By September 1870, the French had suffered a series of military defeats, the Emperor had been taken prisoner and France had been proclaimed a Republic.

Roubaud’s republican outburst against the Sub-Prefect, which is the reason for his being summoned to Paris at the beginning of the novel, acts as an early pointer to the political tensions which underscore the ‘domestic’ events of the novel. Apart from his confrontation with the Sub-Prefect, Roubaud has also, it seems, been airing his views amongst his working colleagues. To Roubaud’s employers and to Camy-Lamotte, republicanism is as serious an offence as murder itself. Roubaud is warned that any further political indiscretion on his part will be dealt with severely. This threat, coupled with Roubaud’s personal decline, effectively silences his political voice. If political disaffection is controlled by threats of reprisal, however, it does not go away. The novel offers repeated reminders of the gathering strength of opposition to the regime and acknowledges the justness of the opposition’s cause in its reference to repressive police measures and police incompetence, to the dubious financing of the building projects of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-91) and to calls for constitutional reform. Zola could not have known, when he first planned the cycle of Rougon-Macquart novels, that by the time he came to complete it the Second Empire would be a thing of the past. The novel still functions, however, as a warning to subsequent generations of how easily injustice and political malpractice, if allowed to go unchallenged, can become the order of the day.

La Bête humaine lays bare aspects of Second Empire France which the Second Empire would have preferred to sweep under the carpet or disown. Under Napoleon III France had created a bright new image for itself, which it was proud to show to the world. But this is not Zola’s concern. Zola turns his gaze away from the newly created elegance of Haussmann’s Paris, with its boulevards, parks and squares. The novel says nothing about the effervescent gaiety of Offenbach’s opera world. There is little sign of the fashionable, cultivated style of living for which the Second Empire was renowned, the world of haute couture and haute cuisine. There is little either about the thriving commercial life of Second Empire France and the increased affluence of the middle-class population. These things, it is true, are not entirely absent from the novel. We see a glimpse of the flower market on the Place de la Madeleine in all its springtime freshness. Séverine sits beside Jacques in the seclusion of a Paris park as a child plays near by with its bucket and spade under the watchful eye of its mother. Séverine enjoys a celebratory meal in an expensive restaurant outside the Gare Saint-Lazare and tells of her helter-skelter shopping spree for fine clothes at the Bon Marché. The lady on the train to Auteuil has clearly made a good marriage and is enjoying the benefits of her new-found prosperity. The train to Paris conveys a number of businessmen to important appointments and also an English woman with her two daughters, who are presumably going there to enjoy the delights which the city has to offer. But each of these appealing glimpses of seeming normality is undercut by the reader’s knowledge of the disordered and violent world that shadows them. Things are not what they appear to be. The lady on the railway platform who demurely holds her veil across her face does so in order to hide the bruising that has just been inflicted on her by her husband. The elegantly dressed young woman admiring the flowers on the Place de la Madeleine is a murderer’s accomplice. The young mother on the train to Auteuil is sitting next to a man who intends to kill her. At every step in the narrative the reader is permitted to see an alternative reality behind what, to the uninformed, might appear to be unremarkable scenes of peaceful, law-abiding civility. At the same time the novel insists that for most people this reality goes unnoticed. The crowds who rush from place to place in the trains may look out of the carriage windows but they see nothing. The twelve members of the jury and the crowds who flock to the public trial are completely taken in by an elaborate fiction concocted by a frustrated magistrate bent on furthering his own career, as are all those who read the reports of his triumph in the official newspapers the next day. Those like Madame Lebleu, who are determined to get at the truth by spying and eavesdropping, in the end learn nothing.