Jewish involvement in the bribery inflamed the already widespread French anti-Semitism, and Drumont’s La France Juive (1886), a two-volume, 1,200-page, violently anti-Semitic work, enjoyed a huge commercial success. The new flare-up of anti-Semitism in the 1880s was much the same as the anti-Semitism of the previous era, when there had been deep resentment of the powerful Jewish bankers, particularly of Baron James Mayer de Rothschild, whose role in the banking world is the model for that of Saccard’s great rival, the Jewish financier Gundermann.

There had been so many disasters in financial institutions that Zola had no lack of models for Saccard’s ‘Universal Bank’. One was Mirès’s innovative bank, the ‘Caisse centrale des chemins de fer’ (‘Central Bank of Railways’), founded in 1850, which collapsed in 1861; then in 1852 the brothers Émile and Isaac Péreire founded the ‘Crédit Mobilier’, a bank expressly intended, like Saccard’s Universal, to foster large enterprises. It played an important part in the economic surge of the period up to 1857, when a financial panic affected the Bourse, the London Stock Exchange, and even Wall Street. The shares of the Crédit Mobilier had risen with amazing rapidity, but the bank crashed disastrously in 1870. A third—and the principal—model for the Universal was the Union Générale of Paul Eugène Bontoux. Founded in 1878, it lay well outside the time-frame of Money, which covers the period from May 1864 to the spring of 1868, but Zola decided to overlook the anachronism since the Bontoux crash was similar to that of the Crédit Mobilier which had happened under the Second Empire. Indeed, history repeated itself sufficiently for Zola to push many features of the Third Republic back into the Second Empire without too grossly offending vraisemblance. Bontoux’s bank, strongly supported by Catholics and monarchists, grew extremely rapidly; it financed and built Serbia’s first railway, bought up insurance companies, and financed schemes in North Africa and Egypt, all the while speculating on the stock market and providing impressive dividends for shareholders. However, prices began to fall in 1880–1 and the bank set about buying its own shares, as Saccard would do, to try to avert disaster; but in January 1882 the Union Générale suspended payments and crashed, the fate that lies in store for Saccard’s Universal.

The failure of Bontoux’s Catholic bank further inflamed resentment of the Jewish banks, especially when Bontoux, with little justification, blamed an ‘Israelite Syndicate’ for bringing down his Union Générale. Zola, who closely followed the fortunes of Bontoux’s bank and the accounts of his trial, and who had read Bontoux’s history of the Union Générale,3 also preserved his anti-Semitism, passing it on to Saccard in the guise of a quasi-hereditary feature: ‘Ah, the Jews! Saccard had that ancient racial resentment of the Jews that is found especially in the south of France’ (p. 78). That resentment is often expressed in extreme and stereotyped terms of hatred of ‘unclean Jewry’ (p. 15). There is a great deal of ugly and angry defamation of Jews in the novel, an unpleasant but accurate reflection of the feelings of the time. Zola did not disguise it, though he was very far from agreeing with it. In his articles, such as ‘Pour les Juifs’,4 and most strikingly in his defence of Dreyfus, Zola shows his abhorrence of such attitudes. In his open letter ‘J’accuse’, published in L’Aurore on 21 February 1898, he succeeded in reopening the case of the Jewish officer wrongly accused and convicted of treason and espionage. Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus case led to his being himself threatened with imprisonment, which he avoided by fleeing to temporary exile in England. The very outrageousness of Saccard’s anti-Semitism underlines its stupidity. Its unreasonableness is further demonstrated by the fact that Saccard cannot help admiring, as well as envying, the Jewish banker Gundermann, the king of the Bourse. And if the behaviour of the Jewish Busch earns derogatory epithets, the same cannot be said for his equally Jewish brother, the Marxist philosopher Sigismond. The unbalanced anti-Semitism of Saccard is also tellingly opposed by the balanced and reasonable views of Madame Caroline, his mistress, who finds Saccard’s views astonishing: ‘For me, the Jews are just men like any others’ (p. 358).

Money

‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about money. It’s cold, icy, lacking in interest …’, Zola remarked in an interview in April 1890. Money, greed, and ambition are the driving forces in the novel, and Zola was determined to avoid what he felt had become a conventional diatribe against money and speculation. He would not speak ill of money, he wrote in his preparatory notes, but would ‘praise and exalt its generous and fecund power, its expansive force’. He embarked on a particularly onerous period of research, studying books and documents,5 as well as interrogating suitably qualified persons, such as Eugène Fasquelle (an associate and son-in-law of Zola’s publisher, Charpentier), who had spent some years working in brokerage. Few novels had been as much trouble to prepare; Zola meticulously annotated the papers of the Bontoux trial, as well as those of Mirès and the Péreires, and studied every detail of the layout of the Bourse, visiting it almost every day for a month.

Zola’s subject was clearly topical. Banking scandals were not confined to France, and in England the fraudulent speculations of the notorious swindler John Sadleir lay behind Dickens’s creation of the unscrupulous banker Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit (1857).