Zola and the Physical Geography of War

ABSTRACT

Émile Zola’s account of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, La Débâcle (1892), provides the basis for an account of the way in which the literary language of war speaks to the physical geography of mimetic fiction as broadly conceived, and in particular its precise concern for mud, earth, soil, and its wider concern for land and its borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Zola
• Second Empire
• Third Republic
• La Terre
• La Débâcle
• Les Rougon-Macquart
• Peter Brooks
• Robert Ziegler
• Eugen Weber
• mud
• land
• frontiers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nicholas White is Reader in Modern French Literature in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is the author of The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and of French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War (Legenda, 2013), and he has edited seven volumes of essays and translations, including special numbers on Zola for Romanic Review and Les Cahiers naturalistes. He is the Principal Investigator for the AHRC network on ‘The Art of Friendship in France from the Revolution to the First World War’.

ORCID

Nicholas White http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3396-1700

Notes

1 The intellectual elasticity of Robert Ziegler’s outstanding critical contribution to the scholarly field of late nineteenth-century French fiction – and particularly his penchants for psychoanalysis and for Decadence – have inspired this largely historicist reading of La Débâcle.

2 Maurice and his twin sister Henriette are weaned on the Bonapartist mythology, each sitting as children on the knee of their grandfather, a soldier from the Grande Armée who recounted for them endless Homeric tales of battles won by ‘le dieu Napoléon’ (1960–67, V: 447).

3 If the defeat at Sedan incarnates the débâcle of the Second Empire, then the semantically and phonically proximitous débauche is repeated in the final chapter of the novel in association with the urban degeneracy which precedes the purificatory zeal of the Commune. In the free indirect discourse emanating from Otto Gunther, cousin of Maurice and Henriette, Paris is said to burn ‘en punition de ses siècles de vie mauvaise, du long amas de ses crimes et de ses débauches’ (1960–67, V: 887). A delirious Maurice will then attach this plural to the specific sins of the Second Empire: ‘il évoquait les galas de Gomorrhe et de Sodome, […] les palais crevant de telles débauches’ (894). The battle of Sedan served to unify Germany of course, as celebrated in the subsequent annual Sedanstag, reflecting the powerful contrast of a country that underwent fragmentation after this battle (France) against that of a country that became ‘whole’ (Germany), and this thanks to the unstable status of the earth: dry (as ink on the map) in France, then wet in that indecisive stage of battle, then dry again as it solidifies within the new frontiers of another territory, Germany. The association of battle and mud is articulated in the very title of Gary Cox’s (1994), The Halt in the Mud.

4 For instance, Gullan and Cranston: ‘Visual deception may reduce the probability of being found by a natural enemy. A well-concealed cryptic insect that either resembles its general background or an inedible (neutral) object may be said to “mimic” its surroundings. […]’ (2010: 366–67).

5 Mud itself is, in fact, also an art historical term, either an insult as in Zola’s analysis of Cabanel’s 1880 salon painting Phèdre – ‘d’une tonalité morne où les couleurs vives s’attristent elles-mêmes et tournent à la boue’ (1969: 1025) – or a Baudelairean challenge to be met, as in the claim attributed by Signac to Delacroix: ‘Une phrase attribuée à Delacroix formule bien ses efforts: "Donnez-moi la boue des rues, déclarait-il, et j’en ferai de la chair de femme d’une teinte délicieuse", voulant dire que, par le contraste d’autres couleurs intenses, il modifierait cette boue et la colorerait à son gré’ (1911: 47).

6 In her nine essays, Hurd (2008) explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Her forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for reflections on mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In her observations of these muddy environments, she finds ample metaphor for human creativity, imagination, and fear.

7 Maria Scott argues for the specificity of Stendhalian mud within the French realist project: ‘mud tends to be presented in Realist texts as a transparent symbol, but, as the example of Stendhal (1964) suggests, Realist mud can also occasionally reveal glitches in the symbolization process and, consequently, glimpses of the Real. It can do this by resisting straightforward metaphorical transformation, as in the novel mirror passage from Le Rouge et le Noir, or by being perceived in a confused way before being interpreted, as in the Waterloo section of La Chartreuse de Parme. In Lucien Leuwen, and most schematically in the aftermath of the Blois episode, mud is thematically associated with a failure of symbolization, of narcissism and of idealization, and with that anxiety and compulsion to repeat that, for Lacan, point to the excessive proximity of the Real’ (2012: 24).

8 Amidst all the interdisciplinary connections privileged by nineteenth-century French studies, geography often stands underprivileged in spite of our shared fascination for place. An important exception to this lacuna lies in Kristin Ross’s (2007) work on Arthur Rimbaud and the Commune, which foregrounds the work of Reclus. She has tracked better than most the alignment of literary and geographical discourses of the period. As she teaches us, geography as a university discipline in France was essentially created in the 1870s by the likes of Émile Levasseur and Paul Vidal de la Blache.