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Intellectuals have imparted polemical contentiousness to French political controversy. Zola's role in the Dreyfus case had a literary legacy on both the Left and Right, with Surrealists and Communists or individuals like Sartre on the Left and Barrès and Maurras on the Right being prominent. Mounier's Catholic anti-liberalism met its reassertion by Aron. Decolonization prompted intellectual activism but Benda made the case against commitment.

This chapter studies the figure of the genius artist in the painter Claude Lantier, the central figure of Émile Zola's novel, L'Œuvre (The masterpiece, 1886). Genius may be a largely positive term for Zola the art critic who regards disruption as a virtue, but for Zola the novelist these “disruptions” are an ambivalent quantity that allows him to explore it both positively as central to the artistic enterprise and negatively as a sterile or destructive pathology. Like Mme de Staël and Balzac, he does so both from an objective external and from a sympathetically internal perspective. As a painter, Lantier offers less scope for identification on the part of the author than did Corinne or Lambert, but both author and painter are bound together by the issue of artistic creativity that is the novel's central concern.

Capellani was now the principal filmmaker at SCAGL. In 1913, he made a powerful adaptation of Zola’s Germinal, shot partially on locations. This film was particularly striking for the underplaying of its actors and its documentary style. He also adapted contemporary novels, such as La Glu (1913) with Mistinguett and his brother Paul Capellani, mixing tragedy and humor.

There are sound reasons for concluding in 1870–1. The Franco-Prussian War affected attitudes towards France, some of France’s major novelists died, a new generation of novelists led by Zola was on the rise, and the 1870 Education Act created fresh concerns about the composition and tastes of the reading public. Although interest in French literature did not begin in the 1870s, as many critics have claimed, the decade did mark a more defiant attitude towards supposed Victorian prudery, and a willingness to highlight and champion the transgressive qualities of French literature. It was in this period that censorshiptook centre stage, but those who resisted it were also ambivalent about the wisdom of allowing readers to access French works indiscriminately. As in previous decades, the critical discourse was often quietly challenged by reading practices.

The notion of animal magnetism takes us back to Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century, whose fame for curing illness with the mere “pass” of a hand quickly turned to infamy under the anti-materialist sentiments of the nineteenth century. And yet, as this chapter suggests, traces of the magnetic force of bodies reappear in works from Madame Bovary to Germinal and, bear seeds of the very intersections between affect and animality that are theorized today. Indeed, it was during the Third Republic that theories of magnetic or hypnotic influence would contribute to Gustave Le Bon’s understandings of crowd theory—also known as herd theory- which emphasized the instinctive animality of human nature in order to lend support to new forms of political control over the unruly and brutish masses. Whereas the first animal to be magnetized was a horse in Lyons in 1784, horses figure prominently in the fin-de-siècle as a means for showing the importance of a scientific understanding of unconscious or affective influence, and how that influence can also serve to educate the masses, whether against or in service of the state.

This chapter explores how Émile Zola’s ekphrastic writings about Édouard Manet’s paintings functioned as a template on which the writer imposed his evolving theories of the naturalist novel. It argues that, while Zola championed Manet in his critical reviews of the artist’s works, he did so in the name of naturalism and the scientific objectivity and analysis naturalism promoted. Moreover, it seems likely that Manet would have read Zola’s 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin where the author first mandated his naturalist theories. The chapter asks what Manet would have thought about Zola’s subjugation of painting to writing and his refusal of meaningful content in his art. It proposes that Manet painted Zola’s portrait in 1868 as a retort to the critic’s misinterpretation of the painter’s artistic method. Manet’s portrait of Zola also reveals how the artist, in turn, appropriated the writer and his writing to his own artistic agenda, the subsequent manifestations of which culminate in Manet’s final masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882).

