Zola, Émile

ZOLA, ÉMILE. - French writer, b. in Paris on 2 April 1840 to a French mother and an Italian father, d. there on 29 September 1902.

He revealed himself to the general public in 1877 with the novel L'Assommoir, and from then on his renown as a theorist and leader of naturalism grew. During the Dreyfus affair he took an active part in the trial, in defense of the accused, adding political and social polemics to the literary ones. Z. is essentially a polemical writer, for whom art is directed at giving life to scientific and social theories. He begins his activity with a moderate realism (Contes d'Nino, 1864; Les mystères de Marseille, 1867); then, under the influence of Taine, of Claude Bernard and of Lucas, he conceives the novel as a demonstration of scientific laws that explain man's relations with his environment and his biological antecedents. This premise, still vague in Thérèse Raquin and in Madeleine Férat, becomes programmatic in the long series of the Rou-gan-Macquart, histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire, twenty novels that appeared between 1871 and 1888. It was rightly defined by J. Lemaitre as «a pessimistic epic of human animality». This exhausting search for so-called «positive» ideals constructed on sensible reality remains a useless and inhuman proof of distrust in humanity, which cannot be deprived of the action of Providence, as of every effective spirituality and religiosity. Immoral is the whole perspective from which Z. places himself, independently of the art he employs, often rich in fantasy and imagination. At the center of the action there is always something inanimate that begins to live a superhuman and terrible life, which personifies natural and social force, outside of every influence not only divine, but moral and spiritual. Of Z. are on the Index Opera omnia (decr. 19 Sept. 1894; 25 Jan. 1895; 21 Aug. 1896; 1 Sept. 1898).

Giacinto Spagnolotti