Émile Zola, French writer (Paris, April 2, 1840 - Paris, September 29, 1902), is considered the leader of naturalism. He played a big role in the review of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus.
Only son of Francesco Zola (August 7, 1795 in Venice - March 27, 1847), Italian engineer who will work in Aix-en-Provence, on the construction of the canal that will bear his name, and Émilie Aubert (February 6, 1819 - October 17 1880), originally from Beauce Burgundy, Émile was born in Paris on April 2, 1840. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence and, on the death of the father, experienced serious financial difficulties. At the college of Aix, he was a fellow student of Paul Cézanne, to whom he later had to meet painters like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Manet. He returned to the Saint Louis high school in Paris in March 1858 and, in 1859, twice failed the baccalaureate (because of French...). No longer wanting to be dependent on his mother, he abandoned his studies and looked for work. On April 1, 1860, Zola entered the customs docks but quit his job two months later. In 1862, he was naturalized French, found a modest job as a handler, for 100 francs a month at the Hachette bookstore, where he remained until 1866.
Journalistic contribution
Within a few months, he became head of advertising at Hachette and forged a number of relationships with big names such as Taine and Littré. From 1863, Zola contributed to the literary sections of various newspapers. His activity as a journalist is promised to occupy a place of choice in his life. From 1866, he wrote a literary column as well as an artistic column in L’Événement. He then had as friends Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and met Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. At Illustration, he gives two tales. He wrote in a then left-wing newspaper, Le Figaro, in Le Globe, Le Gaulois and La Libre Pensée.
He designed the Rougon-Macquart project, which he completed in 1893. This without hiding the fact that it was a venal objective:earning money was one of his obsessions, along with giving back to his mother. social dignity. He began by writing and publishing tales, but his project was romantic and fell within the realism of Balzac and Flaubert, to which he added a marked interest in neuroses. With Thérèse Raquin, the enterprise takes shape, but it will be accomplished with Les Rougon-Macquart, a vast romantic fresco of twenty novels in which the author undertakes to describe all social backgrounds and to show how is transmitted and transformed in a family the same genetic defect. To this colossal work, Zola devoted most of his time for more than twenty years (Nulla dies sine linea - Not a day without a line - was his motto). He married Alexandrine Méley in 1870, but had no children from her. The same year he was hired as secretary by the leftist deputy Alexandre Glais-Bizoin. In 1871, he was a parliamentary journalist at La Cloche and a regular contributor to the Sémaphore de Marseille and the Messager de l'Europe, a monthly magazine in which Les Romanciers contemporains appeared in 1878 and, in 1879, the manifesto of the naturalist movement, Le Roman experimental. /P>
From 1873, he became friends with Gustave Flaubert and Alphonse Daudet. He meets Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Alexis, Léon Hennique and Guy de Maupassant who will become the faithful of the evenings of Médan, place, near Poissy where he has a small country house, acquired in 1878. He becomes the leader of the naturalists. The collective volume of these Evenings will appear two years later. In 1886, Zola broke with Paul Cézanne who was perhaps right to recognize himself in the character of Claude Lantier, the failed painter of L'Œuvre. The publication of La Terre raises controversy:the "Manifesto of the Five" marks the criticism of young naturalist writers. His old age is however illuminated by the two children given to him by Jeanne Rozerot, his mistress since 1888.
Late vocation?
Les Rougon-Macquart finished, Zola undertook a new work in three volumes, Les Trois Villes:Lourdes, which appeared in 1894 and was immediately blacklisted; Rome, in 1895; Paris, in 1898. This triptych describes the adventure of Pierre Froment, son of a singular couple composed of a devotee and a man of science. It is the center of the oppositions of the end of the century:science and the return to spiritualism. The Four Gospels will follow:Peter ended up marrying Mary, with whom he found happiness; they will have four sons, new apostles to whom it belongs to bring about justice and peace on Earth. Mathieu is the hero of Fertility (1899), Luc that of Work (1900), Marc that of Truth (1902). Zola dies while working at Justice, of which Jean would have been the hero.
Engagement in the Dreyfus Affair
Installed in a comfortable notoriety (he regularly transforms the house of Médan with his royalties), he does not hesitate to enter the political struggle when he is convinced of the innocence of Captain Dreyfus accused of espionage at the balance of Prussia. It did not manifest itself when Dreyfus was arrested in 1894. However, from 1895, Zola was outraged by anti-Semitic campaigns, in particular by that of Édouard Drumont in Jewish France and his newspaper La Libre Parole. The public degradation of Dreyfus, on January 5, 1895, and his imprisonment on Devil's Island challenged him. On May 16, 1896, he published the article For the Jews in Le Figaro in reaction to the Drumont campaigns and was already worried about the honor of France.
This commitment, his stature and his status as a leader of naturalism, his independence with regard to religions and money, his rhetorical effectiveness, push the Dreyfusards Scheurer-Kestner and Bernard Lazare to ask him to intervene. He hesitated, but in September 1897 he wrote to his wife that he had made up his mind. On January 13, 1898, he published in L'Aurore by Georges Clemenceau his famous "J'accuse" [1] (Letter to the President of the Republic), thus giving a new dimension to the revision process. A defamation trial condemns him to one year's imprisonment, the maximum sentence, and a large fine - which, with costs, amounts to 7,500 francs (it is paid by the writer Octave Mirbeau) . He went into exile in London to avoid imprisonment. Back a year later, he published his articles on the case in La Vérité en Marche.
Death and honors
On September 29, 1902, he died of asphyxiation at home because of a blocked chimney. This death would be accidental, but given the number of enemies that Zola had been able to make (especially among the anti-Dreyfusards) the thesis of the assassination has never been completely ruled out. After his death, an investigation is carried out but does not lead to any convincing conclusion. During his funeral at the Montmartre cemetery, a delegation of miners from the North marched past his grave chanting the word "Germinal". Pronouncing the funeral oration, Anatole France will say of Zola:"There was a moment of human conscience."
Alfred Dreyfus was rehabilitated in 1906.
Zola's ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris on June 4, 1908.
On January 13, 1998, a ceremony was held at the Panthéon in Paris, presided over by the Minister of Justice, Élisabeth Guigou, for the centenary of the publication in Aurore of the open letter to the President of the Republic, J'Accuse.
Two speeches were made, by the Prime Minister (speech available on Wikisource) and by the first honorary president of the Court of Cassation, Pierre DRAI, on the theme of the role of the Court of Cassation in the outcome of the Dreyfus affair. .
Today he is considered the leading figure of naturalism and one of the greatest French writers of all time.
Since 1985 his house in Médan (Yvelines) has become a museum.
Every first Sunday in October, a pilgrimage is organized by the Literary Society of Friends of Émile Zola.
Cinema
The work of Émile Zola has been widely adapted to cinema, with more than sixty films made from his works, in various languages. The first adaptation was that of L'Assommoir, by Ferdinand Zecca, the very year of the author's death, in 1902.
In addition to L'Assommoir, more than half of the titles in the Rougon-Macquart series have been adapted for the screen. Some, like Nana or Germinal, have been adapted several times, with more or less happy fidelity to the original works.
Apart from Rougon-Macquart, the only work by Zola that will be widely treated on screen is Thérèse Raquin.
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