1887 (November) Publication of
La Terre,
a frank portrayal of peasant life. Five young writers, claiming to be ‘disciples’ of Zola, sign a manifesto in
Le Figaro
against the novel. Publication of the French translation of Lombroso’s
L ’Uomo delinquente.
1888 (April) ‘Jack the Ripper’ commits the first of a series of murders in the East End of London. (October) Publication of Le
Rêve.
Jeanne Rozerot becomes Zola’s mistress. Publication in France of Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov.
1889 (5 May) Begins writing
La Bête humaine
at Médan. (20 September) Birth of Denise, daughter of Zola and Jeanne Rozerot. (14 November) The first three chapters of
La Bête humaine
appear in La Vie
populaire.
International exhibition in Paris (‘Exposition Universelle’).
1890 (March) The final chapters of
La Bête humaine
appear in
La Vie populaire,
and the novel is published in book form by Charpentier.
1891 (March) Publication
of L’Argent.
(25 September) Birth of Jacques, son of Zola and Jeanne.
1892 (June) Publication of La
Débâcle,
an account of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.
1893 (July) Publication of
Le Docteur Pascal,
the final novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. Zola visits London as the guest of the Institute of Journalists and attends a banquet in his honour at the Crystal Palace.
1894 Zola begins a trilogy of novels called
Les Trois Villes
about a priest who turns away from Catholicism in search of a more humanitarian creed. The trilogy comprises
Lourdes
(1894),
Rome
(1896) and Paris (1898). In December a Jewish officer in the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, is convicted by court martial of spying and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island.
1897New evidence suggests that Dreyfus has been wrongly convicted. Zola publishes three articles in
Le Figaro
demanding a retrial.
1898 (13 January) Zola’s article ‘J’accuse‘, written in support of Dreyfus and addressed to Félix Faure, President of the Republic, is published in
L’Aurore.
(21 February) Zola is found guilty of libelling the Minister of War and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000francs. Zola appeals against this sentence but on 18 July, before the appeal is heard, he leaves France for London, where he spends a year in exile.
1899 (4 June) Returns to France. Begins a series of four novels,
Les Quatre Évangiles.
The series remained unfinished at his death.
1902 (29 September) Dies from asphyxiation as the result of the chimney of his bedroom stove being blocked. It is still widely believed that he was assassinated by anti-Dreyfusards.
1908 (4 June) Zola’s remains transferred to the Panthéon.
Introduction
This introduction refers to the novel by its original French
title, La Bête humaine. New readers are advised that the
introduction and the notes which appear at the end of the
book make details of the plot explicit.
La Bête humaine
is the seventeenth in the series of twenty novels which Zola wrote under the collective title
Les Rougon-Macquart.
Zola’s overall purpose in this huge undertaking, as announced by its sub-title, was to depict ‘the Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’.
La Bête humaine
contributes to this family history and continues Zola’s exploration of heredity and social conditioning, but it can be perfectly well read as a novel in its own right. Indeed it is as powerful and dramatic a narrative as any of the other novels in the series. It tells a story of sexual abuse, adultery, murder and suicide. This sombre catalogue of crime and misfortune is set against a background of deeply embedded political corruption which ensures that the voice of justice is silenced, that wickedness goes undetected and that violence is allowed to breed violence. The novel exposes a world of savagery and hypocrisy concealed behind a façade of progressive innovation and social refinement. Its bleak, uncompromising message challenged readers of Zola’s generation, as it challenges readers of today, to seek a clearer understanding of social malignity and to find better ways of dealing with it.
Zola began writing the novel on 5 May 1889 at his country house at Médan and finished it in Paris less than nine months later, on 18 January 1890. He had spent a considerable amount of time and effort in preparing the novel,
1
yet the speed at which it was actually written is remarkable, especially when one considers that during this period he also moved house, continued to write articles for newspapers, was conducting a clandestine love affair and was called upon to do a stint of jury service at the Palais de Justice. The novel was first published in serialized form in the illustrated weekly magazine
La Vie populaire,
the first three chapters appearing on 14 November 1889 and the final instalments on 2 March 1890. The magazine paid Zola 20,000 francs for the serial rights. It appeared in book form immediately afterwards, published by Charpentier in March 1890, and very quickly sold 60,000 copies.
