Émile Zola's Volatile Utopia

Abstract

The essay explores the role played by anarchist thinking on Zola's utopian city in Travail (1901). While Zola did not consider anarchism to be a viable political ideology for the ideal city portrayed in the novel, he found it to be a revelatory model for its artistic culture. Drawing from anarchist agitator Peter Kropotkin, Zola conceived of the residential area as the antithesis of the city center. This essay will examine the contradictory facets in this piece of early twentieth-century utopian fiction, and, through this lens, will consider the more salient tensions in modernist utopias as a whole.

Notes

1. “Je ne sais pas d'autre bombe qu'un livre.” The translation, which deviates slightly from the original, is my own. See: Pamela A. Genova, Symbolist Journals (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 51.

2. “Aux époque troublées, la folie souffle, et la guillotine pourra encore moins qu'un idéal nouveau.” The translation has been borrowed from Genova, Symbolist Journals (see note 1), 51. All further translations in this essay are my own unless indicated otherwise.

3. I would like to thank Mary McLeod and Cesare Birignani for their valuable comments on this piece. I would also like to thank Marc Pitre at the Canadian Centre for Architecture for his advise on image permissions and for his help with photographic reproductions.

4. Armand Lanoux, Bonjour Monsieur Zola (Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1954), 379.

5. Shirley W. Vinhall remarks that Marinetti's passion for machines can be partially attributed to two of Zola's novels, La Bête Humaine and Travail. See Shirley W. Vinhall, “Marinetti, Soffici, and French Literature,” in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 25.

6. Of the many scholarly works that refer to the architectural legacy of Zola's ideal city in Travail the only detailed discussion of the novel is found in Anthony Vidler's essay “The New World: The Reconstruction of Urban Utopia in Late 19th Century France,” Perspecta 13–14 (1971): 243–56, reprinted in The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2011), 244–57.

7. By the mid–nineteenth century the word utopian became an accusation of flightiness or of lack of realism, a damning charge for a period permeated with materialist and positivist values. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels disparagingly referred to the social thinkers of the early part of that century (men such as Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen) as “social utopians” and derided their “castles in the air” which they felt were lacking a larger historical analysis. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). See also Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1888) and William Morris, News from Nowhere: Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (London: Reeves & Turner, 1891).

8. As Frederick Ivor Case has noted, Zola did not read Fourier directly but acquired his knowledge of Fourier's views from a short pamphlet, Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la Doctrine de Charles Fourier, written by Hippolyte Renaud. This was given to him by Monsieur J. Noirot, who was a friend and collaborator with Jean Baptiste André Godin, founder of the Familistère, an experimental phalanstery in Belgium. See Frederick Ivor Case, La Cité Idéal Dans Travail d'Émile Zola (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 18.

9. Case, La Cité (see note 8), 28.

10. The expansion of train routes was an idea championed by the Saint-Simonians who believed in facilitating global communication in order to bring about an “organic” epoch of world peace.

11. The complete passage reads: “What great work, easy and delicious! Barely a few hours per day of surveillance were needed since these powerful and ingenious machines had ended up having arms and legs like the slaves of old. They lifted mountains and manipulated the most delicate of objects, shaping them with infinite care. They walked and obeyed like beings ignorant of their own suffering, wearing themselves out without tiring. Thanks to the machine, man had accomplished the conquering of nature, and had made it its servant and its paradise.” Émile Zola, Travail (Paris: Harmattan, 1993), 643.

12. Zola, Travail (see note 11), 643.

13. Ibid., ii.

14. Only from a clean slate can the anarchist imagine rebuilding. Lange explained: “there are too many poor inhabitants suffering and one of these mornings we will have to blow up Beauclair in order to properly rebuild … one fine day … we are strolling down all the streets and there is a bomb hidden in each cooking pot, we drop one off at the governmental offices, another at the town hall, one at the courthouse, one more at the prison, and one at the church, one at each place where there is an institution of authority needing to be destroyed. The slow burning wicks give us the needed time. And then, all of a sudden, Beauclair bursts, a terrifying volcanic eruption burns it down and eradicates it.” Zola, Travail (see note 11), 191.

15. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The Anarchists: Their Faith and Their Record (Edinburgh: Turnbull and Spears Printers, 1911), ch. 8. Vizetelly was also responsible for translating Travail into English in 1901. Interestingly, Vizetelly explains that at age sixteen Émile Henry received a grant for admission to the École Polytechnique, an opportunity he turned down due to his opposition to militarism. He later entered into an apprenticeship with a clockmaker and finally entered employment as a sculptor of ornamental work. Apparently it was during this period of his career that Henry turned to a virulent strain of anarchism.

16. Ibid., 283.

17. Cited and translated by Genova, Symbolist Journals (see note 1), 50.

18. The fierce sense of individuality in fin-de-siècle Parisian culture is the subject of Debora Silverman's brilliant essay “The 1889 Exhibition: The Crisis of Bourgeois Individualism,” Oppositions 8 (Spring 1977): 71–91.

19. Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 125.

20. Ibid., 604.

21. Zola's Travail, it should be noted, appeared two years before the French translations of Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow and Camillo Sitte's Der Städtebau Nach Seinen Künstlerischen Grundsätzen, both translated into French in 1902.

