Textes et commentaires. Emile Zola

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Émile Zola died on Monday, September 29, 1902. His funeral took place on Sunday, October 5, at the Montmartre cemetery.

Three speeches were delivered:

the first by M. Chaumié, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts;

the second by M. Abel Hermant, president of the Society of Men of Letters;

the third and last by M. Anatole France.

SPEECH BY M. CHAUMIÉ

Gentlemen, just a few days ago, the great writer around whose coffin we are gathered today was in the fullness of life, in the fullness of strength. His powerful talent, which had asserted itself in so many masterworks, pursuing its evolution, each day more elevated and more refined, ensured the accomplishment of the new works undertaken or announced.

And now a most banal accident has sufficed to destroy everything in an instant.

The news of this death produced a general feeling of stupor.

It is not France alone, losing on that day one of its high literary glories, that felt itself in mourning. From all quarters came the most vivid and touching expressions of grief and regret, thus marking what place was held in the world by the man who has just vanished. Among the foreign nations, there is one to which Zola was attached by ties of origin; his loss was felt there more cruelly, and the minister of public instruction of Italy asked me to bring to this coffin the supreme salutation of his country.

The government of the Republic was also honored to take part in these funeral rites.

Others will study the talent of the writer, will show the place he held in letters, will speak of the epic grandeur of his narratives, the intensity of life in his characters, his art of grouping and setting in motion crowds and armies, of feeling their shivers, of extracting their soul, the gripping power of his descriptions, the relief of his tableaux; they will set in full light the great pages that must endure, perhaps drawing a veil over certain ones that provoked in some such protestations and anger, in others such wounds of delicacy and modesty, and which he considered inevitable in his deep concern for sincerity and truth.

It is this concern for sincerity and truth, animated by a great feeling of pity and justice, that dominated at once his life and his work.

From the start, he devoted himself to a mission — a mission, once upon a time, by many misunderstood and mocked, admired today — which he pursued without respite, without faltering, and which he was still accomplishing when sudden death struck him.

What mission? To make and to leave of present-day society, of its organs and their functioning, of the environments in which it moves, of the men who compose it, of the passions that agitate and govern them, and also of its vices, its sorrows and miseries, the sufferings of its disinherited, a portrait so gripping and so true that from its contemplation the necessity of remedying these sufferings, of combating these vices, of softening these sorrows, would become apparent to all eyes — the most blind as well as the most clear-sighted.

Zola, moreover, was a man of his work. As soon as a cause seemed just to him, to brave furious or perfidious anger in its defense, to endure outrageous insults, unjust hatreds, the most painful abandonments — all this seemed to him an imperious duty. No sacrifice was too great for him in answering the cry of his conscience.

SPEECH BY M. ABEL HERMANT

Gentlemen,

At the edge of this glorious tomb, before which even literary enmities have not fallen silent, I would with all my heart, as one wills what one must, render to Émile Zola a tribute worthy of him. Alas! in these trials, those who denigrate truly have every advantage over those who praise and weep. Our grief astonishes our enthusiasm. Our admiration grows impatient and discouraged, feeling that to express itself in all its amplitude it has at its disposal only the summary and improvised words that are proper on a coffin; it is a poignant additional suffering, this insufficiency of the funeral eulogy in the face of so formidable a dead man.

Disputed even in his bier — and we should applaud him for it, for certainly this lover of struggle would have wished it so — everything has been contested about him, except being excessive and colossal; on that, his detractors agree with his panegyrists. His books, before dazzling the imagination with their splendor, impose upon it by their number and weight. If placed one upon another, they would make a pedestal high enough for the statue we shall raise to him. He presents himself at the tribunal of posterity escorted, like a Roman patrician, by a following that is an army, where I count more than twelve hundred living creatures that he fashioned with his hand and animated with his breath.

