Œuvres complètes: Les Rougon-Macquart, I: La Fortune des Rougon by Émile Zola (review)

The late David Baguley’s familiarity with the history of the Second Empire made it as appropriate that he should attend, in respect of Zola’s fictional panorama, to the beginnings of the regime as to its decline and fall. His magisterial critical edition of La Débâcle is definitive (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012; see French Studies, 68 (2014), 258–59). So too is this edition of the opening novel of Les Rougon-Macquart, which Zola insisted, in its preface, ‘doit s’appeler de son titre scientifique: Les Origines’. Baguley’s achievement is brought into sharper relief by an exhaustive bibliography that lists over thirty earlier editions in France alone, supplemented by the fifty or more translations of the novel into German, English, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian. An Introduction of some eighty pages has a double focus: on the one hand, the place of La Fortune des Rougon in the genesis of the series; on the other, the specificities of its own composition, background, structure, themes, and contemporary reception. This is the only edition of the novel that systematically provides the variants between manuscript, serialization, and publication in volume form in 1871. Appendices accommodate the contextual threads of its making, from Zola’s preliminary reflections on the novel cycle as a whole to excerpts from historians such as Hippolyte Maquan and Eugène Ténot whose narratives of insurrections in the Var, provoked by Louis-Napoléon’s 1851 coup d’état, have left their mark on the text. Having been somewhat wrong-footed by an end to the Second Empire, which might suddenly have made this polemical novel appear redundant, Zola was at pains to relate it to a post-Commune, anti-Bonapartist discourse. ‘Une nouvelle actualité?’ heads Baguley’s survey of the few reviews it elicited. Ever since, it has never really figured among key points of reference in assessments of Zola’s œuvre. That La Fortune des Rougon should be one of the agrégation set texts of 2016 will guarantee it a more stable readership. But more generally (in the same way as Proust’s novel cycle returns us to Du Côté de chez Swann), Baguley’s edition will encourage scholars and critics to go back to the beginning of Les Rougon-Macquart. Alongside his authoritative synthesis of modern approaches to the novel, his identification of its burlesque as well as tragic dimensions offers fresh perspectives. Baguley’s impeccable scholarship completes, alas, an enormous legacy to the specialist field he enriched over the last four decades. It also reinforces the certainty that the new Classiques Garnier edition of the totality of Zola’s work is where, from now on, every serious student of the writer should start (see French Studies, 69 (2015), 103–04).