Zola Fifty Years Later

Fifty years ago Emile Zola was at the height of his powers and his reputation. Nine years earlier he had finished the monumental cycle of twenty novels about the Rougon-Macquart family, and had immediately plunged into “The Three Cities,” a series of novels in which a priest, by his successive experiences in Lourdes, Rome, and Paris, finally rejects dogma and superstition to embrace scientific rationalism as the only sane and fruitful basis for human life. Zola had already completed three novels of a new series, “The Four Gospels,” in which this priest's sons founded their own utopias based on their father's final articles of faith–Fecondite, Travail, and Vérité. While working on the “Cities” and the “Gospels” he had championed the innocence of Dreyfus, following up the dramatic rhetoric of “J”'accuse”'accuse”'accuse”'accuse” with months of hard and sometimes spectacular work and, after a year's banishment in England, returning to see the case through to a moral victory. Vérité was about to appear as a serial, and Zola was at work planning the last of the “Gospels,” a novel called Justice which was to show the extinction of war by the growth of a sense of justice among nations.