[BITList] Zola

[fredmno at aol.com]

Salaams,
             I realise this is cheating but I'm cut and pasting from Wikepedia what I gained from Emile Zola. In a nutshell his portrayal of French life and all its faults are laid bare in a series of books on two families. They are as representative today as they were the day they were written. As a nation they carry a massive load on one shoulder and we are to blame for most of that, the Americans make up the extra load. One cannot do them a favour of any sort because they instantly think of what you require in return and are also suspicious of your motives. If they can take any advantage at your expense they will and are most resentful when you get upset on discovering their turpitude, all is from my own experience but not all French people are like this but learning has been a painful process sometimes. We have managed to find some real friends who are French and strangely they agree with Zola.


More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career resynthesized his work into La Comédie Humaine,
Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete
layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces
the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution
which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial
revolution. The series examines two branches of a single
 family: the
respectable (that is, legitimate) Rougons and the disreputable
(illegitimate) Macquarts, for five generations.


As he described his plans for the series, "I want to portray, at the
outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain
itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is
making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal
convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world."


Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood and in youth,
they broke in later life over Zola's fictionalized depiction of Cézanne
and the Bohemian life of painters in his novel L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886).


>From 1877 onwards with the publication of l'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy–he was better paid than Victor Hugo, for example. He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organized cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans and other writers at his luxurious villa in Medan near Paris after 1880. Germinal in 1885, then the three 'cities', Lourdes in 1894, Rome in 1896 and Paris in 1897, established Zola as a successful author.





Then of course there was the Dreyfus affair.




Émile Zola risked his career and even his life on 13 January 1898, when his "J'accuse",[1] was published on the front page of the Paris daily, L'Aurore. The newspaper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, who decided that the controversial story would be in the form of an open letter t
o the President, Félix Faure. Émile Zola's "J'accuse" accused the highest levels of the French Army of obstruction of justice and antisemitism by having wrongfully convicted a Jewish artillery captain, Alfred Dreyfus, to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana.
Zola declared that Dreyfus' conviction and removal to an island prison
came after a false accusation of espionage and was a miscarriage of
justice. The case, known as the Dreyfus affair, divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church, and the more liberal commercial society.










Portrait by Édouard Manet (1868)






The ramifications continued for many years; on the 100th anniversary of Zola's article, France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix, apologized for its antisemitic
editorials during the Dreyfus Affair. As Zola was a leading French
thinker, his letter formed a major turning-point in the affair.


Zola was brought to trial for criminal libel on 9 June 1899, and was convicted on 23 February, sentenced, and removed from the Legion of Honor. Rather than go to jail, Zola fled to England. Without even having had the time to pack a few clothes, he arrived at Victoria Station on 19 July. After his brief and unhappy residence in London, from October 1898 to June 1899, he was allowed to return in time to see the government fall.


The government offered Dreyfus a pardon (rather than exoneration),
which he could accept and go free and so effectively admit that he was
guilty, or face a r
e-trial in which he was sure to be convicted again.
Although he was clearly not guilty, he chose to accept the pardon. Zola
said, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." In 1906,
Dreyfus was completely exonerated by the Supreme Court.

The 1898 article by Émile Zola is widely marked in France as the most prominent manifestation of the new power of the intellectuals (writers, artists, academicians) in shaping public opinion, the media and the State. The power of intellectuals lasted well into the 1980s, with a peak in the 1960s with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus

And of course his suspicious death.

Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning
caused by a stopped chimney. He was 62 years old. His enemies were
blamed because of previous attempings, but nothing ever could be
proven. (Decades later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to
have closed the chimney for political reasons).[2] Zola was initially buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, but on 4 June 1908, almost six years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo.

                          I highly reccomend his series of books but confess that one or two I put down because they were too depressing for even me.
                                0                   BR Fred



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20081021/12ded073/attachment.shtml