Theorizing the Scapegoat in Maupassant and Zola

Abstract

Theorizing the Scapegoat in Maupassant and Zola Roderick Cooke Et Claude . . . serra sa ceinture, en grondant d’une voix fâchée: “Quels gredins que les honnêtes gens!”1 —Emile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris Elle se sentait noyée dans le mépris de ces gredins honnêtes qui l’avaient sacrifiée d’abord, rejetée ensuite, comme une chose malpropre et inutile.2 —Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif Although much has been written about Maupassant’s links to Zola and his judgments of the older man’s novels,3 the above intertext between his Boule de Suif (1880) and Le Ventre de Paris (1873), the third volume in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, appears to date to have gone unnoticed. I will argue here that this connection helps to reveal a much deeper kinship between the two narratives, which can both be read as accounts of the protagonist’s scapegoating. Using René Girard and Jacques Derrida’s substantively different theoretical accounts of the scapegoat, I suggest that Derrida’s model ultimately describes both narratives more effectively. Reading the two works in this manner reveals the importance of political critique to the shared structures of the naturalist text. Any discussion of Le Ventre de Paris as a scapegoating narrative must begin with Naomi Schor’s Zola’s Crowds (1978), which first used Girard’s ideas to analyze it and numerous other Zola novels (including La Conquête de Plassans, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon and Germinal) as accounts of the protagonist’s victimization by their community. Of Le Ventre de Paris itself, Schor says that it is “Zola’s ‘sacrificial novel’ par excellence, in that the sacrificial ritual is coextensive with the main plot, saturates (which is not to say exhausts) the text” (22). In Zola’s account of a small-time political agitator who is met with antagonism and, finally, denunciation to the [End Page 177] police by his neighbors in the Les Halles of the Second Empire, Schor saw a model that would be replicated and modified in later entries to the Rougon-Macquart cycle. But how exactly does Girard’s theory inform the discussion? On his account, any scapegoating is the product of internal tensions within the community that carries out the act. Girard’s central concept—mimetic desire—underpins the claim that the group’s desires become reflective of each other and focused onto the same object, creating tensions and rivalry between individual members. A crisis is born as the mimetic process ablates distinctions between individuals, and can only be resolved through the choice of an innocent victim whom the group members combine to eliminate, reestablishing difference and allowing non-conflictual social relationships to be restored: Il y a pourtant un dénominateur commun de l’efficacité sacrificielle, d’autant plus visible et prépondérant que l’institution demeure plus vivante. Ce dénominateur c’est la violence intestine; ce sont les dissensions, les rivalités, les jalousies, les querelles entre proches que le sacrifice prétend d’abord éliminer, c’est l’harmonie de la communauté qu’il restaure, c’est l’unité sociale qu’il renforce. Tout le reste découle de cela. (Girard, La Violence et le Sacré 22) It is this process that Schor identified in Le Ventre de Paris. We meet the protagonist, Florent, as he returns to Paris following his escape from Devil’s Island, where he had been deported following a politically-motivated arrest in the wake of Napoleon III’s coup d’état in December 1851. Florent quickly finds his beloved brother (known simply as Quenu), and the sister-in-law he did not know he had, Lisa, née Macquart. Over the course of novel, he takes a position as food inspector at Les Halles, at the time newly built and symbolic of the Second Empire’s will to remake Paris into a modern capital. In so doing, he becomes drawn into the plots and rivalries of the mainly female food traders (notably Louise Méhudin, aka “la belle Normande,” and her family), while simultaneously pursuing his own amateurish political plots in a nearby bar. These parallel plots will combine in Florent...