Zola, Émile, geb. Paris 2. April
1840, gest. ebd. 29. Sept. 1902, frz. Schriftsteller.
Zola begann seine schriftstellerische Tätigkeit im Verlag Hachette,
danach wandte er sich 1866 ganz dem Journalismus und der Literatur zu;
vom Ende der 1870er Jahre an war er Mittelpunkt des "Kreises von Medan".
Während der Dreyfusaffäre machte er sich mit einem berühmten offenen
Brief "J'accuse" (Ich klage an; 1898) an den Präs. der Republik zum
Anwalt des unschuldig Verurteilten, mußte danach vorübergehend (Juli
1898 bis Juni 1899) ins Exil nach England gehen. Als Erzähler und als
Programmatiker ("Der Experimentalroman", 1880) war Z. Hauptvertreter
des europ. Naturalismus. Im Mittelpunkt seines Hauptwerkes, des 20teiligen
Romanzyklus "Die Rougon-Macquart. Geschichte einer Familie unter dem
2. Kaiserreich" (1871-93) steht die Frage nach der Rolle von Vererbung
und Milieu im Leben des Menschen: das Werk entstand auf Grund umfangreicher,
mit wiss. Exaktheit vorgenommener Dokumentation und gibt ein umfassendes
Zeitgernälde der frz. Gesellschaft; bes. bekannt wurden daraus "Die
Schnapsbude" (1877, über die Folgen des Alkoholismus in Pariser Arbeiterkreisen),
"Nana" (1880; Roman einer Dirne), "Germinal" (1885; über das Leben der
Bergarbeiter) und "Der Zusammenbruch" (1892; über den Krieg von 1870/71
und den Zusammenbruch des Kaiserreiches). Eine mehr idealist.-optimist.
Einstellung zeigt die Romantrilogie "Die drei Städte" (1894-1898), ebenso
der vom Geist eines fortschrittl.-humanitären Sozialreformers erfüllte
Romanzyklus "Die vier Evangelien" (1899-1903). Verfaßte auch Dramatisierungen
seiner Romane, u. a. "Therese Raquin" (1878).
(Auszug aus Meyers Lexikon, 1993 - (www.iicm.edu/meyers)
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Zola, Émile
b. April 2, 1840, Paris, France
d. Sept. 28, 1902, Paris
in full ÉMILE-ÉDOUARD-CHARLES-ANTOINE ZOLA, French novelist, critic,
and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of
the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism,
which underlie his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, and
for his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair through his famous open letter,
"J'accuse."
Though born in Paris in 1840, Zola spent his youth in Aix-en-Provence
in southern France, where his father, a civil engineer of Italian descent,
was involved in the construction of a municipal water system. The senior
Zola died in 1847, leaving Madame Zola and her young son in dire financial
straits. In Aix, Zola was a schoolmate of the painter Paul Cézanne,
who would later join him in Paris and introduce him to Édouard Manet
and the Impressionist painters. Although Zola completed his schooling
at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, he twice failed the baccalauréat
exam, which was a prerequisite to further studies, and in 1859 he was
forced to seek gainful employment. Zola spent most of the next two years
unemployed and living in abject poverty. Finally, in 1862 he was hired
as a clerk at the publishing firm of L.-C.-F. Hachette, where he was
later promoted to the advertising department. To supplement his income
and make his mark in the world of letters, Zola began to write articles
on subjects of current interest for various periodicals; he also continued
to write fiction, a pastime he had enjoyed since boyhood. In 1865 Zola
published his first novel, La Confession de Claude (Claude's Confession),
a sordid, semiautobiographical tale that drew the attention of the public
and the police and incurred the disapproval of Zola's employer. Having
sufficiently established his reputation as a writer to support himself
and his mother as a freelance journalist, Zola left his job at Hachette
to pursue his literary interests.In the following years Zola continued
his career in journalism while publishing two novels: Thérèse Raquin
(1867), a grisly tale of murder and its aftermath that is still widely
read, and Madeleine Férat (1868), a rather unsuccessful attempt at applying
the principles of heredity to the novel. It was this interest in science
that led Zola, in the fall of 1868, to conceive the idea of a large-scale
series of novels similar to Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine (The
Human Comedy), which had appeared earlier in the century. Zola's project,
originally involving 10 novels, each featuring a different member of
the same family, was gradually expanded to comprise the 20 volumes of
the Rougon-Macquart series. La Fortune des Rougon (The Rougon Family
Fortune), the first novel in the series, began to appear in serial form
in 1870, was interrupted by the outbreak of the Franco-German War in
July, and was eventually published in book form in October 1871. Zola
went on to produce these 20 novels--most of which are of substantial
length--at the rate of nearly one per year, completing the series in
1893.
