Zola and the Bourgeoisie : A Study of Themes and Techniques in Les Rougon-Macquart

Zola's unsentimental but sympathetic portrayal of the working class in L'Assommoir and Germinal largely constitutes his literary status. Few readers of Les Rougon-Macquart would disagree with Angus Wilson's comment that 'no nineteenth-century novelist, perhaps, succeeded so well in depicting the courage and honesty of the individual, aspiring workman of the century'. 1 But the very conception of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, as well as Zola's belief, as a social realist, that the modern novel should embrace the whole of contemporary reality, clearly implies a panoramic survey of society and, consequently, a detailed consideration of the world of the bourgeoisie. In his initial plan for the cycle, Zola wrote: La famille dont je conterai l'histoire, representera le vaste soulevement democratique de notre temps; par tie du peuple, elle montera aux classes cultivees, aux premiers postes de l'Etat, a l'infamie comme au talent. Cet assaut des hauteurs de la societe par ceux qu'on appelait au siecle dernier les gens de rien, est une des grandes revolutions de notre age. L'oeuvre offrira par la meme une etude de la bourgeoisie contemporaine. 2 It is thus not surprising to find EJ. Hobsbawm recommending Les Rougon-Macquart as the best guide to the bourgeoisie in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. 3 I hope that the present study will illuminate an aspect of Zola's work which, although of obvious importance, has not previously received specific and systematic attention. There are immediate problems of definition attached to the amorphous but much-used term 'bourgeoisie', for interpretations of class and class structure vary considerably. Class dif-'bourgeois' or member of the middle class in our period included few people who did not fit into one or other of these pigeon-holes. 5 A typology of Zola's bourgeois, while revealing the extremely disparate composition of the class, confirms this statement. The spectrum includes the gran de bourgeoisie, big financiers, industrial managers, politicians, the liberal professions, rentiers, small shopkeepers and artisans. Max Weber showed that factors of status and power also determine the division of society into strata, and that the criteria of class, status and power, although closely interrelated, are not synonymous. Hobsbawm writes: ... the main characteristic of the bourgeoisie as a class was that it was a body of persons of power and influence, independent of the power and influence of traditional birth and status. To belong to it a man had to be 'someone'; a person who Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-6 Front Matter....Pages 7-7 Waste and Parasitism....Pages 9-20 Leadership....Pages 21-34 Utopia....Pages 35-47 Sex....Pages 48-59 Front Matter....Pages 61-61 La Curée: Speculation and Dissipation....Pages 63-95 Une Page d’amour: The Ambiguities of Passion....Pages 96-128 Pot-Bouille: Black Comedy....Pages 129-157 L’Argent: Energy and Order....Pages 158-188 Conclusion....Pages 189-192 Back Matter....Pages 193-230