303.

12 Edmond de Goncourt, writing in his Journal on 17 April 1890, refers to the novel as ‘pure invention, imagination and fabrication’ (Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal: mémoires de la vie littéraire (Monaco: Les Editions de l‘Imprimerie Nationale de Monaco, 1956), vol. XVII, p. 34). The anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum on 22 March 1890 describes the novel as ‘not true to life’ (quoted in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990), p. 70).

13 Zola’s father was for a while a railway engineer.

14 Even in 1890 there would have been many people alive who could remember the world as it was before the coming of the railway.

15 These procedures are described in Williams, Manners and Murders, pp. 4-15.

16 Zola’s article ‘J’accuse’, in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the army captain falsely convicted of spying, was published in L’Aurore on 13January 1898.

17 Quoted in James F. McMillan, Napoleon III (New York: Longman, 1991), p. 37.

18 Ibid., p. 49.

19 Ibid., pp. 125-7.

Further Reading

The following suggestions for further reading are restricted to works in English. A fuller Zola bibliography will be found in Henri Mitterand’s two-volume Zola (Paris: Fayard, 2001).

 

Baguley, David (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).

Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (New York: Macmillan, 1995).

Burchell, S. C., Imperial Masquerades: The Paris of Napoleon III (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

Guillais, Joëlle, Crimes of Passion: Dramas of Private Life in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by Jane Dunnett (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1990).

Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Hemmings, F. W. J., Culture and Society in France, 1849- 1898 (London: Batsford, 1971), especially chapter 4, ‘Fête Impériale’ .

Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London: Paul Elek, 1977).

Horne, Alistair, Seven Ages of Paris (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), especially chapter 14, ‘The Second Empire’.

Jones, Colin, Paris: Biography of a City (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2004), especially chapter 9, ‘Haussmannism and the City of Modernity’.

McLynn, Pauline, “‘Human Beasts?”: Criminal Perspectives in La Bête humaine’, in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).

McMillan, James, F., Napoleon III (New York: Longman, 1991).

Nye, Robert, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Price, Roger, The French Second Republic: A Social History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).

Semmens, P. W. B. and A. J. Goldfinch, How Steam Locomotives Really Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Simmons, Jack and Gordon Biddle, The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge, 1985).

Williams, Roger L., Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).

Wilson, Nelly, ‘A Question of Motives: Heredity and Inheritance in La Bête humaine’, in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).

Zola, Émile, Œuvres Complètes, edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), vol. VI. This edition of the French text of La Bête humaine contains a number of contemporary illustrations of places mentioned in the novel, including photographs taken by Zola himself.

A Note on This and Some Other Translations

The text used for this translation of La Bête humaine is that published in the fourth volume of Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), edited by Henri Mitterand.

The first translation into English of La Bête humaine appeared in 1890 (in the same year as the publication of the novel in French) under the title Human Brutes, described in The National Union Catalogue as ‘a realistic novel by Émile Zola, translated from the French by Count Edgar de V. Vermont’. It was published by Laird and Lee in Chicago. The first translation to appear in Britain was that of Edward Vizetelly, published by Hutchinson in 1901 under the title The Monomaniac. Vizetelly & Co., the publishing house founded by Edward’s father, Henry, had been prosecuted following the publication in 1888 of Earth (La Terre) on the grounds that the novel was pornographic.