The Earth

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE EARTH

EMILE 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 by 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; this led to yet another cycle, Les Quatre Évangiles. He died in 1902 while working on the fourth of these.

DOUGLAS PARMÉE studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, the University of Bonn, and the Sorbonne. After serving in RAF Intelligence, he returned to teach at Cambridge, where he was Fellow and Director of Studies at Queens' College. He now lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He has written widely on French studies, notably on 19th and 20th century French poetry; he is also a prize-winning translator, mainly from French and German. His other translations in the Penguin Classics are Maupassant's Bel-Ami and Fontane's Effi Briest.

ÉMILE ZOLA

THE EARTH

[La Terre]

TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DOUGLAS PARMÉE

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This translation first published 1980

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Copyright © Douglas Parmée, 1980

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193320-7

INTRODUCTION

ÉMILE ZOLA (1840–1902) first planned his vast cyclical series of novels, under the title histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire, in the late sixties of the last century. While Balzac's Comédie humaine cast its vast shadow over the project, Zola's cycle, concerning five generations of the Rougon-Macquart family, was intended to be much more overtly and consciously ‘scientific’. He had been greatly attracted to the ideas of the positivist philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who particularly stressed the influence of the physical over the psychological. Taine's conclusion that there are three main determinants of personality – la race (heredity), le milieu (environment) and le moment (not only the moment of time but the dynamic momentum of an age) – was eagerly accepted by Zola; and later on, under the influence of the great French physiologist Claude Bernard, he entertained far more nonsensical ideas, for example using the novel as a sort of laboratory to prove certain hypotheses. Fortunately, by the time he came to write La Terre, these scientific enthusiasms had considerably waned and despite the fact that a closed, materialistic agricultural community offered great scope for the observation of heredity and environment, Zola managed to resist this obvious temptation. The most superficial reading of his novel makes it plain that psychology is not ruthlessly sacrificed to physiology and that many, indeed most of his characters, despite the material pressures, lead vigorously independent mental and moral lives, often of considerable subtlety. The image of Zola as a depicter of mindless automata is sheer myth.

The idea of a peasant novel seems to have come late to Zola. His preliminary project on the cycle makes no mention of such a work nor is there any trace of it in the first genealogical tree in 1878. The family's representative in La Terre, Jean Macquart, was originally intended to figure only in La Débâcle, a later novel dealing with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71; indeed, in the last chapter of La Terre he is seen deciding to join up and ‘bash a few Prussians’, though in the event he is the one who is bashed. Readers of La Terre who find him interesting – and Zola did his best not to make him too much of a pure accessory, even though he still seems rather unresolved – may like to know that he recovers from his wounds and in Le Docteur Pascal, the last novel of the series, he goes back to the land – in the less bleak region of Provence – remarries and rears a family. In La Terre, he has one distinguishing moral quality: unlike almost all the others, he is shown as capable of tenderness, in his relation with his future wife Françoise; as Jean is very much the outsider in this village community, is there not a suggestion here that tenderness is a luxury that peasants cannot afford? Be that as it may, the link between La Terre and the rest of the series is a tenuous one and the novel seems all the better for the fact that Zola steers clear of too much science and gives freer rein to his imagination.

Not until 1880, then, do we first find mention of La Terre, when at its very conception he announces that it is going to be his favourite work. His confidence was well-founded. By 1880 he had already written nearly half of his cycle, covering such fields as provincial life (Plassans, alias Aix-en-Provence); political intrigue in Paris; les Halles, the Parisian central food market (in his younger years Zola was something of a gourmand and his description of piles of French cheese is mouth-watering); the Parisian slums (L'Assommoir) and the life of high-class prostitution (Nana). Both of these last novels obtained such a succès de scandale that he would have been silly not to realize the market value of squalor and eroticism, and such considerations cannot have been completely absent from his mind in writing La Terre. However, before La Terre was published, he was to write five more novels, including studies of the urban middle classes, of artistic circles (which cost him the friendship of his old friend from Aix, Paul Cézanne) and also perhaps his best known work, Germinal, a novel situated in a northern French mining village. In a word, he had ranged very widely and was a master of his craft.

This craft was that of the naturalist, and it is in this light that we must now examine La Terre. Leaving aside the scientific pretensions already mentioned, naturalism in the novel revolves around one main concept: impartial truth to life through documentation.