The Debacle: (1870-71) Read online

  THE DEBACLE

  ÉMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up at Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the Collège Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. He was obliged to exist in poorly paid clerical jobs after failing his baccalauréat in 1859, but early in 1865 he decided to support himself by literature alone. Despite his scientific pretensions Zola was really an emotional writer with rare gifts for evoking vast crowd scenes and for giving life to such great symbols of modern civilization as factories and mines. When not overloaded with detail, his work has tragic grandeur, but he is also capable of a coarse, ‘Cockney’ type of humour. From his earliest days Zola had contributed critical articles to various newspapers, but his first important novel, Thérèse Raquin, was published in 1867, and Madeleine Férat in the following year. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to follow out scientifically the effects of heredity and environment on one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. The work contains twenty novels which appeared between 1871 and 1893, and is the chief monument of the French Naturalist Movement. On completion of this series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894–6–8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome, which led to another cycle, Les Quatre Évengiles. He died in 1902 while working on the fourth of these.

  LEONARD TANCOCK spent most of his life in or near London, apart from a year as a student in Paris, most of the Second World War in Wales and three periods in American universities as visiting professor. Until his death in 1986, he was a Fellow of University College, London, and was formerly Reader in French at the University. He prepared his first Penguin Classic in 1949 and, from that time, was extremely interested in the problems of translation, about which he wrote, lectured and gave broadcasts. His numerous translations for the Penguin Classics include Zola’s Germinal, Thérèse Raquin, L’Assommoir and La Bête Humaine; Diderot’s The Nun, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream; Maupassant’s Pierre and Jean; Marivaux’s Up from the Country; Constant’s Adolphe; La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims; Voltaire’s Letters on England; Prévost’s Manon Lescaut; and Madame de Sévigné’s Selected Letters.

  ÉMILE ZOLA

  THE DEBACLE

  [1870–71]

  TRANSLATED

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  LEONARD TANCOCK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  This translation first published in Penguin Classics 1972

  23

  Copyright © L. W. Tancock, 1972

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196104-0

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DEBACLE

  INTRODUCTION

  La Débâcle, the nineteenth and last but one of the Rougon-Macquart series of novels, the first of which was published in 1871, is in some respects the logical end, the Götter dämmerung, of the great saga of the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire, for the final novel, Le Docteur Pascal, will be largely a clearing-up and killing-off of outstanding questions and characters, ending with a vision of the brave new world of science and progress about to be born. The subject is the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and its destruction on the funeral pyre of the Paris Commune of 1871. Its publication in 1892 was an immense sales success, not only because it was a great war novel and documentary reviving memories in the minds of all but the quite young, but because it was an expression of the painful self-examination still going on in France after the most traumatic humiliation any country had so far received in modern times.

  The 1870 war and its sequel in 1871 is one of the watersheds of European history. For a century and a half, from Louis XIV to Napoleon I, the armies of France had ravaged Europe, and the various German states had been invaded, traversed and plundered almost continuously during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But French arrogance overreached itself when Napoleon III deliberately and unnecessarily provoked Prussia and declared war on 15 July 1870. Seven weeks later, on 1 and 2 September, the French suffered a disastrous defeat at Sedan and Napoleon gave himself up to King William. Why such a total calamity? Leaving aside the various political or psychological factors, which are largely a matter of speculation and point of view and tell us more about the judge than the judged, there are the obvious military reasons. France was unprepared; for years the political opposition had bitterly attacked any attempts at modernization of armaments, and of course immediately after defeat was to round on the régime for being unprepared. The Germans had accurate breech-loading guns made by Krupp, with percussion shells. The French muzzleloaders, of which Zola gives a detailed description, fired shells which more often than not burst harmlessly in the air. The French rifle, the chassepot, was good, but the mitrailleuse, an ancestor of the machine-gun, was still on the ‘secret’ list until shortly before mobilization and the army had no experience of how to use it. Technical incompetence and backwardness were made so much more dangerous by the complacency and over-confidence of all in authority, a small example of which was the issue to officers of maps of Germany whereas they had no information on the topography of the difficult mountain terrain of the part of their own country where fighting was bound to occur, and were lured into all sorts of ambushes by highly organized mobile detachments of Germans. And of course rivalries and divided counsels among the commanders were not checked by the weak and sick Emperor. The dash, swagger and bravery of individual French soldiers were no match for the scientific skill and accuracy of the Germans. Flamboyant cavalry charges have no chance against modern technology. In this respect as well as in many others, the 1870 war was the clash of the past and the future, and its lessons were learned by the Germans and ignored by the French.

