For Roubaud, Flore and Pecqueux, murder is conceived as an act of revenge, and as such their crimes proceed from the most ancient of motives. But in each instance revenge comes in ‘modern’ guise. The ancient crime proves itself to be abreast if not ahead of technological progress. As Aunt Phasie comments cynically in one of her rare moments of lucidity, ‘You can go on inventing better machines till the cows come home. It won’t change a thing. In the end we’re at the mercy of beasts’ (II). The novel thus engages with a sharply divided contemporary debate on the nature and causes of criminal behaviour.

In April 1888, this debate was given a particularly gruesome focus by the first in a series of murders of women prostitutes in London’s East End. In September 1888 a letter signed by ‘Jack the Ripper’ was passed to the London police, laying claim to these murders and promising that they would continue. The murders in fact continued during the whole period that Zola was preparing and writing his novel and for another year after the novel was published. They involved throat-cutting and in many cases severe mutilation of the victim’s body. ‘Jack the Ripper’ achieved instant notoriety, and his unsavoury exploits brought home the reality and urgency of the criminological debate, in a way that theoretical discussion could never do, to ordinary citizens going about their daily lives not only in London but in cities throughout the world. In an interview given to the Italian newspaper Tribuna in November 1889, shortly after the publication of the first three instalments of La Bête humaine, Zola speaks of Jacques Lantier as a criminal ‘cast in the same mould as “Jack the Ripper”’.5 Jacques has a psychopathic desire to kill women, and it is this terrifying compulsion that provides the central impetus of La Bête humaine. The name Zola gives his protagonist could not have failed to connect him in the reader’s mind with the legendary perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders (in French ‘Jacques l’Éventreur’). Like ‘Jack the Ripper’, Jacques Lantier’s preferred weapon is the knife. Like ‘Jack the Ripper’, his desire to murder is prompted by female sexuality, and he discovers that one murder is insufficient to satisfy his urge to kill. The novel thus goes beyond the well-trodden path of personally motivated murder and embarks on an exploration of the mind of a potential serial killer.

Jacques’s urge to kill is set within a broader context of violence and crime. The novel describes a total of five murders, each of which has its roots in various forms of sexually related discontent or frustration. Roubaud’s killing of Grandmorin, in the early part of the novel, is a crime of passion, conceived in the space of half an hour by an insanely jealous husband after discovering that his wife, Séverine, has been abused as a child. The immediate cause of Roubaud’s anger is a sense of outrage towards the man who has supposedly molested his wife, coupled with a feeling of resentment towards his wife at having concealed the incident from him. The violence of his reaction, however, is a product of his own unstable and irascible character. Roubaud is capable of excessive fits of rage for the most trivial of reasons and at such moments he is transformed instantly into a creature of brutal and murderous instinct. He suffers from a sense of his social inferiority to his wife and from the fact that he is fifteen years older than her. He is puzzled by her sexual reticence towards him. The discovery of what he clearly considers to be a form of pre-marital sexual licence on the part of his wife (only minutes after she has resisted his own sexual advances towards her) prompts a reaction of unbridled fury.

Séverine is forced against her will to assist Roubaud in the murder of Grandmorin. Strictly speaking, she is an accomplice to murder rather than a murderer in her own right. Yet her involvement in the killing of Grandmorin emboldens her to instigate and assist in a second murder when she decides that the time has come to be rid of her husband. On the two occasions that this murder is planned she proves herself to be more calculating, fearless and resolute than her partner in crime.

Flore’s attempt to murder Séverine and Jacques is also the product of a lover’s fury. She is jealous of her rival in love and feels bitter towards the man who has spurned her. For Flore, as for Roubaud, murder is an act of revenge. But for Flore revenge is more than an act of personal retribution; it is conceived on a cataclysmic scale as a destruction of everything around her. It proceeds from the nihilistic, suicidal conviction that, having been rejected by Jacques, her life is no longer worth living.