However, if the writer takes due account of available scientific data in setting up his ‘experiments’, that is, in his creation of characters and situations, then his ‘results’ should be at least plausible outcomes. Like the scientist who examines his material, however ugly, in order to analyse and heal, so the novelist would observe and accurately represent social ills in the hope that they might be remedied.

Zola’s scientific and physiological studies provided him with a foundation and a discipline for his imaginative vision, but despite all his stress on the scientific approach, Zola’s poetic imagination would obstinately make what he called ‘the leap to the stars from the springboard of exact observation’. That ‘exactitude’ is itself open to question, for even in the act of observation his eye is inherently transformative, as is clear even in the preparatory notes for his novels, where metaphor and analogy constantly slide in to make each detail expressive rather than merely noted.

Throughout the Rougon-Macquart series Zola portrays the interaction of hereditary traits with external forces, creating a drama in which heredity plays an important role but does not work in straight lines, as is evident, for instance, in the shared heredity but very different characters of the three brothers Eugène, the government minister, Aristide (‘Saccard’), the extravagant banker of Money, and Pascal, the doctor of the final volume, Dr Pascal (1893). Members of the family resist, or succumb to, the pressures of their environment, and that environment is the social, political, and economic reality of life in the Second Empire.

Historical Background

The history of the Second Empire can be briefly told. Following the abdication of King Louis-Philippe in 1848 a republic was declared; the workers demanded that the right to work should be guaranteed, and national workshops were created to help the large numbers of unemployed. The spirit of revolutionary reform, however, proved short-lived. Elections in April 1848 returned a mainly reactionary government, whose actions, which included discontinuing the national workshops and restricting the suffrage, provoked widespread protests which were brutally suppressed, with hundreds of thousands killed, arrested, imprisoned, or deported. In November a new constitution was established which provided for the election of a president with a fixed four-year term of office. In December, Louis-Napoleon, then aged forty, was elected President of the Second Republic by a huge majority (5.4 million votes), thanks largely to his being Napoleon I’s nephew. To avoid losing his presidency in 1852 at the end of his four-year term, Louis-Napoleon dissolved the Assembly with a coup d’état on 2 December 1851. Presenting himself as a liberal and a defender of the people, he restored universal (male) suffrage and promised a plebiscite to accept or reject his seizure of power. Protests broke out but were suppressed, once more with widespread killings, imprisonment, and deportation. Leaders of the insurgents, Victor Hugo among them, were forced to flee. In the plebiscite that followed, the people gave Louis-Napoleon its overwhelming approval. One year later, on the same date of 2 December, which was also the anniversary of the coronation of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte, he was crowned Emperor as Napoleon III,2 ruler of the Second Empire.

When Zola started to plan the Rougon-Macquart series in 1868 it was possible to imagine that the Second Empire would last some considerable time. It seemed solid enough despite various contemporaneous upheavals, such as the Italian Wars of Independence and Bismarck’s aggressive moves toward the unification of Germany. But in 1870 Napoleon III was goaded by Prussia over the issue of the Spanish Succession, for which Prussia was proposing a Habsburg prince. Napoleon, facing growing troubles on the home front and not wanting to see France sandwiched between Prussia and a Prussian-dominated Spain, declared war, a war that ended in the humiliating defeat at Sedan, when Napoleon III and his entire army were captured.

A Third Republic was then declared. It continued the war for some months, but after a long siege Paris fell to the better-organized and better-equipped Prussian forces. The Second Empire, meant to endure for at least a goodly number of Rougon-Macquart novels, had come to an abrupt end. The Franco-Prussian War and the civil war of the Commune that followed are the subject of the novel that comes after Money, La Débâcle (1892). This early end of the Empire caused some problems for Zola, who had to squeeze a great number of lives and events into its unexpectedly short time-frame.

The Context of 1890, the Banking World, and Anti-Semitism

By the time Zola came to write Money in 1890 France had undergone a period of great industrialization and expansion. Railways were springing up everywhere, the press was growing in importance every day, and investment banks were thriving. New ideas were abroad: Karl Marx’s Das Kapital had been published in 1867, and Marxist ideas had taken root. All these developments are reflected in the plot of Money. The Republic had suffered a series of government scandals, and there was a great deal of social unrest. The Suez Canal, the subject of much animated discussion and speculation (in both senses) in the first chapter of the novel, had been opened by the Empress in 1869. In 1890 it was the Panama Canal that was occupying people’s minds. The Panama Canal Company, in spite of huge contributions from French investors, went into administration in February 1889, and one of the biggest financial scandals of the nineteenth century was just breaking. Hundreds of thousands of investors were ruined, and the government was accused of bribery and corruption.