  Zola’s novel is the story of this seven-week war and its sequel, and its connection with the Rougon-Macquart saga is tenuous to the point of unimportance, for Jean Macquart, the hero, serves simply as a point of view, or rather, as one of the many points of view. The Debacle is unique in Zola’s work because it is a strictly historical novel. The other Zola novels may have much factual documentation, some of their characters and incidents m
ay be clearly suggested by known people or events, or the setting may be in a known place described with meticulous accuracy, but the plot is pure invention. The Debacle, on the other hand, is the narrative of a very complicated moment in French history so recent that all the events were clearly remembered by all Zola’s readers over the age of forty, or even younger, and many details could be immediately verified or challenged. When the book appeared in 1892 the events it described were more recent than those of the 1939–45 war are today. Zola could not risk being caught out on a point of fact, date, time or place, and many of the real persons, soldiers or politicians, mentioned in the story were still there, or their representatives were, and could answer back. Now this peculiar necessity for accuracy in reporting events of extreme complexity, many of them simultaneous and apparently confused but cumulatively of inexorable logic, carries with it the danger that the book might become a tedious chronicle of endless to-ings and fro-ings, comings and goings, to say nothing of repetitions and recapitulations, a sort of game of chess with commentary. All the more so because Zola wanted to make all aspects of the national disaster clear – the causes going back into the Second Empire, the mistakes and miscalculations, incompetence and sheer bad luck, with the resulting demoralization of the troops and the effects upon the lives of civilians of all kinds. How does he achieve clearness while avoiding the dullness of the minute-by-minute list of events? Mainly by skill in construction and by frequently changing the point of view, at the risk of seeming specious and contrived. It is as though he felt compelled by the very complexity of his material to present it in an arrangement remarkably regular and symmetrical even by his own standards, for many of his novels have some orderly arrangement of chapters or parts. Here there are three parts, each of eight chapters, and each part is a very distinct act in the drama.

  Act I. The trap. From 6 August, near Mulhouse, we follow the movements of the 7th army corps, mostly through the eyes of one squad of its increasingly weary and demoralized soldiers, as it is moved back through Belfort, by train to Paris but immediately forward again to Rheims, its advance as far. as Vouziers, the fatal waste of time there and the false advance and return to Vouziers, then on to Remilly in the Meuse valley and thence into Sedan, surrounded by hills and narrow defiles, every one of which was occupied or dominated by German forces or artillery. And at every stage muddles, supplies sent to wrong places, fuel sent where there was nothing to cook, raw meat where there was no fuel, fodder where there were no horses, guns in one place and ammunition in another, marches and counter-marches. The civilian elements are brought in as the march proceeds, and the exhaustion, hunger and exasperation of the troops become increasingly serious. The stages of this terrible progress from Rheims to Sedan can be followed very easily on the Michelin maps of France, sheets 56 and 53. I have adopted Zola’s method of distinguishing between French and German forces by using arabic figures or roman respectively, e.g. 7th army corps (French), IXth army corps (German).

  Act II. The disaster. The battle of Sedan, fought on the outskirts of the town and in surrounding villages. The whole action takes place in just over twenty-four hours, from very early in the morning of 1 September until 6 a.m. on the 2nd. The problem is to see clearly the different actions going on in different neighbourhoods and at the same time what was going on inside the town itself in all its complicated detail and from different points of view, and to keep the eye on all these things as they move on simultaneously towards the inevitable catastrophe in which a huge French army, with its wounded, guns, material and horses, is rolled back into a small town quite incapable of feeding or housing it. See map 1.

  Act III. The aftermath. 3 September 1870 until May 1871. First, the horrors of the battlefield and captivity of the whole French army in a loop of the river Meuse, the Iges peninsula, where for a week, mostly in bad weather, they had no shelter, next to no food, and droves of captured horses, maddened by hunger, stampeded continually up and down. Even the river water, polluted by corpses, caused terrible dysentery, and the stench was unbearable. Jean Macquart and his friend Maurice Levasseur, whose family had always lived in the region, eventually escape and go to earth at the farm of the latter’s uncle, where his twin sister Henriette, whose husband has been shot by the Germans, is also living. Maurice goes back to Paris intending to fight on, is caught in the siege of Paris, is fired by the fever of the insurrection, deserts and becomes a Communard. But Jean, whom Maurice had brought to the farm wounded and almost dying, has to stay there in hiding for months while being nursed back to health by Henriette. They grow to love each other, but the full implications of their feelings are unrecognized even by themselves. Ultimately Jean also makes his way to Paris, re-enlists in the regular (Government) army, and fate decrees that Maurice, now a fanatical Communard, is mortally wounded by Jean during the last desperate resistance when the Communards, and various criminal elements posing as such, set fire to the whole of the centre of Paris. The curtain goes down on the holocaust and Jean’s departure, all hope of happiness with Henriette gone, to help build a new France.

  Such are the barest bones of the story. But it is clothed with countless incidents, both in military and civilian life, countless authentic facts patiently gathered by Zola, who personally followed out the whole of the route taken in Part I, questioned any local people he could find with personal memories, such as a doctor in Sedan who had helped with the wounded, peasants and notables in and around the town, and in particular Charles Philippoteaux, brother of Auguste Philippoteaux, mayor of Sedan in 1870, and himself mayor of Givonne. He personally conducted Zola to all the places in the battle area and told him of his own glimpse of the Emperor at the farm of Baybel. He is the original of Delaherche, though not necessarily of the latter’s fussy officiousness.

