Realism and Naturalism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, many French novelists had grown tired of Romantic heroes and sweeping emotion, and wanted to describe society as it was: its money, its provincial towns, its marriages, its factories and its slums. The movement was called Realism, and its more scientific offshoot, Naturalism, treated the novel almost as a laboratory. This chapter follows that tradition from Balzac to Zola, and ends with the moment when a novelist's open letter on the front page of a newspaper helped reopen one of the most divisive cases in French history. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked. The chapter reports the Dreyfus affair as history and does not treat it as a matter on which there are two sides to the facts.

Balzac and the Human Comedy

Honoré de Balzac (1799 to 1850) set out to portray the whole of French society in a connected series of novels and stories, which he called La Comédie humaine, "the human comedy" (check the details). It contains dozens of works, and many characters reappear from one book to another (check the number, which varies by count). Le Père Goriot (1835), the story of a father ruined by his two daughters and the ambitious young man who watches, is among the most read (check). Balzac wrote at tremendous speed, fuelled, it is said, by large amounts of coffee (check, since the story is much repeated). His subject was money, ambition and the way society shapes character.

Flaubert and Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880) is famous for his search for the exact word, le mot juste, and for the long labour he put into each sentence (check the phrase and its attribution). His novel Madame Bovary, published in instalments in a journal in 1856 and 1857, follows the wife of a provincial doctor whose romantic dreams, fed by novels, lead to adultery, debt and suicide (check the details). The book was prosecuted for offending public morals, and Flaubert and his publisher were tried in 1857 and acquitted (check). The trial made the book famous.

Zola and Naturalism

Émile Zola (1840 to 1902) took Realism further. He argued that the novelist should study society as a scientist studies nature, observing how heredity and environment shape people (check the description). His main project was a cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, following one family through the Second Empire, published between 1871 and 1893 (check the details). The best known include L'Assommoir, about alcoholism in a working-class district, and Germinal (1885), about a coal miners' strike (check the dates). Zola researched his books closely, visiting mines, markets and slums. His books were controversial for their frankness, and their sympathy for working people.

The Dreyfus Affair and J'accuse

In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a French army captain who was Jewish, was convicted of passing secrets to Germany and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil's Island, off the coast of South America (check the details). Evidence soon emerged that the real culprit was another officer, but the army resisted reopening the case, and France divided bitterly into those who wanted a retrial and those who defended the army. Antisemitism was a major force in the affair (check the extent). On 13 January 1898 Zola published an open letter to the president of the Republic in the newspaper L'Aurore, under the headline J'accuse, "I accuse", naming officers and officials he believed were responsible for the injustice (check the date and the details).

Exercises

Next chapter: Poetry From Baudelaire to Surrealism, which covers Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire and Breton.