The mill-owner Delaherche was a Bonapartist before the war and had enthusiastically voted for the régime in the notorious plebiscite, but he becomes disaffected, anti-Bonapartist and potentially pro-German because to go on fighting is so bad for trade. His second wife, Gilberte, is frivolous, promiscuous, irresponsible, exercising her charms on friend and foe alike. A good time is her chief concern.

But Silvine is different. She symbolizes the deepest meaning of the book. In the most gruesome chapter in the whole novel we see her German seducer being slowly bled to death like a pig by the local band of guerrillas brought in to do so by Silvine. She watches it all and their child sees it too. A country violated and laid waste by an invader, or even beaten in war, will never forget and never rest until it has had its revenge. From 1871 until 1914 the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde was shrouded in mourning, and France was to dream of La Revanche. From 1919 until 1939 Hitler’s Germany was to do the same thing the other way round. Such is the futility of war.

In spite of the apparent optimism of the last page, when Jean goes forth to build a new France (and to what end, one might ask, if not to grow strong again and smash the Germans?), this is a profoundly disturbing book in its prophetic vision of the grim realities of the twentieth-century world. All these people are swept along by forces beyond their comprehension and control. Mass movements push the mobs hither and thither, and the individual has little or no freedom or power. Some of the figures in the Commune may possibly have been motivated by patriotic indignation at what they felt was the craven surrender of the Provisional Government of Thiers in the face of Germany’s demands, but they certainly were not concerned with the fact that every day of their theatrical heroics prolonged the agony of millions of other Frenchmen who did not happen to live in Paris. The millions are exploited by violent extremists out for their own ends. Urban guerrilla warfare is the cruellest and most cowardly form of so-called social action, involving blackmail of the worst kind, death of innocent men, women and children, intimidation and murder of hostages, looting and destruction of property and art treasures and the pursuance of purely personal vendettas. It brings out the beast in human beings. In our own age, when destruction, fire-raising and murder in crowded cities, always under the cloak of some high-sounding ideological, social, racial or even religious ideal, has become a part of the daily scene almost boring in its regularity, it is perhaps of interest to see into the workings of one of the earliest examples.

Of course it is possible to have differing views about the Paris Commune. Some see it as a glorious manifestation of the fight of the workers for freedom. Not unexpectedly Karl Marx, in The Civil War in France (1871), proclaims that ‘working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.’ D. W. Brogan, less lyrical but no reactionary, points out that it was essential that the arrogance and tyranny of Paris over all the rest of France be beaten, above all in the interests of universal suffrage and real democracy. Others again see it as a sinister outburst of violent mob hysteria exploited by a few unscrupulous petty politicians for ends known only to themselves. Zola saw it as a degrading exhibition of human bestiality, with unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides, but his protest is against violence, cruelty and destruction in whatever form and from whatever side. But Zola had over these other commentators the advantage that he was there. He saw it all, for he was not only present but a journalist, having returned to Paris a few days before the revolution of 18 March, after a spell of reporting the doings of the Bordeaux government. He even got into trouble twice and in the atmosphere of indiscriminate killing might have lost his life. To that extent The Debacle is an eye-witness account.

One question remains. In spite of his efforts to be fair, and his genuine compassion for Napoleon III as a man, there is little doubt that Zola’s overriding object in this novel is to demonstrate that the collapse of France in 1870–71 was due, as he put it, to the rottenness of the tree. In his view the Second Empire had been doomed for years by its own corruption and inefficiency.