Tales Of The New Babylon

Tales of the New Babylon

Zola’s La Débâcle, first planned in 1868, was the penultimate chapter in Les Rougon-Macquart. Warfare was something Zola had always meant to give full play in Les Rougon-Macquart, and his 1868 scheme had provided for "a novel that will have the military world as its framework…; an episode in [Napoleon III’s] Italian campaign." But after the calamitous Franco-Prussian War, this installment acquired special significance. What had originally been envisaged as one tale among others came to be seen as the denouncement of the entire saga. Zola decided almost immediately to recount in La Débâcle not only the virtual annihilation of half the Army of the Rhine but the bungled opportunities, political maneuvers, and missed cues that brought about this disaster.

The two-month Paris Commune ensued when the Republicans of Paris staged a bloodless revolution and proclaimed the establishment of the Third Republic shortly after this fall of the Loius Napoleon. As far as Marx was concerned, he felt that at the Commune was merely "the rising of a city under exceptional conditions and its majority was in no wise socialist nor could it be." However Marx emphasised that its "great social measure…was its own existence."

In this essay I will discuss La Débâcle, and Zola’s apparent lecturing tone. For while Zola exposed many social sores he had never previously attempted to put forward ideas...

Tales Of The New Babylon

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