Emile Zola Against Malthusianism

Fertility declined in France earlier than in the rest of Western Europe and remained lower than that of its neighbors throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. France's birth rate in 1900 was around 22 per 1000, compared to about 29 in Britain and 35 in Germany. Worry over depopulation, absolute or relative, has long been a staple element of French population thought. In the late nineteenth century, that concern was expressed in scholarly but vigorous works like Arsène Dumont's Dépopulation et civilisation (1890) and Natalité et démocratic (1898) and in political activism through the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population. Other population ideas, not always compatible, were current as well—most notably, variants of Malthusianism. This was also a time of ferment in social policy debate over the implications of new ideas about public health and hygiene and about heredity and environment.While supporters and opponents of Malthusian views could often be identified with the political right and left, combating depopulation was the cause of all. Equally, imperial ambition was not confined to one side of politics: few contradictions were seen between socialism at home and colonization abroad. (French territorial ambitions at this time looked particularly to North and West Africa.)Unsurprisingly, many of these themes also cropped up in contemporary novels—among them, those of Emile Zola. Born in 1840 of Italian and French parents, Zola was one of the best‐known writers of his time. His many novels include Nana (1880) and Germinal (1885). He is most celebrated, however, for his passionate open letter J'accuse (1898), denouncing the French high command over the Dreyfus Affair. (Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer, was wrongfully convicted of treason in an atmosphere of anti‐Semitism—a judgment eventually reversed.)Always somewhat of a propagandist, Zola, in temporary exile in the aftermath of this intervention, embarked on a cycle of four novels on the themes of fertility, work, truth, and justice. Fécondité (Paris: Charpentier‐Fasquelle, 1899) was the first of these. Two others were completed: Travail (1901) and Vérité (1903). Justice had barely been begun before his death in 1902. An English translation of Fécondité, by Ernest A. Vizetelly, was published under the euphemistic title Fruitfulness (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900). (Zola often skirted the margins of what was then considered acceptable language and subject matter, and Vizetelly had been jailed in England for an earlier Zola translation.) Fécondité is a didactic moral fable rather than a significant work of fiction. The Fortnightly Review (London) of January 1900 wrote of it: “The tale is a simple one: the cheerful conquest of fortune and the continual birth of offspring.” Mathieu and Marianne Froment, the central characters, convey Zola's anti‐Malthusian views through their life story—the meaning of which is underlined in the author's fulsome commentary. At the start of the novel, they are poor but already have four children. By its end, still stalwart and celebrating 70 years of marriage, they have had twelve, seven surviving, together with innumerable grandchildren and great grandchildren. Over the same period, through hard work and prudence, they have gradually amassed a large and highly productive landed estate, Chantebled, much of it acquired from once‐rich but feckless (and unprolific) neighbors whose decline in fortune mirrors the Froments' rise and whose depopulationist views are thereby shown to be groundless. (A fuller précis, also describing the novel's gothic subplots, is given in Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Academic Press, 1985), pp. 25–27.)The excerpts below are taken from the 1900 translation. (The page numbers refer to the more accessible 1925 reprint.) The characters mentioned, aside from Mathieu, are: Beauchêne, a relative of Marianne, owner of a farm equipment factory Boutan, family physician and friend of Mathieu Moineaud, a mechanic in Beauchêne's factory Santerre, a fashionable novelist Séguin, “a rich, elegant idler” whose estate is gradually lost to the Froments The absence of a female voice on the matters discussed is faithful to the novel.