The Beast Within (6 page)

If the voice of justice is silenced, it is because those in power require it to be and provide the means of ensuring that it is. Zola’s critique of judicial practice extends by implication to a broader critique of the closed and repressive nature of Second Empire politics. The action of the novel takes place between mid-February 1869 and July 1870, a period which sounded the death knell of the Second Empire. From its inception in December 1852, the Second Empire had proved itself to be an autocratic regime. Even before being proclaimed Emperor, Louis Napoleon had made it clear that he was determined to exercise personal power. ‘I shall never submit to any attempt to influence me ... I respect those whose ability and experience enable them to give me good advice ... But I follow only the promptings of my mind and heart ... I shall march straight forward ... with conscience my only guide.’
¹⁷
National policy was to be determined by the Emperor himself, ensconced in his palace at the Tuileries. The Emperor appointed (and dismissed) all ministers of state, who were obliged to swear an oath of loyalty to him and to attend an audience at the palace every week. The Assemblée legislative (Legislative Assembly), which was charged with converting national policy into law, was given only limited powers. Members of the upper house were appointed by the Emperor and met in secret. Members of the lower house, which could ratify or reject but not initiate or amend legislation, were elected by male suffrage. But the elections were carefully managed. Certain candidates were designated as ‘official’ candidates and it was the responsibility of Prefects in the various
départements
of France (again appointed directly by the Emperor) to ensure that these ’official’ candidates were elected. This was achieved by tight control of publicity and election propaganda, with the result that very few opposition candidates were elected to the Assembly during the whole period of the Second Empire.
¹⁸
The Empire also took steps to ensure that discussion and criticism of public affairs in the press was similarly controlled. It promoted ‘official’ government newspapers (such as
L’Opinion nationale)
and exercised rigorous censorship over the opposition press. By 1869 opposition to such a ‘closed’ form of government had gained considerable momentum, and the 1869 elections to the Legislative Assembly provided it with a focal point. The Empire had been obliged to adopt a more liberal attitude towards the press a year earlier, and the run-up to the elections saw the creation of a number of new opposition newspapers. Zola himself contributed articles to three of them
(La Tribune, Le Gaulois
and
La Cloche)
between 1868 and 1872. Criticism of the regime certainly had the effect of rallying opposition from all sides (from Republicans on the left to Orleanists on the right). In Paris, attendance at electoral meetings averaged 20,000 nightly, and rioting was commonplace.
¹⁹
In the event, opposition candidates polled 3.5million votes compared with 4.5million votes for the ‘official’ candidates. This represented the most serious challenge to its authority that the Second Empire had ever faced. The Emperor was forced to agree to demands for a more liberal form of government. On 8 May 1870 a new constitution was voted on by plebiscite and overwhelmingly approved. The so-called ‘Liberal Empire’, however, was to be a very short-lived affair. No sooner had the new constitution been approved than France was mobilizing for war against Prussia. By September 1870, the French had suffered a series of military defeats, the Emperor had been taken prisoner and France had been proclaimed a Republic.

Roubaud’s republican outburst against the Sub-Prefect, which is the reason for his being summoned to Paris at the beginning of the novel, acts as an early pointer to the political tensions which underscore the ‘domestic’ events of the novel. Apart from his confrontation with the Sub-Prefect, Roubaud has also, it seems, been airing his views amongst his working colleagues. To Roubaud’s employers and to Camy-Lamotte, republicanism is as serious an offence as murder itself. Roubaud is warned that any further political indiscretion on his part will be dealt with severely. This threat, coupled with Roubaud’s personal decline, effectively silences his political voice. If political disaffection is controlled by threats of reprisal, however, it does not go away. The novel offers repeated reminders of the gathering strength of opposition to the regime and acknowledges the justness of the opposition’s cause in its reference to repressive police measures and police incompetence, to the dubious financing of the building projects of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-91) and to calls for constitutional reform. Zola could not have known, when he first planned the cycle of Rougon-Macquart novels, that by the time he came to complete it the Second Empire would be a thing of the past. The novel still functions, however, as a warning to subsequent generations of how easily injustice and political malpractice, if allowed to go unchallenged, can become the order of the day.

