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Nineteenth Century French Studies 32.1&2 (2003-2004) 190-192



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Mitterand, Henri. Zola, iii, L'honneur (1893-1902 ). Paris: Fayard, 2002. Pp. 864. ISBN 2-213-61331-1

This third and final volume of Henri Mitterand's magistral, 3,000-page biography of Emile Zola, covers primarily the last nine years of Zola's life: the short, but eventful period following the completion of Les Rougon-Macquart, in 1893, and ending with what was very possibly his murder, in 1902. The volume is divided into five main parts, plus (by my count) 161 illustrations, an epilogue, chronological table, bib-liography, and three indexes. It devotes, very logically, most of Parts iii and iv and the first two chapters of Part v to the story of Zola's participation, recounted quite often from day to day and occasionally even hour by hour, in the Dreyfus case, his subsequent exile, and triumphant return. That is by far, needless to say, the most historically important sequence of events that Mitterand had to deal with in this volume. But he also treats, in almost equally rich detail, in these and the two remaining parts, nearly everything else that might interest the broad, cultivated French public, lay as well as academic, to which he has primarily addressed the whole biography.

Like this public - and, indeed, most of those scholars or ordinary readers everywhere likely to read it or use it as a reference work - he is interested above all in those aspects of his subject that have traditionally attracted most attention. In this final volume, these include most notably, besides those having to do with the Dreyfus case, the preparation, writing, promotion, and critical reception of Zola's last two series of novels; his family life, divided between his wife and his mistress and their two children; his myriad friendships and acquaintances; his worldwide fame; his futile struggles to gain election to the French Academy; his friendships, travels, professional activities, finances, business dealings; his shorter works of fiction, journalistic articles on topics other than the Affaire, and unrealized fictional and dramatic projects; and (to quote the title, borrowed from Richard Strauss's famous tone poem, of the last chapter) "death and transfiguration." Mitterand also devotes far more space than any previous biographer has to the numerous operatic librettos, still little known by today's general public, that Zola composed during these same years, and he comments at length on the impressive body of photographic works that Zola left behind him. If there is any single theme that dominates and helps unify Mitterand's presentation of this concluding period of Zola's life, it is the one that inspired this volume's subtitle: L'honneur. In choosing it, he not only had in mind, of course, [End Page 189] Zola's battle in defense of Dreyfus's honor and, indeed, France's honor as well as his own and his family's. He also wished to refer to the honors, along with the abuse, that, as he amply shows to us, were heaped upon Zola both before and after "J'Accuse . . .!" He very cogently shows us, moreover, what was in every sense honorable about Zola.

No previous biographer (and there have been many) has presented a fuller, larger, more accurate, more close-up, more concrete, or more colorful depiction of the man and his works or better placed them in the context of their times. Mitterand nowhere claims, however, that the resultant portrait of Zola - arguably the most ambiguous, surprising, elusive of all novelists - is exhaustive. Although he delves deeply into Zola's political and social ideas, he is not particularly concerned here, any more than in the two previous volumes, with Zola's more philosophically abstract or secular religious thought. He does not minimize it, much less deny that Zola was anything more than the rather crass, simplistic, unyielding positivist that many earlier commentators have mistakenly seen in him. He simply leaves these features of his subject mostly in the shade or out of focus. This is true even of his presentation of Les Quatre Evangiles...

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