The Debacle
THE DEBACLE
ÉMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up at Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the Collège Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. He was obliged to exist in poorly paid clerical jobs after failing his baccalauréat in 1859, but early in 1865 he decided to support himself by literature alone. Despite his scientific pretensions Zola was really an emotional writer with rare gifts for evoking vast crowd scenes and for giving life to such great symbols of modern civilization as factories and mines. When not overloaded with detail, his work has tragic grandeur, but he is also capable of a coarse, ‘Cockney’ type of humour. From his earliest days Zola had contributed critical articles to various newspapers, but his first important novel, Thérèse Raquin, was published in 1867, and Madeleine Férat in the following year. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to follow out scientifically the effects of heredity and environment on one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. The work contains twenty novels which appeared between 1871 and 1893, and is the chief monument of the French Naturalist Movement. On completion of this series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894–6–8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome, which led to another cycle, Les Quatre Évengiles. He died in 1902 while working on the fourth of these.
LEONARD TANCOCK spent most of his life in or near London, apart from a year as a student in Paris, most of the Second World War in Wales and three periods in American universities as visiting professor. Until his death in 1986, he was a Fellow of University College, London, and was formerly Reader in French at the University. He prepared his first Penguin Classic in 1949 and, from that time, was extremely interested in the problems of translation, about which he wrote, lectured and gave broadcasts. His numerous translations for the Penguin Classics include Zola’s Germinal, Thérèse Raquin, L’Assommoir and La Bête Humaine; Diderot’s The Nun, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream; Maupassant’s Pierre and Jean; Marivaux’s Up from the Country; Constant’s Adolphe; La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims; Voltaire’s Letters on England; Prévost’s Manon Lescaut; and Madame de Sévigné’s Selected Letters.
ÉMILE ZOLA
THE DEBACLE
[1870–71]
TRANSLATED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
LEONARD TANCOCK
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This translation first published in Penguin Classics 1972
23
Copyright © L. W. Tancock, 1972
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196104-0
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE DEBACLE
INTRODUCTION
La Débâcle, the nineteenth and last but one of the Rougon-Macquart series of novels, the first of which was published in 1871, is in some respects the logical end, the Götter dämmerung, of the great saga of the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire, for the final novel, Le Docteur Pascal, will be largely a clearing-up and killing-off of outstanding questions and characters, ending with a vision of the brave new world of science and progress about to be born. The subject is the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and its destruction on the funeral pyre of the Paris Commune of 1871. Its publication in 1892 was an immense sales success, not only because it was a great war novel and documentary reviving memories in the minds of all but the quite young, but because it was an expression of the painful self-examination still going on in France after the most traumatic humiliation any country had so far received in modern times.
The 1870 war and its sequel in 1871 is one of the watersheds of European history. For a century and a half, from Louis XIV to Napoleon I, the armies of France had ravaged Europe, and the various German states had been invaded, traversed and plundered almost continuously during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But French arrogance overreached itself when Napoleon III deliberately and unnecessarily provoked Prussia and declared war on 15 July 1870. Seven weeks later, on 1 and 2 September, the French suffered a disastrous defeat at Sedan and Napoleon gave himself up to King William. Why such a total calamity? Leaving aside the various political or psychological factors, which are largely a matter of speculation and point of view and tell us more about the judge than the judged, there are the obvious military reasons. France was unprepared; for years the political opposition had bitterly attacked any attempts at modernization of armaments, and of course immediately after defeat was to round on the régime for being unprepared. The Germans had accurate breech-loading guns made by Krupp, with percussion shells. The French muzzleloaders, of which Zola gives a detailed description, fired shells which more often than not burst harmlessly in the air. The French rifle, the chassepot, was good, but the mitrailleuse, an ancestor of the machine-gun, was still on the ‘secret’ list until shortly before mobilization and the army had no experience of how to use it. Technical incompetence and backwardness were made so much more dangerous by the complacency and over-confidence of all in authority, a small example of which was the issue to officers of maps of Germany whereas they had no information on the topography of the difficult mountain terrain of the part of their own country where fighting was bound to occur, and were lured into all sorts of ambushes by highly organized mobile detachments of Germans. And of course rivalries and divided counsels among the commanders were not checked by the weak and sick Emperor. The dash, swagger and bravery of individual French soldiers were no match for the scientific skill and accuracy of the Germans. Flamboyant cavalry charges have no chance against modern technology. In this respect as well as in many others, the 1870 war was the clash of the past and the future, and its lessons were learned by the Germans and ignored by the French.
Zola’s novel is the story of this seven-week war and its sequel, and its connection with the Rougon-Macquart saga is tenuous to the point of unimportance, for Jean Macquart, the hero, serves simply as a point of view, or rather, as one of the many points of view.
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