Subscribers to Le Bien public had threatened to cancel their subscriptions if the paper continued to carry The Drinking Den. A writer in Le Figaro described it as ‘not realism, but filth; not crudity, but pornography’. It was denounced by Le Gaulois as ‘an inexcusable scandal’. Even some of Zola’s friends had reservations. Guy de Maupassant and Stéphane Mallarmé were enthusiastic, and Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote an appreciative review; but Turgeniev told Ludwig Pietsch that he had read the book ‘with a mixture of horror and admiration’. Gustave Flaubert, with whom Zola was engaged in a continuing debate on literary realism, found it shocking because of the use of popular speech and the depiction of poverty and working-class life, while the Goncourt brothers felt that The Drinking Den owed an unacknowledged debt to their own fiction, for example, the novel Germinie Lacerteux (1864), which dealt with the life of an impoverished and dissolute servant girl. The charge of plagiarism was renewed with respect to other works, especially Denis Poulot’s study of Parisian popular culture, Le Sublime (1870) – which Zola freely admitted having used as one of his sources for information about working-class speech and manners.

There were two immediate effects of the scandal. Not only did it ensure fame and fortune for the author, it also induced him to make a number of very specific statements about his intentions in writing The Drinking Den, in order to correct what he saw as his critics’ mistakes in their reading of the book. These statements appeared in letters to the newspapers and in the Preface to the novel (which is translated below); Zola was to develop his literary theories in Les Soirées de Médan and Le Roman expérimental, both of which were published in 1880. As a result, we know a good deal about what he hoped to achieve with The Drinking Den. An author may not always be the best judge of his own work, but his point of view must be of special interest. Since he was answering what were mainly moral strictures, he emphasizes the moral lessons of the novel, the significance of the characters and their behaviour, and the relation of the events to the social realities of his time. He was also attacked, in particular, for his use of vulgar language and he defends this, countering with a charge of hypocrisy against those who would prefer him to have written in a more elevated manner: ‘All the anger directed against the stylistic experiment that I have attempted, is too hypocritical for me to answer it…’2

Zola’s defence is concerned first of all with those aspects of the novel that have been the subject of hostile criticism; it leaves aside questions of aesthetics, for example, in a novel that had been thought out and constructed with great care. More than its moral impact or its alleged indecency, The Drinking Den interested critics in the second half of the twentieth century because of its rigorous structure, and its symbolic or mythical dimensions, some of which Zola certainly intended us to find. There is always a lot more to Zola than appears. From the Goncourt brothers onwards, commentators on him have observed how difficult he was to pin down, both in his work and in his personality; he is a site of continual contradictions. Taking simply the question of the moral intentions of his work, one can see him in this novel preaching the most conventional bourgeois morality even as he works to challenge its assumptions, condemning Nana for her ‘vicious nature’ while patently sympathizing with her circumstances and her distaste for conventional hypocrisies, depicting Gervaise as at once a victim of her environment and of her own weaknesses, and so on. Throughout his life and work, Zola was torn between idealism and despair, a need to show the worst of life as he saw it and a need to express the human yearning for something higher and better. Zola the atheist coexists with Zola the religious enthusiast, Zola the scientist with Zola the artist.

In the year after the scandal of The Drinking Den, Zola deliberately set about writing a novel that would contrast with it. Une page d’amour (1878) is the story of a middle-class woman who falls in love with a doctor after he has saved the life of her child, but eventually renounces him for reasons of convention and morality – ‘an interlude of tenderness and sweetness’, Zola called it; though he had doubts whether his readers would approve. They were not disappointed, however, in his next work, Nana (1880), which takes up the story of Anna Coupeau, the young woman whom they had already met in The Drinking Den and who, as was already clear from this novel, was destined for a life of high-class prostitution. The outcry from the bourgeois press at this glimpse of the underside of French society was even greater than it had been at the time of The Drinking Den, and the new novel sold more rapidly than its scandalous predecessor.

*

The Drinking Den, Une page d’amour and Nana were the seventh, eighth and the ninth in the cycle of novels called the Rougon-Macquart and subtitled ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. Zola had planned this panoramic survey of French society and started to write the first volume before the Franco-Prussian war, which, in 1870, marked the end of Napoleon III’s reign and the imperial regime. The whole cycle would eventually reach twenty volumes, ending in 1893 with Le Docteur Pascal.

The aim of the Rougon-Macquart novels was to put into practice the concepts of Naturalism, the literary doctrine that Zola had started to elaborate as early as the 1860s. The Naturalist writer saw himself, in opposition particularly to the exponents of Romanticism, as comparable to a scientist or ‘natural philosopher’, observing the interaction between society and individuals, and describing the results of these observations in novels that would expound them with scientific rigour. Naturalism was therefore a development of Realism, which made use of scientific discoveries, including theories of heredity: the Rougon-Macquart as a whole was designed to illustrate the transmission of hereditary traits from one generation to the next in the families of the Rougons and the Macquarts, and the influence on individuals of this heredity, in conjunction with the social environment in which they happened to live: it was thus, in theory, to become in itself the working out of a complex ‘scientific’ experiment. Both families have a common ancestor, Adélaïde Fouque, whose son, Pierre Rougon, founds the respectable, legitimate, bourgeois branch, while her two illegitimate children, Antoine and Ursule, give rise to the working-class Macquarts. The whole cycle covers a wide spectrum of social classes and milieux, from the peasantry and the industrial working class, to the financial bourgeoisie, the priesthood, artistic circles, politics and the army; and from the countryside and provincial towns to the market district of Paris, a department store, a coal mine, theatres and cabarets, and the Stock Exchange.

Time has disproved some of the scientific ideas on which Zola based the overall design of the work – though, when it came down to it, these notions proved to be less prominent in the design than he had originally expected them to be. But, while time may have detracted from the value of the Rougon-Macquart series as a scientific experiment, it has compensated by greatly enhancing its interest as an imaginative evocation of a particular period in nineteenth-century French history, based on personal observation and sociological research. Zola started to plan The Drinking Den in detail as early as 1875.