22. Zola, Travail (see note 11), 591.

23. Ibid., 590.

24. Frantz Jourdain (1847–1935) was at the center of the Parisian architectural world for well over three decades. His sharp criticisms of the École des Beaux-Arts (which he had attended in the 1860s) drew wide attention and launched him as an architectural critic of note during the fin-de-siècle period. Jourdain's theories on decoration and structure, which he believed were consistent with those of Henri Labrouste and Viollet-le-Duc, were displayed in his most ambitious built project, a large art nouveau department store facing the Seine (La Samaritaine). See Meredith Clausen, Frantz Jourdain and the Samaritaine: Art Nouveau Theory and Criticism (Leiden: Brill, 1987) and Arlette Barré-Despond, Jourdain: Frantz 1847-1935, Francis 1876-1958, Frantz-Philippe 1906–1990 (New York: Rizzoli, 1991).

25. Frantz Jourdain, “L'École des Beaux-Arts,” Revue de l'Époque 1 (October–November 1894): n.p.

26. Frantz Jourdain, “L'Indépendance en Art,” Le Livre Vert 3 (December 1896), reprinted in Frantz Jourdain, De Choses et d'Autres (1902), 155-158.

27. Ibid.

28. See César Daly, “De la Liberté dans l'Art,” Revue de l'Architecture et des Travaux Publics 7 (1847): 392–408.

29. Jourdain, “L'École des Beaux-Arts” (see note 24), 366.

30. Jourdain explained this idea in the preface to the publication of Charles Garnier's exhibition L'Histoire de l'Habitation Humaine held at the Paris universal exposition in 1889. See Charles Garnier, L'Histoire de l'Habitation Humaine (Paris: Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1889).

31. According to Jourdain, decoration acted as a kind of social leveler and gave as much voice to the lowly proletarian as the idle rich. Jourdain explained: “For a long time we have attributed to decoration the significance of luxury, wealth, majesty that it does not possess. In reality, decoration remains at the disposal of all, the insignificant and the great, the humble and the powerful, the workers and the princes, the bourgeois and the artists, the savages and the civilized. We would not be able to define where exactly it begins and where it ends, and we would not dare restrict it to any given role or function. Its domain extends so far that it seems impossible to assign limits to it.” Frantz Jourdain, “La Décoration et la Campagne,” in Des Choses et d'Autres (note 25), 197–198.

32. Jourdain, “L'Indépendance en Art” (note 25), 155–56.

33. One such instance in which commercial and artistic aims coincided was the erection of a mural painting by M. Toché on one of the façades of the old building housing the store La Samaritaine. Frantz Jourdain, “L'Art dans la Rue,” La Revue des Arts Décoratifs (1891–92): 211-214.

34. Meredith Clausen, Frantz Jourdain and the Samaritaine of 1905, Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (1972), 125.

35. Roger Marx, “La Décoration Architecturale et les Industries d'Art à l'Exposition Universelle de 1889,” Revue des Arts Décoratifs (note 32), 36.

36. Ibid., 39.

37. See Atsuko Nakai, “Architecture et Littérature: L'Influence Réciproque entre Émile Zola et Frantz Jourdain,” Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture 2, no. 4 (2000): 547–83.

38. The architects, Zola explained, “built immense and superb palaces for the people, made in the image of the people of a scale and a majesty that was as varied as the multitudes, with the adorable fantasies of the thousands of voices that they summarized.” Zola, Travail (note 11), 644.

39. The complete citation reads: “Écoeurant. Écoeuré, LE BON AMATEUR D'ART DIT: Il faut retourner à la nature. La nature est belle parce qu'elle est sensible. Et par un syllogisme impeccable, on conclut: ‘la nature' c'est le travail à la main, parce que la main est sensible et du reste la main est naturelle. Travail tout à la main: face aux produits innombrables de l'industrie, produits de la machine, voici la parade: travail à la main. Mystique. Évocation de Bernard Palissy. Invention des coulées en émaux. Le hasard du four, c'est la nature; la coulée d'émail qui rate, c'est la nature: culte des ‘ratées’.” Le Corbusier, L'Art Décoratif d'Aujourd'hui (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 61.

40. One thinks of Constant Nieuwenhuys's New Babylon, which challenged the productive efficiency of the city at large, and, with the radical impermanence of its internal spatial configuration, divorced habitation from its dependence on habit.

41. Or, to use a contemporary designation for such wholly distinct experiences, one can see the discrepancy as one between smooth and striated space. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500.

42. It is interesting to note that while mid-century modernist city plans such as Le Corbusier's plan for Chandigarh and Lúcio Costa's plan for Brasília projected a unified geometrical order, they did not properly account for subsequent growth, and, in the case of Brasília, for the proper housing of workers that built the city. Today, both cities have had the geometrical idealism of their plans significantly challenged by the vast sectors (in the case of Chandigarh) and outer rings (in the case of Brasilia) of unplanned and informal housing. This was also the case in Paris where Haussmann's dramatic modernization produced large “zones” of squatter settlements beyond the 1844 fortifications of the city. One wonders if Zola, an attentive critic of Second Empire Parisian culture, might have considered the stark contrast produced by Haussmann's Paris when he conceived of Beauclair's disjunctive plan.