At the worst hours, his thought, which cares did not diminish, already aspired to the grandiose: the harsh tragedy of Thérèse Raquin shows him ambitious to disengage types, to personify virtues and vices, like a man who would have the leisure to dominate events, to generalize and abstract. But in an isolated work, however vast, he lacks air. Subjects for novels offer themselves to him in groups: where others conceive a book, he conceives a library. Others dream of forging a character; he dreams of constituting a family. And since the families of today, instead of being as before penned in a narrow cell of the social hive, radiate through society as a whole; since each one can be considered, without forcing the artifice, as a society in miniature, where the larger one is summarized and condensed, he will incorporate in his Rougon-Macquart the full contingent of representatives of an era, and in telling their intimate history he will tell that of France during a quarter century.

He was little curious about details and personal particularities; and one may say, as has been said, that it was for lack of a sufficiently delicate sensibility and a sufficiently penetrating psychology; but it could equally well be because, in present-day humanity, groups seemed to him to have more value than individuals, the collective being more positive life than each of its component units. This is indeed a democratic way of seeing, and I was right to maintain that he is the painter — or if one prefers, the poet, the bard — of democracy.

The crowd was his public too. It is to it that his work is dedicated; it is from it that he obtained that abnormal renown; it is with it that his bid for immortality is pending.

SPEECH BY ANATOLE FRANCE

Gentlemen,

Called by the friends of Émile Zola to speak at this grave, I shall first bring the tribute of their respect and grief to her who was for forty years the companion of his life, who shared, lightened the fatigues of the beginnings, brightened the days of glory, and sustained him with her untiring devotion in the agitated and cruel hours.

Gentlemen,

Rendering to Émile Zola in the name of his friends the honors that are due to him, I shall silence my grief and theirs. It is not with complaints and lamentations that it is fitting to celebrate those who leave a great memory, but with manly praise and the sincere image of their work and their life.

The literary work of Zola is immense. Gentlemen, when one saw it rising stone by stone, this work, one measured its grandeur with surprise. One admired, one was astonished, one praised, one blamed. Praise and blame were pushed with equal vehemence. Sometimes sincere, yet unjust, reproaches were made to the powerful writer — I know this from my own experience. Invectives and apologies intermingled. And the work kept growing.

Today, when one discovers its colossal form in its entirety, one also recognizes the spirit with which it is imbued. It is a spirit of goodness. Zola was good. He had the candor and simplicity of great souls. He was profoundly moral. He painted vice with a rough and virtuous hand. His apparent pessimism, a somber humor spread over more than one of his pages, poorly conceals a real optimism, an obstinate faith in the progress of intelligence and justice. In his novels, which are social studies, he pursued with vigorous hatred an idle, frivolous society, a base and harmful aristocracy; he fought the evil of the times: the power of money. A democrat, he never flattered the people, and he strove to show them the servitudes of ignorance, the dangers of alcohol, which delivers them, stupid and defenseless, to all oppressions, to all miseries, to all shames. He fought social evil wherever he encountered it.

This sincere realist was an ardent idealist. His work is comparable in grandeur only to that of Tolstoy. They are two vast ideal cities raised by the lyre at the two extremities of European thought. They are both generous and peaceful. But that of Tolstoy is the city of resignation. That of Zola is the city of labor.

Zola, still young, had conquered glory. Calm and famous, he was enjoying the fruit of his labor when he tore himself, all at once, from his repose, from the work he loved, from the peaceful joys of his life. One must pronounce at a coffin only grave and serene words and give only signs of calm and harmony. But you know, gentlemen, that there is no calm except in justice, no rest except in truth.

In recalling the struggle undertaken by Zola for justice and truth, can I keep silent about those men bent upon the ruin of an innocent man, who, feeling themselves lost if he were saved, overwhelmed him with the desperate audacity of fear? How can I keep them from your sight when I must show you Zola rising up, weak and unarmed, before them? Can I be silent about their lies? That would be to silence his heroic rectitude. Can I be silent about their crimes? That would be to silence his virtue. Can I be silent about the outrages and calumnies with which they pursued him? That would be to silence his reward and his honors. Can I be silent about their shame? That would be to silence his glory. No! I will speak.

With the calm and firmness that the spectacle of death gives, I shall recall the dark days when selfishness and fear sat in the council of government. The iniquity was beginning to be known, but it was felt to be sustained and defended by such public and secret forces that the firmest hesitated. Those who had the duty to speak fell silent. The best, who feared not for themselves, feared involving their party in frightful dangers. Misled by monstrous lies, excited by odious declamations, the mass of the people, believing itself betrayed, grew frantic. The leaders of opinion too often caressed the error they despaired of destroying. The darkness thickened. A sinister silence reigned. It was then that Zola wrote to the President of the Republic that measured and terrible letter which denounced the forgery and the breach of trust.