La Bête humaine
lays bare aspects of Second Empire France which the Second Empire would have preferred to sweep under the carpet or disown. Under Napoleon III France had created a bright new image for itself, which it was proud to show to the world. But this is not Zola’s concern. Zola turns his gaze away from the newly created elegance of Haussmann’s Paris, with its boulevards, parks and squares. The novel says nothing about the effervescent gaiety of Offenbach’s opera world. There is little sign of the fashionable, cultivated style of living for which the Second Empire was renowned, the world of
haute couture
and
haute cuisine.
There is little either about the thriving commercial life of Second Empire France and the increased affluence of the middle-class population. These things, it is true, are not entirely absent from the novel. We see a glimpse of the flower market on the Place de la Madeleine in all its springtime freshness. Séverine sits beside Jacques in the seclusion of a Paris park as a child plays near by with its bucket and spade under the watchful eye of its mother. Séverine enjoys a celebratory meal in an expensive restaurant outside the Gare Saint-Lazare and tells of her helter-skelter shopping spree for fine clothes at the Bon Marché. The lady on the train to Auteuil has clearly made a good marriage and is enjoying the benefits of her new-found prosperity. The train to Paris conveys a number of businessmen to important appointments and also an English woman with her two daughters, who are presumably going there to enjoy the delights which the city has to offer. But each of these appealing glimpses of seeming normality is undercut by the reader’s knowledge of the disordered and violent world that shadows them. Things are not what they appear to be. The lady on the railway platform who demurely holds her veil across her face does so in order to hide the bruising that has just been inflicted on her by her husband. The elegantly dressed young woman admiring the flowers on the Place de la Madeleine is a murderer’s accomplice. The young mother on the train to Auteuil is sitting next to a man who intends to kill her. At every step in the narrative the reader is permitted to see an alternative reality behind what, to the uninformed, might appear to be unremarkable scenes of peaceful, law-abiding civility. At the same time the novel insists that for most people this reality goes unnoticed. The crowds who rush from place to place in the trains may look out of the carriage windows but they see nothing. The twelve members of the jury and the crowds who flock to the public trial are completely taken in by an elaborate fiction concocted by a frustrated magistrate bent on furthering his own career, as are all those who read the reports of his triumph in the official newspapers the next day. Those like Madame Lebleu, who are determined to get at the truth by spying and eavesdropping, in the end learn nothing. The examining magistrate, when told the truth, refuses to believe it. Camy-Lamotte simply destroys it. Even for the reader, certain parts of the truth are not disclosed immediately or are not revealed at all. It is only late in the novel that Zola confirms that Misard really has been poisoning his wife and tells us exactly how the murder of Grandmorin was committed. What happened to Louisette remains a mystery. A veil is drawn over the exact nature of Grandmorin’s abuse of Séverine and the full extent of Grandmorin’s dissipated life style. The career of Madame Victoire and her relationship with Grandmorin and with Séverine are not fully explained. Is it possible that Séverine could have been Grandmorin’s daughter? The answer is yes. Zola seems to suggest that violence, manipulation and deceit go further than he chooses to tell us.

Early in the novel Zola describes a train rushing through the night carrying a crowd of revellers to Le Havre for the celebration of the launch of a new ship. A child presses its nose to the carriage window and peers out into the darkness. This is one of many images of innocence that occur throughout the novel. The child is presumably excited at the prospect of the next day’s festivities, but what it sees through the carriage window is an unknown world of ill-defined shapes and shadows. Without the child knowing it, the train has just passed within inches of the body of a murdered man. The novel ends with a parallel image of another train running through the night carrying innocent passengers of a different sort, soldiers, riotously drunk and singing at the top of their voices as they are transported in cattle trucks to the battlefront, into a world in which the violence described in the novel is enacted on an even grander scale and with official government sanction. The soldiers do not know it but they may die before they get to fight in a war for the train has no driver and is out of control. Both of these images point the novel towards an unknown and uncertain future. What sort of world are the child and the soldiers being carried into? The question is not quite as indeterminate as the open ending of the novel might suggest. When the novel first appeared in 1890 the Franco-Prussian war was past history, and the novel could be read in the light of France’s humiliation and the enormous loss of life that the war had incurred. Similarly, for the present-day reader the question which the novel throws into the future can be set against the even greater disasters of twentieth-century history.
La Bête humaine
is first and foremost a graphic exploration of the criminal mind and an expose of political corruption, but it also warns against the assumption that technological advance will improve the human condition.

 

 

NOTES

1
Zola’s preparatory notes for the novel cover 600 pages.

2
Émile Zola,
Thérèse Raquin,
translated by Robin Buss (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 22.

3
Zola,
Les Rougon-Macquart,
edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), vol. IV, pp. 1,709-10.

4
Ibid., p. 1,709.

5
Ibid., p. 1,716.

6
Jean Renoir’s film version of
La Bête humaine
ends with Jacques committing suicide by leaping from the footplate of his locomotive.

7
In effect the last three novels of the cycle are
L‘Argent
(1891), which analyses the world of the Stock Exchange, La
Débâcle
(1892), which describes France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and
Le Docteur Pascal
(1893), which proposes that the pursuit of scientific truth is the highest of all human aspirations.

8
An account of the Poinsot murder and the judicial inquiry which followed it is given in Roger L. Williams,
Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 103-12.

9
Zola,
Les Rougon-Macquart,
p. 1,716.

10
Zola visited Les Halles (the central Paris food market) when preparing
Le Ventre de Paris;
he visited three Paris department stores when preparing
Au Bonheur des Dames;
and he went down a mine when preparing
Germinal.

11
. The illustration is reproduced in Zola,
Œuvres Complètes,
edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), vol. VI, p. 303.

12
Edmond de Goncourt, writing in his
Journal
on 17 April 1890, refers to the novel as ‘pure invention, imagination and fabrication’ (Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,
Journal: mémoires de la vie littéraire
(Monaco: Les Editions de l‘Imprimerie Nationale de Monaco, 1956), vol. XVII, p. 34). The anonymous reviewer in the
Athenaeum
on 22 March 1890 describes the novel as ‘not true to life’ (quoted in Geoff Woollen (ed.),
La Bête humaine: texte et explications
(Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990), p. 70).

13
Zola’s father was for a while a railway engineer.

14
Even in 1890 there would have been many people alive who could remember the world as it was before the coming of the railway.

15
These procedures are described in Williams,
Manners and Murders,
pp. 4-15.

16
Zola’s article ‘J’accuse’, in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the army captain falsely convicted of spying, was published in
L’Aurore
on 13January 1898.

17
Quoted in James F. McMillan,
Napoleon III
(New York: Longman, 1991), p. 37.

18
Ibid., p. 49.

19
Ibid., pp. 125-7.

The following suggestions for further reading are restricted to works in English. A fuller Zola bibliography will be found in Henri Mitterand’s two-volume Zola (Paris: Fayard, 2001).

 

Baguley, David (ed.),
Critical Essays on Émile Zola
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).

Baguley, David,
Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (New York: Macmillan, 1995).