This was not the first time that Zola had written about murder. On 24 December 1866
Le Figaro
had published his short story ‘Un Mariage d’amour’, a tale of adultery in which a husband who proves an obstacle to his wife’s amorous adventures is drowned by the two thwarted lovers in the Seine. A more substantial account of murder, again in the context of an adulterous love affair and again incorporating the drowning of the husband, occurs in the novel
Thérèse Raquin,
which had appeared in 1867.
Thérèse Raquin
does not belong to the
Rougon-Macquart
cycle, yet in the prominence it gives to sexually related violence and in the macabre, nightmarish quality of some of the episodes it contains it has as strong an affinity with
La Bête humaine
as any of the
Rougon-Macquart
novels. In his preface to the second edition of
Thérèse Raquin
in 1868, Zola refers to the bestial, soulless character of his two murderers. ’Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more ... the soul is entirely absent ... The murder they commit is the outcome of their adultery, an outcome that they accept as wolves accept the killing of a sheep.‘
2
In the same year, writing as a journalist for
La Tribune,
Zola had also contributed an article on the trial in Marseille of three women accused of poisoning. ’It is good,‘ he says, referring to the trial, ’that human depravity is sometimes paraded before the public. Novelists are often accused of simply taking pleasure in such infamous acts. On the contrary, by making discussion of such crimes public they perform the same service as a court of law.’
3
In the same article he makes the point that a novelist wishing to portray the bestial side of human nature could not have invented characters of a more instinctively criminal disposition.
At an early stage in his planning of the Rougon-Macquart cycle Zola had made provision for including a novel about crime and the law. The eminent critic and literary historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-93), whose opinion Zola had sought in connection with
Thérèse Raquin,
had urged him to reach beyond the closet world of private, domestic conflict and to write novels which, in the manner of Honoré de Balzac’s (1799- 1850)
La Comédie humaine,
would be a mirror of society. Taine’s advice undoubtedly prompted Zola to broaden the scope of his family history. The novels would still focus upon individual members of the Rougon-Macquart family and describe their personal fortunes, but they would also be directed outwards to demonstrate the social context in which these personal stories occurred. The series, when completed, would offer a panoramic view of Second Empire society as a whole.
Crime and the law being one of the many ‘inner’ worlds which went to form the larger, corporate world of the Second Empire, Zola had decided that it would be given a place of its own. Writing to his publisher, Lacroix, in 1868, Zola included in the list of ten novels that he initially envisaged as making up the series a novel set against the background of the law courts. Although at this stage Zola provided no details of plot, he had decided that the hero of the novel would be Étienne Lantier, whom he describes as ‘one of those born criminals who, although not mad, are suddenly driven by some animal instinct to commit murder’.
4
The idea that murder is a product of some ‘animal instinct’ echoes Zola’s comments on
Thérèse Raquin
and the three women accused of poisoning in Marseille. But he now goes further; he sees Étienne Lantier’s propensity for crime as something which may also be explained by reference to heredity. Zola had situated Étienne Lantier on the illegitimate branch of the original Rougon-Macquart family tree, a fourth-generation descendant of the drunken smuggler Macquart and the neurotic and eventually insane Adélaïde Fouque. But by the time Zola came to write
La Bête humaine
some twenty years later, Étienne Lantier had been given a prominent role in another novel,
Germinal
(where he figures as the leader of a miners’ strike and does in fact commit murder) and was ear-marked for a role in the final novel in the series,
Le Docteur Pascal.
Zola needed a different protagonist for his novel about crime and he provided Étienne with an older brother, Jacques, a late addition to the Rougon-Macquart family tree, but one which ensured that his new hero would have the same degenerate forebears as his predecessor. Jacques Lantier, like his brother, would be a ‘born criminal’.
Zola’s thinking about crime during the period immediately preceding the writing of
La Bête humaine
was influenced by his reading of a number of recently published studies in criminology. The most notable of these was a work by the Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909),
L‘Uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man).
