![]() For the most part, the negotiation of the antitheses of inventio and history consists of oblique chronological markers, such as Père Bru in L’Assommoir losing his three sons in the Crimean War, and the intermittent presence of historical figures, such as Renée’s introduction to Napoleon III in La Curée, and Bismarck’s insertion in L’Argent. ![]() In practice, as Guermès argues, only La Fortune des Rougon and La Débâcle sustain the generic imperatives of the historical novel. This informs the explicative logic of the novelist’s discourse to the extent that, even when tempted to let events speak for themselves, ‘le réflexe étiologique revient vite’ (p. 9), Zola derives from this bookish immersion, as well as from his experience as parliamentary journalist at Bordeaux witnessing historic decisions in the making, a profoundly causal conception of the enchaînement of real events and fictional narratives representing them. Although ‘il ne prétend pas être un philosophe de l’Histoire’ (p. It starts by returning to Zola’s intellectual apprenticeship, from childhood reading to his early reviewing of an enormous number of historical works, not least Hippolyte Taine’s landmark Origines de la France contemporaine. ![]() ![]() But Sophie Guermès’s exhaustive study is no mere synthesis of earlier work in this area. Analyses of individual novels have accordingly seldom failed to explore their historical dimension. So, too, Zola’s marketing of his project to his first publisher, in 1869, provides a more precise benchmark for judgements of his achievement: ‘Je ferai pour le Second Empire, ce que Balzac a fait pour le règne de Louis-Philippe’. The subtitle of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, ‘histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire’, is an open invitation to test such ambitions against his imaginative depiction of the period. This is a book that has long waited to be written.
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