and then served for seven years in the army, after which he became a farm-hand in a horrible village in the Beauce (La Terre). So he has lost touch with them and presumably has never seen his nephews the Lantier boys, Claude (L’ Oeuvre), Jacques (La Bête humaine) and Etienne (Germinal), nor Gervaise’s daughter by Coupeau, the notorious prostitute Nana. On the farm he was bitterly resented as a stranger by the family of the girl he married, and when his wife was brutally murdered by her own sister lest her bit of land should pass to Jean or his children, he left the land, horrified and broken-hearted, and re-enlisted shortly before the outbreak of war. He is perhaps the most healthy and sane member of the whole Rougon-Macquart tribe and certainly by far the best of the Macquarts. Maurice is hardly young either, being twenty-nine, but he was helped and protected by his twin sister, who sacrificed to send him to Paris and train him as a lawyer, and he still behaves as impetuously as a spoilt child. The friendship of these two men is one of the most beautiful human relationships in all Zola’s work. Maurice finds himself in a squad of men under Corporal Macquart. At first there is instinctive aversion and mistrust between the simple peasant and the highbrow intellectual. But Maurice is forced to admire the solid qualities of Jean who in his turn helps Maurice when he is in pain and distress and learns to love him like a brother. Later each saves the life of the other. From then onwards their relationship becomes highly symbolical, as Zola himself is at pains to point out. The two apparently contradictory aspects of France are wedded in this wonderful friendship in which Maurice makes the solid peasant more aware, more sensitive, while Jean makes the brittle, frivolous intellectual deeper and more human. And when this union is torn asunder by the national disaster and Maurice, without his sheet-anchor of common sense, hurls himself into the frenzies of the Commune, Jean, the other France, kills him – accidentally of course – but it symbolizes self-amputation, the cutting out and casting away of a rotten, septic limb which, if retained, would ultimately poison and kill the whole organism.

The other soldiers in the squad are well differentiated types, each heavily charged with symbolism and political significance, possibly a little overdrawn in consequence, but none the less recognizable.

Loubet is the smart-aleck Parisian cockney, a jack of all trades, full of bright ideas and gadgets, the artful dodger but also the wit of the party. Lapoulle is the sheer clodhopper, physically magnificent but slow-witted, amiable and a willing beast of burden, but potentially very dangerous, because he can be cruel and bestial, like the peasants in La Terre, and his invincible ignorance and super-stitiousness make him a tool for the unscrupulous. Pache, also from the country, is the pious one who furtively says his prayers and is the natural butt of the others. Meek and mild and consequently a bad soldier who breaks down under hardship and conceals some food, he is denounced by Chouteau, who significantly leaves the actual murdering, for a crust of bread, to the brutish Lapoulle. Finally Chouteau, who could be described in three words : a bloody-minded skunk. He is the professional agitator and trouble-maker, the political pub-orator, the demonstrator against everything, who never does anything except to feather his own nest. He escapes from a prisoner-of-war column by causing his best friend Loubet to be done to death, predictably turns up in Paris as a fire-raising and looting Communard, but quickly changes his coat when the other side looks like winning. Chouteau is another example of Zola’s consistent hatred and contempt for the violent left-wing agitator type, the thoroughly unsatisfactory workman who is a parasite thriving on the hopes and fears of his fellow-men – Lantier in L’Assommoir, Pluchart in Germinal – who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.

Similarly the officers, almost always seen through the eyes of the common soldiers or civilians, fall naturally into the categories of careerists, like Bourgain-Desfeuilles, or brave, old-fashioned diehards still living out the glories of old France or Napoleon’s Grande Armée, like Rochas and Colonel de Vineuil. Most of the higher officers are real historical figures, shown to be incompetent, ambitious and jealous of each other. On his lonely peak is the Emperor Napoleon III, a puppet driven by forces beyond his control, hounded on by Paris and his megalomaniac Empress, ignored by his own military commanders, in constant pain from a mortal illness, a painted figurehead seeking an honourable end but rejected even by death, finding some sort of dignity and strength only at the end when he insists on surrender to avoid further bloodshed.

Zola’s treatment of the Emperor is a remarkable example of his attempts, all through his career as a novelist, except perhaps in his final, ‘evangelical’ stage, to be as fair as possible even to those with whom he has no ideological sympathy. Just as the anti-Catholic found room to bring in some good Christians and saintly priests in the name of the law of averages, if nothing else, so, although himself politically to the left of centre, he had refused to take the facile black-or-white way of demagogues and, for instance in Germinal, treat all employers as capitalist oppressors and all workers as innocent victims, but had depicted some good and just employers and some lazy and selfish workers. So, once again, in spite of the tendency throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels to attack retrospectively the Second Empire, Zola cannot bring himself, in common fairness, to overlook the personal tragedy of Napoleon III or the criminal hooliganism of many of the Paris Communards, who are out for destruction, loot and personal power and use for their own ends such starry-eyed idealists as Maurice. Not that Zola holds any brief for the Maurice type, for none is more inhumanly bloodthirsty than the blind intellectual fanatic. Lovable though he may be at times, Maurice has in him the stuff of a Robespierre.