Flaubert chose to have his characters fail, often because of their limitations and ignorance rather than tragic flaws in their personalities. With this, the two interrelated issues are addressed in this chapter, the concept of failure and the concept of misreading. While Flaubert is expressing his own personal pessimism, he is at loggerheads with a realist vision in which, arguably, some characters do succeed, against all odds. The specific example, which might be considered a singular case of failure, is Emma Bovary's singular capacity for misreading. By inventing a scientific approach to his analyses, Zola might seemingly have avoided the same pitfalls as other authors before or since. Yet in a number of striking cases — the symphonie en blanc in Au Bonheur des dames, as well as Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal — the system implodes upon itself.

This chapter discusses the influence of the naturalist tradition on early French cinema, covering the pictorialist naturalist school of the 1920s, the cycles of Zola adaptations that appeared between 1902 and 1938, and the ‘social-realist’ cinema of Renoir. The categorical map of the significant realist French film production of the 1930–8 period is meant to be neither exhaustive nor definitive. The chapter emphasizes that La Bête humaine focuses on a disturbing and morally corrupt social order, which conforms closely to one of the most important features of the critical realist/naturalist tradition in its employment of an indeterminate aesthetic style. It concludes by accounting for Renoir's La Bête humaine in terms of the model of critical realism.

The aim of this chapter is to use the concept of “confusion” in the wide range of its manifestations in La Débâcle—military, historical, ideological, sexual, and so on—to unpack the several forms of ideological ambivalence at the heart of Zola's novel. No other text of Zola's uses the term “confusion” as often or to such patently critical effect, yet that critical thrust is curiously undercut by the novel's deployment of confusion to specific aesthetic ends. In the first section of this chapter, the author explores the tension between Zola's critique of confusion and his recourse there to in terms of a larger pattern of disavowal typical of Zola's plotting. This focus on disavowal leads, in the chapter's middle section, to an analysis of the melancholic ambivalence inherent in Zola's take on Republican ideology.

This chapter focuses on the imprisonment of Vizetelly, the first successful prosecution of a publisher of serious literature for obscenity. It questions, however, the idea that writers were straightforwardly fighting a culture war against ‘prudes on the prowl’ and argues instead that Vizetelly tried to make money by promoting Zola’s books as salacious.

Writing of the Dreyfus affair when at fever pitch, Carlos Blacker declared that ‘three beings alone knew the whole & entire truth, namely God & the two Military Attachés [the German attaché in Paris Schwartzkoppen and the Italian attaché Panizzardi]’. Blacker became the fourth such being when his intimate friend Panizzardi confided ‘the whole & entire truth’ to him. Together, the two developed a high-risk secret plan for establishing the innocence of Dreyfus and the guilt of Esterhazy. While thus occupied, Blacker received word from Constance Wilde that her husband had recently arrived in Paris and, concerned that he ‘does nothing now but drink’, asking Blacker to go and see him. At the highly emotional reunion that followed, convinced that the same intellectual and moral stimulus that had fired his own passionate commitment to Dreyfus’s cause would do the same for Wilde, Blacker was prompted to confide details of his secret plan to him. The subsequent disclosure by Wilde of Blacker’s confidences to his anti-Dreyfusard friends while resulting in his permanent estrangement from Blacker had at the same time a far-reaching effect on the course of events in the affair.

According to Joseph Reinach in his authoritative history of the Dreyfus affair, the influential ‘Lettre d’un Diplomate’, as it came to be known, published in the journal Le Siècle on 4 April 1898, was written in his home by two prominent Dreyfusards ‘based on notes provided by Zola’. As to the source of Zola’s notes, Reinach’s brother Salomon, in an anonymous report to the Cour de Cassation considering revision of Dreyfus’s court-martial, stated that ‘Zola got some of his information from Oscar Wilde, who had got it from Blacker, the intimate friend of Panizzardi. Wilde betrayed the confidence of his compatriot, but this did not lessen the great value of the information obtained.’ Absent a direct confrontation between Blacker and Wilde over the latter’s suspected perfidy, their estrangement proved gradual until their final meeting in early June. Faced with mounting attacks in the anti-Dreyfusard press, fuelled by information that Blacker became convinced could only have come from Wilde, Blacker left Paris with his family. In reply to an accusing letter from him, Wilde protested his innocence and demanded an apology in ‘a very strong letter’, which, as Blacker noted in his diary, ‘put an end to our friendship forever’.

