Was he right? Was he even being fair? Was he playing the familiar political propaganda game? Or was he influenced by the climate of the time when he was writing the novel, and catering for the fashionable prejudices of 1892, that is to say for the inevitable witch-hunt for scapegoats which follows any national disaster? Let a modern historian express his view:

The defeat that wrote finis to the rule of Napoleon III was an external event not an internal development. The Second Empire was not ended by the will of the people. The last plebiscite gave the Emperor almost as large a majority as the first. It was not destroyed by a revolution: there was no revolutionary party with the power to overthrow it. The Empire had simply, in the person of a defeated, aged and ailing Emperor, been overthrown in war, and capitulated to the invader. Its disappearance, before no predestined successor, left only a void. France was thrust into a new age, not deliberately by its own action, or in the fullness of time by the presence of new social forces, but accidentally and prematurely by the fact of military defeat. The intense conservatism of French society in 1871 was revealed by the savage reaction to the Commune of Paris, as it had been in 1848 by the repression of the revolt of the June days. The aim of the ruling classes in 1871 remained what it had been when the Empire was set up, to preserve the fabric of society unchanged; not to make a new France but to save the old one. This was the task which the National Assembly at Bordeaux, elected to get France out of the German war as soon as possible, took upon itself.*

The reader must decide for himself why in Zola’s novel the ‘intense conservatism of French society in 1871’ is personified in Jean, the intelligent, thoughtful working man.

The text used for this translation is the most recent scholarly one in volume 6 of the Oeuvres complètes of Émile Zola, published under the general editorship of Henri Mitterand, Paris, Cercle du Livre Précieux, Fasquelle, 1967. The text in the paperback Livre de Poche edition, also published by Fasquelle, is very corrupt, with some grotesque misprints and some whole sentences omitted.

Further information about Zola and this intensely interesting period in French and European history can be found in:

F. W. J. Hemmings, Emile Zola, revised edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966.

D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France (1870–1939), London, Hamish Hamilton, 1940 and many later editions. A standard work, with information about almost all the personalities mentioned by Zola.

Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871, London, Gollancz, 1937. A typical statement of the left-wing point of view.

Robert Baldick, The Siege of Paris, London, Batsford, 1964. A day-by-day account, with much contemporary matter and pictures, of the period between September 1870 and January 1871, ‘the last full-scale siege of a European capital, the first occasion of the indiscriminate bombardment of a civilian population, the source of immense hardship and suffering, and the origin of a division in the French nation which has still not been healed.’

Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris, London, Macmillan, 1965. The fullest recent account. Not only covers the siege and Commune, but has a clear, concise chapter on the six-week Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

Alistair Horne, The Terrible Year. The Paris Commune 1871, London, Macmillan, 1971. A ‘coffee-table’ book to mark the centenary of the Commune. Excellent short text and lavish illustrations, including many contemporary photographs.

It is no mere convention to thank my wife for her tireless help.

October 1971

L. W. T.

Map 1: The country around Sedan

Map 2: Central Paris

PART ONE

1

CAMP had been set up two kilometres from Mulhouse, nearer the Rhine, in the middle of the fertile plain. Towards nightfall on this August evening, under an angry sky with heavy clouds, the shelter-tents stretched out and piled arms gleamed, regularly spaced along the battle front, while the sentries with loaded rifles stood watch, motionless, their unseeing eyes staring out at the purple mists of the distant horizon rising from the river.

They had reached there from Belfort at about five. It was now eight and the men had only just got the provisions. But the firewood must have been mislaid, for none had been issued. No way of lighting a fire and making some stew.