It is this all-embracing humanity, perhaps not sufficiently noticed by some critics, Zola’s care to bring in the devotion and beauty of human beings as well as their passions, weaknesses and depravity, that at first sight makes one omission surprising. Here is a novel about soldiers in the demoralizing atmosphere of a campaign, a battle and the subsequent social and political disintegration. Yet although these men are a coarse lot, and some of their language is typically rough, Zola keeps out of their lives almost all sexual behaviour. The man who had recently outraged the respectable with pageants of human lust and bestiality like La Terre and La Bête humaine now, when dealing with soldiers in wartime, a notorious recipe for sexual looseness, reserves such things for civilians, traitors or Germans. The only Frenchman to have a relationship with a woman is carrying on a pre-war affair, and he is killed a few hours after leaving his mistress’s bed. The symbolism of all this hardly needs underlining. Men fighting for their lives not only against the enemy but also against exhaustion, starvation and disease have little inclination for dalliance. That is left to the others.

What of the civilians? They are either innocent victims or motivated by self-interest, and to the latter the war seems either a tiresome interruption of their normal lives or a new chance to do well out of the misfortunes of others. Fouchard, uncle of Maurice and Henriette, will even refuse to sell (let alone give) food or drink to the starving French soldiers because he can get more out of the Germans, yet has the effrontery to claim to be patriotic because he swindles the enemy by selling them rotten meat at exorbitant prices. The mill-owner Delaherche was a Bonapartist before the war and had enthusiastically voted for the régime in the notorious plebiscite, but he becomes disaffected, anti-Bonapartist and potentially pro-German because to go on fighting is so bad for trade. His second wife, Gilberte, is frivolous, promiscuous, irresponsible, exercising her charms on friend and foe alike. A good time is her chief concern.

But Silvine is different. She symbolizes the deepest meaning of the book. In the most gruesome chapter in the whole novel we see her German seducer being slowly bled to death like a pig by the local band of guerrillas brought in to do so by Silvine. She watches it all and their child sees it too. A country violated and laid waste by an invader, or even beaten in war, will never forget and never rest until it has had its revenge. From 1871 until 1914 the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde was shrouded in mourning, and France was to dream of La Revanche. From 1919 until 1939 Hitler’s Germany was to do the same thing the other way round. Such is the futility of war.

In spite of the apparent optimism of the last page, when Jean goes forth to build a new France (and to what end, one might ask, if not to grow strong again and smash the Germans?), this is a profoundly disturbing book in its prophetic vision of the grim realities of the twentieth-century world. All these people are swept along by forces beyond their comprehension and control. Mass movements push the mobs hither and thither, and the individual has little or no freedom or power. Some of the figures in the Commune may possibly have been motivated by patriotic indignation at what they felt was the craven surrender of the Provisional Government of Thiers in the face of Germany’s demands, but they certainly were not concerned with the fact that every day of their theatrical heroics prolonged the agony of millions of other Frenchmen who did not happen to live in Paris. The millions are exploited by violent extremists out for their own ends. Urban guerrilla warfare is the cruellest and most cowardly form of so-called social action, involving blackmail of the worst kind, death of innocent men, women and children, intimidation and murder of hostages, looting and destruction of property and art treasures and the pursuance of purely personal vendettas. It brings out the beast in human beings. In our own age, when destruction, fire-raising and murder in crowded cities, always under the cloak of some high-sounding ideological, social, racial or even religious ideal, has become a part of the daily scene almost boring in its regularity, it is perhaps of interest to see into the workings of one of the earliest examples.

Of course it is possible to have differing views about the Paris Commune. Some see it as a glorious manifestation of the fight of the workers for freedom. Not unexpectedly Karl Marx, in The Civil War in France (1871), proclaims that ‘working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.’ D. W. Brogan, less lyrical but no reactionary, points out that it was essential that the arrogance and tyranny of Paris over all the rest of France be beaten, above all in the interests of universal suffrage and real democracy. Others again see it as a sinister outburst of violent mob hysteria exploited by a few unscrupulous petty politicians for ends known only to themselves. Zola saw it as a degrading exhibition of human bestiality, with unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides, but his protest is against violence, cruelty and destruction in whatever form and from whatever side. But Zola had over these other commentators the advantage that he was there. He saw it all, for he was not only present but a journalist, having returned to Paris a few days before the revolution of 18 March, after a spell of reporting the doings of the Bordeaux government. He even got into trouble twice and in the atmosphere of indiscriminate killing might have lost his life. To that extent The Debacle is an eye-witness account.

One question remains. In spite of his efforts to be fair, and his genuine compassion for Napoleon III as a man, there is little doubt that Zola’s overriding object in this novel is to demonstrate that the collapse of France in 1870–71 was due, as he put it, to the rottenness of the tree. In his view the Second Empire had been doomed for years by its own corruption and inefficiency. Was he right? Was he even being fair? Was he playing the familiar political propaganda game? Or was he influenced by the climate of the time when he was writing the novel, and catering for the fashionable prejudices of 1892, that is to say for the inevitable witch-hunt for scapegoats which follows any national disaster? Let a modern historian express his view:

The reader must decide for himself why in Zola’s novel the ‘intense conservatism of French society in 1871’ is personified in Jean, the intelligent, thoughtful working man.

The text used for this translation is the most recent scholarly one in volume 6 of the Oeuvres complètes of Émile Zola, published under the general editorship of Henri Mitterand, Paris, Cercle du Livre Précieux, Fasquelle, 1967. The text in the paperback Livre de Poche edition, also published by Fasquelle, is very corrupt, with some grotesque misprints and some whole sentences omitted.

Further information about Zola and this intensely interesting period in French and European history can be found in:

It is no mere convention to thank my wife for her tireless help.

October 1971

L. W. T.