In the 1860s and '70s Zola also defended the art of Cézanne, Manet,
and the Impressionists Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste
Renoir in newspaper articles. During this period he was a constant presence
at weekly gatherings of the painters at various studios and cafés, where
theories about the arts and their potential interrelationships were
vociferously debated. Zola's friendship with Cézanne and the other artists
was, however, irreparably damaged by the publication of his novel L'Oeuvre
(1886; The Masterpiece), which depicts the life of an innovative painter
who, unable to realize his creative potential, ends up hanging himself
in front of his final painting. Cézanne, in particular, chose to see
the novel as a thinly disguised commentary on his own temperament and
talent.
In 1870 Zola married Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley, who had been his companion
and lover for almost five years, and the young couple assumed the care
of Zola's mother. In the early '70s Zola expanded his literary contacts,
meeting frequently with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Alphonse
Daudet, and Ivan Turgenev, all successful novelists whose failures in
the theatre led them to humorously refer to themselves as auteurs sifflés
("hissed authors"). Beginning in 1878 the Zola home in Médan, on the
Seine River not far from Paris, served as a gathering spot for a group
of the novelist's disciples, the best-known of whom were Guy de Maupassant
and Joris-Karl Huysmans, and together they published a collection of
short stories, Les Soirées de Médan (1880; Evenings at Médan). As the
founder and most celebrated member of the naturalist movement, Zola
published several treatises to explain his theories on art, including
Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel) and Les Romanciers
naturalistes (1881; The Naturalist Novelists). Naturalism involves the
application to literature of two scientific principles: determinism,
or the belief that character, temperament, and, ultimately, behaviour
are determined by the forces of heredity, environment, and historical
moment; and the experimental method, which entails the objective recording
of precise data in controlled conditions. If Zola's penchant for polemics
and publicity led him to exaggerate his naturalist principles in his
early writings, in later years, it can be said, rather, that controversy
sought out the reluctant novelist. His publication of a particularly
grim and sordid portrait of peasant life in La Terre in 1887 led a group
of five so-called disciples to repudiate Zola in a manifesto published
in the important newspaper Le Figaro. His novel La Débâcle (1892), which
was openly critical of the French army and government actions during
the Franco-German War (1870-71), drew vitriolic criticism from French
and Germans alike. Despite Zola's undisputed prominence, he was never
elected to the French Academy, although he was nominated on no fewer
than 19 occasions. Although Zola's marriage to Alexandrine endured until
his death, the author had a fourteen-year affair with Jeanne Rozerot,
one of his wife's housemaids, beginning in 1888. Jeanne bore him his
only children--Denise and Jacques--who were "recognized" by Madame Zola
afte r her husband's death.
In 1898 Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair--that of a Jewish French
army officer whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 sparked a
12-year controversy that deeply divided French society. At an early
stage in the proceedings Zola had decided rightly that Alfred Dreyfus
was innocent. On Jan. 13, 1898, in the newspaper L'Aurore, Zola published
a fierce denunciation of the French general staff in an open letter
beginning with the words "J'accuse" ("I accuse"). He charged various
high-ranking military officers and, indeed, the War Office itself of
concealing the truth in the wrongful conviction of Dreyfus for espionage.
Zola was prosecuted for libel and found guilty. In July 1899, when his
appeal appeared certain to fail, he fled to England. He returned to
France the following June when he learned that the Dreyfus case was
to be reopened with a possible reversal of the original verdict. Zola's
intervention in the controversy helped to undermine anti-Semitism and
rabid militarism in France. Zola's final series of novels, Les Trois
Villes (1894-98; The Three Cities) and Les Quatre Évangiles (1899-1903;
The Four Gospels) are generally conceded to be far less forceful than
his earlier work. However, the titles of the novels in the latter series
reveal the values that underlay his entire life and work: Fécondité
(1899; Fecundity), Travail (1901; Work), Vérité (1903; Truth), and Justice
(which, ironically, remained incomplete). Zola died unexpectedly in
September 1902, the victim of coal gas asphyxiation resulting from a
blocked chimney flue.
At the time of his death, Zola was recognized not only as one of the
greatest novelists in Europe but also as a man of action--a defender
of truth and justice, a champion of the poor and the persecuted. At
his funeral he was eulogized by Anatole France as having been not just
a great man, but "a moment in the human conscience" and crowds of mourners,
prominent and poor alike, lined the streets to salute the passing casket.
In 1908 Zola's remains were transferred to the Panthéon and placed alongside
those of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Victor Hugo, other French
authors whose works and deeds, like those of Zola, had changed the course
of French history.
(This article has been derived from ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, www.britannica.com
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