This chapter examines the antisemitic riots of 1898, which was possibly the high-point of popular involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, and certainly the main manifestation of hostility to Jews in the period. The evidence from administrative and police reports establishes that the 1898 riots were both serious and widespread, and it provides a good idea of what provoked them. They can thus be placed in the wider perspective, not simply of French antisemitism, but of popular disturbances in general in nineteenth-century France, for the two had traditionally gone together. What was the nature of this antisemitism, and what prompted it, beyond the simple pretext afforded by the Dreyfus Affair? There is a fair correlation between the Jewish presence in a town and the outbreak of an antisemitic riot. In general, it seems to be true that antisemitism in France was not prompted by real grievances against Jews, by the experience of coexistence; it was directed against real Jews. Indeed, the 1898 riots were often expressions of patriotic sentiment, of support for the army and of opposition to Emile Zola, but their main targets were Jews, and Jews were attacked in a material way.

In his 1867 essay on the painter, Émile Zola addressed Manet directly in his defense of Olympia: “You needed a nude woman and you chose Olympia, the first-comer . . . you found it necessary to have some dark patches, so you placed in a corner a Negress and a cat. What does all this amount to—you scarcely know, no more do I.” Manet was simply painting according to the “law of values,” Zola claimed. Beginning with a survey of the scant use of the term “value” before Zola’s usage, this chapter argues that Zola’s was a feint, designed to avoid censorship by deflecting attention away from Manet’s true subject. It compares the juxtaposition of light and dark in Olympia to its companion piece Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, and suggests that both paintings are best understood as caricatures of the Renaissance masterpieces by Titian and Raphael that they quote. Their presence in the Salons subverts the very culture in which Manet has chosen to participate. Like his teacher Thomas Couture’s Romans during the Decadence of the Empire, Manet’s two paintings are admonitions to the French, warning bourgeois culture of the decadence of the Second Empire.

The moralizing force of Manet’s painting is the subject of this chapter. Manet’s sense of the Second Empire’s decadence can be compared to Géricault’s earlier disgust for the Bourbon monarchy, and when Olympia was vilified he had lost faith in French society to a degree comparable to Géricault. Of all the critics of Olympia, Jean Ravenel came closest to understanding Manet’s point of view, and his summary of the painting is analyzed at some length. On another level, Olympia was painted against Michelet’s L’amour (1859) and La Femme (1860). Zola, however, found Michelet’s moral sense compelling, and his first novel, La confession de Claude, written before he met Manet, takes up Michelet’s self-declared task: to restore to marriage an ideal love. But if Claude’s aspirations are high, Zola recognized that his fiction’s power depended on those aspirations crumbling beneath their own weight. Zola’s second novel, Thérèse Raquin, written as Manet prepared his “exposition particulière” at Place d’Alma, can be read, as Robert Lethbridge has noted, as something of a gloss on Olympia. The major tropes of his third novel, Madeleine Férat, are prostitution and slavery. Dedicated to Manet, it offered the painter yet another version of Olympia.

This chapter begins with events surrounding the execution of the emperor Maximilian in Mexico on June 19, 1867, the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Manet’s “exposition particulière” of 56 works in a temporary building on Place d’Alma, and the July 1 news of Maximilian’s execution reaching the capital, shortly after which Manet had begun work on the first of five versions of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, a project that would occupy him until censors informed him that should he try to submit The Execution to the Salon of 1869, it would be rejected, and that they would not allow his lithograph of the same subject to be printed. At the same time, he was painting a portrait of Zola, with Olympia pinned in black-and-white reproduction on the board behind the novelist’s desk. The chapter focuses of what this little painting within a painting might mean by considering at length Zola’s “law of values,” concluding with a consideration of Zola’s use of the term in the novel L’argent, where it both describes the relationship between light and dark in painting and its role in the world of “money”—as commodity, stock, and investment.