LaTerre formed part of a cycle of twenty ‘Rougon-Macquart’novels by Émile Zola (1840-1902).In places, his writing borrows heavily from Romanticism but Zola was an early pioneer of the ‘naturalistic’ movement which attempted to take away all artificiality from fiction, depicting in raw honesty, the lives of ordinary people. The Earth takes place in the period between Solferino in 1859 and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, in Beauce, on the Aigre, close to the town of Cloyes, a region dependant mostly on wheat, a little sheep grazing and the grape.

Zola paints vividly. ‘Before the winter ploughing starts, Beauce is covered in manure as far as the eye can see. Under the pale September skies, from dawn till dusk, carts brimming with steaming piles of old litter would make their way slowly along country roads as though delivering heat itself to the land…a sort of heaving, surging, sea of manure from cowshed and stable…the whole future growth of spring was borne along on this fermenting flood of [decomposition]… And from one end of the vast plain to the other, you could smell the stench of all this animal excrement, from which man’s daily bread would come.’ The heroine is simply the land. When the boorish Buteau, wife-beater, rapist, killer in turn of each of his frail and aged parents, had done his backbreaking day’s toil , he would go back and with tenderness ‘contemplate [his fields] like a lover’. After a long period of drought, with tempers sore and miserable, the warm summer raindrops fall like five-centime coins. That is the centrepiece of Zola’s work. His characters serve this canvass, and highly colourful and charismatic though they are, they cannot, even collectively, appear more than as mere ants by comparison to Mother Earth.

The account of peasant life transcends revolutions, both industrial and political, wars, and the pressure for change. On dark winter nights they talk endlessly of folk-legends from well before the demise of the ancien regime, old yarns of robber-baron armies evicting an entire village, possessing its crops, its livestock and its women. But they all knew who had benefited from the large parcels of aristocratic and church land that were sold at the Revolution, and it was not the likes of them. Elemental needs had not changed for centuries. Food, shelter, the satisfaction of sexual passions, security in old age, were negotiated under brutally hard and unpredictable circumstances, according to peasant lore, no matter who the rulers. Whether times were lean or plentiful, there was little remedy outside the natural powers of endurance. A hailstorm which, in the space of ten minutes, destroys the crops of the village is accepted in the only way possible, with stoicism and replanting.

Parmée sees Zola’s peasants as ‘tough, harsh and ungrateful, concerned only with their own short-term interest, understanding only coercion and thus kowtowing to any established authority, superstitious, barely Christian, though perhaps deists, childish, deceitful, stoical, mean and greedy’ At the same time he observes, such nasty characteristics are understandable in a context of unremitting toil and grinding poverty.

Parmée says that Zola’s direct knowledge of country life was not inconsiderable. Clearly many of the obvious characteristics of nineteenth-century French history are evident. Perils of ever-increasing subdivision of the land, into smaller and smaller holdings, under the French system of inheritance, take centre-stage. Compulsive sexual desires desperately interrupted mid-coitus, provide evidence to the real costs of more mouths to feed. It is clear from the dialogue among older characters, that religion and the church have lost authority during their lifetimes. There is an expectation that the priest will conduct baptisms, weddings and funerals. Superstition abounds over such as the positioning of a grave, prayers will be offered by the desperate, but nobody seems to care enough for the parish to provide the funds to replace a retiring priest.

Peasant rebellion is not clearly focused. One encounters no gentry, as one would in an English novel of the period. Only Canon, the townie, shocks the country folk by talking glibly about guillotining the toffs. Arguments for and against the Emperor’s policy of free-trade, the value of farm mechanisation and artificial fertilizers, are conducted between the few characters with important financial interests, as well as two, of more urban provenance, who are familiar with revolutionary ideology. The schoolteacher provides a detailed and worrying description of the American prairies, mechanised and vast, which he says will flood France with cheap grain and consign all their days to poverty.

At his death in 1902 Zola was recognised as one of Europe’s greatest writers. Berg talks of his ‘unique artistry, a poetry of machine and motion, vitalised by the individual viewpoint, yet structured by vast networks of imagery that capture the intense activity and alienation of modern society…above all Zola’s writings endure on account of his forthright portrayal of social injustice, his staunch defence of the downtrodden.’ The most enduring monument to his character will always be the part that he played in the exposing of the Dreyfus affair, through his famous open-letter J’accuse, and his subsequent trial. The Rougon-Macquart series, of which The Earth was his own favourite, constitute a family saga that accompanies the events, institutions and ideas associated with the rise of industrialisation. Zola was eulogised at his funeral, by Anatole France, as having been not only a great man but ‘a moment in the human conscience’.

Bibliography.

William J. Berg, ‘Emile Zola’ in Encyclopædia Britannica, CD98, Multimedia Edition, International Version.

Émile Zola, The Earth : translated from the French, with an introduction by Douglas Parmée (Penguin, London 1980)

Technically awe inspiring - intelligent yet accessible - fascinating and powerful - a wonderful book.