Éditer et relire la correspondance de Zola ed. by Sophie Guermès (review)

This volume of fourteen varied and insightful essays, topped and tailed by incisive pieces from the much-respected Zola scholar, Sophie Guermès, is based on a colloquium she hosted in December 2014 at her home university of Brest. As such, it responds to a range of paper publications in the field. In 2010 an eleventh volume was added to the standard Montreal–Paris correspondence project (a ‘correspondence générale’, in the words of Alain Pagès, of 4,700 letters, which continue to emerge). The ‘correspondence intime’ of around 530 letters to the mother of Zola’s two children, Jeanne Rozerot, and to Zola’s wife, Alexandrine, has been ably stewarded by Pagès alongside Brigitte Émile-Zola toward publication in two volumes (Lettres à Jeanne Rozerot (1892–1902) (Paris: Gallimard, 2004) and Lettres à Alexandrine (1876–1901) (Paris: Gallimard, 2014)), in keeping with the promise made in 1963 by Zola’s great-granddaughter to his son, Jacques, as he lay on his deathbed, to wait until this century to publish these documents. The letters to Alexandrine, published only two months prior to the Brest colloquium, are usefully analysed here in chapters by two of the team of Zola scholars working on the volume alongside these editors (Jean-Michel Pottier and Céline Grenaud-Tostain). That team was completed by Guermès and Jean-Sébastien Macke. Here, Guermès articulates in her own chapter the privileged position which the modern researcher now shares with Zola’s own awareness of this dual correspondence: ‘le lecteur [.. .] peut, comme seul le scripteur au moment où il écrivait ces lettres, lire les deux versions écrites le même jour à chacune des deux femmes’ (p. 115). Macke analyses here the correspondence behind Zola’s musical collaboration with the composer Alfred Bruneau and the librettist Louis Gallet. The publication of these essays in 2018 coincides with the next stage of this scholarly journey, as Macke co-ordinates the digitization of the vast correspondence sent from around the world to this novelist and political activist. Sponsored by the Labex Transfers scheme, the Naturalisme-monde project, managed by Olivier Lumbroso, has brought together a range of scholars from Brazil to Hungary to work editorially on this digital correspondence which, it seems, grows by the day. As long ago as 1987, John Walker estimated that Zola received around twenty thousand such letters, many sent in response to the international press coverage of Zola’s defence of Dreyfus. To provide for the first time the digital tools for a properly systematic analysis of this late-nineteenth-century version of big data is to allow us to dream of a different model of scholarly engagement with the lost voices of the Affaire.