  The result is one of the best examples of Zola’s peculiar gift for taking masses of accurate, verifiable facts or documents and breathing into them life and a formal artistic pattern. Each little incident really happened (local tradition has it that everything in the novel is based on fact except the murder of Goliath, which is Zola’s invention), but still the characters are live people with motives and emotions. Zola’s art consists in the arrangement and the aesthetic and symbolical value, even as thousands of single notes are combined by a musical mind into a symphony.

  But this formal aspect does raise a question in the reader’s mind: is it not contrived, does not Zola stretch the long arm of coincidence too far for credibility? It may be objected, and with some justification, that everyone happens to run into the appropriate person exactly when the next twist in the story or next pieces in the jigsaw are required, and that therefore many of the ‘fortuitous’ meetings are foreseeable, however improbable in real life. Some may feel that the works are visible if not creakingly audible. That may well be. But it is nearly a thousand years since this island of ours experienced invasion and occupation by a foreign power. The sceptical reader should try to picture, say, the clash of the defending English army with the invading Welsh in and around a small town in a river valley traversing a region of wooded hills, such as Bewdley on the Severn or Ross-on-Wye. All that is then needed is that one English soldier should hail from those parts, have local knowledge and relations and friends still living there, and the rest of the meetings and coincidences must follow in such a restricted environment, where everyone knows everyone else. If you place the small town near a frontier (and the Sedan area has been one of the cockpits of Europe all down the ages), there will be traitors who fraternize with the enemy, locals who see a chance of moneymaking, the underground resistance movements and guerrilla bands, the enemy repressions and penalties. Moreover in a frontier region there are bound to be divided loyalties, families with a foot in both camps, population torn by conflicting linguistic, religious, racial and traditional stresses and strains. Such has always been the painful position of Alsace, Germanic in language and many of its customs, intensely French emotionally, yet often treated with the most tactless lack of unders
tanding by Paris, with its mania for domination and impatience of what it dismisses as la province. In a word, as in any drama, the symbolism, real meaning and significant confrontations are more important to the artist than plausibility in the narrow sense. The subject, after all, is war and how it poisons and deforms all human relationships.

  Hence not only the apparent speciousness but also the choice of characters and points of view. In a historical novel it is unwise to challenge real history by placing well-known figures in the principal roles, but it is equally unwise to omit all known historical figures and try to give a slice of life in another period or setting, for that will produce a boring archaeological reconstruction. Zola avoids these traps by introducing Napoleon III, MacMahon, Bazaine, Thiers, Gambetta and many others episodically or indirectly, as seen through the eyes of lesser mortals. But the front-rank characters in the novel are typical soldiers or civilians representing various kinds of victims or beneficiaries of war.

  In a sense the principal part is a dual one, a pair incarnating the two eternal and irreconcilable facets of the French national character: Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur. Jean is balanced, reasonable, hard-working, law-abiding and conservative; Maurice is highly intelligent (although his behaviour makes one wonder), but mercurial, brilliant at chicanery and destructive criticism but less so at construction, nervy, dashing, effervescent, but fatally inclined to collapse hysterically under stress. France has ever been thus, one half practising moderation and common sense, the other flying to the most violent extremes. Jean is not young, he is thirty-nine and has been through personal tragedy. He is, though there is little resemblance, brother of the smug, self-centred Lisa Quenu (Le Ventre de Paris) and of the pathetic Gervaise (L’ Assommoir). But the two girls left home early and went to Paris while he stayed in Provence as a carpenter and then served for seven years in the army, after which he became a farm-hand in a horrible village in the Beauce (La Terre). So he has lost touch with them and presumably has never seen his nephews the Lantier boys, Claude (L’ Oeuvre), Jacques (La Bête humaine) and Etienne (Germinal), nor Gervaise’s daughter by Coupeau, the notorious prostitute Nana. On the farm he was bitterly resented as a stranger by the family of the girl he married, and when his wife was brutally murdered by her own sister lest her bit of land should pass to Jean or his children, he left the land, horrified and broken-hearted, and re-enlisted shortly before the outbreak of war. He is perhaps the most healthy and sane member of the whole Rougon-Macquart tribe and certainly by far the best of the Macquarts. Maurice is hardly young either, being twenty-nine, but he was helped and protected by his twin sister, who sacrificed to send him to Paris and train him as a lawyer, and he still behaves as impetuously as a spoilt child. The friendship of these two men is one of the most beautiful human relationships in all Zola’s work. Maurice finds himself in a squad of men under Corporal Macquart. At first there is instinctive aversion and mistrust between the simple peasant and the highbrow intellectual. But Maurice is forced to admire the solid qualities of Jean who in his turn helps Maurice when he is in pain and distress and learns to love him like a brother. Later each saves the life of the other. From then onwards their relationship becomes highly symbolical, as Zola himself is at pains to point out. The two apparently contradictory aspects of France are wedded in this wonderful friendship in which Maurice makes the solid peasant more aware, more sensitive, while Jean makes the brittle, frivolous intellectual deeper and more human. And when this union is torn asunder by the national disaster and Maurice, without his sheet-anchor of common sense, hurls himself into the frenzies of the Commune, Jean, the other France, kills him – accidentally of course – but it symbolizes self-amputation, the cutting out and casting away of a rotten, septic limb which, if retained, would ultimately poison and kill the whole organism.