The 'African Pages' of Zola's Fécondité: Testimony to Colonial Politics and Attitudes about Race during the French Third Republic

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY THE ‘AFRICAN PAGES’ OF ZOLA’S FÉCONDITÉ: TESTIMONY TO COLONIAL POLITICS AND ATTITUDES ABOUT RACE DURING THE FRENCH THIRD REPUBLIC CARMEN K. MAYER-ROBIN READERS readily identify Zola with his naturalism, the literary science aimed at penetrating the “cadavre du coeur humain” and a “siècle de nerfs” (Mes Haines). Scholars of the Quatre Évangiles just as readily concur that Zola shifted away from naturalism after Le Docteur Pascal, submitting that the last novels represent a forward-looking dream of republican progress, or at the very least, as Jacques Noiray carefully terms it, “une version attendrie du naturalisme” (142). If the novel has garnered a reputation as utopian, it is in part due to the author’s own pronouncements in the first ébauche of Fécondité: “Je songe que si j’ai une partie utopique à la fin, il faut que je la base sur une meilleure distribution de la richesse, l’égalité économique établie comme l’égalité politique. Une démocratie où les mœurs sont simples (et belles) et où chacun est à sa place” (10.301, folio 547).1 Preoccupied with the creation of an archetypal, humanitarian city of the future, this novel clearly dreams,2 as Zola intended it should, according to the oft-cited letter to 1 Two University of Alabama Research Advisory Committee Grants (2003, 2006) allowed me to consult these documents at the Institut des texts et manuscrits modernes (ITEM) in Paris. I am indebted to Danielle Coussot of the ITEM for her able efforts on my behalf, without which I would not have had such rapid access to original manuscripts housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All other quotations of Fécondité are drawn from the Cercle du Livre Précieux edition. 2 I do not wish to confuse Zola’s particular kind of dreaming with that of some of his contemporaries, like Flaubert and Huysmans, for whom dream meant experimenting with hallucination and the unconscious. YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 5 Octave Mirbeau in 1899: “Voici quarante ans que je dissèque, il faut bien permettre à mes vieux jours de rêver un peu” (qtd. in Cogny, 14). Fécondité imagines a bountiful agrarian society founded on republican ideals and combating the pathologies associated with urban life in a modern industrial setting. It envisions a “république en marche” in which motherhood, held among the highest of principles alongside truth and justice, forms the basis for a new matrilineal paradigm of human lineage.3 It proposes a secular gospel intended to bridge the gap between dreams of progress and real progress. Fascinating, then, that Fécondité contains only one ostensible reference to utopia, appearing on the last of approximately five hundred pages of dense prose. The passage states: “Et le divin rêve, l’utopie généreuse vole à plein ciel, la famille fondue dans la nation, la nation fondue dans l’humanité, un seul peuple fraternel faisant du monde une cité unique de paix, de vérité et de justice” (502). That progress should be sung in the final book of Fécondité through a grandiose and rather troubling portrayal of French imperialism complicates the picture even further. Indeed, when read through the prism of these so-called ‘African pages,’ the lyrical refrains closing many of the thirty chapters that comprise the novel, appear to be a textual incantation of a colonizing semantics, one which Zola unselfconsciously assimilates to the mythical dimension of his fiction. One is thus led to wonder to what extent the novel may be considered truly utopian, or in what respects it might be understood rather to echo both contemporary discourses on French colonial policy and late nineteenth-century attitudes about race. In his article, “L ’Afrique utopique de Fécondité,” Jean-Marie Seillan proposes compelling arguments for considering these “pages africaines” neither purely utopian nor historically accurate, as naturalism might have wanted it: “Ni franche utopie, ni tableau crédible du monde colonial , le Soudan zolien flotte dans un espace habité surtout de contradic6 ROMANCE NOTES 3 To describe the ever-expanding Froment family, Zola appropriates certain stylistic elements from the Genesis, but rewrites them in the feminine, so that the women of the family beget daughters...