From Decadence to Health: Zola's Paris

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reassessment of Zola's Paris (1898), the last volume of his trilogy Les Trois Villes and an often misunderstood portrayal of fin-de-siècle French society. Placing it in the context of Decadent and Symbolist literature with which it is contemporaneous, I argue that far from being naive and strangely out of place in the literary and intellectual climate of the 1890s, as certain critics have suggested, the novel engages ironically with Decadent and Symbolist topoï through an extensive use of pastiche and self-pastiche. Rather than discrediting Paris, we should understand it as a reaction to the challenge the Decadent movement presented to Naturalism, and more widely, as an attempt to overcome the intellectual mood of pessimism and despair we generally associate with Decadence. Its reaction to Decadence and its enthusiastic embrace of the dawning twentieth century in the final chapter make it a seminal example of the 'Classical Naturalism' of Zola's final years.