Everything was saved. Zola had not merely revealed a judicial error; he had denounced the conspiracy of all the forces of violence and oppression united to kill in France social justice, the republican idea, and free thought. His courageous words had awakened France.

The consequences of his act are incalculable. They unfold today with a powerful force and majesty; they extend indefinitely: they have set in motion a movement of social equity that will not cease. From it there emerges a new order of things founded on a better justice and on a deeper knowledge of the rights of all.

Gentlemen,

There is but one country in the world in which these great things could have been accomplished. How admirable is the genius of our fatherland! How beautiful is this soul of France, which in centuries past taught right to Europe and to the world! France is the country of adorned reason and benevolent thoughts, the land of equitable magistrates and humane philosophers, the fatherland of Turgot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Malesherbes. Zola served his fatherland well by not despairing of justice in France.

Let us not pity him for having endured and suffered. Let us envy him. Raised upon the most prodigious heap of outrages that stupidity, ignorance, and wickedness have ever piled up, his glory reaches an inaccessible height.

Let us envy him: he honored his fatherland and the world through an immense body of work and a great act. Let us envy him: his destiny and his heart gave him the greatest of fates: he was a moment of the conscience of humanity.

GABRIEL TRARIEUX ÉMILE ZOLA, MAN OF ACTION

His work is there, born of his doctrine and — method aside — in conformity with it. It leads us slowly through the sewers, the gardens of life. A strange, systematic power of exploring one by one the environments, of evoking one by one the settings, of accumulating so many documents, precise facts, dead things! An Italian crudity, a somber satiric verve, a goodness, a childlike candor, sometimes a splendid human emotion animate these opulent tableaux. Rubens mingles with Teniers. He gorges us with giant provisions. He never seems sated. And yet it is not the ample love, the ample rush of warm, red blood that empurples the Titans of Balzac; it is not that sacred fury “of a Curtius plunging into the gulf” and dragging us in with him. It is a tenacious, reflective, studious, somewhat dull will. One halts suddenly with delight in charming oases: The Sin of the Abbé Mouret, A Love Episode stand as counterparts to the sinister visions of L’Assommoir and The Debacle. More often one labors painfully. Sometimes one stops, repelled. One admires, one submits, more than one loves.

And we arrive at his Act. Nothing more logical, in a sense, than this final flowering. Zola’s daily studies predisposed him to be passionate about all the conflicts of his time. Having relived his past, having finished the “Rougon-Macquart,” he was inevitably led to concern himself with the present. A judicial drama, better than any other, was bound to captivate the novelist enamored of complicated intrigues. This drama, moreover, was human, incarnated in a victim, a shadow of a tortured man, and thereby transcended politics to reach and move all living thought.

Zola had not foreseen everything. He had counted on triumph. It was crushing defeat that came. I am less grateful to him, for my part, for having uttered his famous battle cry than for having persevered, vanquished, when hope was no longer possible, ever more lucid and more steadfast. I recall, on the morrow of Rennes, the admirable impression of reading his words come from exile. And later, after the amnesty, when he saw it accepted by all — even by Jaurès, “the great Jaurès!” — what bitter pain of a free man detached from all parties! His last public word, at a banquet where the famous “communicative warmth” reigned at dessert, was: “Let us not congratulate ourselves…” There is the attitude of the Artist in the face of the perpetual, the necessary abortion that all political action is: he upholds the rights of the solitary, the savagery of the absolute. That he rose in this way — we have all remained standing because of it.

I believe he was not very far from being, after all, of this opinion. Since everyone at this moment is evoking personal memories, here is the one I keep. I met Zola — alone with him — only once, in winter, two years ago now. I see him seated at his desk, in the evening, in his study, a gray blanket on his knees, his neck protected by a white scarf. A lamp burned on the table, illuminating the great bare forehead, the tormented, indecisive face, the intense gaze of bitterness.