‘L’enclume toujours chaude’: Émile Zola’s Newspaper Trilogy

ABSTRACT

Recent research on Émile Zola’s involvement with the French press of the late Second Empire and early Third Republic has clarified the shape of this history of his engagement with journalism, including a supposed absence from the fray between 1881 and 1895. This article, however, identifies in the period 1888 to 1892, between the idealism of Le Rêve and the reflexivity of Le Docteur Pascal, a period of particular reflection on the press by Zola which illuminates ‘le retour du réel et de l’actualité’ in his novels: La Bête humaine, L’Argent and La Débâcle.

KEYWORDS:

• Zola
• journalism
• circulation
• paper
• newspaper
• press
• La Bête humaine
• L’Argent
• La Débâcle
• Les Rougon-Macquart.

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 and of French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War, and he has edited seven volumes of essays and editions, including special numbers on Zola for Romanic Review (2011) and Les Cahiers naturalistes (2017). 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. See also Saminadayar-Perrin’s piece,‘Portrait d’Émile Zola en “enfant de la presse”’, in Les Cahiers naturalistes, 91 (2017).

2. As Birch’s thesis shows, in spite of Zola’s own lack of critical or fraternal response to the novel, Bel-Ami stands at the centre of early Third Republic fictionalizations of the press, and has itself been the object of a cluster of important recent publications. See Birch (2014b); Dorian Bell (2018, ch. 2); Andrew J. Counter (2008 and 2010); Heidi Brevik-Zender (2012).

3. The very same quotation from Zola also introduces Jean-Pierre Bédéï’s more populist account of ‘L'Age d’or de la presse (1830-1870)’. See https://www.herodote.net/L_age_d_or_de_la_presse-synthese-2155.php [accessed 1 October 2016].

4. Henri Mitterand associates these three pieces with Zola’s earlier piece on the French press for Le Messager de l’Europe of August 1877 as well as certain pages of Nouvelle Campagne and La Vérité en marche. As he notes, ‘Le tout formerait un excellent point de départ pour l’étude des “communications de masse”’ (Zola, 1969: 742).