Originally written in 1876, it had been translated into French as
L’Homme criminel
in
1887
. Zola had read it carefully. Lombroso argued that most criminals were ‘born criminals’, drawn to crime by an atavistic instinct and by pathological characteristics which were often discernible in their physical appearance. Basing his account on a study of the physical characteristics of convicted criminals, he identified various ‘abnormalities’ (pronounced lower jaw, oversized hands, low forehead) which he claimed indicated a biological regression to a primitive animal state and even a predisposition to certain types of crime. A year before the appearance of the French translation of
L’Uomo delinquente,
the French criminologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) had published his
La Criminalité comparée (Comparative Criminology).
Tarde had read Lombroso’s work in the original Italian and sought to challenge the assumptions that he was making. Criminals, he argued, were not just ‘born’; nor could they be regarded as a purely biological throw-back to a primitive form of existence. Heredity and social environment also contributed to the making of the criminal. If the criminal displayed what might be termed ‘regressive’ patterns of behaviour, it was because the circumstances of birth and upbringing had upset the normal balance of inherited characteristics relating to the past history of the species. Tarde also insisted that whilst the human race had advanced intellectually and technologically, its moral development lagged far behind. Atavistic impulses had adapted themselves to changing conditions and to technological progress. Tarde had worked as a judge’s assistant and as an examining magistrate at Sarlat, in the Périgord, since 1867. His
Comparative Criminology
was written out of twenty years of practical experience of criminal investigation and it also had a practical objective. Tarde was concerned to ensure that the administration of justice did not consist merely in the application of summary sentences but that each case would be judged with reference to all the particularities of character and circumstance that attended it.
Echoes of this criminological debate are sensed in a number of ways in
La Bête humaine.
Most obvious is the suggestion, introduced early in the novel, that Jacques’s urge to kill is an atavistic impulse whose origins are lost in the remote past. ‘Was this the swollen legacy of a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave?’ Jacques asks himself (II). The question is never resolved. It returns insistently throughout the novel, tormenting Jacques’s conscience and calling for the reader’s attention. Yet however remote its possible origins, Jacques’s urge to kill is also perceived as the legacy of a more recent past, an unwanted bequest from the family of drunkards and delinquents into which he has been born and whose tainted blood he has inherited. Jacques gloomily reflects on the generations of Macquarts and Lantiers that have preceded him. ‘It couldn’t really be called a normal family. So many of them had some flaw, and he often thought he must have inherited this family flaw himself’ (II). It is this hereditary ‘flaw’ (the French ‘fêlure’ literally means ‘crack’) that allows resentments and obsessions which no longer find room in the conscious memory to seep through the walls of social conditioning into a supposedly more civilized modern world. The notion of heredity acting as a mediating agent for primitive impulse or as a catalyst for some latent genetic disorder is close to the thinking of Tarde.
Some of the physical features which Lombroso had identified as distinguishing marks of the criminal also find their way into Zola’s description of characters in the novel. Roubaud is given a low forehead and short, hairy fingers; Jacques’s otherwise handsome appearance is marred by a pronounced lower jaw. This should not be taken to imply that the novel simply endorses Lombroso’s ideas and reduces the physical appearance of characters to a series of ready-made hallmarks of criminal types. Zola does not allow these supposedly ‘criminal’ features to go unchallenged. When Cabuche stands before the judge at the final trial, accused, according to the examining magistrate’s interpretation of events, not only of murder but of an act of necrophilia, Zola provides him, in a manner that verges on caricature, with the ‘enormous fists and carnivorous jaws’ appropriate to the crime committed. The well-dressed ladies crowding the reserved balcony of the courtroom eager to catch a glimpse of this monster of sexual depravity need no further convincing. Zola ensures, however, that the reader of the novel knows that Cabuche is perfectly innocent. More than this, Cabuche is the one character in the novel who displays any true generosity of spirit. His physical appearance thus belies his true nature; if he lives as a recluse in a hovel in the woods, it is partly because social prejudice against a man of his ‘type’ forces him to do so.